Some weeks ago (..old news is good news?), January 17th to be more precise and outdated all at the same time, Time magazine went all New Agey with a special 'Mind & Body' issue, though not too New Age mind since its cover boasted a 'Science of Happiness' feature within. A week earlier, January 10th, Time's website had a Web Exclusive! which told the story that once upon a time in 1972 there was crowned a king called Jigme Singye Wangchuck in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. This king declared he was more concerned with Gross National Happiness than Gross Domestic Product. The article explains:

"Wangchuck still maintains that economic growth does not necessarily lead to contentment, and instead focuses on the four pillars of GNH: economic self-reliance, a pristine environment, the preservation and promotion of Bhutan's culture, and good governance in the form of a democracy.

King Wangchuck's idea that public policy should be more closely tied to wellbeing — how people feel about their lives — is catching on."

Indeed. The March issue of Prospect magazine announced 'The Return of Happiness' on its front cover. Or if not actual happiness then at least a book about it by Richard Layard entitled 'Happiness: Lessons from a new science'. Layard also helpfully authors an article in said issue of Prospect explaining that since it has been shown that richer societies aren't necessarily happier societies and that areas of the brain involved in being happy can now be scientifically scanned then the Benthamite principle of the 'greatest happiness' should be adopted as a guide to public policy rather than simply a focus on personal material gain. He identifies the key factors affecting a person's happiness as family and personal life, work and community life, health and freedom -and money -but only in a very specific way. He goes on to suggest ways in which happiness may be promoted in various areas of public policy which touch upon these factors. David Aaronovitch doesn't seem so happy with Layard's analysis worrying that the policy implications might be a tad too conservative but Will Hutton thinks there is nothing more radical than trying to be happy. As for the King of Bhutan, no wonder he suggested such a policy. Though it is an old picture!

He has a point though. Our own politics seem to get more and more grumpy and I wondered if there was something in the two-party first-past-the-post nature of our system that predisposed it to such tendencies. And then right out of the blue (or red, if you like) arrived a pamphlet by someone who really was thinking what I was thinking - Meg Russell whose recent Fabian pamphlet 'Must Politics Disappoint?' contains a chapter entitled 'Politics and Adversarialism'. Andrew Rawnsley explains a little of her argument in last Sunday's Observer and Kirsty Milne in an article for the Guardian also identifies similar trends to those in Russell's pamphlet which bear upon the political process such as the 'press-protest axis'. While Milne is hopeful for the electorate in that many voters are still interested in 'issues' she cautions that these are increasingly single-issues and that the Press as a proxy for the people is not necessarily a good thing:

"Press protest matters, for reasons heartening and disturbing. The good news is that people have not given up on politics....The bad news is that newspapers create their own political ecology, a one-party state of yes/no answers where the majority wins and the losers are, Big Brother-style, evicted. The Sun's campaign against Gypsies ("Stamp on the camps") shows how press protest tends to close off compromise on issues that divide us."

Hence the grumpiness. As politics in an age of consumerism treats voters as customers, politics disappoints as not everyone can get what they want -interests have to be balanced, people disengage except on single issues of direct concern, politics without ideology or a vision of the good society means people do not think in terms of the whole and we lose the art of compromise. The Sun's 'Stamp on the Camps' headline is hardly an invitation to civilised sentiment. This situation can be exploited as has been noted in the coining of the phrase 'dog whistle politics'. Or politics and politicians and the electorate can debate, discuss, persuade, compromise, get along, do the vision thing. The political choices are clear. Fluffy bunnies or attack dogs.

(Who started February without me?!)

Tony Blair started the month warning that neither the globe nor Incapacity Benefit claimants should be allowed to be unnecessarily warm, though methinks he will be tougher on the latter than the former. Matthew Norman in the Independent (4 Feb 2005) wrote a great article in praise of indolence. He wonders first whether politically chucking a million people of IB is feasible, yet:

"This is not to say that Mr Blair wouldn't love to do it, which is what is so depressing. Every bone in his socially authoritarian body must ache to blackmail people off the sick list by threatening to cut their lavish maximum incapacity benefit of £74 per week if they don't go looking for work....

In fairness, it isn't cancer sufferers any more than the out-and-out skivers (or conscientious objectors, as I prefer it) who'd be the casualties in Mr Blair's fantasy war, but the poor bloody infantry in the middle ... the ME sufferer who can't persuade a job centre official (the ultimate arbiter if the change ever comes) that she really is as weak as a kitten; the asthmatic whose condition would be aggravated by office air conditioning, the agoraphobic, the depressive, the sufferer from panic attacks, and so on....

How can a low-level civil servant decide if someone is in constant agony from a slipped disc or feigning it? When the inevitable league tables are imposed, would an official fretting about hitting Whitehall targets err on the side of generosity or harshness with a borderline case? For every real scrounger sent to work, how many troubled and painful lives will be made worse?

For a measly few billion, the world's fourth largest economy can well afford to look after the chronically but mildly unwell, the weak and feeble, the wretched and morose, and even the bone bleedin' idle, to the tune of £74 a week....

We can't all be super troopers like a warlord prime minister who really ought to know by now that an army always carries its wounded ... albeit the wounds aren't always visible to the naked eye, or even the MRI scanner."

Margaret Cook in this week's New Statesman also has this to say:

"The new system, demanding a definition of "more severe conditions" to qualify for payments, will be yet more unwieldy. Ministers have convinced themselves that people who suffer from back pain and depression, the two commonest reasons for claiming IB, would be better off back at work and, if they do not look for a job, they will be reduced to a jobseeker's pittance. But for many, the jobs are just not there. Someone in his fifties who has worked in a heavy manual job all his life, suffers wear-and-tear arthritis, and has lost income, social life and self-respect, is not easily re-employable.

Pain and depression are subjective, and are in truth impossible to assess by an observer, no matter how astute and well trained. There is a clear-as-daylight association between poverty and disability, which none of the assessments takes into account. Almost without exception, those who attend assessment centres find the experience stressful, demeaning, even terrifying. There is good reason for a doctor sitting near the door with a panic button.

Ministerial angst over the "work-shy" is based on primordial echoes of enforced community co-operation in hunter- gatherer societies. It is a psychological fluke the government should learn to discard. The first step would be to abandon incapacity assessment altogether and have a single-level benefit for all those of working age who are jobless. Most people are motivated more by self-esteem than by money. The unemployment figures would naturally rise. But governments might then pay more attention to job creation and skills training."

Since most of the accusations of malingering and the reasoning behind policies of starving people back to work or into marriage proceed mainly by assertion, it is my assertion that people are naturally industrious or at least active rather than passive. Look what happened to the little children in the Romanian orphanages, starved of human contact and stimulation. Most people want to be active, naturally, its just that governments and businesses definition of what is active can differ markedly to that of humans.

The title of Matthew Norman's piece 'What's wrong with a little indolence?' reminded me of something I read a few years ago about a group called The Happy Unemployed which Der Spiegel online reported as "a Berlin initiative 'which wanted to rid joblessness of the whiff of despair that surrounds it. People are to be made to understand that "there is a life after work." The underlying notion is quite simple, like all revolutionary ideas. There isn't enough work to go round, and there is never again going to be full employment. In this situation, the "Happy Unemployed" regard it as their altruistic duty to do without that scarce commodity - a job - and, in return for an appropriate fee, leave the jobs that still exist to those who are absolutely set on working".

Those with time on their hands should read this. For those without, here is a sample:

"Unemployment exists for the very reason that making money rather than benefiting society is the ultimate objective. Full employment spells economic crisis, unemployment means a healthy market. Just consider what happens when a company announces that it is destroying x number of jobs? Stock exchange speculators praise the scheme to restore the firm to profitability, the company's stocks rise in value and sooner or later the company's balance sheets have the profits to show for it. In this way the unemployed create more profit than their former colleagues. In fact, it would be only logical to thank the unemployed for promoting growth in a way unmatched by any other. Instead they don't get a whiff of the profit that they have created. The Happy Unemployed believe that they should be rewarded for not working." and....

"If the unemployed are unhappy, it's not because they don't have any work but because they don't have any money. So to make things clearer we shouldn't talk about being jobless but being moneyless....."Unemployment" is a poor word, a term with negative connotations, the other side of the coin to employment. An unemployed person is nothing more than a worker without work. But that doesn't tell us anything about the person as a poet, a traveller, a seeker or as a breathing human being..... ..... all unemployed people have a very valuable thing at their disposal: time. That could prove to be a stroke of historical fortune - a chance to lead a decent, meaningful and happy life. You could describe our goal as reconquering time. In other words, the Happy Unemployed are active people. For that very reason they don't have any time to work."

...war correspondent Mark Steel in the Independent reports on the action on the immigration battlefront so far:

".. The last of these contests was won by Blair. The Tories said they'd keep all asylum-seekers in camps. So Labour said they'd cut all their benefits; the Tories came back with not letting them apply for jobs; then Blair said he'd take away their kids, at which point Howard put his hands up and said: 'You're too good for me mate, I can't keep up with that.'"

Though I think he might have a good stab at it.

On the proposed points system, Steel, more pointed than a smart bomb, asks the question "how do they know who's going to be an 'economic benefit'?"

Just imagine, if we had a points system already, who would have said 'I think this country needs a new 'nation's favourite dish'. We will be needing boatloads of Indians who make a mean Chicken Tikka Masala. Some Thais might be nice, too.' The thing is, sometimes the immigrants come first and the industry's created second. Limiting immigration to only those who can fill jobs we already have would stifle the continually evolving vibrancy of a varied nation.

While both the Tories and New Labour seem to have read the poll findings that x% of people are concerned about immigration as an issue, they must also have seen the findings that another x% of people aren't even in the ballpark when it comes to estimating the numbers and sources of immigration. But rather than seek to re-educate the people the parties chose to exploit their fears.

Speaking of fear...

Scott over at The Daily Ablution has already commented on the increasingly tabloid tone of the Independent. Well this really did it for me, just gave me the heebee jeebees:

This appeared as the front page headline on the Independent of Saturday 5th February. Setting aside the content of the story and the analysis of whether the US will really bomb Iran or not, the imagery of the headline had the desired effect. The swapping of the 'q' of Iraq to an 'n' to spell Iran, and here's the thing -at the mere stroke of an editors pen, conjures up something blasé about the act, a bit like sticking a pin in a map with your eyes closed and saying 'I know! Let's bomb there!' and also echoes the concerns of those who fear that the US (or at least the reputed neo-cons) literally has an axis-of-evil tick-list it intends to bomb its way through.

Brrrrrrrr. Shudder.

Elsewhere it is hoped peace will break out.

April January