Tag: UK

A Second Chance

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

Lockdown 2.0 is coming. France and German signed up last week. Athens will this week. England will be joining the club in the coming days. Scotland is persevering with it’s tier system instead with no regions currently in tier four and lockdown but it’s likely a watch this space thing. Politically if Scotland’s approach doesn’t work it will have a lasting effect on the Scottish elections in May next year but equally that is a long time in politics. As this most remarkable of years has shown; a lot of the unexpected can happen in a short space of time. Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish First Minister, met with Micheal Gove the other day, along with the leaders of Wales and Northern Ireland to discuss the differing approaches and the potential financial aid necessary. He suggesting the government were listening and would give it some thought. Gove the ultimate in parodies, giving the perfect non-committal politician response. Issues have started to arise as it appears funding to prop up jobs UK-wide only seems to be on offer when the English in the south-east start to find themselves in need. The Tory government propping up their heartlands. It is an easy accusation to make but equally a very believable one on which they have form.

How then are people planning on experiencing these lockdowns. Boris Johnson says it’ll be only for four weeks but the previous one was only supposed to be three weeks and it ended up being three months. If people living in the Arctic circle can not just endure but actively enjoy a few months of winter darkness then surely we in the UK can survive some bleak skies for a bit. Apparently one method they have for remaining happy in these long winters is to find excitement in the things they can do instead which they can’t in summer months. They ski, they make fires, they go for night walks, they do indoor things. In Scotland because the weather can be so volatile it has always felt necessary to make the most of good weather and complete outdoor tasks, or even just enjoy the outdoors. When it’s raining and cold we do the jobs we have put off inside the house. It may not be the most exciting prospect but it creates a wealth of opportunities. With many having already experienced one lockdown in Spring they will be either daunted and fatigued by the prospect of a second or excited at being even better at their second attempt. What didn’t we get to learn in the first one, what didn’t we manage to watch on Netflix, what books didn’t we manage to get through and so on. Modern life has meant people rarely get to spend lengthy periods of time with themselves but it is crucial in our self-development as people. Aren’t we lucky we get a second roll of the dice. A hard six perhaps? What a glorious opportunity we have.

Ten Days Free Falling Tree

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

This then is day one of ten without the news. It doesn’t feel a great deal different from yesterday except I missed listening to the two daily Economist podcasts I would usually listen to while driving. Not checking the BBC feels like absolutely zero loss which is quite a pleasant and reassuring feeling and without access to my Facebook wall I am unlikely to come up with any articles from independent or alternate media sources. Life doesn’t feel much different then as I said after one day, but then I wouldn’t expect it to, it’s after five or six days that I’m curious to see the affects.

This is not my first time without any access to the news. There have been plenty of opportunities for me to be ignorant of the worlds ignorance’s when travelling and either being away from the internet or just with better things to do. It is probably important then to get this straight; there are many more important things in life than knowing what is going on in the world, or a version of the world people you don’t know want you to see. When I have been away from the internet for a bit though my first thought is not to check the world or local news but is to find out what the score in the football was. That’s my weakness, everything else is secondary.

These moments of no internet are incredibly rare in modern times. We have access to the internet in ways unthinkable just ten to fifteen years ago. I do remember a time before mobile phones let alone phones with all this infinitely accessible information. I have no idea of the figures and will perhaps expose my ignorance but I imagine the majority of houses in the UK have wifi or at least access to a neighbours. Failing that a trip to McDonalds is the norm for some and even public transport has wifi these days. We’ve come along way from dial-up connections and it taking a minute to download one image.

It is probably a good thing. Long term it is unclear but then what the people of the future think is good will probably be different to what I do now. We apparently have less ability to remember information because we have Google as a surrogate memory bank. Our lack of real face to face connection has been shown to create feelings of loneliness which is surely the opposite of what a world of connectivity is supposed to do. Maybe we need to refine our understanding of the nuances of connection. On the flip side, unless we switch off our devices which can genuinely be really difficult, we are never fully alone and able to relax in our own company. We seem to be in a middle ground that does nobody any favours.

But I started out with discussing taking a break from the constant barrage of news not a one-sided take on the ills of technology. The news then makes us excitable in all the wrong ways and feeds into some primordial survival network going on in our brain. It undoubtedly leads to increases in anxiety and it’s only real benefit seems to be in allowing for a good conversation with someone about, well, the news. Yet being able to share information of massacres, injustices and private and state corruption is invaluable even if it does get drowned out by all the rest of the bullshit. In these ten days though I’ll be fine, as will the world without my observations for I suspect it is true; a falling tree does make a sound in the woods even when nobody is there to hear it.

Modern Morality & Historical Identity

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

There is a common theme running through our historical education at school. It is usually the simple narrative that supports our national identity and message; that we as a country haven’t really done much wrong. We learn about the two World Wars from the British perspective, the industrial revolution, The Soviet Union and never in a favourable way and sometimes the Napoleonic Wars but are taught about it and him from a very different angle than the French are. Which means every country does it and that is why this isn’t a piece bashing the UK and suggesting we’re wrong in a world of right. There is currently much discussion about Churchill or the philanthropic slave trader Edward Colston and we as a populace are being forced to explore their roles in our national identity with a different set of eyes. This can only be a good thing because to describe someone such as Churchill as the greatest Briton of all time must only ever sugar coat the actions he took that led to people suffering. Equally not everything he did was bad so it’s important to examine him and his legacy from all angles and in a fair way. We live in an age of trial by social media but once the furore dies down I suspect their will be a few historic individuals with slightly different identities than before.

We are re-addressing our own history then and as long as that’s not with corrupted intentions it can only ever be a good thing. It is important to realise though that we are doing so with our modern take on morality and while it doesn’t absolve people of their wrongs it is still important to take into consideration the times in which they lived. That doesn’t entirely excuse them of course because there are plenty of examples of people in their time expressing beliefs more attuned to our contemporary ideals. Slave traders can not be excused when there are so many examples of people trying to eradicate the practice at the time for example. It can be used by apologists as an excuse but it is important to remember that we are viewing a different time when trying to understand previous takes on racism, sexism and power.

Which begs the question of whether we need to take into consideration how future generations may view us now. Will they understand our actions on race, sex, religion or economic productivity and think us simply abhorrent. On the other hand will they view all religion as abhorrent. I have called people fascists in the past in a derogatory way but had historical events turned out differently that word would have a different meaning. Ultimately we have no idea how our societies and our moralities will evolve and how we will be viewed in the future but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take it into consideration. Our behaviour in combating climate change is one such example. If we carry on like this I suspect it’ll be pretty clear how we’ll be viewed. It could be argued this will tie in with whether we manage to overcome neoliberal capitalism and what kind of society we manage to create in the next fifty years. It is easy to criticise people from the past and sometimes rightly so but it’s important now in understanding our own actions that one day we too will be someones past.

A Union of Secession

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

I’m going to attempt to recreate the main points of a conversation I’ve just had with my Dad. For context he is both pro-Brexit and pro-Union. These ideas discussed have come up in the past but seemingly have taken a step further with recent events.

The Tory party in the UK won a stonking majority of some forty seats and in Scotland the SNP won an equally stonking forty-eight out of a possible fifty-nine seats. Both of these result can be and have been spun in numerous ways but arguably what it does do is give a mandate for Brexit and a mandate for a second referendum in Scotland on independence. It is hard to argue against either of those things when Brexit and Scottish independence were the main priority of both parts respectively. However as with everything in politics this is not as straightforward as it seems. We in the UK have a voting system called First Past The Post, which allows for people to win seats once they get a certain number of votes but which for numerous reasons too many to get into here, creates a voting system which arguably favours the larger parties, creates a two party system like we have in the the UK and in the US too and which often allows for a larger percentage of seats that percentage of the vote.

The point is that while this may have been a Brexit election the Remain supporting parties actually received more votes in total than the Brexit supporting parties yet received vastly fewer seats. The same can be said for Scotland which has so many tight marginal seats that can be won by less than one hundred votes, the SNP received a far fewer percentage of the vote than percentage of the seats, which also equated to fewer pro-independence votes than pro-union. The argument made by my Dad was that the SNP don’t actually have a mandate because were there to be another referendum they would lose it because of this share of the votes but it is also an argument which can be made back in regard Brexit.

Put simply; the unionists want to maintain one union while breaking up another while the separatists want to break up one union while also maintaining another. The unionists believe they have the mandate to break from the EU because they hold a resounding majority in the UK parliament but not break up the UK because the majority of those voting in Scotland voted for parties not pushing for independence, whereas the separatists want to break from the UK because they hold a majority of Scottish seats in parliament but maintain the connection with the EU because the majority of Scottish voters voted to remain. Confused? You should be.

Ultimately that is the more ridiculous nature of politics and power. We pick and choose what we want to see and believe depending on what fits our narrative. We have a belief, we see facts, numbers, ideas which support this belief and fervently repeat them even in the face of contradictory points we choose not to see. I don’t doubt I do this too and hope one day to develop the self-awareness to stop. It’s just both amusing and depressing to see both sides using the same argument against each other and being oblivious to the fact its exactly the same argument. And whats worse, this road of obliviousness appears to stretch from one horizon to the other. This madness has always been, the question is then, will it always be?