I have been thinking about rejoining the Greens. However, I read this article by Bjorn Lomborg, the well-known Danish "sceptical environmentalist" and my doubts return. It could well be the case that humanity has passed the point of no return, but if we haven't...?? Perhaps the onset of global warming is to green thought what the collapse of the global capitalism is to socialist thought. It can happen, and perhaps it will, but is it inevitable? What if it doesn't happen?
I procrastinate. I shop at supermarkets, fly aeroplanes and eat meat. I don't want to be a fraud and a hypocrite in the politics I advocate. I wish I had proper answers to all this. Anyway, here's BL's piece..
Sucked dry: While we're misled on the effects of climate change, costly plans to cut emissions are hampering cheaper, effective solutions to problems we face now
Bjorn Lomborg, The Guardian,Wednesday October 17 2007
Nets and medication would have a bigger, faster impact on malaria than implementing the Kyoto protocol for the rest of this century.
We hear a lot from people who argue that we are heading for catastrophe. We also hear from those who maintain climate change is a hoax. Neither of these extremes is right. The Earth is warming, and we are causing it, but that is not the whole story. Predictions of impending disaster don't stack up.
We have become fixated on solving climate change through cuts in carbon emissions and, as a result, we are losing sight of the real problem, ignoring more effective solutions.
The climate models show that the Kyoto protocol would have postponed the effects of global warming by seven days by the end of the century. Even if the US and Australia had signed on and everyone stuck to Kyoto for this entire century, we would postpone the effects of global warming by only five years.
Although there are no certain predictions of climate change's effects, I believe it is best to employ the most widely accepted estimates - those created by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC finds that ocean levels will rise between 0.5ft and 2ft over this century, with the best expectation being about 1ft. That's similar to what the world experienced in the last 150 years.
A 1ft rise in sea level isn't a catastrophe, though it will pose a problem, particularly for small island nations. But very little land was lost when sea levels rose last century, and it costs relatively little to protect the land from rising tides. We can drain wetlands, build levees and divert waterways.
Some individuals and environmental organisations scoff that the IPCC has severely underestimated the melting of glaciers, especially in Greenland. But delegations tend to fly first to the Kangerlussuaq glacier, then change planes to fly to the fastest-moving glacier, Ilulissat, where they declare that they see climate change unfolding before their eyes. They don't stay in Kangerlussuaq, where the glacier is growing, and they don't mention that temperatures in Greenland were higher in 1941 than today.
There are other ways we only hear one side of the story. We are told climate change will cause more heatwaves and therefore more heat-related deaths. That is true. But rising temperatures will also reduce the number of cold spells. This is important because the cold is a much bigger killer than the heat. Globally, it's estimated that by 2050, global warming will cause almost 400,000 more heat-related deaths each year, but 1.8 million fewer people will die from cold.
Drastic cuts
The Kyoto protocol, with its drastic emissions cuts, is not a sensible way to stop people from dying in future heatwaves. If the US and Australia had committed to the pact, it would have set us all back by $180bn each year. At a much lower cost, urban designers and politicians could lower temperatures more effectively by planting trees, adding water features and reducing the amount of asphalt in at-risk cities. Estimates show that this could reduce the peak temperatures in cities by more than 10C.
We also hear a lot about how global warming will increase infectious diseases. It is true that higher temperatures will probably cause about 3% more malaria by the end of the century. But, according to scientific models, implementing the Kyoto protocol for the rest of this century would reduce the malaria risk by just 0.2%.
On the other hand, we could spend $3bn annually - 2% of the protocol's cost - on mosquito nets and medication and cut malaria incidence almost in half within a decade. For every dollar we spend saving one person through climate policies, we could save 36,000 through direct intervention.
Since awareness of global warming started rising, it seems nearly every "extreme weather event" has been blamed on the changing climate. Flooding is probably weakly related to global warming. We should expect more precipitation, but increasing rain does not necessarily increase flooding. Rises happen mostly during autumn when there is generally a much lower flow and little risk of flooding, and rarely in spring, with high flows.
Using the Kyoto protocol, at best we can postpone warming - and flood damage - by five years by the end of the century.
We have other options. We could limit or reduce people and wealth on floodplains, although this would be politically hard. We could inform people better about flood risks, cancel public subsidies to settlements in floodplains, have more stringent public planning, use levees more sparingly, and allow some floodplains to provide buffers for the remaining areas. We could return some areas back to wetlands, which would both decrease flooding and improve environmental quality.
For every pound of UK flood damage we would save through climate change policies, the same resources spent on direct flood policies could save £1,300. If we care about the future victims of flooding, shouldn't we choose to use flood policies first?
Wherever you look, the conclusion is the same: reducing carbon emissions is not the best way to help the world. We do need to fix global warming in the long run. But I'm frustrated at our blinkered focus on policies that won't achieve it.
I think we need to find a smarter way than spending enormous sums of money doing very little good for the planet a hundred years from now.
Focusing resources
The first step is to start focusing our resources on making carbon emissions cuts much easier. The typical cost of cutting a tonne of CO2 is about $20. Yet, according to a wealth of scientific literature, the damage from a tonne of carbon in the atmosphere is about $2. We need to reduce the cost of cutting emissions from $20 a tonne to, say, $2.
The way to achieve this is to dramatically increase spending on research and development of low-carbon energy. Ideally, every nation should commit to spending 0.05% of its gross domestic production exploring non-carbon-emitting energy technologies - be they wind, wave or solar power - or capturing CO2 emissions from power plants. This spending could add up to about $25bn a year, but it would still be seven times cheaper than the Kyoto protocol, yet increase global research and development tenfold. All nations would be involved, but the richer ones would pay the larger share.
Climate change is not the only challenge of the 21st century, and for many other global problems we have low-cost, durable solutions. I formed the Copenhagen Consensus in 2004 so some of the world's top economists could come together to ask not only where we can do good but at what cost, and to rank the best things for the world to do first. The top priorities are dealing with infectious diseases, malnutrition, agricultural research, and first-world access to third-word agriculture. For less than a fifth of Kyoto's price tag, we could tackle all these issues.
Obviously, we should also work on a long-term solution to climate change. If we invest in research and development, we'll do some real good in the long run, rather than just making ourselves feel good today. But embracing the best response to global warming is difficult when sensible dialogue is shut out. So first, we need to cool our debate.
Bjorn Lomborg, an adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School, is the author of Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming, published by Marshall Cavendish/Cyan (£19.99). To order a copy for £18.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875
Monday, 29 October 2007
The English Radical Tradition: The Levellers
"None comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him."- Richard Rumbold, Leveller.
I should not be amazed any more, but it still surprises me so many radical people in England (and elsewhere in the West, for that matter) seem to relive the Bolshevik daydream when it comes to considering political change. It is ridiculous when you consider England (and every other Western country, if you are prepared to look) has its own radical political traditions which it can draw upon. We have the whole resistance to the post-1066 "Norman Yoke"; the 1381 Peasants Revolt; the Levellers in the English Civil War; Tom Paine; the Chartists; the mutualist and co-operative movements. Even with the events of 1917-18, when English Radicalism (and its Scots and Welsh counterparts) was swept under the carpet by both Labour and the Leninists, there must be hope that, with both of these political traditions' political bankruptcy increasingly apparent, almost a century after they achieved their hegemony over "the Left", people will rediscover their radical traditions and embrace them.
With that in mind, it's great to see that people are beginning to see the relevance of the Levellers and the 1647 Putney Debates. Labour-loyalist intellectual Tristram Hunt tries to pin the Levellers and their ideas to Labour's flag in the article below, but hopefully people will see through that!
The Putney Debates, 1647
A jewel of democracy: Last year we asked readers to nominate the neglected event in Britain's radical past that best deserves a proper monument. You chose the Putney debates of 1647, where ordinary people established the principle of votes for all. At last, its place in history will be celebrated - at St Mary's parish church, starting tonight
Tristram Hunt, The Guardian, Friday October 26, 2007
From this evening, British democracy has a new HQ. Modestly placed part way between the Palace of Westminster and the Magna Carta memorial at Runnymede, Putney parish church is now a living monument to the story of English liberty. And it is all thanks to Guardian readers. In summer 2006, G2 ran a competition to unearth Britain's radical past. We argued that despite major advances over the past 10 years in opening up popular understandings of "heritage", the radical inheritance was still not nearly as well represented as it could and should be.
For the most part, it was the cathedrals and castles that continued to dominate the national memory. The stories, monuments and myths that traditionally linked progressive people with their heroic past had steadily retreated from public consciousness. As Nick Mansfield of the People's History Museum, Manchester, put it, "In the past, conservation planners and architectural historians have concentrated on protecting buildings of artistic value or those associated with 'great men' and their achievements. Sites associated with the labour movement or the history of working people have been largely overlooked." What we wanted to do was tell another story of Britishness and, in the process, make sure we preserve and popularise our inspiring radical history.
You responded in your thousands, highlighting the forgotten landmarks of the progressive past: from Bodmin parish church in Cornwall - scene of the 1549 Prayer Book rebellion - to Discovery House in east London with its connections to the Poplar rate dispute of 1921; from Queen's Square, Bristol - the setting for the reformist riots of 1831 - to Orgreave coking plant in Yorkshire and its symbolic role in the 1984-85 miners' strike.
There could only be one winner, but since the launch of the competition radical heritage has come alive. The People's History Museum and Monmouth Shire Hall, venue for the show trials of Chartists following the failed 1839 Newport risings, have both received substantial grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund (of which I am a trustee) to interpret and explain their collections. In Manchester city centre, plans are under way for a proper commemoration of the 1819 Peterloo massacre. And in London, discussions are well advanced for a liberty trail across the capital to chart the streets, institutions and buildings that marked some of the milestones towards modern democracy. But the jewel in the crown is Putney, in south-west London, where support from the Guardian, Lady Antonia Fraser, the Heritage Lottery Fund and numerous kind donors has funded a new exhibition centre.
Why Putney? Because Guardian readers were adamant that this delicate little church, situated on the edge of the Thames amid all the vulgar bustle of wealthy south-west London, retains an unrivalled foothold in the story of Britain. The debates that began at St Mary's church on October 28 1647 pioneered the liberal, democratic settlement: a written constitution, universal suffrage, freedom of conscience and equality before the law. "From its first ascendancy here at St Mary's, there may be traced the acceptance - centuries later in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and now in two-thirds of the nations of the world - of the idea that government requires the consent of freely and fairly elected representatives of all adult citizens, irrespective of class or caste or status or wealth," in the words of Geoffrey Robertson's new introduction to the Putney debates.
By summer 1647, the Roundheads were winning the English civil war. At Marston Moor and Naseby, Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army had crushed the Cavaliers and King Charles I himself was now in custody. But among the victorious soldiers there was a gnawing fear that parliament and the army generals (or "grandees") were preparing to sell them out. Some MPs, fearing the religious militancy of the army and keen for a settlement with the king, wanted to cut soldiers' pay, disband regiments, refuse indemnity for war damage and pack them off to Ireland. Most loathsome of all, they also looked set to betray the religious and political ideals the New Model Army had spent the previous five years fighting for. "We were not a mere mercenary army hired to serve any arbitrary power of a state, but called forth ... to the defence of the people's just right and liberties," the soldiers complained.
Their grievances were taken up by Leveller agitators within the army rank and file. The Levellers ("who declared that all degrees of men should be levelled, and an equality should be established", according to critics) put forward a postwar manifesto entitled the Agreement of the People. This was a response to "The heads of the proposals", which the grandees had submitted to the king - a highly conservative document that did little to challenge the existing power structures. By contrast, the Agreement of the People was a purposively radical text proposing a constitutional settlement that would be the envy of many post-conflict nations today. It urged religious toleration ("The ways of God's worship are not at all entrusted by us to any human power"); a general amnesty and an end to conscription; a system of laws that must be "no respecter of persons but apply equally to everyone: there must be no discrimination on grounds of tenure, estate, charter, degree, birth or place"; regular, two-yearly parliaments and an equal distribution of MPs' seats by number of inhabitants. At its heart was a profound belief in human liberty and a conviction that politicians were as dangerous as princes when it came to undermining personal freedom. It was the people who were sovereign.
With Oliver Cromwell in the chair, the general council of the New Model Army came together at Putney church, in October 1647, to argue the case for a transparent, democratic state free from the taint of parliamentary or courtly corruption. It proved to be one of the greatest intellectual encounters in western political thought. What was first of all remarkable was the active involvement of rank and file soldiery. And it is thanks to the shorthand notes of the army secretary, William Clarke, that 360 years on we get to hear their political theory. "Never again, even up to today, have private soldiers been allowed to question their officers," as one Guardian reader remarked during the competition.
On the second day of the debates, after a good five-hour prayer session, the soldiers focused on the question of the franchise. Who had the right to vote? For the Levellers, the answer was clear: all those who placed themselves under government should have the right to elect it. The vote was a natural right, irrespective of property or position. "I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he," in the celebrated words of Colonel Rainsborough, "and therefore ... every man that is to live under a government ought first, by his own consent, to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under."
The wealthy, socially conservative grandees were horrified by this spectre of egalitarian democracy. To their minds, it presaged anarchy and corruption with wealthy politicians able to buy up the votes of the uneducated, dependent masses. Instead, Cromwell's son-in-law, Henry Ireton, proposed that the franchise be limited to those with a "fixed local interest", that is, the independent, propertied sort. For Rainsborough, such a solution was a wretched betrayal of the civil war sacrifice. "I would fain know what we have fought for: for our laws and liberties? (Yet) this is the old law that enslaves the people of England - that they should be bound by laws in which they have no voice at all!" In the end, they reached a compromise that the vote should be granted to all adult males - excluding servants, apprentices, foreigners, beggars and, obviously, women.
The debates then went on to discuss how to deal with the problem of Charles I. And it was during those chilly autumn days, in the pews of Putney, that the mood hardened against that "man of blood" King Charles and a deadly momentum developed to put him on trial for high treason. The road to the English republic - that epic moment in these islands' history - flowed downstream from Putney to parliament.
Given such subversive sentiments, it was unsurprising that Clarke's shorthand manuscript (subscribed into long hand after the Restoration) was kept hidden. Many of the ideas expressed at Putney - liberty of conscience; a government dependent upon the sovereign will of the people; equality before the law - would, via the ministrations of John Locke, make their way into American political thought and the US constitution. But in Britain these philosophies remained buried late into the 19th century until the Clarke Papers were finally unearthed in Worcester College, Oxford, by the historian CH Firth. They then received popular notoriety thanks to ASP Woodhouse's 1938 work, Puritanism and Liberty, which implicitly conjoined the struggle against fascism with Rainsborough's cry of liberty.
Today, the debates at Putney speak to our modern politics with an equally powerful voice. For the ideal of democracy and liberty the Levellers proposed seems a horribly long way off from our deracinated political system with its party hierarchies, executive arrogance and parliamentary pomposity. Not to mention our murky system of peerages. Their notion of the political life would appear far closer to the extra-parliamentary activities of pressure groups, activists and campaigners than the cosy world of three-party politics. As Gordon Brown edges closer towards a written constitution and a new Bill of Rights, the debates of 1647 might also serve as something of an inspiration. What the Levellers posited nearly 400 years ago was precisely the kind of secular constitution guaranteeing freedom of conscience and speech alongside a sovereign parliament which many regard today as much needed political safeguards.
But the Levellers were not simply secular democrats in prototype: the Putney debates were more a mass prayer meeting than constitutional symposium. Every day the soldiers sought God's guidance in their search for a political solution to the civil war and a post-monarchical settlement. While the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins might find it uncomfortable, the story of British democracy is intimately bound up with the theology of Protestant Christianity. Yet Putney was also a gathering of soldiers. With the British army seeming once more to be led by evangelical Christians (with the chief of the general staff, General Sir Richard Dannatt, making no secret of how religion informs his leadership) unafraid to make their spiritual beliefs dictate questions of public policy, it might be pertinent for our defence establishment to look back upon the debates as both an inspiration and a warning.
More importantly, as the government searches for histories and narratives to bind Britain's increasingly disparate communities together, the story of democracy is as good a one as any. What the Putney debates highlight is this nation's extraordinary role in the development of participatory democracy. In our diffident relativism we tend to shy away from it, but from the Magna Carta onwards, we have played a pioneering role in the emergence of equality before the law, universal suffrage, an independent judiciary and freedom of speech. The struggle for these rights is precisely the history we should be teaching our schoolchildren and new migrants.
At Putney, we have made a start. The Guardian's money has helped to fund a small but permanent exhibition centre with digital copies of the Debate transcripts, explanations of the civil wars and the context of 17th-century Putney, and a historical commentary on the meaning and legacy of 1647. In addition, this week the church is hosting a series of events - from plays to debates to re-enactments - to involve as many new audiences as possible in the story of Putney. The problem is that these exhibitions are operating in a vacuum: only one (fee-paying) school in the area is teaching the civil war in the history AS/A-Level syllabus. As government initiatives eat into the school day with anodyne citizenship lessons, the one part of our history that teaches the fundamentals of modern citizenship - democracy, toleration, quality - is being quietly abandoned. Can you for one moment imagine French schools not teaching the 1789 Revolution or American high-schools omitting the Wars of Independence?
So the battle for radical restoration goes on. More landmarks need to be preserved and opened up to the public. We need to free our radical heritage from the crusty, self-contented ghettoes to which it has succumbed and make the point that this is our history. At the same time, we must guard against the philistines intent on dismantling our progressive inheritance - and few are currently quite so brazen in this regard as the Labour councillors (Labour councillors!) of Waltham Forest in London who are trying to flog off the superb William Morris gallery. At least south of the Thames there is now a proper memorial and explanation of one of the great radical moments of our past, suitably housed in the Reverend Giles Fraser's progressively ecumenical church. And since you helped to choose it, you should now go and visit it.
From this evening, Putney church will be hosting a series of events to mark the 360th anniversary of the Putney debates. Visit putneydebates.com for more information. A new edition of the Putney Debates and surrounding texts, with an introduction by Geoffrey Robertson QC, has been published by Verso, priced £7.99.
Sleep and "Semi-Somnia"
That'll teach her to become addicted to my blog...
I saw this in The Daily Mail while at work. Working nights I know all about sleep problems. I also know more than one acquaintance outside of work who has suffered from sleep ailments of one sort of another. This is for them!
Are you one of the millions of Britons suffering from 'semi-somnia'?
Moira Petty, Daily Mail, October 23rd 2007
The buzz of the alarm clock forces you out of bed, blearyeyed and anything but refreshed.
You snap at your partner, lose patience with the children and struggle into work with all the dynamism of a slug.
About the only thing that keeps you going through the day are sugary snacks.
Back home, even when the evening's tasks have been completed, there are 101 things to do — e-mails to check, a television programme you want to stay up for, preparation for the next day.
Millions of Britons are suffering from 'semi-somnia' - chronic tiredness caused by our hectic 24-hour lifestyle
You finally fling yourself exhausted into bed, mind racing, and wonder why you can't get to sleep.
Sounds familiar? You, like another 30 million Britons, could be suffering from semi-somnia, a term coined by leading sleep expert Dr Neil Stanley to describe persistent low-grade exhaustion due to poor sleep.
"If you put 100 people in a room and asked how many of them felt really good, energetic and full of vitality, few would raise their hands," he says.
In a report, commissioned by Horlicks, to be published next week - revealed exclusively in Good Health today - Dr Stanley reviewed 30 years of academic sleep research and discovered that huge numbers of people complain of feeling chronically tired all the time - "semi-somnia".
But because these people did not have "proper" insomnia or other serious sleep disorders, they were largely ignored by healthcare professionals.
The problem is caused by a combination of lack of sleep and poor quality sleep, and is the result of living in a culture with competing demands on our time.
"These days, we don't see sleep as an end in itself, but as a disposable thing which gets compressed," says Dr Stanley.
"As a result, we trim time off the hours of sleep we get, and when we do sleep, we sleep fitfully because our minds are buzzing."
So how is semi-somnia different from insomnia?
It's like comparing someone who eats only junk food to someone whose diet is half junk food, half nutritious food.
The symptoms of insomnia include taking longer than 30 minutes to get to sleep, and frequently waking in the night or early in the morning.
Chronic insomnia occurs most nights for more than three weeks, but often lasts for months, years or decades.
The semi-somniac may suffer milder versions of the same symptoms; or they may simply not sleep for long enough because they have too much else to do.
It may be a halfway house, but, says Dr Stanley, semi-somnia is a real health concern that should not be ignored. He suggests it is as grave a concern as the obesity crisis.
Yet while there is plenty of public health information about diet, there is almost no attention paid to how vital sleep is to our wellbeing.
The symptoms of insomnia include taking longer than 30 minutes to get to sleep
"We have lost sight of the fact that sleep is vital for good emotional, mental and physical health, and as important as exercise and a good diet," says the former director of sleep studies at the Human Psychopharmocology Research Unit, University of Surrey. (He is now manager of the Clinical Trials & Research Unit at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital.)
When we sleep, we experience cycles of deep sleep, in which our body and immune system are repaired, and REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, in which we dream, lay down memories and deal with stress and emotions.
If we don't sleep for long enough, our body will play catch up next time. It makes up the deep sleep first - although in extreme cases you might never achieve this completely. It may never get the chance to catch up on the REM sleep.
In the short term, poor sleep is linked to irritability, poor performance, lowered immunity and mood swings. In the longer term, it can lead to depression, obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease and stroke.
Poor sleep has been linked to marital problems and divorce, time off work and unemployment.
One in five car accidents is caused by tiredness - more than the number caused by drink-driving.
In his report, Dr Stanley calculates that this year alone, semi-somnia will cost the National Health Service £290million in treatment.
Intriguingly, Dr Stanley's research suggests that while many of us feel tired (75 per cent of the population admit to waking up exhausted every day), most don't realise, oddly, that it's due to poor sleep - blaming instead factors such as poor diet or lack of exercise.
Semi-somnia is not calculated on the basis of how much sleep you have, but how much you need to be really vibrant the next day – and only you can be the judge of that.
"What is important is not how you rate your sleep, but the daytime consequences of your sleep," he says.
The clue to finding out if you are suffering from semi-somnia is to ask yourself, on a scale of one to 10, how good you feel at 11am and 2pm.
"If you're a five, you're half as good as you should be," says Dr Stanley.
"Even a seven isn't there. If you're suffering from semi-somnia, you have the feeling that you are not on top of the game.
"We live in a tired society, and we have become accepting of being tired. The days when we feel really good are incredibly rare."
So why haven't doctors taken this chronic tiredness more seriously? It seems part of the problem is that we have concentrated exclusively on insomnia.
Dr Stanley, who has previously run a 24-bed laboratory monitoring sleep problems, says that just three per cent of the population suffer from medically recognised sleep disorders.
Apart from chronic insomnia, these include bruxism (clenching or grinding of the teeth), sleep apnoea (excessive snoring in which the sleeper stops breathing many times in the night), and narcolepsy (falling asleep without warning at inappropriate times).
Another problem, he says, is that doctors have so little training in the area.
One study found that half of all doctors receive no training on sleep problems, and the other half get five minutes' training in seven years of study.
"I'd like to know which bits are covered in those five minutes," says Dr Stanley.
"If you go to the doctor and say you're having sleep problems, as likely as not you'll be prescribed drugs for insomnia."
Few GPs even tell patients about the standard sleep hygiene rules devised by Peter Hauri in 1977.
Hauri, who directed the insomnia programme at the famous American Mayo Clinic, is widely regarded as the world's foremost sleep expert.
The rules can be found in self-help books, but even then, they are really aimed at insomniacs.
Among Hauri's rules was the advice that stimulants and alcohol should be avoided in the evening, and that a light snack should be eaten at bedtime to harness the sedative effects of digestive hormones.
Stanley says this is not only an inflexible, one-size-fits-all approach, but it is often unsuited to today's world.
He favours a much less prescriptive approach, with basic principles that the individual adapts to their style and needs.
"The most important thing is that we must actively pursue sleep: we must prepare for it rather as we warm up before exercise," says Dr Stanley.
"We insist that our children 'wind down' before bedtime - and adults need to do the same, physically and mentally.
"But every person's wind down needs to be personal to them, depending on their likes and dislikes."
The first step is to understand the modern barriers to sleep - and to work out which affects you in order to fix your semi-somnia.
Dr Stanley says there are two main problems: our inability to switch off from work and the 24-hour society, and bedtime "buzz".
"We work and play hard, and time has become irrelevant. Sleep is seen as something you snatch when you are finished with everything else.
"We live in a 24-hour society, where you can even do your supermarket shopping in the middle of the night.
"Twenty to 30 years ago, there was no overnight TV or radio, and no all-night clubs, let alone the internet.
"Texting is one of the major problems of teenage sleep. Teenagers are actually woken in the night when they hear the ping announcing they have a message.
"Then there are people who sit up using the internet, thinking: 'I must stay on top and be in control.' But evolution says we should be awake in the day and sleep at night."
For some people, the problem is compounded by an inability to separate work from their home life. "You know the sort," says Dr Stanley.
"They have a BlackBerry and two mobile phones glued to their ears. They can't switch off, and are still checking their messages late at night.
"But in order to fall asleep, you have to be thinking of nothing in particular — but nowadays that's virtually impossible. No wonder so many of us can't sleep."
The other major problem is what he calls "bedtime buzz"; our habit of going to bed with the day's issues - personal, domestic or career - unresolved.
"Don't lie in bed next to your wife discussing the mortgage repayments," says Dr Stanley.
Sometimes this buzz is caused by stress over our inability to sleep.
"The more you worry about not sleeping, the harder it will be."
Dr Stanley admits that many of his techniques are simply common sense - but the key is to do what suits you.
That means that if drinking alcohol or coffee at night doesn't affect your sleep, you can avoid Hauri's strictures against such habits.
"If you have happily been drinking a cup of coffee every night for 40 years and more recently had sleep problems, in all likelihood the coffee is not the culprit," says Dr Stanley.
"People go out to dinner, have a heavy three-course meal and then order a cup of decaffeinated coffee - as if that will make any difference.
"Your body temperature needs to fall before you go to sleep, and it won't if you have taken in all those calories just before bedtime."
Nor does he believe that TV and radio should be banned from the bedroom - even though this goes counter to all the advice usually given about sleep problems.
"If having a television in the bedroom is an excuse to watch for hours more than you would if you were still up, then that is not good. But if it helps you sleep, that's fine.
"It's not the process of getting to sleep that is important, but the destination.
"My message to semi-somniacs is be nice to yourself. Wind down in a way that pleases you. Make it a pleasurable process.
"Sleep is such a good thing to have and as essential - and arguably even more so - as good diet and exercise.
"See sleep as a pleasure. Going to sleep is such bliss. If we forget that, then, as a society we must accept the consequences.
"Remember how good you feel when you've had a really good night's sleep, and think how much better you would work if you always felt like that."
Dr Stanley's report, Making Time For Sleep, will be available on www.horlicks.co.uk from October 30.
Here are Dr Stanley's 3Rs of getting a good night's sleep:
RESOLVE: The countdown to bed, when you begin the process of putting aside the day's chores and worries. Start by turning off the computer and perhaps the radio and TV, too.
Music might provide a better background for your sleep preparation.
Think about your environment. Can you soundproof it against car alarms or noisy neighbours?
Invest in the thickest curtains or blinds you can find. Just four minutes of sunlight on the retina are enough to make you feel wide awake.
Does your partner disturb you with snoring or restlessness? Consider a bigger bed, or separate bedrooms.
Your evening meal should be three to four hours before bedtime. There's no need to avoid specific food or drink unless they interfere with your sleep.
RELAX: Use a relaxation technique. Some prefer yoga or meditation, but for most people a hot bath with your favourite oils will work.
Perhaps light a scented candle or play classical/light music in the background. Your bedroom needs to be as inviting as you can make it.
The body needs to cool down before you can sleep so make sure the bedroom is well-ventilated and turn off the heating well before you go to bed.
Women are more likely to suffer from semisomnia, partly because hormonal changes cause their temperature to rise.
Do not keep a computer in the bedroom. (Some people are online until they climb into bed.)
A TV or radio is fine if it provides a harmonious background to your bedtime ritual. Take advantage of feeling sleepy and go to bed.
A hot milky drink such as Horlicks works for some people.
It sounds obvious but with so much entertainment on offer, too many of us sit up yawning long after our body has told us it is time to sleep.
RELEASE: Develop techniques to counter "racing brain", when an overactive mind stops you sleeping.
Ideally, you need to be thinking of nothing much and allowing your mind to drift. For some people, playing a familiar, well-loved piece of music may help.
Visualisation techniques can be useful: imagine a scene of great serenity. The textbook example is a deserted, tropical beach at sunset - but an entirely different image might appeal to you.
If you are concerned about things you need to do the next day, write a list on a pad and leave it on the bedside table.
More Shakespeare!
Hello- sorry for the silence, but a combination of life, Facebook and post-General Election-that-never-was Hamlet-style political procrastination has led me to neglect this blog. Hence to plug the gap I'm back to post some other people's stuff I like and you may like too! I saw this in yesterday's Sunday Times "Culture" section.
Bawdy face of the Bard’s London: A long-neglected document started this writer off on his latest piece of literary detective work
Charles Nicholl, The Sunday Times, October 28, 2007
The story begins with a sheet of greyish paper, housed unceremoniously with others in a cardboard box at the National Archives in Kew. Though slightly mouldered at one edge, it is in remarkably good condition after nearly four centuries. It is mostly filled with the handwriting of an unknown Jacobean law clerk, but what makes it special is the rather hurried-looking signature at the bottom: “Willm Shaks”.
The document records Shakespeare’s testimony in a lawsuit at the Court of Requests in Westminster in 1612. Much of it is the usual legalistic cotton wool, but the nub of it, the actual answers to the court’s questions, is purely Shakespeare. It is the only occasion when his spoken words are recorded. This intriguing piece of paper was discovered nearly 100 years ago, but has been strangely neglected as a biographical source. This little window into Shakespeare’s life has not been opened.
The case was a family dispute about money: standard fare at the Court of Requests, which was something like the small-claims courts of today. The defendant was Christopher Mountjoy, described as a “tiremaker”, a maker of the decorative headwear for ladies known as “headtires” or “attires”. The plaintiff, Stephen Belott, had once been Mountjoy’s apprentice and was now his son-in-law. Both were French immigrants but had lived for many years in London. The dispute concerned an unpaid dowry: a goodly sum of £60, which Belott claimed had been promised when he married Mountjoy’s daughter in 1604.
Shakespeare was one of three witnesses called on the first day of the hearings: Monday, May 11, 1612. He tells the court he has known both the disputants “for the space of tenne yeres or there-aboutes” – that is, since about 1602. He remembers the apprentice Belott as a “good and industrious servant”, who “did well and honestly behave himselfe”; he was “a very honest fellowe”. Shakespeare is sure Belott had been promised a dowry – a marriage “porcion” – but he cannot remember the sum mentioned. Nor does he remember “what kinde of household stuffe” had been given to the couple when they married.
And then, amid the general blandness of his statement, there is a hint of something more. He says he had been asked by the girl’s mother, Marie Mountjoy, to “perswade” the apparently reluctant former apprentice to go through with the marriage. This presents him as a kind of marriage counsellor, but another witness implies that Shakespeare’s role went further than this: the couple was “made sure by Mr Shakespeare” and gave “each other’s hand to the hand”. These phrases have a precise significance. They suggest Shakespeare had formally betrothed the couple, performing the simple household ceremony known as “trothplighting” or “handfasting”. There are scenes and stories preserved in these old papers: a message in a bottle.
Shakespeare does not actually say why he was involved in these family affairs chez Mountjoy, but the answer is soon provided by another witness, the Mountjoys’ former maid, Joan Johnson, who refers to “one Mr Shakespeare that laye in the house”. To “lie” in a house meant to be staying there, and she undoubtedly means that Shakespeare was the Mountjoys’ lodger.
This is one of the primary nuggets of information from the Belott-Mountjoy case: it gives us an address for Shakespeare in London. His wife and family were up in Stratford, but for professional reasons (and perhaps others), the “sweet swan of Avon” spent most of his working life in rented accommodation in London. We know of other areas of the city he lived in – Shoreditch, Bishops-gate, Southwark – but this is the only time we have a specific address. The Mountjoys lived on Silver Street, in Cripplegate, close to the northeastern corner of the city walls. How long Shakespeare lodged there is not certain, but he was definitely there in 1604, when the marriage in question took place. He was then 40 years old, a writer, actor and shareholder in the leading troupe of the day, the King’s Men – a man at the peak of his profession.
Silver Street was bombed out in the Blitz and never rebuilt. The old line of it runs partly under and partly alongside a busy road, London Wall, part of the A1211. Pacing it out, I conclude that the closest one can now get to the Mountjoys’ house is underneath the road, in London Wall car park. I am at roughly the right spot, even at the right depth – the preFire stratum is some metres below the current surface – but this is, on the whole, a depressing proximity. An underground car park is unmis-takably an underground car park, whether or not Shakespeare once lived on the site of it.
I am a great believer in physically searching out traces of the past, but here there really is nothing. The house and the street are gone – “melted into air, into thin air” – and it is to that box of old papers in the National Archives that one must turn to reconstruct something of what it was like and of what went on there. Shakespeare’s testimony is only the beginning, a few curt words of reminiscence. From there, the paper chase leads on – other depositions, other documents: tax records, immigrant lists, medical casebooks, probate registers, scribbled marginalia, and the rich, dense sociology of the St Olave’s parish registers, preserved in the Guildhall manuscript library.
Bit by bit, this little corner of Jacobean London emerges: the industrious, quarrelsome, somewhat rackety French family with whom he lodged; the neighbours he knew – the trumpeter Humphrey Fludd, the adulterous mercer Henry Wood, and, most interesting, the brothel-keeper and hack author George Wilkins, who later collaborated with him on Pericles. Wilkins was a dangerous and unpleasant character – his voluminous police record includes brutal acts of violence against prostitutes. On one occasion, he “outrageously beat one Judith Walton, & stamped upon her, so that she was carried home in a chayre”; on another, he was charged with “kicking a woman on the belly which was the greate with childe”. Wilkins’s establishment – nominally a tavern but certainly a brothel – was on Turnmill Street, in the notorious red-light district of Clerkenwell. His wife, Katherine, was nicknamed “Mistress Sweetmeat” – perhaps she served the overpriced cakes and pastries that were associated with brothels. “For a pippin pie that cost in the market fourpence”, warns the pamphleteer Robert Greene, you will pay “at one of the trugging houses 18 pence”.
Wilkins and Shakespeare probably met in 1605, when the newly wed Belotts were actually lodging with Wilkins. In that year, Wilkins, then unknown as a writer, was commissioned by Shakespeare’s company to write a play based on a recent murder case. The result, The Miseries of Enforced Marriage – his best and most biting work, full of the “low-life” he knew so well – played to packed houses. The collaboration on Pericles followed, Wilkins writing the first two acts (and perhaps contributing some expertise to Act IV, which has the only scenes in Shakespeare set in a brothel).
Shakespeare’s connection with this lurid young pimp-playwright is slightly troubling. Was it merely literary opportunism, or were there other services Wilkins offered to a middle-aged man working away from home for months at a stretch? Prostitution was one of the growth industries of Jacobean London; the theatre was another. The two were linked in the minds of moralists, and in topographical fact. The Globe theatre stood among the famous bawdyhouses of Southwark – The Cardinal’s Hat, Holland’s Leaguer and The Castle, the latter on the site of the present-day Southwark pub The Anchor – and the playhouse itself was a place of simmering erotic potential, where “lewd” and “light-tailed” ladies offered “bargaines of incontinency”.
Pursuing these characters, one is prey to the randomness of historical evidence. Whole tracts of the Mountjoys’ life are lost to us, but amid this desert are little oases of actuality. Here is Shakespeare’s landlady in 1597, as recorded in the casebooks of the astrologer Simon Forman: “In Silver Street Mary Mountioy of 30 years lost out of her purse in the street as she went, the 10 of Septembris last between 7 & 8 at night, a gold ring, a hoop ring & a French crown.” In the same entry, we hear of one of the Mountjoys’ maids, Margaret Browne, described as a “tall wench” with a freckled face. It appears this unmarried girl is pregnant; the master of the house might be suspected, as he was later accused of having fathered two bastard children by a serving girl.
In these old pages of semi-legible ink, we start to hear the voices of the past and to feel ourselves back in the narrow lanes of Cripplegate, where the elusive Mr Shakespeare is discreetly lodged above the Mountjoys’ busy workshop, with its wire-mills and twisting-wheels, and its clientele of fashionable and not always very reputable ladies, and the sound of foreign voices floating up into the room where he writes.
The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street, by Charles Nicholl, is published by Penguin on November 8 at £20
Bawdy face of the Bard’s London: A long-neglected document started this writer off on his latest piece of literary detective work
Charles Nicholl, The Sunday Times, October 28, 2007
The story begins with a sheet of greyish paper, housed unceremoniously with others in a cardboard box at the National Archives in Kew. Though slightly mouldered at one edge, it is in remarkably good condition after nearly four centuries. It is mostly filled with the handwriting of an unknown Jacobean law clerk, but what makes it special is the rather hurried-looking signature at the bottom: “Willm Shaks”.
The document records Shakespeare’s testimony in a lawsuit at the Court of Requests in Westminster in 1612. Much of it is the usual legalistic cotton wool, but the nub of it, the actual answers to the court’s questions, is purely Shakespeare. It is the only occasion when his spoken words are recorded. This intriguing piece of paper was discovered nearly 100 years ago, but has been strangely neglected as a biographical source. This little window into Shakespeare’s life has not been opened.
The case was a family dispute about money: standard fare at the Court of Requests, which was something like the small-claims courts of today. The defendant was Christopher Mountjoy, described as a “tiremaker”, a maker of the decorative headwear for ladies known as “headtires” or “attires”. The plaintiff, Stephen Belott, had once been Mountjoy’s apprentice and was now his son-in-law. Both were French immigrants but had lived for many years in London. The dispute concerned an unpaid dowry: a goodly sum of £60, which Belott claimed had been promised when he married Mountjoy’s daughter in 1604.
Shakespeare was one of three witnesses called on the first day of the hearings: Monday, May 11, 1612. He tells the court he has known both the disputants “for the space of tenne yeres or there-aboutes” – that is, since about 1602. He remembers the apprentice Belott as a “good and industrious servant”, who “did well and honestly behave himselfe”; he was “a very honest fellowe”. Shakespeare is sure Belott had been promised a dowry – a marriage “porcion” – but he cannot remember the sum mentioned. Nor does he remember “what kinde of household stuffe” had been given to the couple when they married.
And then, amid the general blandness of his statement, there is a hint of something more. He says he had been asked by the girl’s mother, Marie Mountjoy, to “perswade” the apparently reluctant former apprentice to go through with the marriage. This presents him as a kind of marriage counsellor, but another witness implies that Shakespeare’s role went further than this: the couple was “made sure by Mr Shakespeare” and gave “each other’s hand to the hand”. These phrases have a precise significance. They suggest Shakespeare had formally betrothed the couple, performing the simple household ceremony known as “trothplighting” or “handfasting”. There are scenes and stories preserved in these old papers: a message in a bottle.
Shakespeare does not actually say why he was involved in these family affairs chez Mountjoy, but the answer is soon provided by another witness, the Mountjoys’ former maid, Joan Johnson, who refers to “one Mr Shakespeare that laye in the house”. To “lie” in a house meant to be staying there, and she undoubtedly means that Shakespeare was the Mountjoys’ lodger.
This is one of the primary nuggets of information from the Belott-Mountjoy case: it gives us an address for Shakespeare in London. His wife and family were up in Stratford, but for professional reasons (and perhaps others), the “sweet swan of Avon” spent most of his working life in rented accommodation in London. We know of other areas of the city he lived in – Shoreditch, Bishops-gate, Southwark – but this is the only time we have a specific address. The Mountjoys lived on Silver Street, in Cripplegate, close to the northeastern corner of the city walls. How long Shakespeare lodged there is not certain, but he was definitely there in 1604, when the marriage in question took place. He was then 40 years old, a writer, actor and shareholder in the leading troupe of the day, the King’s Men – a man at the peak of his profession.
Silver Street was bombed out in the Blitz and never rebuilt. The old line of it runs partly under and partly alongside a busy road, London Wall, part of the A1211. Pacing it out, I conclude that the closest one can now get to the Mountjoys’ house is underneath the road, in London Wall car park. I am at roughly the right spot, even at the right depth – the preFire stratum is some metres below the current surface – but this is, on the whole, a depressing proximity. An underground car park is unmis-takably an underground car park, whether or not Shakespeare once lived on the site of it.
I am a great believer in physically searching out traces of the past, but here there really is nothing. The house and the street are gone – “melted into air, into thin air” – and it is to that box of old papers in the National Archives that one must turn to reconstruct something of what it was like and of what went on there. Shakespeare’s testimony is only the beginning, a few curt words of reminiscence. From there, the paper chase leads on – other depositions, other documents: tax records, immigrant lists, medical casebooks, probate registers, scribbled marginalia, and the rich, dense sociology of the St Olave’s parish registers, preserved in the Guildhall manuscript library.
Bit by bit, this little corner of Jacobean London emerges: the industrious, quarrelsome, somewhat rackety French family with whom he lodged; the neighbours he knew – the trumpeter Humphrey Fludd, the adulterous mercer Henry Wood, and, most interesting, the brothel-keeper and hack author George Wilkins, who later collaborated with him on Pericles. Wilkins was a dangerous and unpleasant character – his voluminous police record includes brutal acts of violence against prostitutes. On one occasion, he “outrageously beat one Judith Walton, & stamped upon her, so that she was carried home in a chayre”; on another, he was charged with “kicking a woman on the belly which was the greate with childe”. Wilkins’s establishment – nominally a tavern but certainly a brothel – was on Turnmill Street, in the notorious red-light district of Clerkenwell. His wife, Katherine, was nicknamed “Mistress Sweetmeat” – perhaps she served the overpriced cakes and pastries that were associated with brothels. “For a pippin pie that cost in the market fourpence”, warns the pamphleteer Robert Greene, you will pay “at one of the trugging houses 18 pence”.
Wilkins and Shakespeare probably met in 1605, when the newly wed Belotts were actually lodging with Wilkins. In that year, Wilkins, then unknown as a writer, was commissioned by Shakespeare’s company to write a play based on a recent murder case. The result, The Miseries of Enforced Marriage – his best and most biting work, full of the “low-life” he knew so well – played to packed houses. The collaboration on Pericles followed, Wilkins writing the first two acts (and perhaps contributing some expertise to Act IV, which has the only scenes in Shakespeare set in a brothel).
Shakespeare’s connection with this lurid young pimp-playwright is slightly troubling. Was it merely literary opportunism, or were there other services Wilkins offered to a middle-aged man working away from home for months at a stretch? Prostitution was one of the growth industries of Jacobean London; the theatre was another. The two were linked in the minds of moralists, and in topographical fact. The Globe theatre stood among the famous bawdyhouses of Southwark – The Cardinal’s Hat, Holland’s Leaguer and The Castle, the latter on the site of the present-day Southwark pub The Anchor – and the playhouse itself was a place of simmering erotic potential, where “lewd” and “light-tailed” ladies offered “bargaines of incontinency”.
Pursuing these characters, one is prey to the randomness of historical evidence. Whole tracts of the Mountjoys’ life are lost to us, but amid this desert are little oases of actuality. Here is Shakespeare’s landlady in 1597, as recorded in the casebooks of the astrologer Simon Forman: “In Silver Street Mary Mountioy of 30 years lost out of her purse in the street as she went, the 10 of Septembris last between 7 & 8 at night, a gold ring, a hoop ring & a French crown.” In the same entry, we hear of one of the Mountjoys’ maids, Margaret Browne, described as a “tall wench” with a freckled face. It appears this unmarried girl is pregnant; the master of the house might be suspected, as he was later accused of having fathered two bastard children by a serving girl.
In these old pages of semi-legible ink, we start to hear the voices of the past and to feel ourselves back in the narrow lanes of Cripplegate, where the elusive Mr Shakespeare is discreetly lodged above the Mountjoys’ busy workshop, with its wire-mills and twisting-wheels, and its clientele of fashionable and not always very reputable ladies, and the sound of foreign voices floating up into the room where he writes.
The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street, by Charles Nicholl, is published by Penguin on November 8 at £20
Thursday, 27 September 2007
Beer!
Sorry, I'm not drinking until I finish shift on Monday morning, so see this as not-so-subliminal displacement activity!
Here for the beer: Against all odds, Britain's real-ale industry is thriving. Tom de Castella explores the regional brews on offer
New Stateman: 13 September 2007
On 22 September, the world's most famous beer festival begins in Munich. But just as there is a misconception about when Oktoberfest starts - September, confusingly - so, too, there is one about its status as a beer pilgrimage. In truth, it's a Bavarian knees-up beloved by tourists and devoted to established brands. You can't wander around and sample; instead, the visitor must choose a tent belonging to one of the city's big-name brewers, sit down at a table and drink the same thing all night.
Britain's equivalent comes far closer to being a real beerfest, although it, too, is built on a glaring contradiction. Every year in August, tens of thousands of people converge on a huge, soulless hangar in central London in search of the rich cosmos that is Britain's local brewing industry - an abundance of bitter, mild and stout with names like Shropshire Lass, Pit Shaft, Golden Lance and Roaring Meg. Each beer has been uprooted from its natural ecosystem, lugged hundreds of miles in a lorry to central London and served up in a building with all the ambience of a bus depot in Ceausescu's Romania.
It's about as far from the fireside pint at the local as one can get, but people love it. Set up by the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) in 1977, the Great British Beer Festival has become one of the capital's summer highlights since it moved to Olympia in 1992, and last year to the even more cavernous Earls Court, attracting 66,000 people over the five days. That's still only a hundredth of the attendance of the 17-day Oktoberfest, but not bad for a tipple that not so long ago was being read the last rites by drinks-industry analysts.
I'm a son of Burton-on-Trent, so really it's my solemn duty to go along. Real ale is special because it uses traditional ingredients that are left to mature in the cask through a process called secondary fermentation, which is what lends it its rich, complex flavours. So there I was again, on the opening day of the 30th festival, being issued with a pint glass and wondering which of the 700 brews to start with. I found myself at the stand labelled Central Southern England - CAMRA does love its confusing subregions - and began with a third of Moleton Silver from the Moles Brewery in Wiltshire.
Crudely speaking, my fellow drinkers could be split into three distinct groups - the demob-happy, after-work crowd in suits and shirtsleeves, the hardcore real-ale fans with the standard-issue paunch and facial hair, and last the tourists, delighted by what they had stumbled upon. It's usually a wider mix of ages than you get in most bars or pubs, and in ethnic terms there seem to be a lot of Chinese and Japanese drinkers, although real ale doesn't seem to have made many inroads with black Britons. But before the government starts drawing up proposals for an access regulator, it is worth pointing out that the festival's appeal is evolving organically. Although eight out of ten women have never tried real ale in the pub, there is a growing number of female enthusiasts and perhaps a third of drinkers in the hall were women.
This year CAMRA introduced the third of a pint measure to maximise one's opportunity to sample. And that is the event's charm: once you've paid your £8 to get in, you can, rather like an adult Charlie in the chocolate factory, explore every region of Britain at sub-London bar prices. The real fun comes in comparing notes with your fellow drinkers. My party variously decided that Burton Bridge's Golden Delicious was "seaweedy", Skinner's Betty Stogs Bitter was "sau sagey", 1648's Lammas Ale "would be good with chocolate cake" and Bushy's Pure Gold from the Isle of Man was "sessionable".
The picture one gets is of a brewing industry in rude health. But away from this one-off extravaganza, cask ale accounts for only 7 per cent of beer sales in the UK, with 55 per cent of all beer being sold at supermarkets and off-licences. The big four brewers - Scottish & Newcastle, Coors, InBev and Carlsberg - are global brands with more than 80 per cent of the domestic market that have ditched bitters to concentrate on buying up the world's most lucrative lager brands. Real ale is an irrelevance to them. But their lack of interest has left room for the larger regional brewers such as Marston's, Greene King and Fuller's, and beneath them hundreds of micobreweries.
Real-ale fans have mixed feelings about the medium-sized players. On the one hand they are serious about selling cask ale and investing in their breweries. On the other, they are predators, buying up the small and interesting and, in the case of Greene King, closing them down, moving production to their own Bury St Edmunds HQ, and forcing newly acquired pubs to replace local favourites with their own beers. The microbrewers are what the Great British Beer Festival is really about and on this score there are grounds for hope. They may account for only 2 per cent of the market overall, but they seem to be on a roll, aided by the trend for local food and drink.
It's not just about taste. Drinking beer produced by a local business five or ten miles down the road rather than shipped from the other end of the country seems sensible: "sustainable", if we must. And the thousands of vertical drinkers at Earls Court demonstrated another virtue - handling their booze. Without academic research into this murky area one can only speculate: is it the real-ale drinker's nature or the qualities of the drink itself that make its effects more good-humoured than the belligerent feeling lager drinkers get? A bit of both, I suspect. Perhaps officials at the Treasury should look into the practicability of bringing in a variegated duty for beer, with real ale benefiting from lower rates than "antisocial" lager.
The champion beer this year was a Shropshire brew called Hobsons Mild. But for me Butcombe Bitter from Wrington in Somerset won the day. The whole process is subjective, of course - not only do I like its nutty bitterness, but there's the fact that I discovered it some years ago in a pub in Pilton before a rain-sodden Glastonbury Festival. In beer, geography, memory and taste are all intricately linked, which is why our local breweries are so important to the country's heritage. The Great British Beer Festival brings this diversity together and inspires you afresh, so that in the end the contradiction of paying homage to a local craft in a big shed in Earls Court dissolves into your glass with the hops and barley.
Here for the beer: Against all odds, Britain's real-ale industry is thriving. Tom de Castella explores the regional brews on offer
New Stateman: 13 September 2007
On 22 September, the world's most famous beer festival begins in Munich. But just as there is a misconception about when Oktoberfest starts - September, confusingly - so, too, there is one about its status as a beer pilgrimage. In truth, it's a Bavarian knees-up beloved by tourists and devoted to established brands. You can't wander around and sample; instead, the visitor must choose a tent belonging to one of the city's big-name brewers, sit down at a table and drink the same thing all night.
Britain's equivalent comes far closer to being a real beerfest, although it, too, is built on a glaring contradiction. Every year in August, tens of thousands of people converge on a huge, soulless hangar in central London in search of the rich cosmos that is Britain's local brewing industry - an abundance of bitter, mild and stout with names like Shropshire Lass, Pit Shaft, Golden Lance and Roaring Meg. Each beer has been uprooted from its natural ecosystem, lugged hundreds of miles in a lorry to central London and served up in a building with all the ambience of a bus depot in Ceausescu's Romania.
It's about as far from the fireside pint at the local as one can get, but people love it. Set up by the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) in 1977, the Great British Beer Festival has become one of the capital's summer highlights since it moved to Olympia in 1992, and last year to the even more cavernous Earls Court, attracting 66,000 people over the five days. That's still only a hundredth of the attendance of the 17-day Oktoberfest, but not bad for a tipple that not so long ago was being read the last rites by drinks-industry analysts.
I'm a son of Burton-on-Trent, so really it's my solemn duty to go along. Real ale is special because it uses traditional ingredients that are left to mature in the cask through a process called secondary fermentation, which is what lends it its rich, complex flavours. So there I was again, on the opening day of the 30th festival, being issued with a pint glass and wondering which of the 700 brews to start with. I found myself at the stand labelled Central Southern England - CAMRA does love its confusing subregions - and began with a third of Moleton Silver from the Moles Brewery in Wiltshire.
Crudely speaking, my fellow drinkers could be split into three distinct groups - the demob-happy, after-work crowd in suits and shirtsleeves, the hardcore real-ale fans with the standard-issue paunch and facial hair, and last the tourists, delighted by what they had stumbled upon. It's usually a wider mix of ages than you get in most bars or pubs, and in ethnic terms there seem to be a lot of Chinese and Japanese drinkers, although real ale doesn't seem to have made many inroads with black Britons. But before the government starts drawing up proposals for an access regulator, it is worth pointing out that the festival's appeal is evolving organically. Although eight out of ten women have never tried real ale in the pub, there is a growing number of female enthusiasts and perhaps a third of drinkers in the hall were women.
This year CAMRA introduced the third of a pint measure to maximise one's opportunity to sample. And that is the event's charm: once you've paid your £8 to get in, you can, rather like an adult Charlie in the chocolate factory, explore every region of Britain at sub-London bar prices. The real fun comes in comparing notes with your fellow drinkers. My party variously decided that Burton Bridge's Golden Delicious was "seaweedy", Skinner's Betty Stogs Bitter was "sau sagey", 1648's Lammas Ale "would be good with chocolate cake" and Bushy's Pure Gold from the Isle of Man was "sessionable".
The picture one gets is of a brewing industry in rude health. But away from this one-off extravaganza, cask ale accounts for only 7 per cent of beer sales in the UK, with 55 per cent of all beer being sold at supermarkets and off-licences. The big four brewers - Scottish & Newcastle, Coors, InBev and Carlsberg - are global brands with more than 80 per cent of the domestic market that have ditched bitters to concentrate on buying up the world's most lucrative lager brands. Real ale is an irrelevance to them. But their lack of interest has left room for the larger regional brewers such as Marston's, Greene King and Fuller's, and beneath them hundreds of micobreweries.
Real-ale fans have mixed feelings about the medium-sized players. On the one hand they are serious about selling cask ale and investing in their breweries. On the other, they are predators, buying up the small and interesting and, in the case of Greene King, closing them down, moving production to their own Bury St Edmunds HQ, and forcing newly acquired pubs to replace local favourites with their own beers. The microbrewers are what the Great British Beer Festival is really about and on this score there are grounds for hope. They may account for only 2 per cent of the market overall, but they seem to be on a roll, aided by the trend for local food and drink.
It's not just about taste. Drinking beer produced by a local business five or ten miles down the road rather than shipped from the other end of the country seems sensible: "sustainable", if we must. And the thousands of vertical drinkers at Earls Court demonstrated another virtue - handling their booze. Without academic research into this murky area one can only speculate: is it the real-ale drinker's nature or the qualities of the drink itself that make its effects more good-humoured than the belligerent feeling lager drinkers get? A bit of both, I suspect. Perhaps officials at the Treasury should look into the practicability of bringing in a variegated duty for beer, with real ale benefiting from lower rates than "antisocial" lager.
The champion beer this year was a Shropshire brew called Hobsons Mild. But for me Butcombe Bitter from Wrington in Somerset won the day. The whole process is subjective, of course - not only do I like its nutty bitterness, but there's the fact that I discovered it some years ago in a pub in Pilton before a rain-sodden Glastonbury Festival. In beer, geography, memory and taste are all intricately linked, which is why our local breweries are so important to the country's heritage. The Great British Beer Festival brings this diversity together and inspires you afresh, so that in the end the contradiction of paying homage to a local craft in a big shed in Earls Court dissolves into your glass with the hops and barley.
Sicko- it can't happen here can it?!
One of the things about going on holiday in North America is that you tend to see publicity about, and reviews of, films that were about at home months before you came over. Or you become aware of films that still have be shown back home. For example,Sicko, Michael Moore's film about the US health system, was on in Vancouver's cinemas when I was over there in June/July, but it won't be released here until the end of October. If the weather hadn't been so good and I didn't have friends to meet, I might have gone and seen it to pass a wet afternoon trying to keep out of bars. I couldn't say the same about, for instance, License to Wed , the latest dire Robin Williams "comedy", which just by reading the Vancouver papers I knew would be a turkey ages before it arrived in Limeyland's cinemas...
I(touch wood)rarely use the NHS, but I'm glad I don't have the system they have in the USA, where you have really excellent healthcare as long as you have the cash to pay for it. I don't think the NHS here is perfect (and one day I would like to see a health service here run on mutualist lines. Until then...). I have no problem with us taking up ideas from abroad. I've read pieces about Europe's other health systems and I think we could steal ideas off them. Other European countries are often cited when discussions about "reforming" the NHS take place. However, it appears to me that when NuLab and the Cons are talking about taking cues and cures from abroad they mean handing over the NHS to US health corporations for private profit. Maybe I'm being a tad cynical, but perhaps I shouldn't read pieces like the one below. Allyson Pollock has been a constant gadfly to NuLab's "reform" plans for the NHS over the last Ten Glorious Years and I thoroughly recommend her NHS Plc to understand why, despite more money than ever been spent on the NHS, patients and staff are often irate with its performance. Her review of Sicko is a timely antidote to those who dumbly glorify our health system over that in the US, when the Government would like ours to be more like that over the water.
What Sicko doesn't tell you ...: Michael Moore's film hails the NHS and condemns US healthcare. But behind the scenes the UK government has already started adopting the American model of health provision.
Allyson Pollock, The Guardian, Monday September 24, 2007
Viewers of Michael Moore's new film will come away convinced that the public healthcare system in this country is superior to its privatised American counterpart, where more than 50 million people are without any kind of care at all. But does the government agree? Or has it instead been taking ideas from the very system revealed in Sicko to be so iniquitous?
The film is very much made for a US audience. Moore does not go into the huge changes that are taking place in European healthcare - and the new, privatising project going on here. It might surprise many British people who see the film to know that, for example, the British government has for years been in contact with Kaiser Permanente, one of the big US healthcare corporations, and is actively trying to remodel the NHS along American lines. All the reforms carried out by the government over the past few years have been aimed at that.
In 1995, civil servants from the Department of Health, fresh from visits to the US, thought they had found the future of the NHS. They invited Kaiser Permanente to look at whether it could deliver health services as part of the new Private Finance Initiative in the NHS. The PFI is a building programme of public infrastructure that brings with it a long-term debt that the government takes out from a private company. But as the medical director of Kaiser Permanente, which is both an insurer and healthcare provider, told me at the time in her marbled headquarters in California, the NHS was not yet ready for Kaiser. Such a system, built on public ownership, control and accountability, was closed to commercial companies. And it was the same story for the whole of Europe. But Kaiser Permanente, which, along with the rest of the US healthcare industry, was known as one of the "darlings of Wall Street" because it made so much money, was restless. It wanted to make more, and had its eye on the rich pickings of European tax funds. And where better to begin than by conquering the UK's "socialised" NHS, so long the model for much of the world?
Kaiser Permanente didn't have long to wait. In 1997, the Labour administration swept away the last remaining obstacles to PFI and, in so doing, established the laboratory for the great market experiment in public services.
The accumulated neglect and backlog in maintenance and repair became an excuse to sell off NHS land and assets at knockdown prices. The NHS is now a tenant in hospitals it once owned, leasing back buildings and services from private sector landlords at astronomical rents that are currently consuming £500m a year and will increase exponentially. The diversion of scarce funds from hospital revenues to bankers and shareholders has starved the NHS of cash, and the result has been a major downsizing. For almost every PFI hospital built, three hospitals close. Bed closures and staff reductions occur on an unprecedented scale.
Back in 1997, the NHS had major capacity problems. Waiting lists kept rising, accident and emergency wards were overflowing, public discontent was growing and staff morale plummeting. Tony Blair found a solution one night in 2000 as he was leaving the smart River Cafe. He was introduced to Tim Evans, external affairs director of the Independent Health Care Association, the body that represented the private healthcare industry, who convinced him that the private sector had all the answers.
But the Labour government knew that a public sector NHS was close to the heart of most Britons, and a spin operation was required. So, from the start of the Labour government, ministers dismissed the NHS as Stalinist, a 1940s relic of socialism, bureaucratic and rigid. Then, in 2002, the highly respected British Medical Journal published a paper purporting to show that Kaiser Permanente (them again) was more efficient than the NHS. Within hours, hundreds of emails had poured into the BMJ exposing the flaws in the paper, from the misleading nature of the claims to the authors' links to the company. But the BMJ's editor, Richard Smith, declined to retract the paper, correct it or publish a proper scientific rebuttal.
The paper had done its work. Its propaganda was cited and repeated everywhere by academics and policy-makers and, most crucially, by the government in its white papers and documents, including the Wanless Report. The much-despised US healthcare industry, of which Kaiser Permanente is a part, was to be the new model for Britain.
Not long after publishing the article, Smith left the BMJ for a lucrative post as chief executive of the UK subsidiary of the US health corporation UnitedHealth. There he joined its new European president, Simon Stevens, formerly adviser to every Labour health secretary, and Tony Blair, since 1997. The flow of ideas, from him and many others like him, was all one-way: from the US to the UK.
As adviser to Alan Milburn, health secretary from 1999 to 2003, Stevens and his American colleagues helped to shape the NHS Plan 2000. It promised to provide more money, doctors, nurses, beds and capacity. But in the event the funds were directed at building a new parallel system that would be owned and operated not by the people but by the private sector on behalf of shareholders.
Using the mantra of choice, the market was thus disguised. In primary care the government negotiated a new GP contract that would allow commercial companies to run GP services. There are now more than 30 corporations running GP services in England.
It was choice that was used to bring in the highly controversial ISTC (independent sector treatment centre) programme, spearheaded by Texan Ken Anderson, which provides mini- factories for elective surgery. Anderson headed the new commercial directorate of the Department of Health and quickly set about awarding £6bn worth of contracts to healthcare corporations, thereby undermining elective surgery, diagnostics, radiology and pathology provision in the NHS.
Local people from Portsmouth to Scarborough have been protesting against ISTCs draining scarce NHS funds, which has led to service closures and staff redundancies to balance the books. There is not an area of the country where services are not being cut and closed. Protests against the closures of accident and emergency departments and hospital services are happening in Surrey, East and West Sussex, Kent, Worcester, Manchester, Leeds, Durham and Huddersfield; and against the 150 community hospitals in places such as Norfolk, Cambridge, Leicester, Devon, Marlborough and Bromley. The NHS, the government says, has had unprecedented levels of funding - so where has all the money gone if it isn't into services? Is it really all down to bad managers and greedy doctors and nurses?
All markets need systems for pricing, billing and invoicing. Labour has introduced those: the electronic patient record, part of the £1bn IT disaster. The NHS too is being transformed from within. Foundation trusts such as University College London Hospitals Trust have been given new powers to enter joint ventures with commercial companies such as the Hospital Corporation of America and to spend millions of pounds on advertising campaigns, PR agents, mega-departments of finance and accounting, press officers, management consultants and profits. As in the US, billions of pounds, probably approaching 20% of annual NHS funds - estimated to be £20bn in England in a year - are being squandered on what are called the transaction costs of the market.
Earlier this year the US chief executive officer of UnitedHealth, Bill McGuire, was sacked along with other board members for repricing share options. His annual $126m package was not enough for him. Meanwhile more than 50 million Americans, including 10 million children, go without care - in the richest country in the world. Is this what we want?
Allyson Pollock is author of NHS plc: The Privatisation of Our Healthcare and professor and head of the centre for international public health policy at the University of Edinburgh.
I(touch wood)rarely use the NHS, but I'm glad I don't have the system they have in the USA, where you have really excellent healthcare as long as you have the cash to pay for it. I don't think the NHS here is perfect (and one day I would like to see a health service here run on mutualist lines. Until then...). I have no problem with us taking up ideas from abroad. I've read pieces about Europe's other health systems and I think we could steal ideas off them. Other European countries are often cited when discussions about "reforming" the NHS take place. However, it appears to me that when NuLab and the Cons are talking about taking cues and cures from abroad they mean handing over the NHS to US health corporations for private profit. Maybe I'm being a tad cynical, but perhaps I shouldn't read pieces like the one below. Allyson Pollock has been a constant gadfly to NuLab's "reform" plans for the NHS over the last Ten Glorious Years and I thoroughly recommend her NHS Plc to understand why, despite more money than ever been spent on the NHS, patients and staff are often irate with its performance. Her review of Sicko is a timely antidote to those who dumbly glorify our health system over that in the US, when the Government would like ours to be more like that over the water.
What Sicko doesn't tell you ...: Michael Moore's film hails the NHS and condemns US healthcare. But behind the scenes the UK government has already started adopting the American model of health provision.
Allyson Pollock, The Guardian, Monday September 24, 2007
Viewers of Michael Moore's new film will come away convinced that the public healthcare system in this country is superior to its privatised American counterpart, where more than 50 million people are without any kind of care at all. But does the government agree? Or has it instead been taking ideas from the very system revealed in Sicko to be so iniquitous?
The film is very much made for a US audience. Moore does not go into the huge changes that are taking place in European healthcare - and the new, privatising project going on here. It might surprise many British people who see the film to know that, for example, the British government has for years been in contact with Kaiser Permanente, one of the big US healthcare corporations, and is actively trying to remodel the NHS along American lines. All the reforms carried out by the government over the past few years have been aimed at that.
In 1995, civil servants from the Department of Health, fresh from visits to the US, thought they had found the future of the NHS. They invited Kaiser Permanente to look at whether it could deliver health services as part of the new Private Finance Initiative in the NHS. The PFI is a building programme of public infrastructure that brings with it a long-term debt that the government takes out from a private company. But as the medical director of Kaiser Permanente, which is both an insurer and healthcare provider, told me at the time in her marbled headquarters in California, the NHS was not yet ready for Kaiser. Such a system, built on public ownership, control and accountability, was closed to commercial companies. And it was the same story for the whole of Europe. But Kaiser Permanente, which, along with the rest of the US healthcare industry, was known as one of the "darlings of Wall Street" because it made so much money, was restless. It wanted to make more, and had its eye on the rich pickings of European tax funds. And where better to begin than by conquering the UK's "socialised" NHS, so long the model for much of the world?
Kaiser Permanente didn't have long to wait. In 1997, the Labour administration swept away the last remaining obstacles to PFI and, in so doing, established the laboratory for the great market experiment in public services.
The accumulated neglect and backlog in maintenance and repair became an excuse to sell off NHS land and assets at knockdown prices. The NHS is now a tenant in hospitals it once owned, leasing back buildings and services from private sector landlords at astronomical rents that are currently consuming £500m a year and will increase exponentially. The diversion of scarce funds from hospital revenues to bankers and shareholders has starved the NHS of cash, and the result has been a major downsizing. For almost every PFI hospital built, three hospitals close. Bed closures and staff reductions occur on an unprecedented scale.
Back in 1997, the NHS had major capacity problems. Waiting lists kept rising, accident and emergency wards were overflowing, public discontent was growing and staff morale plummeting. Tony Blair found a solution one night in 2000 as he was leaving the smart River Cafe. He was introduced to Tim Evans, external affairs director of the Independent Health Care Association, the body that represented the private healthcare industry, who convinced him that the private sector had all the answers.
But the Labour government knew that a public sector NHS was close to the heart of most Britons, and a spin operation was required. So, from the start of the Labour government, ministers dismissed the NHS as Stalinist, a 1940s relic of socialism, bureaucratic and rigid. Then, in 2002, the highly respected British Medical Journal published a paper purporting to show that Kaiser Permanente (them again) was more efficient than the NHS. Within hours, hundreds of emails had poured into the BMJ exposing the flaws in the paper, from the misleading nature of the claims to the authors' links to the company. But the BMJ's editor, Richard Smith, declined to retract the paper, correct it or publish a proper scientific rebuttal.
The paper had done its work. Its propaganda was cited and repeated everywhere by academics and policy-makers and, most crucially, by the government in its white papers and documents, including the Wanless Report. The much-despised US healthcare industry, of which Kaiser Permanente is a part, was to be the new model for Britain.
Not long after publishing the article, Smith left the BMJ for a lucrative post as chief executive of the UK subsidiary of the US health corporation UnitedHealth. There he joined its new European president, Simon Stevens, formerly adviser to every Labour health secretary, and Tony Blair, since 1997. The flow of ideas, from him and many others like him, was all one-way: from the US to the UK.
As adviser to Alan Milburn, health secretary from 1999 to 2003, Stevens and his American colleagues helped to shape the NHS Plan 2000. It promised to provide more money, doctors, nurses, beds and capacity. But in the event the funds were directed at building a new parallel system that would be owned and operated not by the people but by the private sector on behalf of shareholders.
Using the mantra of choice, the market was thus disguised. In primary care the government negotiated a new GP contract that would allow commercial companies to run GP services. There are now more than 30 corporations running GP services in England.
It was choice that was used to bring in the highly controversial ISTC (independent sector treatment centre) programme, spearheaded by Texan Ken Anderson, which provides mini- factories for elective surgery. Anderson headed the new commercial directorate of the Department of Health and quickly set about awarding £6bn worth of contracts to healthcare corporations, thereby undermining elective surgery, diagnostics, radiology and pathology provision in the NHS.
Local people from Portsmouth to Scarborough have been protesting against ISTCs draining scarce NHS funds, which has led to service closures and staff redundancies to balance the books. There is not an area of the country where services are not being cut and closed. Protests against the closures of accident and emergency departments and hospital services are happening in Surrey, East and West Sussex, Kent, Worcester, Manchester, Leeds, Durham and Huddersfield; and against the 150 community hospitals in places such as Norfolk, Cambridge, Leicester, Devon, Marlborough and Bromley. The NHS, the government says, has had unprecedented levels of funding - so where has all the money gone if it isn't into services? Is it really all down to bad managers and greedy doctors and nurses?
All markets need systems for pricing, billing and invoicing. Labour has introduced those: the electronic patient record, part of the £1bn IT disaster. The NHS too is being transformed from within. Foundation trusts such as University College London Hospitals Trust have been given new powers to enter joint ventures with commercial companies such as the Hospital Corporation of America and to spend millions of pounds on advertising campaigns, PR agents, mega-departments of finance and accounting, press officers, management consultants and profits. As in the US, billions of pounds, probably approaching 20% of annual NHS funds - estimated to be £20bn in England in a year - are being squandered on what are called the transaction costs of the market.
Earlier this year the US chief executive officer of UnitedHealth, Bill McGuire, was sacked along with other board members for repricing share options. His annual $126m package was not enough for him. Meanwhile more than 50 million Americans, including 10 million children, go without care - in the richest country in the world. Is this what we want?
Allyson Pollock is author of NHS plc: The Privatisation of Our Healthcare and professor and head of the centre for international public health policy at the University of Edinburgh.
Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine is a book I want to get, although I might leave it until it comes out in paperback (this side of winning the Lottery, I think £25 is a lot for pay for a book). For those of you with similarly frugal tendencies, there are good extracts at:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/shockdoctrine/story/0,,2165953,00.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/shockdoctrine/story/0,,2165953,00.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/shockdoctrine/story/0,,2166586,00.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,,2167226,00.html
The extract which most struck me was this:
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been a powerful reckoning with the crimes committed in the name of communism. But what of the crusade to liberate world markets?
I am not arguing that all forms of market systems require large-scale violence. It is eminently possible to have a market-based economy that demands no such brutality or ideological purity. A free market in consumer products can coexist with free public health care, with public schools, with a large segment of the economy - such as a national oil company - held in state hands. It's equally possible to require corporations to pay decent wages, to respect the right of workers to form unions, and for governments to tax and redistribute wealth so that the sharp inequalities that mark the corporatist state are reduced. Markets need not be fundamentalist.
John Maynard Keynes proposed just that kind of mixed, regulated economy after the Great Depression. It was that system of compromises, checks and balances that Friedman's counter-revolution was launched to dismantle in country after country. Seen in that light, Chicago School capitalism has something in common with other fundamentalist ideologies: the signature desire for unattainable purity.
This desire for godlike powers of creation is precisely why free-market ideologues are so drawn to crises and disasters. Non-apocalyptic reality is simply not hospitable to their ambitions. For 35 years, what has animated Friedman's counter-revolution is an attraction to a kind of freedom available only in times of cataclysmic change - when people, with their stubborn habits and insistent demands, are blasted out of the way - moments when democracy seems a practical impossibility. Believers in the shock doctrine are convinced that only a great rupture - a flood, a war, a terrorist attack - can generate the kind of vast, clean canvases they crave. It is in these malleable moments, when we are psychologically unmoored and physically uprooted, that these artists of the real plunge in their hands and begin their work of remaking the world.
The Leninist fervour of Milton Friedman and his followers (who have as much to do with Adam Smith and David Ricardo as Lenin and Trotsky had to do with Marx and Engels) is recognised by John Gray in his review of The Shock Doctrine:
The end of the world as we know it: Naomi Klein's critique of neo-liberalism, The Shock Doctrine, is both timely and devastating, says John Gray
The Guardian, Saturday September 15, 2007
Over the past few decades, many of the ideas of the far left have found new homes on the right. Lenin believed that it was in conditions of catastrophic upheaval that humanity advances most rapidly, and the idea that economic progress can be achieved through the devastation of entire societies has been a key part of the neo-liberal cult of the free market. Soviet-style economies left an inheritance of human and ecological devastation, while neo-liberal policies have had results that are not radically dissimilar in many countries. Yet, while the Marxist faith in central planning is now confined to a few dingy sects, a quasi-religious belief in free markets continues to shape the policies of governments.
Many writers have pointed to the havoc and ruin that have accompanied the imposition of free markets across the world. Whether in Africa, Asia, Latin America or post-communist Europe, policies of wholesale privatisation and structural adjustment have led to declining economic activity and social dislocation on a massive scale. Anyone who has watched a country lurch from one crisis to another as the bureaucrats of the IMF impose cut after cut in pursuit of the holy grail of stabilisation will recognise the process Naomi Klein describes in her latest and most important book to date. Visiting Argentina not long before the economic collapse of 2002, I found the government struggling to implement an IMF diktat to roll back public spending at a time when the economy was already rapidly contracting. The result was predictable, and the country was plunged into a depression, with calamitous consequences in terms of poverty and social breakdown.
Klein believes that neo-liberalism belongs among "the closed, fundamentalist doctrines that cannot co-exist with other belief-systems ... The world as it is must be erased to make way for their purist invention. Rooted in biblical fantasies of great floods and great fires, it is a logic that leads ineluctably towards violence." As Klein sees it, the social breakdowns that have accompanied neo-liberal economic policies are not the result of incompetence or mismanagement. They are integral to the free-market project, which can only advance against a background of disasters. At times, writing in a populist vein that echoes her first book No Logo, published seven years ago, Klein seems to suggest that these disasters are manufactured as part of a deliberate policy framed by corporations with hidden influence in government. Her more considered view, which is also more plausible, is that disaster is part of the normal functioning of the type of capitalism we have today: "An economic system that requires constant growth, while bucking almost all serious attempts at environmental regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological or financial. The appetite for easy, short-term profits offered by purely speculative investment has turned the stock, currency and real estate markets into crisis-creation machines, as the Asian financial crisis, the Mexican peso crisis and the dotcom collapse all demonstrate."
There are very few books that really help us understand the present. The Shock Doctrine is one of those books. Ranging across the world, Klein exposes the strikingly similar policies that enabled the imposition of free markets in countries as different as Pinochet's Chile, Yeltsin's Russia, China and post-Saddam Iraq. Part of the power of this book comes from the parallels she observes in seemingly unrelated developments. In a fascinating and alarming examination of the underside of recent history, she notes the affinities between the policies of shock therapy imposed in the course of neo-liberal market reform and the techniques of torture that have been routinely used by the US in the course of the "war on terror". Klein begins her first chapter with a moving account of a conversation she had with a victim of a covert programme of mind-control experiments, carried out in Canada in the 1950s, which used people suffering from minor psychiatric ailments to try out techniques of "de-patterning" that aimed to scramble and reshape their personalities.
Employing electroshock therapy, sensory deprivation and drug-induced comas, these experiments helped develop some of the "coercive interrogation techniques" that have been practised in Guantánamo Bay. Klein uses torture as a metaphor, and does not claim any cause-and-effect link between its re-emergence and the rise of neo-liberal shock therapy; but she does point to some disquieting similarities. Individuals and societies have been "de-patterned" with the aim of remaking them on a better, more rational model. In each case, the experiments have failed, while inflicting lasting and often irreparable damage on those who were subjected to them.
But has the free market experiment failed? As Klein sees it, free market shock therapy may actually have succeeded in achieving its true objectives. Post-invasion Iraq may be "a ghoulish dystopia where going to a simple business meeting could get you lynched, burned alive or beheaded". Even so, Klein points out, Halliburton is making handsome profits - it has built the green zone as a corporate city-state, and taken on many of the traditional functions of the armed forces in Iraq. An entire society has been destroyed, but the corporations that operate in the ruins are doing rather well. Klein's message, then, seems to be that - at least in its own, profit-centred terms - disaster capitalism works.
There can be no doubt that fortunes have been reaped from the Iraq war as they have been from other experiments in disaster capitalism. Yet I remain unconvinced that the corporations Klein berates throughout the book understand, let alone control, the anarchic global capitalism that has been allowed to develop over the past couple of decades - any more than the neo-liberal ideologues who helped create it foresaw where it would lead. Rightly, Klein insists that free market ideology must bear responsibility for the crimes committed on its behalf - just as Marxist ideology must be held to account for the crimes of communism. But she says remarkably little about the illusions by which neo-liberal ideologues were themselves blinded. Milton Friedman and his disciples believed a western-style free market would spring up spontaneously in post-communist Russia. They were left gawping when central planning was followed by the criminalised free-for-all of the 90s, and were unprepared for the rise of Putin's resource-based state capitalism. These ideologues were not the sinister, Dr Strangelove-like figures of the anti-capitalist imagination. They were comically deluded bien-pensants, who promoted their utopian schemes with messianic fervour and have been left stranded by history, as the radiant future they confidently predicted has failed to arrive.
The neo-liberal order is already facing intractable problems. The Iraq war may have allowed another experiment in shock therapy, but a failed state has been created as a result of which Gulf oil - which a former chair of the US joint chiefs of staff accurately described as "the jugular vein of global capitalism" - is less secure than before. Faced with defeat in Iraq, the Bush administration seems to be gearing up for an assault on Iran - a desperate move that would magnify the existing catastrophe many times over. At the same time financial crisis has reached into the American heartland as an implosion in speculation-driven credit markets has started to spread throughout the system. It is impossible to know how these crises will develop, but it is hard to resist the suspicion that disaster capitalism is now creating disasters larger than it can handle.
Finally, before I'm totally Kleined-out, an interview piece:
Brainwashed by the market: What drives Naomi Klein?
Naomi Klein's critique of 'disaster capitalism' will echo around the world – but its roots lie in a scandal close to her Canadian home
By Julie Wheelwright, The Independent, 14 September 2007
The author and activist Naomi Klein has just endured a gentle mauling on the Today programme. Klein had been speaking about her new book The Shock Doctrine, arguing that capitalism's latest incarnation is about profiting from – even creating – crises. Diane Coyle, an economist and BBC trustee (and former economics editor of The Independent), sniffed that this argument was "another example of American imperialism". When we meet an hour later at a Soho hotel, Klein seems unruffled. "I did some research about Diane Coyle," she says, rooting through a file. She hands me a paper entitled "The Role of Mobiles in Disaster and Emergencies", which Coyle wrote for a mobile-phone trade association.
"You can see," she says, "that I'm a bit of an obsessive." Ironically, for a woman who has been hailed as the author of a "Das Kapital of the growing anti-corporate movement", there's nothing grungy about Klein. With her sleek hair-cut, immaculate teeth and friendly but down-to-business attitude, she could easily be mistaken for a telecoms exec winding up a power breakfast in the lobby of a boutique hotel.
Having tackled the way our affluent lifestyle is a by-product of globalisation's devastating effects on the world's poor in No Logo (2000), Klein now deftly marshals another enormously complex subject into a series of elegantly argued chapters. In a damning critique of Friedmanite economics, The Shock Doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism (Allen Lane, £25) uses thousands of documents and interviews to expose how governments and corporations have used or even invented disasters to push through laissez-faire market reforms before local populations can recover from the shock. Wars and disaster responses are now so fully privatised that they themselves have become the new markets.
Klein traces this Dr Strangelove world back to Milton Friedman, who turned the University of Chicago's economics department into a hotbed of free-market radicalism. With the complicity of the US government and its intelligence services, Friedman and his "Chicago Boys" brought their doctrine to Latin America in the Seventies. Where democratically elected leaders like Salvador Allende were ousted by military dictators, the Chicago Boys moved in to help privatise, de-regulate and clean up. Their greatest weapon, argues Klein, was shock. After their success in Chile, the roadshow moved on to Argentina, Bolivia and Uruguay. Later, Friedman's star graduate, Jeffrey Sachs, was parachuted in to Poland and Russia, where democracy was sacrificed for market interests. The rumours that sparked the "Asian Flu" financial crisis of the late Nineties saw the dismantling of state-owned industries.
The list goes on, culminating in the new disaster economies that have turned Thai fishing villages into high-end beach resorts, post-tsunami, and New Orleans public schools into privately funded "charter" schools after Hurricane Katrina. But does Klein believe that the often faceless operators believe their rhetoric about free markets being the cornerstone of democracy? She pauses. "There are some true believers who really think that trickle-down economics is the best way to improve the lot of all humanity," she says. "But I think those people are few and far between."
Among the most haunting chapters are those dealing with the dismantling of Iraq. While the Bush presidency now seems mired in scandals, Klein takes little comfort in the comeuppance of his closest allies. "I wrote the book because I think we need to be talking about systems rather than individuals," she says. "My worry is that the danger of the Bush years is that these guys are so outrageous that the focus has just been on the bad apples. You gun, gun, gun to get Rumsfeld to resign; you gun, gun, gun to get Cheney to resign, and then do we really think this is going to change things?'
Klein recently attended a congressional hearing on private-sector security in Iraq, where military support services are being contracted out to corporations such as Blackwater, Bechtel and Halliburton. The number of private contractors in Iraq now outstrips the number of US forces in the field. Klein found that the politicians were relying on the journalists for their information. "It was amazing how little they knew – they were asking us, 'What's going on?' It was kinda nice that they were asking," she says, widening her eyes with astonishment, "but it was also a little late."
What the Bush administration has created are no-go areas for private contractors. Klein relates how two former employees at the security firm Custer Battles accused it of defrauding the government for work at Baghdad International Airport. Even though a federal court found Custer Battles guilty, the verdict was overturned when the company argued it wasn't a part of the US government. So the Bush administration had indemnified US corporations in Iraq from liability under Iraqi or American law. For Klein, "Iraq represented the most extreme expression of the anti-state revolution: a hollow state."
I ask Klein if she feels grateful to have spent her childhood in Montreal during the tail-end of prime minister Pierre Trudeau's Liberal government. "Oh yeah," she says. "I feel very fortunate to be a Canadian, and when I talk to my American friends about these issues, it's very abstract for them. They don't really know what 'public' means because this agenda has triumphed so completely." Klein's parents had left the US in protest against the Vietnam war, and headed for a country where public services were flourishing.
She had impeccable "red diaper" credentials. Her grandfather Philip Klein, an animator at Disney, was blacklisted for organising a strike in the Fifties. Her father, Dr Michael Klein, taught at McGill University's medical department, while her mother Bonnie Sherr Klein became a celebrated feminist film-maker. But if Canada proved a haven, Klein has drawn on a sinister episode from her neighbourhood as a central metaphor for the book.
The Allan Memorial Institute, a psychiatric hospital at McGill, had been a place that people had whispered about, says Klein. A family friend was a chief intern who refused to participate in the experiments of its director, Dr Ewan Cameron. "I never knew the history, even though I had these close connections." Since the Eighties, there have been revelations about the horrific abuse of mostly female patients, who were subjected to a regime of drugs, ECT and sensory deprivation to erase and "repattern" their personalities.
Further research revealed that Cameron's experiments were funded by the CIA to create a handbook for torture. Known as Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation, the techniques – first used on women suffering from post-partum depression – became standard torture practice: sensory deprivation, stress positions, hooding, electric shock. But it was only as Klein was leaving Iraq in 2004, when photos documenting the torture at Abu Ghraib prison were being leaked, that she made the connection with Cameron.
"There's something about putting populations into a state of shock that these architects of war are drawn to," she says. "So it made me want to understand what happens when a brain goes into a real state of shock." Klein interviewed Gail Kastner, a former McGill nursing student who had sought psychiatric help for anxiety. After receiving a cocktail of drugs and ECT, Kastner left the clinic with a badly damaged memory and a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. After their meeting, "it was as if I'd been talking about a photocopy and now I was talking about the real thing".
That "real thing" was a method of shocking individuals and nations into a state of submission, wiping out memories and filling them with what doctors saw fit. This emblem of Klein's book has also become a through-line for a short documentary film she has made with Alfonso Cuaron, the Mexican director of Children of Men.
"We sat down and wrote the script in one day," says Klein. "I loved this process because Alfonso is so creative and he sets the bar so high." The Cuaron film, screened at the Toronto and Venice film festivals, was also released on YouTube. Her book will be published in 10 languages. She'll spend the next year travelling the globe to promote its message. Whatever her critics might say, Klein's work is taking a generational pulse, and possibly lifting the veil on a perilous post-Bush future.
Biography: Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein, 37, grew up in Montreal, the daughter of activists who had moved from the US to Canada. A journalist who began as editor of the University of Toronto's newspaper The Varsity, in 2000 she published No Logo: taking aim at the brand bullies.
It became a "movement bible" for anti-corporate protesters, translated into 28 languages. In 2002, she published her essays, Fences and Windows. She has collaborated with her husband Avi Lewis on a film about factory workers in Argentina, The Take, and writes a syndicated column. She was ranked 11th in the 2005 Global Intellectuals poll – the highest-ranking woman. Her new book is The Shock Doctrine (Allen Lane). She lives in downtown Toronto.
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