The Love of the People - quotation from A People's Tragedy by Orlando Figes, p.26, by Brother John Maynard, in a homily given on the Feast of Christ the King, 25 November 2018. "From a letter of Queen Victoria to her granddaughter, the Empress Alexandra. 'There is no harder craft than our craft of ruling. I have ruled for more than fifty years in my own country, which I have known since childhood, and, nevertheless, every day I think about what I need to do to retain and strengthen the love of my subjects. You find yourself in a foreign country, a country which you do not know at all, the way of thinking and the people themselves are completely alien to you, and nevertheless, it is your first duty to win their love and respect.' The reply is not promising: 'You are mistaken my dear grandmama; Russia is not England. Here we do not need to earn the love of the people. The Russian people revere their Tzars as divine beings, from whom all charity and fortune derive. As far as St Petersburg society is concerned, that is something which one may wholly disregard. The opinions of those who make up this society and their mocking have no significance whatsoever.'"
Brexit proved our economy is broken, but our leaders still have no clue how to fix it - article by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian. "We rarely ask people what they want from the economy; if we did it more often, the answers might surprise us. The free-marketeers at the Legatum Institute did pose the question in a survey conducted in 2017. Top priorities for respondents were: food and water; emergency services; universal healthcare; a good house; a decent well-paying job; and compulsory and free education. At the bottom were owning a car and cheap air travel. HS2, a new runway at Heathrow or a garden bridge on the Thames didn’t even rank. After reporting the survey, the Legatum Institute concluded: 'Significant portions of the country … are vehemently anti-capitalist.' The report was co-authored by Matthew Elliott, former head of the Vote Leave campaign. Which just about sums up the Brexiteers’ politics: savvy enough to listen to what people want, cynical enough never to enact it."
Power to the people: could a citizens’ assembly solve the Brexit crisis? - article by Leo Benedictus in The Guardian. "In the summer of 1978, George Bishop and a team of researchers in Cincinnati, Ohio, conducted a poll on some of the big political topics of the day. One question went as follows: 'Some people say that the 1975 Public Affairs Act should be repealed. Do you agree or disagree with this idea?' It turned out that 16% did agree, and 18% didn’t. This was surprising. There should have been no controversy about the 1975 Public Affairs Act because it did not exist. The study, Pseudo-Opinions on Public Affairs, became a classic of political science. It has been rerun in different versions several times: in 1983, 1984, 1995 and 2013, always with similar results. Around a third of people will pretend to have an opinion, unless you make it easy to say 'don’t know'. If you say that 'President Obama' or 'the Republicans' want to repeal the Public Affairs Act, even more opinions appear, along partisan lines.... In November last year, Gordon Brown suggested that [a citizen's] assembly might resolve the Brexit crisis. Last month, Damon Albarn, Rowan Williams and a number of other public figures wrote an open letter to the Guardian in support, and the idea now has this newspaper’s backing. ... In 2016, for instance, when Ireland decided to reconsider its abortion laws, ... parliament established a citizens’ assembly of 99 randomly selected Irish citizens, who would reflect the national balance of age, gender, class and region. They would be chaired by a supreme court judge (now retired), Mary Laffoy. No politicians would be involved."
Adam Curtis and Vice director Adam McKay on how Dick Cheney masterminded a rightwing revolution - interview by Paul MacInnes in The Guardian. "AM: Information warfare is where we’re living now. More specifically, it’s story warfare. There’s this battle in the US where our oligarchs are claiming they are the Joseph Campbell heroes. That they’re the ones who are going through the three-act structure of going into the unknown. Charles Koch is taking on the world. There’s this weird thing going on where these traditional story structures really play bogus now. AC: That’s because they have been appropriated by those people who really do have power. But that’s also because politicians have given up telling stories. They have nothing to say any longer."
Trapped in a hoax: survivors of conspiracy theories speak out - article by Ed Pilkington in The Guardian. "[Lenny Pozner’s crime, in the eyes of conspiracy theorists, is being the father of one of the 20 children who were gunned down in the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012. Noah was the youngest of all victims. He had just turned six. Within months, conspiracy theorists, egged on by Alex Jones and Infowars, went to work. They generated thousands of web posts and a 426-page book called 'Nobody Died at Sandy Hook'. Their thesis: the shooting at the elementary school never happened. The 20 kids who died were “crisis actors”. The tragedy was a con. Noah had never even existed, he was a construct of Photoshop.... By Pozner’s reckoning, one in five people around the world are suggestible to conspiracy theories, and their obsessions are amplified by the crude logic of digital algorithms. 'There is just no more truth, there is just what’s trending on Twitter,' he says. 'Used to be, you had to burn books to keep people from finding out the truth, now you just have to push it to page 20 of a Google search.'”
The new elite’s phoney crusade to save the world, without changing anything - article by Anand Giriharadas in The Guardian, based on his book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. "That vast numbers of Americans and others in the west have scarcely benefited from the age is not because of a lack of innovation, but because of social arrangements that fail to turn new stuff into better lives. For example, American scientists make the most important discoveries in medicine and genetics and publish more biomedical research than those of any other country – but the average American’s health remains worse and slower-improving than that of peers in other rich countries, and in some years life expectancy actually declines. American inventors create astonishing new ways to learn thanks to the power of video and the internet, many of them free of charge – but the average US high-school leaver tests more poorly in reading today than in 1992."
Engines of Privilege: a challenge to Britain's private schools? - review by Kate Clanchy in The Guardian. "Private schools are smart institutions, and ... in the last 30 years they have grabbed every opportunity and anticipated every turn of fashion. As we became obsessed with school data, so they became more selective and academic and dominated the league tables. When a feminist agenda became more important, girls’ schools captured it:, turning into academic powerhouses, pushing girls into science, educating, they tell us, the female leaders of the future. As our attention turned to mental health, so private schools came to the forefront of mindfulness education and wellbeing counselling. As the state schools have been starved of funds and bullied by curriculum changes, so private schools have picked up the dropped agendas, persecuted subjects and displaced teachers: first classics, then history of art, then modern languages, now music, drama and, cruellest of all, special needs education. They have replaced bum-kicking with liberal lines on transgender pupils, colonial patronage with multiculturalism, dumb team sports with Olympic sailing... They have helped themselves annually to larger and larger slices of what we love and value most of the cultural capital pie, and all the time singing ... oh what a good (multicultural feminist artistic dyslexic-friendly) girl am I. They’ve boxed a terrific match and it would, sadly, take a much defter, subtler and better researched book than this to even lay a glove on them."
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