Conservative, liberal, and all the rest

Out of the mouths of Vulcans

One of the great things about sites like Facebook is that every now and then a half forgotten name from the past pops into your head, you rattle it into the search box and up they pop. It can be fascinating and enjoyable to see what someones journey through life has been since it diverged from yours.

So I was happy to see an old friend of mine from university called Gordon on there, someone I'd not seen in ten years. He seemed to have a wife and kids, stuff we'd talked about back when it was in the distant future.

He and his girlfriend Tess were American exchange students at Swansea University. Me and Gordon got on incredibly well. We hung around together, travelled to Ireland together and he came to stay at my parents.

Gordon was a pretty political guy. I suppose he was fairly left wing by American standards which is to say not very by British standards. It was from him, a gun owner and recreational shooter, and not Charlton Heston, that I first heard the phrase "From my cold, dead hand" But he supported the rights of any group you care to name; gays, African-Americans, Native Americans, 'diversity' was his watchword.

So when I sent him an email saying hi and asking how he was I was dismayed to get this reply

"Things are good! Thanks. I read some of your writings and, well, have a nice life. I hope the whole conservative thing works out for you"

When he'd finished typing he blocked me. Apparently Gordon's support for diversity stops short of people's politics. That is a diversity too far.

I think that's sad. Beyond having the memory of a nice guy and friend tainted he isn't even right; like Margaret Thatcher's idol Freidrich von Hayek, I am not a conservative. I'm a liberal.

I don't mean that in the sense that it is used in America where it has become a term for what, in Europe, we would call social democrats. I mean it in the original, enlightenment sense, of being a believer in the sovereignty of the individual.

This is why I am not a conservative. There are still very many areas where the scope for free people to pursue their welfare and that of others, to map out their own paths and define their own destinies is hobbled. I do not want to conserve this.

So much for semantics. The real sadness here is a lost friendship. And for what? Because he didn't like my politics? Many don't. I don't like theirs.

But there is more to each of us than that. Human beings are deep, complex, fascinating creatures. There is more to each of us than our politics, our social class, our nationality, religion, race or sports team. As the Vulcans had it, 'Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations'

So there are few more depressing trends in the world today than that of sticking labels on each other. 'conservative' or 'liberal', 'rich' or 'poor', 'Christian' or 'Muslim', all of these may be partly true for some of us but are never wholly true for any of us. We are all more complex than that with more identities. To boil us down to this label or that label strips us of the rich variety of our humanity. It is debasing and dehumanising.

In large part this accounts for the increasingly divisive and bitter tone that public debate is conducted in. I'm guilty of it myself from time to time.

So in losing, or not regaining, a friendship with Gordon, I have not lost some leftie Democrat. I have lost a guy who came to see me in the plays I was in, who I introduced to Newcastle Brown Ale and who I spent long hours with discussing the novel I wonder if he wrote. I lost a guy I liked just because my politics were different from his.

As for my friend Tess, well, she's better off with her new guy. He's a lovely chap, a dyed in the wool Democrat, but we get on because there is more to us than our political views. We are all human beings. Which ever box you tick on election day, that remains our inalienable common ground.

The rise and fall of Occupy London

No, you're not

One night last week the BBC news ran an item about the Tobin Tax on financial transactions. An economist bobbed his head up and down speaking rather earnestly about why it would be damaging. Then something extraordinary happened; the report cut to a rather nondescript person standing at the Occupy LSX camp outside St Pauls Cathedral who maintained that it definitely would be a good idea.

Why, I wondered, were they giving a few dozen oiks* like this a national platform? Why not drag someone out of the Dog and Duck and ask them? I felt like Jacobin Mugatu in Zoolander when confronted with Blue Steel; “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!”.

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* Substituted by the editor for the original 'drug addicts'

Public sector strikes: Unaffordable and unfair

Hands off my wages

And so the world keeps turning. An estimated two million public sector workers have gone on strike and the nation has kept ticking along.

The false argument about public sector pensions is put rather well by this which is going round on Facebook

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The late, occasionally great, Ken Russell

The 1960s ‘Harry Palmer’ spy films starring Michael Caine were intended as the antithesis of James Bond. They were downbeat, gritty, and realistic. The first in the series, ‘The Ipcress File’ (1965), opened with Palmer fumbling for his horn rimmed specs and sleepily making coffee. Then Ken Russell, who died yesterday aged 84, was hired to direct the third instalment, ‘Billion Dollar Brain’ (1967).

Perhaps the producers were attracted by Russell’s intellectual cache and documentary film background. He made his name with a string of films he produced in the 1960s for ‘Monitor’, the BBC’s arts show. In themes he would return to in his films Russell’s finest television work focused on artists. His documentary on Edward Elgar (1962) was more than a simple biography with some musical clips. By setting up shots and scenes and using Elgar’s symphonies almost as incidental music Russell placed the composer squarely in his time and setting. It was as much an evocation of the high noon of Imperial Britain as a documentary about Elgar.

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Versus: Death of the Author

The late Roland Barthes

Holly Steell: The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes was published in 1967, and in this controversial essay he criticises the tradition of interpreting text through the author’s history, personal views and actions.

Barthes argues that the text is not the sole product of the author, but rather it is the sum of society – every sentence is the quotation of a previous work and the author merely the channel it is expressed through; they are the “Scriptor”, not the creator.

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What's holding the British economy back? Debt, debt, and more debt

Maxed out

Last week the coalition government was hit with a combination punch of bad economic news. On the same day unemployment was upand the Bank of England’s growth forecasts were down.

Labour were quick to point the finger. Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls said “The British economic recovery was choked off well before the instability in the last few months in the eurozone...The government is cutting too far and too fast and it’s pushing borrowing and unemployment up at the same time”

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Maggie, Maggie, Maggie!

Four more years

According to an old joke a dancefloor will have to built over Margaret Thatcher's grave to accomodate the vast number of people who plan to dance on it.

Perhaps not. I've looked before at how such a hated and unpopular leader, for so we are often told she was, could have won every general election she fought.

This weekend saw further evidence that hatred of Thatcher id neither so widespread nor so deep as those who really do hate her would have you believe. A YouGov poll for The Sunday Times placed her firmly at the top of a list of post war British prime ministers with a whopping 27%, more even than Winston Churchill. The sainted Clement Atlee, architect of the welfare state, overseer of the NHS, and nationaliser of industries, limped home with just 5% of the vote behind Tony Blair and, mysteriously, Harold Wilson.

This is not to say that some people do not hate Margaret Thatcher ver much but they are not so numerous as they would have you think. They may need that dancefloor, albeit a smaller one than they expect, and the DJ might be playing 'Dancing With Myself'.

Cameron faces a fight on two fronts against Germany's Merkel

Watch out for those Prussians on the left!

It has become a terrible cliché to discuss Anglo-German relations using World War Two metaphors. But as David Cameron advanced on Berlin for a showdown with Angela Merkel on Friday other military antecedents sprung to mind.

Cameron is fighting Merkel on two fronts. First, he is attempting to resist the tax on financial transactions which the European Union wants to introduce. And so he should. The tax, which is supposed to fund future Eurozone bailouts, will get an estimated 80 percent of its take from the City of London.

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Monetarism: what it is and what it isn't

On last week’s Question Time two people in the audience angrily condemned the “monetarist” policies apparently being pursued by the British and German governments. I groaned. It seems that the only people who use the phrases ‘monetarist’ or ‘monetarism’ anymore are people who haven’t got a clue what they mean.

Monetarism was at its height around thirty years ago. With double digit inflation in Britain, the United States and elsewhere and the failure of Keynesian policies to deal with it (indeed, they were the cause of it) the search was on for a set of policies which would. As the chaos grew in the late 1970s many fixed on monetarism as the answer. It went where few economic theories had gone before; debated in Parliament, the front pages of national newspapers and TV current affairs shows. Rarely has a reasonably technically involved economic concept achieved such widespread discussion among non-economists.

Though it had roots deep in the history of economic thought monetarism was popularized in the 1970s by Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize winning economist from Chicago University. Friedman was on a roll at the time. In the 1950s he had argued for floating exchange rates and in the 1970s these had come about. In 1968 he had predicted the breakdown of the Phillips Curve relationship between unemployment and inflation and, again, in the 1970s this had come about.

His theory was really very simple and was based around one of the oldest and one of the very few useful equations in economics, the equation of exchange

MV = PT
Here M stands for the amount of money in an economy and V stands for velocity of circulation, how many times in a given period a unit of currency is spent. Thus, if M was, say, £50 and V was 3 then MV would equal £150 which would be the total amount of spending in that economy in that given period.

P stands for the price level, a statistical aggregate of prices in the economy like the inflation figure reported monthly in newspapers. T stands for the real value of aggregate transactions in the economy in a given period. If that sounds like a slippery concept don’t worry, Freidman swapped it for y, or income in the economy in a given period to give a refined equation

MV = Py
So far we have a truism, an equation which is true by its very definition. It simply says that spending (MV) will equal income (Py) in the economy in the given period which, when you think about it, is obvious.

Freidman took the truism and made it into a theory by holding V and y constant. V would depend on people’s habits which would change little over the short and medium term. Y was fixed by the economy’s capacity; given a set amount of capital and labour in the economy in a given period production could not be expanded in the short and medium term.

The conclusion that followed utterly logically from this was that increases in P, the very inflation which was plaguing economies, must have been caused by increases in M. Indeed, in his mammoth 1963 book ‘A Monetary History of the United States 1867 – 1960’ (written with Anna J Schwartz) Freidman claimed to have conclusive empirical proof of this theory.

The policy prescription that followed was equally utterly logical; if you wanted to lower and control inflation you had to lower and control increases in the money supply. Freidman argued that the aim should be for price stability, that the money supply should grow at a fixed, pre announced rate which would be calculated to match the trend growth rate of the economy.

That, and nothing else, was monetarism. Its supporters might have argued for and its practitioners might have enacted a raft of other policies such as lower taxes, lower public spending and privatization which could crudely be labeled ‘right wing’ but these were not part of monetarism which was a narrow theory of monetary management. It would have been perfectly possible for a left wing government to have raised taxes, raised spending and nationalized and still committed itself to monetarism.

And plainly not Britain, Germany, nor anyone else today is even following anything which could be called a monetarist economic policy. Monetarism prescribed control of the money supply to control inflation; it said nothing about interest rates which it left to the market. By contrast Britain and the German controlled European Central Bank follow the monetary management method which replaced monetarism when it fell out of favour towards the end of the 1980s. Nowadays the control of interest rates is the chosen tool in the fight against inflation. It is the money supply, central to monetarism, which is left to the market.

This isn’t necessarily to praise monetarism or even to bury it. It is simply to wash off of it some of the mud thrown at other ideas.

From Miliband and Balls to Osborne: riding our luck in the bond market

Only the second most dangerous type of Bond there is

String theory posits the possibility of multiple universes exiting at the same time and in the same space. Economically we saw a little of that last week.

In London a few thousand students and professional protestors marched against the government’s plans to make them pay more towards their education.

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Protesting is soooooooooooooo last year

Put an X in any of the many empty spaces where you think a protestor was and send your coupon to...

Late last year some students, many of whom turned out to be rather plummy middle class kids, decided it would be larks to smash up bits of London to register their annoyance at having to pay for a service they were using.

Today saw students take to London's streets again. But, perhaps because the news that universities are cutting tuition fees to compete on costs suggests the coalition's policy is working as they said, only 2,500 are estimated to have turned out. Rather embarrassingly for the revolutionaries this dismally small gathering, nearly 2,000 fewer than saw Yeovil vs Walsall in the Third Division a couple of weeks ago, was outnumbered by the Police.

That's the thing about fashions, whether for leg warmers or protests. They're fickle.

More regulation is not a good thing

Courtesy of the Financial Times

A common interpretation of the credit crunch and ensuing global turmoil is that it was all down to unregulated or under-regulated financial institutions and markets. As a result, one of the most commonly advanced solutions is for more and/or better regulation. Indeed, this call is about as close as we get to a firm demand from the presently fashionable ‘occupy’ protests.

There are many things wrong with this view. First, the underlying causes of the recent boom and bust could be found, as so often, in monetary disturbances. In comparison to the damage wrought by a deluge of credit, any regulatory deficiencies are just hundreds and thousands atop a cake that was always going to turn out pretty sour.

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The European Union would have Pericles turning in his grave

Lo, all their pomp and circumstance...

“We have a form of government not fetched by imitation from the laws of our neighbouring states - nay, we are rather a pattern to others, than they to us - which, because in the administration it hath respect not to a few but to the multitude, is called a democracy”

Pericles spoke those words in 430 BC, at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War. In his famous funeral oration he commemorated the men of Athens who had died defending their democracy from the military dictatorship of Sparta, and reaffirmed what they had died for.

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Clerically clueless - The Church and the protestors

It is difficult to understand quite what protestors expected to happen when they tried to ‘occupy’ the London Stock Exchange a couple of weeks ago. Firstly, it’s a pretty well used building already so is in little need of further ‘occupation’. Secondly, it’s a privately owned building. Even Britain’s supine Police force was unlikely to allow a well advertised act of breaking and entering to take place.

So the protest was rather silly from the off. But as they kicked their heels outside the stock exchange the protestors knew enough to know that they would get a warm welcome from the Church of England, an institution which has become rather silly itself.

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EU referendum and the political class

"This guy cracks me up"

Poor old Gerald Ford was derided for, apparently, being unable to walk and chew gum at the same time. But today’s front rank (sic) British politicians are open about their inability to do two things at once.

As momentum grew in the Conservative parliamentary party for a referendum on membership of the ailing European Union, David Cameron and Ed Miliband both said that to hold one would be a “distraction” from the more pressing business of saving the euro.

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Dirty Hari

“Uh huh, I know what you’re thinking; you’re thinking does this article contain six lies or only five?”

Drowned out by Hackgate this summer was another spectacular story of media self-immolation. Johann Hari, columnist at the Independent, winner of the prestigious Orwell Prize, regular on Newsnight Review, and darling of the left was caught stuffing his columns with lies.

It began in June when a blogger noticed that some of the quotes given by Hari’s interviewees were identical to quotes which had previously appeared in those interviewees published works. Hari defended the charge, saying that “When you interview a writer – especially but not only when English isn’t their first language – they will sometimes make a point that sounds clear when you hear it, but turns out to be incomprehensible or confusing on the page. In those instances, I have sometimes substituted a passage they have written or said more clearly elsewhere on the same subject for what they said to me so the reader understands their point as clearly as possible” He called any allegation of plagiarism “totally false”

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No more Solyndras: time for the sun to go down on public spending

$535 million
Whenever I watch Dragon’s Den (Shark Tank to readers in the United States) and I see some entrepreneur waking away with £50,000 in his pocket I try and come up with my own ‘Dragon’s Den idea’.

I wonder how far I’d get if I turned up and said “I want $535 billion and I’ll go bust in two years”? I might not get too far with Duncan Bannatyne, but if I was pitching to Steven Chu, Barack Obama’s Energy Secretary, I might be in with a shot.

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The Tea Party and the Occupy Movement: two sides of the same coin but only the former really gets it

That is, like, soooooooo Tea Party

My mother always used to tell me that what was sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander. Apparently not. Many of the same people who get swivel eyed about Tea Party rallies are running out of laudatory epithets for the various ‘Occupy’ protests.

Back in January it only took a pair of crosshairs on a web page for New York Times columnist Paul Krugman to deduce that the Tea Party were behind the horrific shooting of Gabrielle Giffords.

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Healthcare - Public and private

Move over love, we've got another two to fit in here

In the summer when the shocking abuse of residents at the Winterbourne View care home in Bristol was revealed Polly Toynbee took to the pages of the Guardian crowing that " The "dead hand of the state" looks rather more welcoming than the grasping hand of private equity"

This week saw a report from the Care Quality Commission found that half of all hospitals were filing in their duty of care for the elderly and that 20% of all hospitals were so bad they were breaking the law.

Does this call into question the entire basis of publicly provided health and social care as, for Ms Toynbee, Winterbourne View did for private provision? Ms Toynbee has yet to address the CQC report.

Quantitative easing: why it doesn't work

Laying the foundations for recovery

In the second year of my economics degree we were mixed in with some first years for some lectures. In the first week one of the freshers asked “Why don’t we just print more money, give it to people, and make them richer?”

We second years laughed, but that economic ingénue might be having the last laugh. As the Bank of England prepares to print another £75 billion of new money, she seems to have a seat on the Monetary Policy Committee.

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A woman has the right to choose...sometimes

Seriously

Laurie Penny is one of the silliest people on the planet. But she might have outdone herself.

On her New Statesman blog back during the furore over Nadine Dorries ill fated abortion law amendment Ms Penny was fulminating about the "anti-choice minority" who wanted "to roll back women's right to reproductive choice"

Well, as ever with the left, its not 'choice' Ms Penny supports, its choices she agrees with. Even cherished reproductive choices.

Less than a month after venting at the 'anti-choice' crowd Ms Penny took to the very same blog to bemoan "The selective abortion of female foetuses" around the world. She spoke of the "tens of millions of potential human beings, neglected to death, murdered at birth or (in increasing numbers) terminated when an ultrasound scan showed that a woman was due to come into the world"

Read that again and tell me how it differs from the rhetoric of the anti-abortion camp.

Cognitive dissonance, they name is Penny.

The hills are alive with the sound of praxeology

When I told a friend of mine three years ago that I was interested in Austrian economics she asked “Isn’t that just selling cuckoo clocks and lederhosen?” True, she wasn’t the brightest, but Austrian economics was fringe stuff. An influential school originating in Vienna in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century it was largely buried under the Keynesian avalanche of the 1930’s. That’s changing.

The Austrian school survived in America where émigré economists escaping the turmoil of 1930s Europe inspired a new generation. Perennial presidential candidate Ron Paul is an advocate of Austrian economics and the Ludwig von Mises Institute dominates the field.

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We are on the economic brink

It just happened

Yesterday the Bank of England announced another round of quantitatuve easing worth £75 billion.

Andrew Lilico responded by asking

"Perhaps the Bank of England is privy to data that makes it believe that further collapse in the British banking sector is now inevitable. If so, an increase in QE is inevitable and correct. But are we really there yet?"

It seems Lilico's question has been answered. Today came the news that

"Moody's has cut its rating on the debt of 12 UK banks, including the state-supported Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland"

The banks are back on the verge of collapse.

Beyond credit easing and council tax: How Osborne can sail us toward 'calmer, brighter seas'

Under pressure

The Labour conference last week was all about Ed Miliband but that didn’t really matter, few are listening to him.

The man currently front and centre of British politics spoke at the Conservative conference in Manchester yesterday, Chancellor George Osborne. His brief, the economy, dominates politics.

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Things will only get worse for Labour until they discuss voters’ inflation concerns

Hands up if you're being screwed by inflation

AS LABOUR gathered in Liverpool for its party conference this week, one of their top priorities was to fashion a message on the dominant issue in British politics today: the economy. They failed.

FISCAL FAILURE

On the fiscal side, the shadow chancellor Ed Balls, unveiled an economic recovery package that seemed like it had been drawn up by a right-wing blogger taking the mick; it simply amounted to borrowing and spending more money. He refused to apologise for Labour’s borrowing – even when the economy was growing – to spend on its public sector client state. But considering that the beneficiaries of that largesse are Labour’s core vote and paymasters his hands are pretty much tied.

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Ed Balls and Irish austerity: what you didn't hear at party conference

May the growth rise to meet you

Ed Balls used to cite Ireland as exhibit A in his argument that ‘austerity’ would cripple the British economy.

A year ago, when Ireland’s economy had just shrunk by 1.2% Balls, then making his unsuccessful run for Labour leader, said

“These figures are a stark warning to governments across Europe including our own. An austerity programme of deep cuts now, when our economic recovery is not secure, risks lower growth and higher unemployment”

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Versus: A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole

‘I am at this moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.’

Sean O’Faolain: ‘Write about what you know’ is usually the first advice given to any aspiring writer and it was certainly followed by John Kennedy Toole when he wrote A Confederacy of Dunces. Toole was a native of New Orleans with a Masters in English and mother issues. The main character of this book, Ignatius J. Reilly, is also from New Orleans, has a Masters in English and mother issues. Confederacy is one of only two books Toole wrote. It was published in 1981, 12 years after his death, and won a Pulitzer Prize.

Reilly is also loud, sanctimonious, dishonest, cowardly and convinced of his own superiority, in short, he’s one of the least appealing main characters I’ve ever come across. His actions spark a story which rattles around New Orleans some time in the early 1960s (when the novel was written) taking in a former prostitute turned bar owner, a wannabe stripper, a bored businessman and his resentful wife, a black guy who meets his oppression with wisecracks, a put-upon police officer and Reilly’s long-suffering mother among many others.

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Sam Peckinpah

When ‘The Wild Bunch’ was released in 1969 there were reports of people being stretchered out of cinemas after fainting during the prolonged, slow motion machine gun massacre which closes the film. The ambiguous rape scene in ‘Straw Dogs’ (1971) saw that film banned in Britain for 18 years. The title character of ‘Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia’ (1974) was a severed head roasting in the Mexican sun.

But it wasn’t just in his films that Sam Peckinpah, director of these movies, shocked. His behaviour on the set of ‘Major Dundee’ (1965) caused Charlton Heston to charge at him with a sabre. On his first day on the set of ‘Pat Garret & Billy the Kid’ (1973) a stunned Bob Dylan watched Peckinpah urinate on a screen to show his disapproval of the footage shot that day. He was thrown out of a tribute to Jimmy Cagney for fighting a waiter.

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Correcting the contextualisers

All property is theft

The response of some to the riots which swept the UK last month was to say “Yes, we know this is criminality, but you can’t ignore the cuts/poverty” While stopping short of excusing the violence which left five dead and caused millions of pounds of damage there was an attempt by these people to ‘contextualise’ it.

Contextualising is often little more than pinning the tail of your pet political cause to the donkey of whatever is in the headlines that week. So it was with the riots. As Kristian Neimetz blogged for the Institute of Economic Affairs the riots had nothing to do with material poverty. Neimetz points out that:

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Religious Keynesianism and Obama's blind faith

Peas in a pod

In the film ‘2010’ Milson tells the astronaut Heywood Floyd “Whenever a President is going to get us into serious trouble they always use Lincoln”.

During his much trailed speech on jobs in front of a joint session of Congress last week President Obama took no chances throwing in Kennedy along with Abe. But given the content of the speech he might have been better invoking Nixon; if two wrongs don’t make a right, try a third.

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9/11 - Ten years on

I was back from university for the summer and working in my local pub. I worked in bars at uni so I’d been given the responsibility of going in at 10am to get the place ready for opening at 11am. It was quiet. The pub had been my regular for a few years and I was always struck by how different the old 16th century building could be when the only noise was the low, soft hum of the fridges and the clanking cleaners bucket.

It was, everyone remembered afterwards, a beautiful, bright clear autumn day. I carried the pub billboard onto the pavement out front and looked around the benches scattered around the town centre. Everyday from about 10:45am onwards they would be occupied by the regulars waiting to come and assume their usual perches at the bar at the stroke of 11 o'clock. Today was no different.

The regulars were all in that day. A retired gardener everyone called ‘Greengrass’ who never bought his own drink, a guy who had one day a week with his kids and would bring them in and plomp them in the corner with a coke while he drank with his pals, two old ladies who drank half a pint of Stella with a dash of lime each.

Around 2pm another regular came in, Rocky they called him because he looked like Neil Morrissey in ‘Boon’. He was a postman just off his rounds. “Pint of four X” he asked before saying “And turn the tele on, there's been a plane crash in New York, it was on the radio in the van”

I flicked on the big screen we used for sports. It went straight to BBC 1 and I was about to switch to a news channel when I saw that they were already covering it. Whatever had happened was big.

There, billowing smoke silently on the screen was one of the Twin Towers in New York. Behind me, at the bar, the regulars shifted on their stools for a view, except for Greengrass who was wondering where his next pint was going to come from. “Fucking hell” I remember all of them saying. They fell silent when the shot changed and showed the second tower also pouring smoke into the clear sky.

Speculation started immediately. One suggested rockets, another that one plane had hit both towers. Soon the TV news showed both wrong. As two separate planes were shown hitting each tower in turn we all realised that this was an attack.

While I had been working, while the regulars had been drinking, 3,000 people had been murdered in New York City.

A decade has passed since then. It’s been a decade which has seen more murders committed in the same cause that drove the 19 killers of 9/11. In Madrid, Bali, Mumbai and London, fanatics have seen fit to murder people who never harmed them to further their own agendas.

It’s been a decade which has seen military action on a scale few expected to see again after the end of the Cold War. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 a broad coalition of countries went with the United States into Afghanistan to topple the Taliban government which had sheltered the inspiration for the attack, Osama Bin Laden. At the end of that decade many of those countries are still there.

In 2003, with the war in Afghanistan still going, the United States led a smaller coalition, including Britain, into Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein. Less clearly justified by 9/11 this was always more controversial.

It has been a decade where, until the financial crisis hit, the attacks of 9/11 and the responses of the various actors defined the political landscape. Your attitude to terrorism and the ‘war on terror’ were the standard against which your politics and your personality were judged.

What have we learned in this decade? Not as much as we should have. People are generally rather good at learning the lessons they wanted to learn. For the neo cons who had been speculating on intervention in the Middle East even before 9/11 the lesson was that they should intervene in the Middle East. For the left, which had always opposed anything the United States had done, the lesson was to oppose anything the United States did.

The one undeniable lesson was that in the 21st century mans capacity for cruelty to his fellow man remained as great as ever. But it also taught that his capacity for compassion for his fellow man and for sacrifice remained as great as ever.

Consider a man like Pat Lyons, a fire fighter from Brooklyn who left his heavily pregnant wife to go to work that morning. When the call came he selflessly ran into the burning North Tower to save the lives of total strangers because it was his job. Pat Lyons never saw his son, Patrick, who was born on October 7th 2001. He was one of the 343 New York fire fighters who died at the World Trade Center.

Compare this to the cruel and selfish actions of Mohammad Atta, murdering to get his hands on 72 virgins. But there were more of the selfless than the selfish, more fire fighters than hijackers, more heroes than villains even on that awful day.

On that morning ten years ago today as I worked at the Swan Geoffrey Campbell went to a conference hosted by a publishing company at the World Trade Center. A couple, Dinah Webster and Neil Cudmore, who were planning to marry, were working alongside each other there. So were brothers Andrew and Tim Gilbert. Vincent Wells who worked for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104th floor of the North Tower was celebrating his 23rd birthday. Christine Egan went to visit her brother Michael who worked on the 100th floor of the South Tower. Graham Berkeley was on United Airlines flight 175 from Boston to Los Angeles. All of them were British.

They all died that day. In total 67 Britons died in lower Manhattan on September 11th 2001 making it the deadliest terrorist attack in British history.

This wasn’t an attack on America it was an attack on a way of life. 9/11 wasn’t about blowback, Imperialism or Israel. It was about people like us living like we live who were killed out of the clear blue sky. Remember them today.