20 Mar 2025

A thousand or more years ago, the Catholic church sold protection, known as salvation, after death, known as the afterlife. This was controversial but lucrative. Over the years, this practice faded, due both to the rise of the Protestant movement and the lack of supporting evidence. As far as I am aware, no one from the afterlife has been in touch to say whether it worked. INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION – PROGRESS FOR HUMAN RIGHTS, SLOWLY Happily, some gifts of health, comfort and security became available for free as modern, industrial economies developed. In the UK, average life expectancy rose impressively, doubling from around 40 in 1870 to 80 in 2020. (Though one should remember that this is a skewed statistic due the high infant mortality rate in Victorian times. Anyone who actually lived to 21 had a decent chance of some more decades.)   Parliamentary legislation very gradually reflected the idea that poor people should not be expected to die young. Child labour laws were implemented at glacial speed. The minimum working age was raised to twelve in 1901, fully 67 years after the abolition of slavery act.  From here, the slowness with which respect for common rights evolved seems surprising. Two world wars may have accelerated some aspects – the right to vote after WW1 and the right to education after WW2. The Clean Air Act of 1956 deserves to be remembered better than it is.  As we know, the rights to unemployment and various disability benefits have gradually entrenched themselves until they have become a public liability of monstrous proportions with no political party daring to address the issue lest it lose votes. This is arguably how democracy works but it is also how national bankruptcy works.  And here is the core of the issue. Claims of safety from all kinds of things like ill-health and economic disaster come with an invoice that somebody has to pay and ultimately that somebody will be you. THE PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE – NOW WE’RE TALKING REAL MONEY The cost becomes ruinous when we begin to be protected from unknown threats, an attitude sometimes known as “the precautionary principle”.  The precautionary principle is presented as a responsible way of...

9 Dec 2024

WAR WAS TRADITIONALLY DELEGATED TO MEN In the last thousand years or so, nations that considered themselves civilised generally delegated the task of fighting wars to their male populations. On average, men were stronger and probably more violent and possibly less prone to the introspection that might question whether an order to engage in a near-suicidal action was stupid and pointless.  Napoleon and Wellington live on through war gamers who deploy men in ways that might have led to a different outcome at Waterloo. The US civil war (also a gamers’ favourite) was for a while peak slaughter of loyal male soldiers. In addition there were unsurprisingly many civilian casualties but these were regarded as regrettable mistakes.  And then came World War I. The women kept the home fires burning (and much else) but the reputation of that conflict is that it was a foolish and immoral waste of young male life.  AFTER WWI WE ALL BECAME INVOLVED The result was widespread pacifism with a twist. George Orwell said that if nations insisted on going to war they should accept that the cost would and moreover should be borne by the whole population. The Spanish civil war and in particular the attack on Guernica in 1937 by German and Italian bombers brought to international attention what this meant – that civilians would be casualties of contemporary warfare.  Consequently, appeasement was an extremely popular response to the demands of the Nazis in the late 1930s. When Churchill voted against Neville Chamberlain’s Munich agreement of September 1938 he was nearly deselected by his own constituency party. A few months later Hitler broke his word and invaded Czechoslovakia. At that point war was seen as nearly inevitable and, correctly envisaging that London would be a bombing target, the government began to prepare for the mass evacuation of children, gasmasks in hand, to rural and seaside areas. WWII is notorious for the attempted genocide of Jews but also for the bombing of cities. The “Battle of Britain” aimed at London, first by the Luftwaffe and then by V1 and V2 rockets, the destruction of German cities by British and US bombers in early 1945 and the atomic bombs...