The politics of gossip

25. June 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Media & Politics, Uncategorized
English fans at Estádio Mineirão in Belo Horizonte during the Costa Rica-England match for the 2014 FIFA World Cup, Brazil. 24 June 2014, 11:17:21 Source: Mariordo (Mario Roberto Duran Ortiz)

Ever wondered why you often feel overwhelmed and powerless in the face of the daily news coming at you from TV, radio and social media? It is easy to lose sight of the culture we have surrounded ourselves with, to assume that it could be no other way and that we are seeing the world as it is when we are “assisted” to make judgements about things and people, that the way we organise our society has been distilled from hundreds if not thousands of years of experiment to arrive at something which we would be foolish to deviate from too much.

So it is always valuable to come across a book which challenges this very particular viewpoint, coming as it does from a very particular geography or geographies and at a very particular point in our history. Harvey Whitehouse’s excellent Inheritance – the Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World is just such a book. Its main contention is that our beliefs and behaviours have evolved much as our biology has and that three urges in particular can explain how our cultures have developed: conformism, religiosity and tribalism. All had strong survival advantages to them: conformism, via the urge to imitate, allowed us to store discoveries and innovations from generation to generation and build them up over time; religiosity, a by-product of our adaptive psychology – to anticipate how others will behave, to create lists and categorisations, our tendency to think things can be used as tools, and our other tendency to overdetect potential dangers around us; and finally tribalism. These urges have been used to create progressively more complex societies via routinisation of our lives and the fusion of our identities (the extreme state that causes people to lay their lives down for each other in military conflict in extreme cases for instance) with ever larger groups.

And some of the places Harvey and his co-researchers have ventured to test their ideas sound extremely challenging. Interviewing insurgents in the Libyan revolution, being initiated by the Baining tribe in Papua New Guinea, talking to a former member of the Indonesian terrorist organisation Jemaah Islamiyah about working with convicted terrorists in Indonesian prisons. People often with completely different perspectives on things which we have long regarded as settled in our own culture but also recognisably the same as us in all important ways. However I think my favourite attempted interviews were when they were making their way through the crowd at the England game against Costa Rica at the 2014 FIFA World Cup to test out their hypothesis that losing at football had “a more powerful bonding effect on supporters than winning”. 48 years of pain, etc.

The experiments they have carried out are also eye-opening. Creating made-up rituals of different intensities in a wooded field near Queens Belfast to see whether those who had been more scared by what they had been asked to do reflected more deeply on their experience and developed richer symbolic interpretations of the ritual. These developed until they were wiring up participants within a performance space with powerful speakers and lighting effects to lead them through rituals of even greater intensity.

Once you have started looking at your own society a bit more from the outside in this way, it is hard to stop. There is a great passage in the book about gossip:

When we lived in small communities, in which everybody knew everybody else, news consisted mainly of socially strategic information about who was hoarding wealth, who was telling lies, who was sleeping with whom, who was stealing, who was free-riding, and so on. In most of these newsworthy stories, there would be transgressors and victims, and news purveyors and consumers would be very sensitive to the reputational consequences of this information. The common term for this is gossip.

So today’s front page from The Daily Mail is almost purely gossip: an article about the wedding of a man widely regarded as having hoarded wealth on a literally galactic scale and the potential reputational damage to the Prime Minister of a backbench revolt against his proposed disability benefit cuts.

Similarly today’s front page from The Sun is also almost purely gossip: a story about people variously called migrants and asylum seekers (presented as the same thing) asserted to be illegally working as delivery riders, which the paper labels as a “scam”. Plus something about the return of Cool Britannia and Keir Starmer warning us to prepare for war and the story about us buying some new fast jets which could carry nuclear weapons.

Now these are potentially important stories about how we want to run our country (well not the Bezos wedding or the Cool Britannia ones), but they are all told through the medium of gossip. This means we focus on the moral transgressions of people we will never meet that do not affect us personally rather than whether we are managing our complex society remotely competently.

The Daily Star makes it even easier to see how a serious story about the war between Iran, Israel and the United States can be reduced to one about Trump’s so-called “F-bomb”. And it may look like I am picking on the red tops, but all these stories are present and correct in The Guardian too.

I have just focused on a few newspapers here, but obviously social media has turbo-charged this effect and now with the power increasingly to generate convincing images and videos of things which have never even happened, the ability to unhinge our “news” operations completely from real life has never been greater.

If you were being presented with this gossip in a social situation within a group of people all spouting the Deliveroo story, it would be hard to argue with it, as it would fight against your very strong instinct to conform in your behaviour and to belong to the tribe you were surrounded by. The conflation of the Cool Britannia idea and the fast jets with nukes is a mystical jingoistic attempt to pull at our natural religiosity.

This is not news at all, it is psy-ops.

Back in June

07. May 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized

First of all, my apologies to any of you who have been trying to access my website over the last couple of weeks. Apparently the plucky British small business which was hosting it has collapsed under the strain and so my sysadmin Tom has judiciously decided to move me to a giant French corporation of the too-big-to-fail variety. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

The other thing that has happened is that my mother died two weeks ago and my blogging has since been incapacitated amongst much else. My aim is to be back next month, with probably a different set of priorities to the ones I mentioned at the start of the year.

I have set up a JustGiving page for St Barnabas Hospice, who looked after my Mum so brilliantly in the last week of her life and who, along with the rest of the hospice sector, are going through an extremely difficult time financially at the moment.

Best wishes all.

https://www.justgiving.com/page/hazel-foster?utm_medium=FR&utm_source=CL&utm_campaign=015

Invisible Jokes

05. March 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized

Just a quick note to apologise to readers via the email newsletter about the some of my recent posts which included embedded YouTube videos. They didn’t appear in the emails – you needed to click the read in browser link to see them. This must have made some of what I was writing about (eg about Phoebe Buffay) even more incomprehensible than usual! I intend to link to them for the time being (as I did yesterday) rather than embed them until I can work out a way to smuggle them past mail servers!

The Day After The Night Before

06. November 2024 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized

I have been reading many accounts of what happened last night. Richard Murphy was clear what he thought:

I reserve the right to change my mind on this and to revisit the issue, but my immediate feeling is that there is one point of common ground between those who have voted for Trump and those who read this blog, and that is that they have rejected neoliberalism.

Biden’s economic boost after Covid was not felt by most Americans. The growth went to the already rich.

Most Americans do not want to preserve an economic system that very clearly does not reward them and has no intention of doing so.

Many Americans already feel alienated within their own country.

The Biden support for Netanyahu’s tyranny in Gaza made many feel that the Democrats had already embraced fascism, so what would the difference be if they did so with Trump?

And, I have no doubt many Americans have good reason to fear the consequences of neoliberalism that it pretends do not exist, but which are readily apparent, from massively divided societies to fears of climate change, to constant reminders of inequality, to the loss of hope and the denial of opportunity as a consequence of ever-growing divides in a society when neoliberal politicians long ago ceased to tell the truth. In that situation, Trump might look mad and a terrible choice, except for the fact that neoliberalism and its perpetuation look to be even worse because there is a guarantee of failure to come in it, whereas Trump only offered the possibility of something that might be terrible.

David Allen Green, on his Empty City blog, recalled the essay written by Neil Postman’s son, Marc, at the time of Trump’s first election victory, about his father’s prophetic book Amusing Ourselves to Death. This postulated that we have been too worried that our future might resemble 1984 while a future strongly resembling Brave New World took shape instead. In it he quoted his father:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.

Meanwhile Jason Hickel’s analysis on X ended with a call for action:

The deeper reality is that liberalism has failed, liberalism is dead, and people urgently need to wake up to this fact and respond accordingly. It is a defunct ideology that cannot offer any meaningful solutions to our social and ecological crises and it must be abandoned.

Democrats have proven over and over again that they cannot accept even basic steps like public healthcare, affordable housing, and a public job guarantee – things that would dramatically improve the material, social and political conditions of the working classes. And they cannot accept a public finance strategy that would steer production away from fossil fuels and toward green transition to give us a shot at a liveable future.

Why? Because these things run against the objectives of capital accumulation. And for liberals capital is sacrosanct. They will do whatever it takes to ensure elite accumulation, it is their only consistent commitment. At home, they suppress and demonize progressive and socialist tendencies. Abroad, they engage in endless wars and violence to suppress input prices in the global South and prevent any possibility of sovereign economic development.

The Democrats have done all this purposefully and knowingly, for my whole life, not as some kind of “mistake” but in full consciousness that it is in the interests of capital.

And because liberalism cannot address our crises, and because it crushes socialist alternatives, it inevitably paves the way for right-wing populism. They know this pattern, and yet they risk it every time – this election being only the most recent example. They did it in 2016, when they actively crushed the Sanders campaign and sent Trump to the White House. They do it because ultimately they (and I mean the liberal ruling class here) don’t really mind if fascists take power, so long as the latter too ensure the conditions for capital accumulation. They 100% prefer this to the possibility of a socialist alternative.

So, progressives have to face reality. The dream of “converting” the Democratic party is dead. This is now a fact and it must be accepted. The only option is to build a mass-based movement that can reclaim the working classes and mobilize a political vehicle that can integrate disparate progressive struggles into a unified and formidable political force and achieve substantive transformation. This will take real work, actual organizing, but it must be done and that process must begin now.

This was taken up in turn by Roger Hallam (who co-founded Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain, the cooperative federation organisation Radical Routes and the political party Burning Pink, and who is currently, ridiculously, imprisoned for 5 years) with a suggested plan. As he says:

Progressives and the Left fail repeatedly because they are wedded to an Enlightenment secular religion that assumes people respond to ideas over emotions and ideology over connection. They’re embarrassingly mistaken. Fascist men, for instance, often abandon their views after forming personal relationships—such as getting a girlfriend. There are countless stories of individuals entering far-right spaces, listening, building personal connections, and subsequently helping others to leave those spaces. During the recent English riots a group of Muslims, faced with an angry crowd outside their mosque, offered food and listened to people’s concerns. Conversations ensued, tensions eased, and constructive dialogue began.

You can sign up to join this social movement here.

This in turn chimes with what George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison (and Lucas Sabean in the film) are saying in their new book The Invisible Doctrine, where they talk about a politics of belonging as what is needed to replace neoliberalism.

And just to cap it all off, the book I have been reading for the last 2 weeks (the excellent The History of Ideas by David Runciman, also available as a podcast here) arrived at the final chapter on Judith Shklar this morning and was suddenly discussing Trump:

Trump is a cruel politician. Cruelty is one of his calling cards. He can be cruel in how he treats the people around him and he’s often cruel in how he goes after his critics, mocking them and seeking out their vulnerabilities. He goes for the weak spots of his opponents and he takes no prisoners. To be in Trump’s orbit is to be vulnerable to degradation and humiliation. But Trump is not a hypocrite. Indeed, that is one of his great sources of appeal as a democratic politician – he is as he seems. He appears to be willing to be as unpleasant in public as he is in private. All the accounts I’ve read of how he treats the people who have worked for him – in the West Wing, in his businesses, even the members of his family – are reminiscent of how he treats his political opponents: bullying, mockery, rule by fear. Trump is himself all the way through – cruel all the way through – which makes him consistent. The opposite of hypocrisy, on some measures anyway, is sincerity. There is a case for saying that Trump, though he is an inveterate liar, is also a sincere politician. He is sincere about being a liar, he doesn’t try to hide it or to dissemble his true character. There is a brazenness to it.

Our pervasive intolerance of hypocrisy is one of the things that allowed Donald Trump to wind up as President of the United States.

This came out earlier this year, so is referring to the 2016 election, but it still rings true for me. We spend a lot of our social media activity and journalism on trying to expose and then punish public figures for hypocrisy. We don’t expend nearly as much effort worrying about cruelty. Judith Shklar thought this was a mistake and I agree with her. Of course we need to set up our institutions to be honest and not hypocritical but people will always have things about themselves that they do not want the rest of us to know about. And, hard-wired as we are to obsess about finding out such secrets, we often lose focus on what is more damaging to our society. I will finish with one last Trumpian extract from The History of Ideas:

The emergence of an unauthorised recording of a talk she [Hillary Clinton] gave to a Wall Street bank dogged her campaign – it apparently gave the lie to her public protestations of being tough on financial fat cats. Worse, she seemed to know it was damaging – why else go to such lengths to cover it up? It did her far more damage than the emergence of a tape in which Trump talked in demeaning, sexualised terms about women (“Grab ’em by the pussy”), because in Trump’s case it was what you’d expect him to say.

Our relationships with each other and how we behave within them are, I believe, the most important things in most of our lives, not the finer details of the political ideologies we favour. I fear that Trumpism is growing in the UK too and we need to keep our current closeness (what Roger Hallam refers to as our “proximity”) to each other and indeed build on it if we are going to repel it and build something better in its place.

Day 7 of the UCU Strike: the magic of an arbitrary number

15. March 2023 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized

Jim Callaghan’s memoirs of the way in which his 5% pay increase limit came about (courtesy of Andy Beckett’s excellent When The Lights Went Out) are fascinating:

At the Cabinet Meeting on 22 December, I threw out the idea that from August 1978, we should aim to get pay settlements down to 5%…As far as I can recall, because no formal proposal was before the Cabinet, there was no discussion…Ministers probably assumed that I was thinking aloud – as indeed I was. However, when I made my New Year Broadcast…the 5% idea hardened and popped out when the interviewer tempted me…

Inflation was at around 8% at the time. However average earnings between August 1977 and August 1978 rose by 14% and this was the anchor for future pay deals. In September 1978, 50,000 workers at Ford went on strike in response to a 5% pay offer and went on strike (“Stuff the 5%” was on some of the placards). Two months later, the strikers accepted an offer of 17% from Ford.

CPI was at 10.1% to January 2023 and CPIH (the one that includes housing costs) at 8.8%. However the anchor now appears to be working in the opposite direction due to years of low inflation: a recent CIPD survey indicated that planned pay settlements in the public sector fell to 2% from 3% in the quarter before, compared to a median of 5% in the private sector.

This may be changing. Another recent survey of 181 large private firms had 29% of firms expecting to award pay increases between 5% and 5.99% in 2023 and 24% increases of 6% or higher.

This therefore seems like an odd time for the UCEA (the Universities and Colleges Employers Association) to refuse to negotiate with the University and College Union, particularly after agreeing a two week “period of calm” without strike action specifically so that further negotiations could take place. Instead they are unilaterally implementing their arbitrary number.

Needless to say, the strikes are now back on!

The Time Has Come For Lecturers To Decide What They Want

17. March 2018 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Defined Ambition, Pensions, Regulation, Risk, Uncategorized

Since my last post on the strike, where I set out my reasons for not joining it, a lot has happened. The strike has forced UUK back to the negotiating table, overseen by ACAS, on a deal originally presented as done. The consultation period on the new arrangements has been postponed. University Vice Chancellors are scurrying to distance themselves from the UUK negotiating position and side with their own striking lecturers. As most observers admit, including most recently the Head of Public Sector Pensions at KPMG in the tweet below, the UCU have won the communications battle. Victory appears to be total.

However there remains a problem, which we seem to be facing increasingly in recent years from Trump to Brexit, and that is this: what to do when the victory you have won is based on campaign arguments which are fundamentally untrue, not backed by evidence or existing pensions legislation, and ultimately undeliverable? Just keep saying no to any workable option which is put to you?

How untrue? Well let’s go back to the now famous letter to the FT signed by many famous lecturers across the UK, including David Spiegelhalter, Ben Goldacre and Steven Haberman (notable as he is deputy director of the Actuarial Research Centre). This was itself a response to a FT story based on the audited accounts, where the pension deficits were merely being updated in line with what had previously been agreed and bore no relation to the negotiations about the March 2017 valuation. As the audited accounts state quite clearly:

The trustee regularly monitors the scheme’s funding position as part of the overall monitoring of FMP introduced followed the 2014 valuation. The monitoring is based on the assumptions used for the 2014 actuarial valuation (updated for changes in gilt yields and inflation expectations). The monitoring does not involve the same detailed review of the underlying assumptions (including the financial, economic, sectoral assumptions for example) that takes place as part of the full actuarial valuation, the next full actuarial valuation being due as at 31 March 2017. Therefore the amounts shown for liabilities in the funding position below are not indicative of the results of the 2017 valuation.

So arguing about these assumptions was futile. The letter also showed an unexpected lack of understanding (particularly from Steven Haberman, who must have spent enough time in the company of pensions actuaries who carry out these kinds of negotiations all the time to know better) about what the assumptions shown in the accounts meant. In particular, there is a note saying that the general salary assumption is only being used for the recovery plan contributions rather than to calculate the scheme deficit. That means that, if you think the assumption is too large, it will be overstating the value of future contributions and therefore understating how large those contributions need to be. So rather than making the scheme seem more unaffordable, it would be making it seem less.

Then there is the mortality point – a massive misunderstanding. The assumptions do not say that life expectancy is increasing by 1.5% pa which would clearly be absurd. They are saying that mortality improvements (ie the percentage by which the expected probability of death of a 70 year old in 2020 is less than that of a 70 year old in 2019) are assumed to be 1.5% pa. Stuart McDonald gently put Ben Goldacre right on this point here.

However the bigger overall point is that individual assumptions are not the thing to focus on here anyway, but the overall level of prudence or otherwise in a basis. And the facts around this are considerably clearer.

  • We know that the initial valuation proposed by the USS Trustee to the Pensions Regulator and the covenant assessment on which it was based (ie the willingness and ability of the employers in UUK to continue paying contributions) were both rejected. As this initial valuation disclosed a deficit of just over £5 billion, then the proposal resulting in a £7.5 billion deficit which was finally presented to the Joint Negotiating Committee would appear to be as low as the Trustee could reasonably go and still get the valuation past the Regulator.
  • The S179 valuation of the scheme (this is the valuation all occupational pension schemes who pay levies to the Pension Protection Fund as insurance against the failure of their employer(s), which is done on the same valuation basis for all schemes) at the last valuation as at 31 March 2014 showed a deficit of £8.95 billion (compared to the £5.3 billion funding deficit disclosed). The latest “more prudent” valuation proposed is therefore still unlikely to be proposing a target which goes anywhere near 100% funding on this basis (the scheme was only 82% funded in March 2014 when, as you can see below, nearly 40% of schemes were in surplus on this measure). There is therefore no justification for the repeated assertion by the UCU that the scheme is not under-funded.

Source: Commons Work and Pensions Select Committee report on defined benefit pension schemes 20 December 2016

One last point on the campaign. Some of it seems to have been directed personally at the USS Trustee. This is the body with no other job than to protect the security of the pensions that lecturers have already built up. Why would anyone want to turn on them? Bill Galvin, the Group CEO at USS Ltd, the Trustee company, has set out responses to some of the other misconceptions here. I would urge anyone with an interest in this dispute to read them.

So, if the deficit is what it is and there is no scope for weakening the funding assumptions any further and maintaining current benefits on these funding assumptions involves contribution increases which are unacceptable to both scheme members and the employers, what is this dispute about now? The time has come for lecturers to decide what they want. Of course the basic premises of pension scheme funding can be argued about (and I direct anyone interested in the long history of actuarial debate in this area to read chapter 6 of Craig Turnbull’s A History of British Actuarial Thought which traces this from 1875 to 1997), and perhaps ultimately legislative change might be brought about if a new argument could be won in this area. But that is a long term objective and the funding of this scheme needs to be agreed now. If a £42,000 cap for 3 years while negotiations continue on a long term structure of the scheme which doesn’t leave all risk with scheme members is not acceptable, then we need to decide pretty quickly what is. Because once we move to a DC arrangement, the chances of us moving back to any form of risk sharing subsequently are in my view remote. There will always be other uses for that money.

However there are many possible alternative structures and many ways of sharing the risks between employers and scheme members. In particular let’s not get too obsessed with Collective Defined Contribution schemes, the enabling legislation for which has yet to materialise. Consider all the alternatives and let proper negotiations commence!