Reasons to be cheerful I

After the last, rather depressing post, something more cheerful.

In the course of one lucky day last week two young boys (about 8 years old) separately and spontaneously held gates open for me whilst I was wrestling with my bike.

And then I came across this:


Amazing. Alongside the adverts for suspiciously cheap rooms and busty caribbean ladies in the window of a newsagents on the Holloway Road. I wonder if he has had any interest...

Mmm cheery - prediction of another recession

It is not news to people working in the public sector that our fortunes are dependent on spending decisions made in Whitehall. But it is beginning to dawn on us just how vulnerable we are going to be in 2011.

In 2007, the government published the long awaited (and delayed) Comprehensive Spending Review. This set out and guaranteed public spending across a range of services including health, education and local government. But the guarantee runs out in 2011.

The years since 1997 have been fat for the public sector, but this generous period is likely to come to a dramatic end in April 2011. A number of factors will come together to produce a significant cut in public spending:

• The end of the CSR07 guarantee
• The (likely) presence of a Conservative government
• The need by any government to cut public spending in light of the enormous public debt accumulated in trying to tackle the economic downturn

Approximately one fifth of the population is employed in the public sector; in Northern Ireland the figure is 30%. Given a UK workforce of 29m, this means 5.8 million people are employed by the public sector.

I don’t think cuts in public spending in the region of 10% are unrealistic, and assuming these translated into a 10% reduction in the public sector workforce, that would mean 580,000 people losing their jobs. I am not an economist, but I think a cut in spending / rise in unemployment on this scale could trigger a second recession, just as we are recovering from this one.

Jan Palach + my mother

I mentioned my idea that environmental activists should throw themselves under horses to my mother on Tuesday, while we were eating pizza at my cousin's 12th birthday party.

She said she remembered very clearly watching the funeral of Jan Palach, the first non-Vietnamese man to burn himself alive in the 1960s. He was protesting the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. She remembered watching the funeral procession, and the impact seeing it had made on her. Then she said she often dreamed of "doing that" - of self-immolation in protest. And I felt shaky and said something flippant and wished that it wasn't true.

Resurrection + Doris Lessing

I want to resurrect this blog, become a tourist again, but this time in my own life. Some new and potentially exciting things are happening - I have a new job and am trying to find some local but collective ways to make the world a better place - and I think writing is a good way to concentrate on them, make sure I pay them the attention they deserve.

My contrast for the day is between my life, my approach to life, and I think my generation's approach to life, and the way in which people tried to make social change happen in the long postwar period. I'm reading The good terrorist by Doris Lessing, which I would recommend highly. Her 1980s activists are filled with a level of anger, even of hatred of society, that I don't recognise in the people I know. They are inwardly focused, living off others whilst despising them. It's a depressing picture of what can happen to people when they become too caught up in a cause and lose their compassion for people who are different or not committed to the same ideals.

But it also reminds me that previous generations were more prepared to make sacrifices for their cause - indeed may not even have seen them as sacrifices. People of my parents' generation left university to live in squats or communes, devoted years of their life to Greenham Common or community projects in distant and thoroughly deprived places like Harlesden. They were not thinking about getting on the property ladder, they ate homemade soup and they hitch-hiked. Is this just a cliche? I don't think so.

It often occurs to me that the environmental movement needs people who are after more than being chased by police and being arrested as a badge of honour. It needs people prepared to throw themselves in front of horses, or go on hunger strike, or camp out for years at a time (and raise children in the campsite!). I'm not sure that it is these actions themselves which change the world, but I have a sense that they can send a powerful message of commitment.

But who will take up the challenge?

At this point I will confess to having both a mortgage and a pension.

Bon Voyage

And now, when I've finished my coffee (an American habit) and had some lunch, I am off. If anything interesting happens on the boat I'll put it on here when I get home. If not, this is goodbye!

Montreal VI

I am definitely a tourist in Montreal; much more so than I was in America. Not really because the things I have been doing are different. I think it is more that I was on the lookout for interesting anecdotes and sociological moments in America. And, I realise now, looking especially for those which would reinforce my preconceptions of the country.

In contrast, here I have walked past a fair number of people begging, and met a guy selling books of his jokes on the street, while essentially refusing to let them colour my picture of Canada as a civilised country with universal health care and few social problems.

Which is obviously only half true (the universal health care...). Even museum exhibits frequently refer to the city's divided nature (both in terms of income and of ethnicity - French and English, as well as various more recent immigrant groups) and various social problems. It has been a lesson to me in the power of unexamined prejudice to influence the way one sees things.

Montreal V

This is becoming seriously addictive. The previous post took me to 61% female... I wonder if it's the exclamation marks that give me away...