History for today

15. April 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized
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Roman Krznaric has recently written a book (History for Tomorrow) of suggestions for how we can learn useful things from history to navigate our way into the future: from how to nurture tolerance, bridge the inequality gap and revive faith in democracy to how to break fossil fuel addiction, kick consumer habits and secure water for all. In the introduction to all of this, there is a particularly arresting paragraph (perhaps particularly so for me as I was born in October 1962):

“Can history really live up to such promise as a guide in a complex world? In October 1962, in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis, President John F Kennedy turned for counsel to a recent work of popular history, Barbara W Tuchman’s The Guns of August, which chronicled the series of misperceptions, miscalculations and bungles by political and military leaders that had contributed to the outbreak of the First World War. Kennedy was worried that an aggressive policy response from the US might lead to a similar cascade of decisions that could provoke Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to push the nuclear button. ‘I am not going to follow a course which will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time – The Missiles of October‘, the president told his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. ‘If anyone is around to write after this, they are going to understand that we made every effort to find peace and every effort to give our adversary room to move’.”

Unfortunately JFK did not fully get his wish. Yes nuclear war was averted but a movie was made in 1974 with the title The Missiles of October, starring William Devane and Martin Sheen and with JFK’s brother getting a writing credit! JFK was assassinated a year after the events of October 1962 and his brother was assassinated in 1968.

Sometimes history can just put what seem like current quite extreme events into a broader context.

For instance, which US Secretary of State said of the UK:

All we needed was one regiment. The Black Watch would have done. Just one regiment, but you wouldn’t. Well don’t expect us to save you again. They can invade Sussex and we wouldn’t do a damn thing about it.

Sounds like the kind of thing JD Vance would have said at Munich, doesn’t it? But it was in fact Dean Rusk in 1964 after the UK declined to send troops to Vietnam (something I discovered from Alan Johnson’s biography of Harold Wilson). So immediately we can see that, objectionable as Vance is, Vances have happened to us in the past and we’ve survived them. If, as seems likely, we are going to be reversing many of the assumptions of globalisation over the next few years, we should perhaps expect international diplomacy to look more like the 1960s than the 2010s.

Another example, courtesy of Ed Conway. Trump’s bid to secure minerals in return for continued support of Ukraine seems extreme to us. Until we realise that FDR considered all kinds of possible things from the UK in return for the Lend-Lease deal which allowed the UK to continue fighting the Second World War.

Once we realise that some aspects of Trump’s behaviour merely belong to a period of international relations that we thought we had evolved beyond rather than being totally unprecedented, then we can understand it better and respond accordingly.

The Redistribution of Space

10. April 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Birmingham, Climate Change

My 60th birthday celebrations, a couple of years ago now, centred around train journeys to the South of France and then onto Madrid. The highlight was (pictured above) spending a large part of my birthday, in mid October, on a huge deserted beach at Narbonne and being able to comfortably swim in the sea. So much space.

And the trains also seemed so much more spacious. I travel a lot on trains in the UK, with sometimes comedically little space. And I am not just talking about space in terms of leg room in European trains, but also whenever you want to walk over to the restaurant carriage on the upper floor of a double decker train to improve the views, with a bar and an array of kidney shaped tables dotted around the carriage to eat hot meals at, before ambling back to your seat. Mental space is much greater too, with fewer announcements and partitions between passengers to reduce the amount of conversation bouncing around the carriage. I had several 5-6 hour journeys over the two weeks I was away, and they were without exception very relaxing experiences.

So enough travelogue. What point am I making? It is the importance of space.

I think of other things where my view of it has been affected by the space attached to it. Take swimming, for example. I spent three of my formative years (aged 3 to 6) in Singapore where my father was stationed with the RAF. We swam outdoors at the Singapore Swimming Club every afternoon and lived in flats right next to a beach. Swimming was all about space – on my back staring up at the limitless sky, or mask and snorkels on and face down to explore the depths of the pools.

Back in the UK, it has never been anything like the same experience. I have swum in pools in village schools in Yorkshire, council pools in Cheltenham and Witney, the pools built for the Youth Games in Sheffield, a private school’s tiny pool in Oxford where I did my bronze survival badge. Endless school outings with compulsory swim caps and cold water. I have swum in lakes and spent probably more time in the Cherwell than was strictly healthy, sometimes deliberately, sometimes because the canoes we were given at school were designed to be manoeuvrable rather than stable. I have swum in decaying metal structures in spa towns and pools fed by spring water with no heating in the Peak District. I only discovered body boarding relatively late and the joys of doing it for much longer in colder seas with a wetsuit even later (last year). I also spent a fascinating morning with the Wild Woman of the Wye, Angela Jones, learning how to swim safely in the river in our current polluted times. And it certainly feels like the decline in swimming quality in recent years extends indoors as well as outdoors. The Wyndley or Beeches Leisure Centres near my part of Sutton Coldfield just don’t hold much appeal for me. Sure there are bodies of water there, but nothing to lift your spirit while using them and the constraints, in terms of the narrow time slots and even narrower lanes you are confined to, are the very opposite of my earliest experiences of water. I am lucky enough to be able to afford the local David Lloyd Centre, with much less pressure on their pools, in particular their excellent outdoor pool in Birmingham, which is miraculously underused. On a day with bright sun, with the birds singing and a light breeze rustling the trees just enough to drown out the industrial hum from next door and push back the smell of solvents, I can sometime almost imagine I am back in the Singapore Swimming Club.

But generally when you attempt to venture outside you find the constraints are even greater than those at Wyndley swimming pool. According to the Right to Roam campaign group we only have access to 3% of rivers in England. Meanwhile the Outdoor Swimming Society are campaigning for swimming access to reservoirs.

On land we have slightly more access, but half of the land area of England is owned by around 1% of the population. As Guy Shrubsole points out:

The aristocracy and landed gentry still own around 30% of England, whilst the country’s homeowners own just 5% of the land. The public sector owns around 8% of England; the country’s 24 non-Royal Dukes own a million acres of Britain.

I can only redistribute some space in my direction, on a train, in a pool of water, by paying more than most can afford for those experiences, and allowing me to behave like a non-Royal Duke for a short time.

This has huge implications for carbon sequestration of course, with, for example, 60% of deep peat owned by just 124 landowners. These landowners are not looking after it very well either, with upland peat being degraded as a result of moorland burning for grouse moors, and lowland peat in the Fens and elsewhere being damaged through drainage for intensive agriculture. As a result, England’s peat soils are now a net source of carbon emissions rather than a sink, leaking around 11 million tonnes of CO2 annually. The Government has committed to protecting 30% of land in the UK for nature by 2030, but is itself hugely constrained by the concentrated ownership of land.

So our land is like our swimming pools: tightly constrained by the narrow time slots and narrower lanes most of us are allowed access to. We are being stifled by the property rights of a tiny minority.