Following my previous, football-inspired post on team and tribe, I plucked up the courage to read a distantly related Guardian article entitled Now comes the ‘womanosphere’: the anti-feminist media telling women to be thin, fertile and Republican which sent me back to my own very conservative, Catholic (pretty tribal!) upbringing, with all the pre-marital sexual guardrails and constraints that came along with that. There, too, the default expectation was that mothers would be housewives, to manage the large family* and support the breadwinner. That sense was bolstered by a feeling of us being an embattled, absolutely correct minority, cast unwillingly but cohesively into the wild and sinful wider world. That feeling accompanied me through university and my earliest working days, to thankfully be sloughed off over decades of ‘normal’ life, helped I think by a slow-to-awaken core of suspicion that “all of” right wasn’t necessarily on our side, that helped loosen that armour from the inside.

Yet another related Guardian article cropped up on the American (where elsican?) natalist movement What is America’s pro-natalism movement really about? m highlighting a (for now) relatively small, embattled, inherently correct minority turning inwards to battle and protect itself against a wrong-headed wider world.

Then, finally, there was another article, entitled Please, yell at my kids! Five lessons I’ve learned about good parenting from around the world (I have to say, though: ‘five or ten things’ are the worst articles, but still…) about ways of raising families around the world, with the common, positive thread being that of community. The author also points out that

parenting is hard everywhere, but nowhere is it as lonely as it is in the US

The message for me from all of these links has to be that of plurality as a good. Communities can be too closed and insular, becoming cells focussed on their own people and messages: with the availability of self-reinforcing but unreflective, non-selfcritical media (print media does the job well enough, too), these cells can grow to become a danger to society - from thread to theat, as it were. Communities can also potentially become too loose and incoherent to retain that identity.

If we can gain a plural sense of community, that is, openness to the idea of interwoven groups and communities, then we have a stronger society. For societies are interwoven, interlocking communities. If too many communities cut the threads and build walls rather than bridges, convince themselves that everybody else is the enemy, then societies suffer. Communities need to be challenged with the fundamental questions: who is this good for, and where do our goods come from?

And society needs to monitor and promote the health of its communities. We don’t need to convert everybody from Catholicism; housewives make a valuable (if undervalued) contribution to society; football fans bring cohesion and dynamism to a town; positive birth rates can be a sign of healthy communities. “Just” keep everybody respectful, and things will be better for all.

No doubt that’s a rich Western point of view - but even here, in strong Europe, we need that reinforcement. But before things become too earnest…

*: an early draft had me writing

… housewives being there to cook and manage the family

which, thanks to English grammar, came across as rather gruesomely funny when I mentally parsed it in that way…)

I was surprised at how Jonathan Liew’s article in the Guardian Pundits’ showy partisanship reflects football’s embrace of fan-centric populism resonated with me and caused the notion of an “anti-identity” to bubble up in my mind, reinforced by the thought, kindly provided by Brexit Prime Minister Theresa May, of me as a “citizen of footballing nowhere.”

Throughout my football-formative years, as we moved house and as I later continued my own arc around the UK and abroad, I have supported home teams in Liverpool, Manchester, Ipswich, Bologna, Shrewsbury and Mainz. Through friendships and admiration of certain teams, I have also supported Sampdoria (Vialli, Platt), Bayer Leverkusen (Ballack, Babic, Berbatov), Tottenham (Hoddle, Waddle, Mabbutt) and Arsenal (Overmars, Petit, Henry…). Now, with a German wife and family, I can’t feel too bad if they play well and win (though it’s agonising watching England play badly and lose, especially to Germany). I’ve been astounded and confounded at matches, in pubs or at home, so - I think it’s important to emphasise this - I don’t consider myself to be emotionally stunted when it comes to football.

Yet I find myself asking now: what does it mean to support a team? Is an appreciation of who they are at the time and of their vicissitudes sufficient? Am I OK to reset so quickly after fleeting elation or disappointment, and appreciate their struggles after going down, or do I have to feel things more viscerally, for longer?

Liew’s article also highlighted my innate reluctance – quiet, usually unaware – to despise opponents (provided they’re not simply being despicable) in any field: sport, religion, politics, work. This can put me at odds with the heartfelt supporters, those who have maybe never known anything else, who are all-in, who would consider themselves the ‘true’ supporters. It makes me wonder: is my perspective shallower, somehow weaker, more diluted than theirs? And does it reflect the problem in the populist slide, that full-throated, roaring fanaticism trumps broad appreciation?

Football is often used as an analogy or metaphor for much else in life - team and tifo, as it were: If society can find the balance between passion and respect, my team, my tribe distinctly with all the others, not against, then I think we’d all be better off.

FaNatiCS could be an acronym for Fascist Nationalist Conservative Sovereigntists, that power-hungry breed of sociopaths and their cronies that have gained power in the US using newish but also very old methods, steeped in uncaring. Simon Tisdall in his article in the Guardian on the greedy power grab by Trumb and co links to an article on the Boston Rare Maps site about the Technocracy Inc movement formed in the 1930s and still apparently going today. That article links to a Substack post by Manolo Quezon summarising the “intellectual” links between then and now as Everything Old is New Again.

The trouble with these is always the same: the mismatch between the visions of power and might, and anything considering basic human lives. It’s easy enough for these miserable people to make us miserable too: our challenge is not to let them. Stay nice, stay considerate and friendly - and lend your voice to those who give voice to the calm majority, when you can.

Alas, there are idiots out there who have “fun” dangerously manipulating parked bikes at school. My daughter had already had her front quick release axle loosened last year (we replaced it with a fixed one), and just on Friday the brake cables had been slipped out of their housings:

The way some peoples' brains work, how they are hooked up to pursue “tee-hee-giggle” nastiness is quite sad. Maybe they get a thrill, maybe they feel some kind of peer pressure towards and acceptance from the deed, but they really don’t think things through for the risks they are generating for other individuals and - by extension, in the worst case - their families.

There’s something of that in the Trump movement - some just don’t care any more and get that “tee-hee” thrill when it goes worse for others.

Societal norms are important, as are support structures for all, including those - hopefully just temporarily - teenagers seeking dumb-ass thrills.

Tony Judt talking to Timothy Snyder in Thinking the Twentieth Century

This, in my view, is the intellectual sin of the [20th] century: passing judgement on the fate of others in the name of their future as you see it, a future in which you may have no investment, but concerning which you claim exclusive and perfect information.

Last night I wanted to enjoy an evening G&T with my wife. She’d been back for a day already after visiting friends, so we had caught up personally, but she wanted to catch up on the news (flooding in Valencia, the execution of a German-Iranian in Iran, the upcoming US elections) and so she switched on the TV. I watched, for a little while, too. But as soon as they started reporting on stupid Republicans spreading doubt about the legitimacy of the vote and the security of the polling stations, and they showed a clip of their stupid candidate raging about something, I couldn’t take any more. Feeling viscerally disgusted, I left the room and went upstairs to finish reading the final chapter of Hillary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light.

Those of Henry VIII were dark days, for most people: of an omnipotent yet inconsistent absolute ruler and his councillors, most from ancient ruling families who couldn’t countenance any move towards a less feudal system. Of the jostling between the great powers in Europe (France, the Pope) with no consideration or care for individual lives.

This is my visceral fear for today, of thuggish, childish, nihilistic autocrats returning to the fore: something dark that I - thankfully, but also tellingly - don’t encounter in my daily life and so don’t feel I can counter: I try to tune out that noise from the media, tune out those concentrated slugs of negativity bias, and be nice and courteous to the people I meet.

Every Christmas, Easter and family birthday, as I list out the contents of a parcel on what feels like an excessively conspicuous “non-EU deliveries” sticker, then pay the suddenly exorbitant postage and customs fees to the UK; every time that, right at the end of the ordering process, a British website discovers that I’m based in Europe, or a European online store learns to its horror that I want to ship to the UK - indeed, every time I want to ship nice things, only to discover that they won’t, and now that the formerly anticipatory, family-related traipse to the post office has become a trudge to bureaucracy, I silently curse Brexit.

These are, in the grand scheme of things, little niggles, already well known to anyone who has ever wanted to ship to countries like the USA or Japan. But they always remind me that the UK - barely but clearly (though for some vague notion of “Brexit means Brexit”) - voted and then acted to make things worse than they had been until just very recently.

What good did it do?

For what and for whose benefit? From my perspective here in Germany, I still haven’t discerned anything concrete: nothing that has made Europeans look jealously across at their neighbours, the land of my birth, and want to change course in that direction.

Assuredly, there are people feeling good about Brexit back home, and like-minded tribalists around Europe who share the dream: a vague but powerful sense of “freedom”, a baseline intuition that the UK is not “beholden” to the admittedly confusing construct of European political entities, that the UK has been released from some dread dream of federalism or a “United States of Europe”, however far in the future, however long past their own lifetime. A UK unbound from European lethargy and tortuous consensus-building, able to spring free and react swiftly, or plan for a greater, divergent future: that sounds pretty good, I suppose.

Equally, though, the UK still needs to trade with the EU, and that trade has taken a significant and - in my view - unneccessary hit. It’s still a source of frustration to me that the likes of the wretched “European Research Group” managed to characterise the EU as simultaneously a homogeneous mass of “them”, and as an overly complicated, bureaucratic mishmash of cultures. The Brexit discourse, such as it was, cleverly split the double-sided nature of political diversity in Europe, ranging as it does from Costa in Portual and Scholz in Germany, to the likes of Orbán, Meloni, Fico in Slovakia and Wilders in the Netherlands; how that diversity makes consensus so difficult, on the one hand, yet also demonstrates the EU’s startling heterogeneity: quite clearly the opposite of the unified, “one size fits all” / lowest common denominator monolith (aka “enemy”) that all populists need.

It’s still unclear to me which, if any at all, of Britain’s latest or forthcoming legislations would not have been possible as a member of the EU…

Do we need Orbán to show that Brexit was unnecessary?

That Europe can still countenance an increasingly thin-skinned authoritarian in Orbán, who seems to idolise the others of his ilk (the usual suspects along the lines of Putin, Erdogan, Trump and Xi), is not a good sign, but it does at least seem to confirm that Brexit wasn’t required for the UK to be able hold extreme views, to argue for a severe limitation of immigration, for a country to be held hostage to simplistic, nationalistic, illiberal populist authoritarian ideologies.

Ideologies always tend towards a message of “greatness”, skipping the concept of “goodness”. Greatness requires winning, beating someone else to some goal, and - as mentioned above - having antagonists in the story. Goodness requires a careful balance of ethics, and is often extremely complicated.

Sovereign projects

The question of sovereignty in a highly networked, multi-nodal world is a genuine one. People want their votes to count in determining the course of their own country, without the idea of layers over them constraining their actions. The addition of supranational unions and associations, along with the increasing power of non-state actors in the digital realms (OpenAI, Google, et al), makes it understandable that many will want to withdraw from such a complex life, seek solace and clarity in a “tribe”, and perhaps even dream of just having a “strongdoofus” to solve all their problems.

But did leaving the EU truly provide a remedy to that complexity? I don’t see that it did.

Perhaps Brexit can be viewed as a grand project, without which politics can enter a period of “drift”; except, a project usually has a goal, and it seems that Brexit was the goal, with nothing else beyond.

There’s a similar case to be made for the EU right now: does it have an overarching project beyond its own creation, defence and maintenance? It would seem so: being a liberal democratic regional power to match the USA and China (along with all the many thousands of sub-projects that spin off from that).

Posting

With Brexit off the political menu in the UK for the foreseeable future, my hope is of the return of a general political will to rejoin the EU customs union, then to start engaging more constructively with other countries on the EU’s periphery; a return to a freedom of movement not just of people, but of the nice things that we have in Europe that I would love to share with my family back home, and for them to share nice British things once more with us…

Ah, Marmite…

A Happy New Year

Despite letting my niggles at the post office take me to excessive amateur politics, and despite the other tragic things going on in the world demonstrating humanity’s capacity for allowing bigotry and hopelessness result in violence and death rather than action to reverse them, I do want to wish everybody a Happy New Year, may your networks and connections grow broader and stronger, and your deliveries on time!

Heat

There's been a heatwave and very little rain these last couple of weeks. The press that I read has been very focussed on the pernicious and systematic nature of these heatwaves, clearly linked to climate change driven by human emissions, mostly of carbon.

The Economist had two articles about it: Today's heatwaves are a warning of worse to come, and The increase in simultaneous heatwaves which clearly set out the current set of problems and challenges ahead.

The Guardian, naturally, also contains warnings about the situation, including a typical piece from the inimitable George Monbiot: This heatwave has eviscerated the idea that small changes can tackle extreme weather; and an Opinion piece on the public perception of what needs to be done, and the almost impossibly political predicament we're in: The Guardian view on public attitudes to the climate crisis: burning for change

It's all just politics?

Deciding to do things for the environment, and how fast, is a political matter, possibly the biggest of our time. How to ensure that humanity continues to develop whilst permitting nature to recover, without massive and sudden sacrifices or a return to excessive hardship is hard. Connecting this thought to the boneheaded, insular, selfish and populist-nationalistic messages streaming and steaming from the minds, mouths and military of such leading lights as Putin, Erdogan and their authoritarian ilk, and from the ever more similar sounding, coal-fired Republican Party in the US (or the coal-powered Democrat Manchin), leaves me feeling rather down on our direction as humanity, as does the self-destructive infighting with right-leaning nationalists in Italy leading to this comment from (where else?) the Economist about:

...their ambition, narrow self-interest and failure to understand, or perhaps care, that events in their troubled country have unfortunate implications far beyond its borders

Fortunately, there are teams and institutions working on solutions - some piffling and perhaps wrong-headed (Heliogen?), many promising (the whole stream of Long-Duration Energy Storage, LDES, investigations, well summarised, again, by the Economist in their article Decarbonisation of electric grids reliant on renewables requires long-duration energy storage

There are institutions and companies, ranging from traditional behemoths like BASF (itself a huge customer of Russian gas) to clever startups who will likely not make it, even if their ideas will, eventually. This gives me hope.

What can I do about it?

As a long-term employee / inmate in the automotive industry, I've made my contribution to mobility and its environmental downsides. With the part of the company that I work for settling in as a low-cost commodity with a long but time-limited future, I have the ever-stronger feeling that it's time to move on to more climate positive initiatives.

Whether this involves joining the hydrogen economy in some capacity (attractive, but ambiguously beneficial), or batteries, or insulation, or positive recycling, I don't know. It's all contingent on me finding something that involves as little commuting as possible - so, either close to where I live now, or somewhere where the family would gladly want to move, having never moved out of the city we live in now. Maybe my experience and energies would be better spent in adjacent, perhaps "agnostic", but enabling industries, such as coatings or fittings, where better and cheaper products enable better and cheaper climate solutions...

I won't and can't post my thoughts and investigations into alternative employment here - no radical openness here, I'm afraid / to your relief - but this is a subtle little starting point for what might come later.

Might... But after my holiday break from it all! (driving, but not flying anywhere) 

From View from the EU: Britain ‘taken over by gamblers, liars, clowns and their cheerleaders’, a view from Helene von Bismarck:

“Populists depend on enemies, real or imagined, to legitimise their actions and deflect from their own shortcomings,” she said. If the EU has been the “enemy abroad” since 2016, it will steadily be replaced by “enemies within”: MPs, civil servants, judges, lawyers, experts, the BBC.

Oversimplification, lack of nuance are greedily seen as ways of cutting the Gordian knot of complex debate and “getting things done”. There are times and places for such methods, but not permanently in running a country. 

Also, from John Crace in the same paper (On Boris’s big day, Tories kid themselves this is the deal they always wanted)

“He had united his party – if only temporarily – over Europe. So it was job done for Boris, as Brexit had mainly only been about divisions within his own party. “

Labour had a seemingly impossible decision to make regarding the Brexit trade deal vote in the House of Commons on Wednesday 30th December.

Labour leader Keir Starmer is quoted as saying:

“The choice before the house today is perfectly simple. Do we implement the treaty that has been agreed with the EU, or do we not? If we choose not to, the outcome is clear: we leave the transition period without a deal. Without a deal on security, on trade, on fisheries. Without protection for our manufacturing sector, for farming, for countless businesses. And without a foothold to build a future relationship with the EU.”

To me, the words "perfectly simple" are rather disingenuous. Starmer tried to portray the judgement as a binary choice, whereby all other considerations are neglected. That can be seen as clear leadership; it can also be a sign of a leader uncomfortable with conflict. 

Fortunately, there was some public debate on the day:

[Stella] Creasy said in a statement on her website: “Whatever Labour does, the Conservatives will cry foul, suggesting any attempt to scrutinise the deal after it is passed reveals a true intention to fight Brexit. The road ahead will be rocky for all concerned. To abstain is not to refuse to be part of that fight but to refuse to do so on the prime minister’s terms.”

“While I understand the desire to move on I simply don’t understand why it’s necessary for those who believe this is a bad deal to vote for it, and dip their fingertips in this abject failure of national ambition,”

“false framing, used to hold this house to ransom”

Within three months of coming to power, a Labour government will secure a sensible deal. And within six months, we will put that deal to a public vote alongside the option to remain.

The Brexit pre-mortem: BFMEA

Building the structure

What could possibly go wrong (failures)?

How could it come to this (causes)?

Somebody will have to do something about this (actions)!

So much to do! Where to start (Effects)?

Presenting the BFMEA

Build and forget?

Do they? Can they?

BFMEA network and other points

ABQP: Advanced Brexit Quality Planning

APQP: Advanced Project Quality Planning

• Planning and Defining the Program
• Product Design and Validation
• Understanding the needs of the customer
• Analysing (/predicting) and mitigating failure

Advanced Brexit Quality Planning: A light-gloom-hearted ABQP Statement Of Work

Project Name

Project Scope

Project Type

1. Plan and Define Program
2. Product Design and Development Verification
3. Process Design and Development Verification
4. Product and Process Validation and Production Feedback
5. Launch, Assessment & Corrective Action

Phase 1: Plan and Define Program

1.1 Identify the needs of the customer

1.1.1 Identify the customer

1.1.2 The needs of said customer

1.2 Develop timing plan

Article 50 has been invoked

Deadline is now May 2019.

None that anyone can discern; negotiations will be the easiest ever anyway. There was something about the EU not showing its hand until Article 50 had been invoked: unhelpful gamesmanship, a trap that the British Government, gleefully bellowing "freedom from!" fell into

1.3 Develop Budget

1.4 Assemble Team

Phase 2: Product Design and Development Verification

2.1 Develop Product requirements

• Restore / Increase British national autonomy
• Restore / Increase national togetherness
• Significantly reduce immigration
• Increase internal investment (e.g. NHS)
• Retain and protect UK integrity (e.g. Northern Ireland)
• Protect inter-Irish peace
• Avoid becoming part of the EU Superstate

Predicting and mitigating failures (BFMEA)

Phase 2 (Continued)

Oh never mind: Phase 2,3,4 Finished!

LAUNCH

The unvalidated state

Well, that all went somewhat awry, didn’t it?

I must confess that I was prepared neither for the result of the referendum on Thursday 23rd June nor for its impact on my state of mind. I spent most of Friday, 24th June 2016, in a strangely blank pall of frustration, disbelief, even - briefly - anger, plus an element of intrigue at what the future will bring. Such a complex bubbling brew of emotions will take some time to subside as this weekend peters out into another week, the first of a long, long series of weeks, months and years bringing ructions and repercussions in my homeland along with administrative hurdles and considerations of nationality for me personally.

Questioning our sanity

Did 52% of Britons really, actively, vote to exit the EU? It doesn’t seem that way: the EU was never really the point during the less than savoury referendum campaign. Those who voted for Leave were sold a dream of “reclaiming our sovereignty” without being told why the EU was bad for them personally, nor what would be improved for them personally once Britain left the EU. Did 48% really vote for the EU, or were they simply hoping for the relatively quiet life of being able to travel, work, study, buy and sell within what has become a large and appealingly non-homogeneous patchwork of countries whilst tacitly accepting the bewilderingly opaque bureaucratic apparatus that enables it?

Was the referendum correctly set up in the first place? Was 50% the correct limit for such a momentous decision, or should it have been 2/3rds? Should oldies - pensioners - have been allowed to vote at all? Can’t the Queen step in and say: “you bally idiots, it’s our (Queen’s perogative) country and we shall stay in the EU, if only so that one won’t have to produce one’s passport when travelling to one’s castle in Balmoral.”?

Whatever the answers to these questions, we are now left in the precarious position of Britain being a product sold yet never tested or proven out. We don’t even know if it will remain intact over the coming years: in engineering terms, it’s a state that was never validated before it was introduced to the customer.

Trial by error

The Leave campaign was based on disassociated presumptions that were packed into sentences in such a way as to sound like a way for the disaffected English middle to break free of - something - and to arrive at a much better - something else. Unfortunately, the Remain campaign was equally pathetic, having realised fairly early on (presumably in the split second after David Cameron announced the referendum), that the EU is impossible to be passionate about these days.

Neither side made any attempt made to list out the various implications of each necessary step towards leaving the EU, and could therefore make no list of mitigating measures to prevent the worst of those repercussions hitting the UK as hard as it might.

The UK’s relationship with Europe and the rest of the world will have to be hammered out in real-time as uncertainties - and some avoidable certainties - cause unpleasant and unforeseen things to happen.

The future UK will only become what it will be once everything that might happen to it has happened to it. And not much of that will have been properly thought through before the 23rd of June - it certainly won’t adhere to the peddaled flickers of a dream of a greater, better, Britain.

What now? A question to self

There still seems to be a residual hope that the increasingly well-known Article 50 (the procedure for leaving the EU) won’t be triggered: but there’s no great point in holding out for that, especially as I wouldn’t have to act if that turns out to be the case.

If Britain really does start to extricate itself from the EU, I’ll presumably have to start acting - so I should start planning soon or risk falling into the same “dreamland trap” as the politicians. It will most likely involve looking to apply for a European (Irish or German) passport and finding out how my status in Germany will change over time.

But that’s all for the future. For now I need to strip out as much of the first three feelings that I mentioned at the top of this post - frustration, disbelief, anger - and settle to a state of vaguely positive curiosity as to how things will turn out.

This will mean reading as little as possible about the politicians (the Boris Johnsons, Michael Goves, Iain Duncan-Smiths and F*****s of this world), forgetting as much as possible the geographic and demographic divides that this referendum revealed, and hoping that the British “Apparat”, the civil servants, regulators, negotiators and the like, are as good as they might reasonably be expected to be when entering discussions with their European, American, Chinese counterparts…

… or am I selling myself yet another dream?

• the pleasure of concentration
• the harmony of communication
• the gratification of good work achieved