It really starts this week

So, after a number of weeks of preparation, which have included becoming -- briefly -- a full-time student again, this week I will start teaching. I will, initially, only be teaching 8 lessons a week, but over time it will increase, probably to 18 lessons a week by the end of the school year.

Here we go... 

A change of direction

There was nothing to blog. Now there is something to blog, so I shall blog. 

For reasons too tedious to go into, I no longer work at Ricardo. Not working at Ricardo coincided with a holiday in Cornwall and the fresh air (and isolation due to the fact that I crashed the car and it took 5 days to fix the broken windscreen) provided space for reflection. 

Reflection one. The worst but about my previous job (and there were many good bits) was the lack of a team which saw me often working in isolation. Reflection two. That while it got me closer to real impact, there was a nagging doubt that my climate risk analysis was not changing behaviors or investment decisions. Reflection three. Science teaching in my sons' school is struggling, particularly with retention. 

By now you can see where this is going (and H.R.H. Prince Jaime de Bourbon de Parme, who I was just chilling with at the Mansion House last week, announced it to the gathering, so the secret is out). From September I will be studying for a PGCE, spending most of my time in a school setting, with the aim of being a qualified secondary school chemistry teacher in a year from now. 

This will mean that I do a lot less work in climate, but aside from the fact that I think I'm going to love teaching, I think that - once I've achieved the rank of "at least tolerable" teacher - there will be opportunities within the profession to support concrete actions on decarbonization and, particularly, climate resilience in schools. 

But one thing at a time. The next 12 months are going to be a challenge but one I'm really excited about. 

Not ChatGPT

Kate asked ChatGPT to describe the water-cycle in the style of Ivor Cutler. It came back with a song that was perfectly nice, but rather twee. More McGonagall than Cutler, I felt.

Since then (last Monday) the idea has been banging around in my head, so I've come up with my own version. It doesn't explain the water-cycle, but I hope it is more Cutlerian than ChatGPTs rather bland attempt.

--

I was gazing out the school window – which rattled precociously in its frame whenever the wind blew, the putty dried and shrunken – when my reverie – I was staring at the clouds, wondering what Forfar looked like from way up there – was interrupted by Mr MacNally bellowing “THE WATER CYCLE! Ivor One. You! Stand up!”

I started. Even now, years later, Mr MacNally’s voice – whenever I imagine I might have heard it – causes the bristles on my chin to flare alarmingly. Then a sense of creeping terror came running up my trousers. There was no escaping this, I knew. Trembling I rose to my feet.

“Sir?”

“THE WATER CYCLE, Ivor One. Explain to the class the water cycle”.

I stammered. To my left, Ivor Two, my hated foe, stifled a giggle. This brought me a little time, as the chalk MacNally let fly struck him straight between the eyes. MacNally, if raised in Sparta, would have been renowned across all Greece for his skill with the Dory. Ivor Two wimpered but knew better than to cry. It must have hurt. MacNally’s aim was such that the chalk had pinged him straight on the scab from a previous effort, and it was now oozing slightly.

“The Water Cycle, Ivor One.” There was now an unmistakable tone of quiet warning in his voice. I was terrified.

There were further faint sounds from around me. The other children, noting that MacNally was out of chalk, and with his ire directly entirely at me, were emboldened. A sudden fury gripped me, chasing the terror back down my trousers.

“Clouds, sir!” I responded, grasping the last fully formed thought my head had encompassed. “The water comes up off the Clyde sir, and down onto Fife”.

I waited. The silence was total.

MacNally was satisfied with this incomplete answer, bade me to sit, and proceeded to embellish it with an explanation of the water cycle of his own, quite unlike the explanation that you will find in any school textbook. Quite a few of the pupils scored very poorly in their Geography examination that year.

I suppose, looking back, that was the closest I ever had to having a good day at school. When I mentioned it to my father – later – he looked thoughtful and almost said “Well done”. Though you could see the look of scorn on Grandfather’s face the hateful words “Stop bragging” never passed his lips, and I went to sleep that night with almost a smile on my face.

Worries

The Uber driver was chatty. Very, vary chatty. The journey was pretty short. From Homerton Hospital to our house, but he filled it with chat. Schools, hospitals, economics and the nature of London. Why, he wondered, are London people so unfriendly?

I muttered something about fear, and stress, and Brexit.

As a drafted this post, it started to veer all over the place. To improve it (I hope) I'll to get straight to the point, and expand on the following background points in the endnotes. You can read them if you get that far. Or not.

• I am hot, grumpy and a bit depressed [1]
• The Conservative Party is useless, and out of ideas [2]

So, the promised point. As I said, the Conservative Party is useless. However, they will, one hopes, be out of power in 2 years. The really important point (in my view) is is the Labour party any better? By this I don't mean "morally" better. We can take as read that they won't seek to deport Asylum seekers to Rwanda (right? right...?). What I mean is, the nation is, to be blunt, rather up against it. Is Labour in a position to act? Does Labour understand the size of the challenge, and does it have the cojones to act at the scale needed? 

In 1997 Tony Blair inherited a growing economy (the Q before he was elected GDP grew 1.8%, the biggest single Q growth since 1986), low inflation (<3%), low electricity prices (the gas-for-gas meant there was oversupply of coal generation which in turn meant super-low margins for electricity wholesalers). There wasn't a housing crisis. Our EU membership meant low trade barriers and easy access to labour, highly skilled and less skilled. Most of all, perhaps, the mood in the country was really optimistic. I remember "Things can only get better". People believed. Maybe Sherringham and Shearer had made the nation happy. Maybe it was Jarvis Cocker. Maybe it was Liam bloody Gallagher. Maybe it was really strong, moving storylines on Neighbours, Eastenders, Corrie and Brookside. I dunno. But we believed. You could feel it.

Kier Starmer and Labour are not, to put it likely, to be dealt such a strong hand. Aside from economic uncertainty and (seemingly inescapable) trade barriers, the country doesn't believe. Yes, as covid shows, when push comes to shove, the vast majority of people will put up with any amount of sacrifice if they can see a better day at the end of it. People are, I think, fundamentally decent, and people will, if inspired, do remarkable things.

I guess I'm building towards the point where I say "This isn't 1995. It's more like 1945."

And in 1945 we (not me, obvs) elected Clem. As a reminder, the Attlee Government

• Created the NHS
• and National Insurance (sickness, unemployment, pensions)
• Abandoned poor law in favour of comprehensive support, beyond NI, for those who needed it
• Built not just council houses (though they did) but also the started New Towns 
• Created British Rail
• Expanded family allowance and access to education

Not only did they do all this in only 4 years (all of the above was done by 1948), but they set the direction of the next 40. A consensus, which more or less continued to Thatcher, was established. If you look at the list above, it is (to my mind, at least) impossible to understand how transformational and important that programme was to ordinary people, and most importantly, to the poorest and must vulnerable.

It's not actually 1945, but if a Labour Government can build a new country out of the shattered remains of a war, with 450,000 dead and entire cities in ruins, it does not seem to me beyond the bounds of possibility that an incoming Government could be equally transformational. Things are bad. They aren't "Coventry is a smoking husk and there are shortages of food, raw materials and working age people" bad.

Ultimately the future of this country depends on whether Labour they seek to transform the UK with a bold, ambitious rebuilding programme, or just triangulate through meaningless platitudes like "efficiency", "technology" and "spirit of enterprise"?

If the latter, they deserve everything coming to them in the 2029 GE. Though we, sadly, don't...

And their weird thing is, if Labour go to the country with a transformational plan of investment, house building and a closer trading relationship with the EU, they might actually find that people actually want to vote for them as opposed to just voting against the Tories.

[1] It's hot. It's far too hot. As someone who works on climate change, has worked on climate change pretty much my entire working life, heatwaves in major cities and forest fires all over the world are a depressing example of our failure to reduce emissions. This is not the end point I keep reminding myself. Emissions are still increasing. We are, at the very best, only halfway towards peak temperatures. The 1.5 degree target has sound moral, political and scientific rationale, but we have already passed the point where it could be achieved. You simply can't decarbonise the planet quickly enough to reach it, and if we "overshoot" then - baring an invention that hasn't been invited yet - we won't be able to reduce atmospheric CO2 concentrations substantially. The energy requirement is vast. Solar radiation management - reflecting the sun away from the earth - is a mad, dangerous scheme with known and unknown consequences which we should go nowhere close to. We probably will, mind you...

This wasn't meant to be a post about climate change. It's just that climate change in my face, on my doorstep distresses me. You can understand the science, but seeing it play out is horrifying. Plus it's too damm hot to sleep, and if I drink any beer I get a headache.

So this post is meant to be about the national mood in the nation, but should be taken with a pinch of salt, in that I, and K, are both wandering around the house in a miserable mood wondering when it will all end. (The boys have never been happier I am pleased to report).

[2] The quality of the Conservative Leadership debate, both in terms of the general performance of the candidates, and their specific inability to articulate any concrete actions about the issues we face, is woeful, and unsurprising. The Cabinet was specifically selected on the basis of compliance, hatred of the EU, and inability. 'Conservative' economic ideas have been reduced to reducing taxes and removing regulations. Like, presumably, the regulations designed to prevent a repeat of Grenfell, or keep shit out of rivers, or stop another banking crisis. (and if not those regulations, then which ones, specifically?) 

Liz Truss is a walking embodiment of the rot at the heart of British Conservatism. She states, correctly, that the economic status quo is undesirable. She then serves up content free word salad. Not a single policy. No sight of a plan. Boris Johnson's claim to have a fully costed Health & Care plan was more convincing.

So, whoever our next PM is, there is zero chance of any useful change of direction on housing, energy costs, environmental degradation, the NHS, the Criminal Justice system, or 'levelling up' (which I would replace with 'tackling inequality wherever it is found'. The UK will doubtless get more unequal up to the next General Election.   

Watching history

I write this less with the aim of communicating anything particularly profound to the small number of readers of this blog, but more with the aim of capturing what I am currently thinking so I can refer back to it at a later time to see if I'm right. Though 'right' is a ridiculously narrow concept for history. Perhaps better to say that it will be interesting and perhaps informative to see how I would change my views with the benefit of hindsight, rather than simply right/wrong. 

Maybe that's the point of all these posts. Something to reflect on later. But read on, anyway. It might be interesting.

I think that the rapid collapse of the Afghan national army, and Government, underlines why Joe Biden was right to withdraw from Afghanistan. In 20 years "the West" had failed to establish a stable Afghan state. So the options were stay in perpetuity, like on the Korean border, or leave.

But Afghanistan is not Korea. Is is not a 'frozen war' but a hot war. 'Allied' soldiers, foreigners, Afghan security forces, Taliban, and civilians, particularly, always, civilians, were dying, and if "we" stayed, those deaths would have escalated on all sides. Nobody can credibly claim that, having failed to defeat the Taliban over two decades, we could defeat them this time. No military strategy for "winning" was presented because none existed.

Staying, at current troop levels, was unsustainable. The Taliban, already buoyed by the release of 5,000 of their members by Trump, were gaining ground daily. A protracted war to push they back could not be fought with the troops we had, and the Afghan army practically useless. There would have had to have been a total repudiation of the Trump deal (disgusting as that deal was) and a massive troop increase. Deaths would have spiralled on all sides. We could presumably, once that initial burst of fighting was over and the Taliban were pushed back, have frozen the conflict with our Western troops and our Afghan allies controlling the urban centres, subject to regular terrorist attack, with the remoter regions handed over to warlords, drug gangs and the Taliban. Women in Kabul would still have been in school, and we could salved our consciences that ever time an allied rocket went astray and killed an innocent, that was a price worth paying, that every solider we sent to die went in a noble cause. It is obvious that the Taliban are total shits, and women will be treated as chattels now that they are in charge, but it is not obvious to me that the balance sheet is worth it. Then again, I'm not a woman. Still, we are very keen to talk about women in schools, and not very keen to talk about all the dead people we had to kill to keep them there, whether or not the particular people who ended up dead were bad or not. How much killing is it worth enduring to keep the schools open?

I do not believe - and this is where I could be most wrong, and in being wrong, the balance changes - that the Taliban regime can endure. But the very presence of allied forces justifies its existence. Afghanistan was in stasis, and is was a ghastly status. Poverty was, under our 'rule' endemic. Corruption was endemic. This was true in 'our' areas as well as areas outside our control. It doesn't logically follow that our withdrawal with reverse this, but the abject failure of our attempts to 'develop' the country undermine the rationale for continued occupation. Nation building had failed. Perhaps, just perhaps, under a ghastly time under the 2nd Taliban regime, something better can emerge. Of course, this is wishful thinking, but no more wishful thinking than believing that further occupation would have led to a stable Afghan state at some indefinable point in the future.

Furthermore, the presence of 'our' troops in Afghanistan was an occupation. Over successive general elections the proportion of the electorate voting has declined to 20%. Hamid Karzai could hardly demand that the Americans leave, given that they turned a blind eye to the electoral fraud that saw him elected in 2009, and Ghani could not feasibly claim to represent the majority of Afghans when such a tiny fraction of them voted for him. There was no meaningful democratic mandate for any Afghan Government from 2009 onwards, and therefore no group represent Afghan's who could ask the Americans to leave or hold them to account. I don't think, by this point, it's in any way possible to know whether Afghans in the country as a whole prefer rule by a Ghani puppet government propped up by Americans or the Taliban, who will offer stability and less corruption, if not democracy or prosperity. This is not, of course, to suggest the Taliban have any mandate other than that of force of arms. But then, by the end, neither did the former Government.

Permanent occupation of a country by an outside force is not -- to put it mildly -- a good state of affairs, though obviously it might be considered the least bad one. 

Of course, the binary surge/leave framing might be an over-simplification. Perhaps a small 'surge' could have kept the Taliban at bay, at least until the winter when the fighting tends to die down. But imagine a situation where the Taliban enter into a Government of 'national unity' with Ashraf Ghani. As soon as Western troop levels dropped, the Taliban would have killed him and taken complete control. Which is why Ashraf Ghani, not an idiot, rejected such a deal. 

We could, of course, have done a deal where we handed the entire country over to the Taliban immediately and spirited Ghani and anyone else who wanted to leave out of the country. The optics of that would have been worse than what we have now, though our withdrawal/surrender might have been more orderly.

In short, of course we could have stayed. But an honest appraisal of staying is one where Afghanistan is under permanent western occupation and in perpetual civil war, unable to go back and unable to move on. I'm not sure it is the role for the USA, the UK, or any other country, to keep the demons at bay in a far off land, particularly when they continue to sell arms to other demons, in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and more, and particularly when poverty cannot be fought in their own countries because there is no 'magic money tree'. To suggest that Afghanistan has to stand or fall on its own feet may feel particularly callous, given the likely killings and oppression the Taliban will probably unleash over the coming months and years, yet in the long run things may improve. "Tell that to the women of Kabul" is a reasonable response, but I guess my counter-offer is that telling the families of soldiers, Western, Afghan and Taliban, that the deaths that would have followed another "surge" were worth it rings equally hollow.

I think history may be kinder to Biden, and much less kind to Obama, than the news today would have you believe.  

Leather

This is not a sporty household. I have been relegated to the kitchen. In days gone by I guess I would have sloped off to the pub, but its wet, and indoors drinking isn't a thing yet. To be honest, watching any kind of sport, worst of all England in a major tournament, is no fun in a pub. I always get there far too late and end up standing by the toilets, craning my neck, trying to see. In the 2018 World Cup the boys and I managed to capture England vs Tunisia in an Italian restaurant, listening in Italian and eating squid.

The build up is inane. "What is captaincy?", the England Captain is asked. "Leadership", he stoically replies. But what else could he have said? Disrespecting or even making light of the England football captaincy is like pissing on the flag.

Still, he'll be done by 33 and retire before 40. I'm somewhat older, and I feel like I'm getting better at what I do. Unlikely I'll ever reach England Captaincy heights but there's something to look forward too. I wonder if David Beckham feels like there is meaning in his life. Wikipedia says he enjoys building lego, which is, I suspect, what I'd do if I was a squillionaire. I'd be llike Will Ferrell in the Lego movie. Ah, one can but dream.

Good job I don't have to retire at 37. DECC would never have had an "Evidence Framework" if I had, and then where would we be? Though I guess there is a parallel with football, in that I've gone from being a team member to a manager. And like football, there's no real correlation. I see myself as more Arsene Wenger than Tony Adams, though my team may disagree.  

Right. It's nearly time for kick-off. I should find a beer and a bottle opener, and sign off. covid, of course, has totally messed with football's circadian rhythm. The world is next year which means we'll barely have time to get over the disappointment of dull failure in this thing before we start the next. Though to be honest, I think K will cope.

 

Not catching up on Line of Duty

So I was planning on writing a sweeping, but depressing, post encompassing the latest volume of the LRB, today's UK elections, my job, the Guardian and how empty the whole damm lot makes me feel inside. But you are spared that for, I remember, I promised to learn the rules of "Race for the Galaxy" before we next meet to play boardgames, and I haven'. So I will. I shall sit here with a pint of East London Brewing "Jamboree" (a more than passable Golden Ale) and learn the rules of "Race for the Galaxy" and my life will be all the better for it.

And you shall be spared my nihilistic drivel.