jamescalumcampbell

During the southern hemisphere’s summer of 1997 I visited Antarctica.  I wasn’t a tourist; I was a ship’s doctor.  I wonder now that I had the nerve.  If anybody were to fall ill, seriously ill, I would not have the option of referring them to the nearest district hospital.  Healthcare-wise, I was it.  Fortunately, nobody came a cropper.  Most of my patients were suffering from mal de mer.  I’m pretty sure one patient, incongruously, had malaria, but she had just come back from a trip to Vietnam, and fortunately she had brought her anti-malarials with her.  For myself, prone to motion sickness, I knew there would be nothing worse than trying to manage patients if I myself felt like death.  So I dosed myself up with my antihistamine of choice, and was walking on air. 

I flew from Auckland across the International Date Line to Buenos Aires, courtesy of Aerolineas Argentinas, thence to the most southerly city in the world, Ushuaia, at the bottom of Terra del Fuego.  The crisp air of the Patagonian mountains reminded me of Scotland.  In the streets of Ushuaia I was menaced by a vicious looking dog and I wondered if it could be rabid.  I had no idea.  But I wasn’t bitten. 

Down at the dock, there was a billboard looking out to sea, designed after the fashion of a gilded picture frame you sometimes encounter, encapsulating a beautiful view; but the vista was cut out in the shape of the Malvinas, the Falklands.  Quark, who organised global adventure tours, had advised me not to advertise my origins.  Memories of 1982, of the General Belgrano, of Goose Green, were still very raw.  Best say I was a New Zealander, which was true. 

The ship was The Professor Multanovskiy, formerly a Russian spy ship.  Indeed the ship’s captain and crew were Russian.  The passengers were all Belgian, and the lingua franca on board was Flemish.  The only English native speaker was the barman, a French Canadian, with whom I played chess.  I conducted most of my consultations in schoolboy French. 

It was a ten day trip, two and half days spent crossing the Drake Passage, two and a half back, with five days on and around the Antarctic Peninsula.  Aside from the penguins and the seals, we largely had the place to ourselves.  This was just before the dawn of the age of mass tourism.  Now the great and the good, the very rich, go down on their cruise ships, anchor off Deception Island and semaphore to one another, because while they have their gin and tonic, with ice, no lemon, they have run out of Perrier water.  But ours wasn’t merely a sightseeing trip.  There was a film crew on board, making a documentary about the hundredth anniversary of the discovery of the Gerlache Strait, which separates Brabant Island and Anvers Island from mainland Antarctica, by a Belgian explorer, Gerlache, whose grandson, the Baron, was present.

Of the trip itself I have written elsewhere.  There remains in my memory only a collage of impressions.  Admiralty Bay, Hanna Point, Telephone Bay, Pendulum Cove, Whaler’s Bay, Melchnikoff Point, Melchior Island…  And some of the bases – Arctowski (Polish), Bellingshausen (Russian), Argentinean and Chilean bases whose names I can’t remember, and of course the British Base at Port Lockroy.  There was a lot of joshing and banter at Port Lockroy, and I realised after days at sea (in more ways than one) conversing in French, how much I’d missed irony.  I think I sent a post card from there.  To whom I sent it, or whether it turned up, I can’t say.

We were very lucky with the weather.  The seas were calm, aside from the pronounced swell across the Drake Passage, the skies blue.  The sun shone and the ambient daytime temperature was about three degrees Celsius.  I actually managed one day to sunbathe, after a fashion, on deck, and I made a point of dawning shorts and running vest and going for a run on the Antarctic beach. 

But I bring all this up today to provide a backdrop to a very vivid experience I had, which left a lasting impression, towards the end of the return trip to Ushuaia.  The good weather held and the ship’s captain made a diversion in order to go round Cape Horn.  I remember seeing, on the Chilean coastline, a stone’s throw away, green grass, and experiencing a tremendous sense of relief.  I was returning to an environment where I belonged, having been a visitor to a region which was totally inimical.  Visiting Antarctica is not that different from visiting the moon.  You can’t go there without a substantial backup of life support.  The penguins, sociable cobbers, Adelie, Gentoo, Chinstrap, are right at home, but we are only there under sufferance.  Antarctica definitely changed my world view.  I had thought of the whole of planet Earth as our home, yet in fact our natural habitat is even more circumscribed, within certain latitudes.    

Yet we are reliant upon Antarctica.  We need it, in its pristine state, for the equilibrium of our ecosystem.  This has been recognised in the – somewhat fragile – international agreement that Antarctica should not be mined, should not be exploited.  Precisely the same can be said for the northern, polar regions.  And yet look at what is now happening up there, and with extraordinary rapidity.  President Trump wants to exploit Greenland.  If he doesn’t, the Russians or the Chinese will.  It is therefore imperative, he says, that he have control of Greenland.  He says he doesn’t want Russia as a neighbour.  Doesn’t he realise that Russia, fifty one miles across the Bering Strait from Alaska, is already his neighbour?  He is already a close ally of Greenland, through NATO, and is welcome to increase his military presence there.  But apparently this is not good enough.  Complete commitment only comes with complete possession.  This is going to happen.  We can either do it the easy way, or the hard way.  In this blog I’ve previously compared President Trump to Harold Potter, the wheeler dealer in the film It’s a Wonderful Life who changes peaceful Bedford Falls into the grotesque, dystopian Pottersville; and to Shelley’s Ozymandias, he of “wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command”, the haughty and disdainful king who eventually is rendered extinct in a barren wasteland.  Yesterday I heard somebody compare the President, appropriately enough in this season of Epiphany, to King Herod.  Such is his paranoia. 

The irony is that all this rapacity, this compulsion to extract every last fossil fuel, mineral, and rare earth from the earth’s crust, is being unleashed at the same time that the Arctic ice is melting and the Northwest Passage is opening up.  That which looks like a business opportunity is actually the intimation of a dire threat.  President Trump might well be advised to leave 57,000 Greenlanders alone.  They are looking after their island very well, as their ancestors have done for thousands of years.  But no.  President Trump is going to “double down”.  It’s all there in his National Security Policy:

We reject the disastrous “climate change” and “Net Zero” ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States, and subsidise our adversaries.

We can’t say we weren’t warned.  In this 250^th anniversary of the founding of the United States, we may ask, what does President Trump stand for?  For the past eighty years we have thought of the US as the house on the hill, a beacon of light.  But there is no reference in the National` Security Strategy to whatsoever things are good, whatsoever things are true.  President Trump stands for national aggrandisement, and the accumulation of wealth.  He says so, quite explicitly, and proudly.  Last week, almost unnoticed, he pulled out of 66 institutions of international cooperation, some UN, for example, the Peacebuilding Commission, and the Peacebuilding Fund, some non-UN, for example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  He has little interest in the United Nations, or NATO, or the World Health Organisation, or the Conference of the Parties.  He is only interested in cooperation with allies if it will swell the Federal Reserve, whose interest rates had better be controlled by him.  When the USAF used RAF Mildenhall, and then Wick John O’Groats Airport, en route to commandeering an oil tanker between Iceland and Scotland, I couldn’t help recalling that, once more, Orwell saw it all coming.  Britain was a satellite of the US, renamed “Airstrip One”.  Now imagine threatening to attack an ally of 57,000 peace-loving people.  You could hardly conceive of a victim who posed less of a threat.           

He needs to be told.  He is quite explicitly, after all, threatening to destroy the planet.  He needs to be confronted with the truth.  It won’t be pretty.  He won’t like it.  He could make things very unpleasant for us all.  But sometimes you have to rise to a challenge, because the alternative is so unthinkable.  As Ernest Shackleton once said, we all have our Deep South.              

“If you don’t have a Sphere of Influence, then you are in one.”  According to Sir Alex Younger, former head of MI6, the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov said that.  It is an arresting aphorism.  A characteristic, perhaps the defining element of any form of subjugation, say, that of the abused spouse, the decrepit elderly relative being gently coerced towards Dignitas, the bullied, the gaslit, the downtrodden, the despised and rejected, is that, unless confronted, the controlling behaviour of the strong over the weak is invisible.  Customs officials have politely enquired of me, when passing from Portugal to Spain, or from Canada to the United States, “Why on earth do you want to go there?”  It’s a form of passive aggression, the only mode of expression available to the underdog. 

I wonder if Garry Kasparov was thinking in terms of chess strategy when he passed his remark.  People often liken international politics to a game of chess.  The Masters of the Universe look down upon the field of play, conjure scenarios of “if this, then that…” into the future, and make their move.  The balance of power is all important; either you are evenly matched, or you are in a dominant position, or you are being dominated.  But the trouble is that real life is not remotely like a game of chess.  Chess can be played, and won, by a computer, because there is always a demonstrably optimal move, available to those with a big enough brain.  Chess can be played out.  Real life is more like a game of poker.  There is the element of chance, both in not knowing what is in the mind of your opponent, nor in having any control over the hand you’ve been dealt.  How can you play for a grand slam if you’ve been dealt a chicane?  As President Trump memorably said to President Zelenskyy, “You don’t have the cards.”  Then again, real life isn’t like poker either.  The stakes are too high, or, as President Zelenskyy replied to President Trump, “This isn’t a game.”

It’s hard to comprehend that, almost, but not quite, within living memory, Great Britain in its Empire controlled the greatest, or at least the biggest, Sphere of Influence the world has ever seen.  It was an accident of the amalgamation, or conglomeration, of the industrial revolution and the rise of naval power.  We had command of the high seas.  As God made us mightier yet, we exported a kind of swashbuckling Christianity.  We were self-confident.  We ruled the waves, and were quite sure we would never ever be slaves.  We espoused noble causes.  We even abolished slavery.  We were happy to bestow upon others the Pax Britannica, so long as it was not challenged.  By the time of the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, it looked as if the empire upon which the sun never set would indeed last a thousand years.  George Orwell did not take such a sanguine view.  As a young man, working as a policeman in Burma, he came to the conclusion that Empire was essentially a money-making exercise.  

What went wrong?  Within a single generation, it seemed likely that Great Britain would be invaded and occupied.  The Royal Navy would have been requisitioned by the Kriegsmarine, and the Empire would have ceased to exist.  This was certainly the prediction of the US Ambassador to the Court of St James, Joe Kennedy, at the outbreak of the Second World War.  The US might have, to borrow a recent expression Sir Keir Starmer, “shed few tears”.  This might have happened, but for the pigheaded bloody-mindedness of a maverick PM, and the valour of a handful of airmen.  As it happened, we survived, but although Winston said he had not become PM to preside over the dismantling of the Empire, that, like it or not, became his role. 

So the Empire became the Commonwealth and, for his second term, Winston devoted himself, insofar as his failing health would allow, to the formation of international institutions and the cause of world peace.  He didn’t get very far.  He tried to organise a “summit” – he even coined the term – of the three great powers who had periodically met in conference during the war.  But the US and Soviet Russia weren’t interested, and Winston quietly resigned during a newspaper strike. 

Still, there remained close ties with the US, the Commonwealth, and Western Europe.  Out of the ashes of the League of Nations arose the phoenix of the United Nations.  The idea of a “rules-based international order” took root.  The stakes were very high because two opposing ideologies were nuclear armed.  They glared at one another across the “Iron Curtain” that stretched from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic.  But at least there was an international forum based in New York, and a “permanent security council” originally formed by the allies of World War II.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was even more spectacular than the demise of the British Empire.  For no apparent external reason, German youth climbed on to the Berlin wall, and started to demolish it, without fear of being shot.  Two years later, the historians pronounced “the end of history”.

But it seems to be easier to win the war than to win the peace.  Russia was arguably taken over by the mafia, the oligarchs who were content to send their children to the English public schools, and flood the City of London with laundered money.  Mr Putin deeply regretted the eclipse of Russian power.  He kindly laid out for us a blueprint of his conception of the Russian Federation’s “Sphere of Influence”, and prepared to attack Ukraine.  He advised us not to interfere in this sphere, lest he, if we understood him correctly, unleashed nuclear weapons. 

All of this was arguably quite predictable, but could we have predicted the attack upon Caracas?  Well, yes.  The build-up of naval power in the Caribbean was a hint, and President Trump did tell us that he wanted to purge the area of “narco-terrorists”.  In fact, in his recently published National Defence Strategy, he gave us a blueprint, much like Mr Putin, of his conception of his own particular Sphere of Influence.  This is described as the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.  President Trump wants the US to dominate the entire Western Hemisphere.  When he said he wanted to make Canada the 51^st State, and to take over Greenland (not ruling out the use of force), we all thought he was joking.  Donald just being Donald.  Now it doesn’t seem so funny. 

Some people think that untapped Venezuelan crude, the largest oil resource in the world, is the real reason for President Trump’s preoccupation with Venezuela.  Not the traffic in fentanyl.  After all, if it were all about drugs, why not attack Mexico, or Bolivia?  Some people think – are they being uncharitable? – that the accusation of “narco-terrorism” resembles Mr Putin’s accusation, levelled at Ukraine, of “Nazism”.  A pretext.   

When President Trump was asked on board Air Force One whether President Maduro had been kidnapped, apparently he nodded and said, “That’s a good word.”  The rules-based international order has gone, to be replaced by the Rule of Might, the Big Beasts with their Spheres of Influence. 

Should we have seen this coming?  Orwell did, as far back as 1948.  He thought there would be three spheres, three great “superstates” – Oceania (the absorption of the British Empire by the United States), Eurasia (the absorption of Europe by Russia), and Eastasia (China and the countries to the south of it, Japan, and parts of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet).

Each New Year, the political pundits on the BBC have a radio programme where they make predictions about the coming year.  What will 2026 bring?  The irony is that this year, they recorded the programme the night before the US bombed Caracas.  This was not foreseen.  As Mr Macmillan said, “Events, dear boy…”  So it would be a wise man, or a foolish one, who predicts how events are to unfold.  But let us suppose Orwell was right.  We would have to conclude that President Trump would, at least for the time being, stay out of other people’s Spheres of Influence.  So we might expect the war in Ukraine to grind on, and Russia to continue pushing west into Europe.  We would expect Mr Xi to carry out a Caracas-style copy-cat manoeuvre on Taipei.  And we would expect that the British PM, when asked to criticise President Trump, might shrug and say, “I’m not going to shed tears over Mr Maduro”, because after all, if you don’t have a Sphere of Influence, then you are in one.                                                      

Somebody wrote into The Herald the other day in praise of Prestwick Airport.  I have a soft spot for Prestwick because it was the destination for my father when he undertook a rather hazardous journey by Dakota, from Canada via Greenland and Iceland during the war.  He visited my granny, ten miles up the road in Saltcoats, for the first time in years, before being posted on to England.  Prestwick Airport gets a bit of stick.  It’s a political football, because its financial viability has been called into question, and the road and rail links to Glasgow are not that great.  (Same could be said of Glasgow Airport.)  On the other hand, it’s essentially fog free, and, according to the Herald correspondent, has the longest runway in the UK.

Wait a minute!  That’s not right.  I fired off a rejoinder.

Dear Sir,

Prestwick is indeed a terrific airport, but at 2,987 metres (9,801 feet), its runway is not, as your correspondent states, the longest in the UK (“Flying High”, The Herald, December 18th.)  The runway at Machrihanish, two miles west of Campbelltown, is 3,049 metres (10,003 feet) long.  I believe it was extended during the Cold War to accommodate Avro Vulcan bombers.  I see from my logbook that on December 6th, 2002, I landed a Cherokee Warrior there, and I remember touching down at the start of the enormous stretch of tarmac, and coming to a halt before I had reached the black and white “piano keys” signalling the start of the runway.  Happy days.

Yours sincerely…

The rejoinder got a rejoinder.  Machrihanish may have the longest runway in the British Isles, but, being at least three hours away from Glasgow by road, it’s a white elephant.

Wait a minute!  Not the British Isles.  The UK.  Shannon is longer.  Thus do the army of nerdish Herald correspondents fight like bald men over a comb, or look for a fight the way other people look for their dinner.  Well, I thought, if we built a bridge between the Mull of Kintyre and Antrim, Belfast would be just round the corner.  We could open up the Celtic world!  But I didn’t write back. 

It’s a fretful time of year, or it can be if you have a predisposition to bah-humbuggery.  I remember in the world of emergency medicine that Christmas was the most miserable day in the year.  People would present throughout the day to the emergency department with all manner of human wretchedness in mind, body, and spirit.  As the evening wore on, the incidents of interpersonal violence would increase in number and severity.  Amid all the blood and thunder, I remember one particularly patient individual finally reaching the head of the queue, only to request access to abortifacients.  It seemed a bizarre request on the day of a nativity.       

The newspapers are only too well aware of readers’ fretfulness.  This is why they are full of giant crosswords and multifarious brain-teasers designed to keep one occupied, or preoccupied.  I did the Sunday Times giant prize crossword last night, all but one clue, a 23 x 23 box monster.  I’m not sure if I’ll hunt up the last solution.  Didn’t Persian carpet makers deliberately leave one flaw in the weft, because only God is perfect?  Besides, the prize is a 530 piece wooden jigsaw from the Puzzly Company, depicting Claude Monet’s Woman with a Parasol.  I’ve never done a jigsaw in my life.  Perhaps this is my opportunity.  (530 pieces.  I can’t help noticing that 530 is just one more than 23 x 23.  There’s a jigsaw piece for every square of the crossword, and one to spare.  Only a fretful nerd would spot such a thing.)

The hiatus twixt Xmas and Hogmanay reminds me of a long haul journey by air.  It’s like suffering from jet lag without even getting off the ground.  But you feel as if you are stopping off in Singapore en route to Auckland, dozing off in the Sheraton Towers, 39 Scott Road, and waking at some unimaginable hour to stare stupidly at the TV screen, where a fish in an aquarium ogles you right back.  There’s some ghastly minimalist background music.  So it is now, this Limbo.  Have another mince pie, do another crossword, har har. 

I’ve kept New Year’s Resolutions to a minimum, otherwise they’d be liable to be the same as last year.  Having a lengthy bucket list is the same as being completely demotivated.  I really must read Proust.  I really must learn Wagner’s Ring, or Maxwell’s equations.  Repeating the same resolutions year on year is the definition of insanity.  You resolve, and then go off at a tangent.  Life, according to John Lennon, is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.  I really must visit Munich.  If you don’t know where you’re going, according to George Harrison, any road’ll take you there. 

So: one resolution.  Finish Tome No. 5.  It’s currently 70,000 words long, but the words aren’t necessarily in the right order.  Should I get AI to do it for me?  No thank you.  I have a notion that on a previous publishing exercise my copy editor was a robot, and it lacked a sense of humour.  That’s how I knew it was a bot.  Now there’s a white elephant.  Artificial Intelligence is the latest infatuation of our politicians.  It’s the deus ex machina that’s going to solve all the problems in the NHS, and in social services.  The lonesome will be consoled by AI.  Bots are really good at empathy.  Count me out.

But talking of fretfulness, I see that today the Chinese are exercising around Taiwan, rehearsing a blockade.  I wonder if the South China Sea is going to be the flashpoint of 2026.  It’s being so cheery keeps me going.

Every good wish, when it comes, for a happy and prosperous New Year

JCC.

When I first heard the term “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (TDS), I thought it was a joke, of the sort you might hear – indeed I did hear – on Dead Ringers (Friday, 6.30 pm, BBC Radio 4).  Turns out it’s dead serious.  When the film director Bob Reiner and his wife were murdered last week, President Trump went on Truth Social, not to express shock, nor outrage, nor grief, not to sympathise with friends and family, nor commiserate, nor soothe the nation, but to attribute the deaths, through some bizarre concatenation of circumstances, to a mental illness.  Apparently Reiner had been suffering from TDS.  It is characterised as a monodelusional psychosis.  People who are in every other walk of life apparently sane, become so angry with the President, that they are literally driven mad. 

It’s not a new phenomenon.  It’s not even peculiar to any particular side of the political aisle.  There was a George W. Bush Derangement Syndrome, and a Barack Obama Derangement Syndrome.  I’m even led to believe – though I’m inclined to think that it surely must be fake news – that it appears in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM 5, Text Revision 2022).  And there have been attempts to legitimise it through law. This year, politicians in both Minnesota and Ohio have tried to introduce a bill recognising TDS in medical and legal contexts, and requiring the National Institute of Health to study it and report annually to Congress.  Political interference in medical diagnosis and treatment is not a new phenomenon either.  Gender Dysphoria has disappeared from the US radar, and the current Health Secretary doesn’t think much of vaccination. 

Societally, we tend to be a bit casual about dubbing our fellows, who might stand out from the crowd, as mad.  The English language bursts with idiomatic expressions for craziness.  See that guy?  He’s one sandwich short of a picnic, not the full shilling, out to lunch, bonkers, raving, barking, bananas, daft as a brush, mad as a snake, “a nut job”…  We take offence on behalf of people who are black, Roma, LGBTQI, or a member of many other disadvantaged or minority groups who are frequently disparaged, but for some reason people who have lost touch with reality seem to be fair game.  On the whole, I don’t think we should casually refer to somebody as being one raven short of an unkindness or, more colloquially, “aff ’is heid” unless we really wish to assign him a DSM 5 diagnosis, and even then we, at least among the medical community, should be silenced by the constraints of confidentiality.  From time to time, doctors have been known to render and make public a diagnosis formulated remotely, and it usually lands them in trouble.  It was just something they saw on the telly.  Bad idea.  I certainly don’t think doctors should say, for example, that President Trump has a Narcissistic Personality Disorder, unless the diagnosis is made on the basis of a psychiatric history and mental state examination, and even then, it would be nobody else’s business. 

By the same token, I don’t think people, Presidents or otherwise, should be issuing putative diagnoses post mortem.  Why speak ill of the dead?  Maybe the President didn’t care for Bob Reiner’s movie A Few Good Men, with Tom Cruise, Demi Moore, and Jack Nicholson, a fine legal drama in which a young Tom Cruise exposes in court the corrupt dealings of a crusty and thoroughly unpleasant military commander (Jack Nicholson).  Reiner was politically active, and anti-Trump.  It seems to me that “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is a form of gaslighting.  You deliberately attempt to unnerve a critic, or opponent, by suggesting to them that they might be going crazy.  That’s not a new phenomenon either.  Totalitarian regimes have a long history of incarcerating political dissidents in lunatic asylums.  Their views are obviously so unbalanced, and they are so unhinged, that they clearly need to be locked up in a padded cell for their own protection.  You can see why people have tried to deflect Trump Derangement Syndrome back on those who variously ascribe the diagnosis.  It is they who are unwell or, in other words, the lunatics have taken over the asylum.  This, it seems to me, is the key to the music of Dmitry Shostakovich, a sane man who found himself to all intents and purposes incarcerated in a madhouse.  That is why the music is so sardonic, and often so harsh.    

Seasoned political dissidents know only too well that expressions of anger can be counterproductive.  This is why they turn to humour, especially political satire.  Going back to Dead Ringers, I laughed out loud on Friday at the recurring joke of President Trump (brilliantly impersonated) casting aspersions upon various well-loved persons, from Shakespeare’s Romeo, to Leo DiCaprio’s Jack in Titanic, to Bambi’s mother, all dying a pathetic death.  “Horrible person, evil person…”  It occurred to me on hearing the sketch, that the BBC, faced with an impending lawsuit now inflated to somewhere between $5,000,000,000 and $10,000,000,000, is “doubling down”.  Re Splicegate, the row about Panorama’s editing of a Trump speech, allegedly to make it appear that after his presidential defeat in 2020, he was inciting his supporters to violence, it suddenly occurred to me, and I became convinced, that the BBC are not going to settle out of court.  They are not going to back down.  It’s a bit like the bombardment of the French Fleet by the Royal Navy at Mers-el-Kébir, near Oran, on July 3^rd 1940.  That was the moment during World War II when the world came to realise that Britain had no intention of suing for peace. 

And I can see why.  This is an existential crisis.  Plenty of people on the right, on both sides of the Pond, wouldn’t mind if the BBC ceased to exist.  We all moan about the BBC, but when the threat comes from outside, it is time to circle the wagons.  Personally, I would miss Michael Barclay’s Private Passions, Matthew Bannister’s Last Word, Michael Rosen’s Word of Mouth, Laurie Taylor’s Thinking Allowed, Tim Harford’s More or Less, and a live concert on Radio 3 most evenings.  Oh, and The Briefing Room, with David Aaronovitch.  On Thursday we stepped into the briefing room, together to find out about the US National Security Strategy (NSS).  I pricked my ears up because I’d only just written about it.  The panel of experts highlighted the recent dramatic divergence of US foreign policy, particularly with respect to relations with Europe, and with Russia.  Europe and Ukraine painfully thrashed out a financial package overnight on Thursday – Friday, while Russia and the US have been meeting in Miami at the weekend.  There doesn’t seem to be much of a meeting of minds between the US and Europe.  Europe is, we are told, facing “civilisational erasure”. 

I was critical of the National Security Strategy in this blog last week.  Unlike Dead Ringers, I wasn’t trying to be funny, and I hope my language was not intemperate.  Admittedly I called the NSS “tosh”.  Maybe I’m suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.                                                   

In these strange and troubled times, when the head of NATO is glooming us up for the imminent prospect of war, I thought I would read the National Security Strategy (NSS) of the United States of America, November 2025.  So I printed it off and read it, twice.  It’s 30-odd pages of A4, maybe about 10,000 words.  I’ll try and summarise it. (I’m using English rather than American spelling, eg defence for defense, and also, dare I say, Calibri font, sans serif, which is easier for the visually impaired.  Marco Rubio in the State Department has rejected it in favour of Times New Roman).    

We begin with a message from the President.  “My fellow Americans…”  This year, the administration has brought the world back from the edge of disaster, taken back control of US borders, strengthened the military (and expunged it of “woke lunacy”), got NATO to increase defence spending from 2% to 5%, unleashed energy production, imposed import tariffs, obliterated Iran’s nuclear programme, taken on the drug cartels, and settled eight raging conflicts worldwide.  The theme underlying all this activity is “America First”.  The President signs this preamble with his signature signature, so to speak (so familiar to us from a plethora of executive orders), which looks to me like a long barbed wire fence interspersed with goon boxes.      

The Strategy follows.  It is in four parts.

1.  Introduction – What is American strategy?

The aim is to ensure that America remains the world’s strongest, richest, most powerful, and most successful country for decades to come.  Previous administrations have gone astray by overburdening the country with overseas commitments not integral to its own interest, becoming embroiled in the activities of international institutions, while attempting to run a massive welfare-regulatory-administrative state.  No more – thanks to “President Trump’s Necessary, Welcome Correction”. 

•  What Should the United States Want?       

At home, survival and safety, protection from hostile attack (in the broadest sense), control of borders, resilient infrastructure, the most powerful military in the world, a modern nuclear deterrent and associated missile defences, the world’s most advanced economy, the world’s most robust industrial base and energy sector, the most advanced science and technology, unrivalled “soft power”, and a restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health, rooted in strong traditional families that raise healthy children. 

Abroad, a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine (a stable Western Hemisphere, supporting critical supply chains and free of hostile incursion), reversal of damage to the US economy from hostile actors in the Indo-Pacific (reliable supply chains and access to critical materials), support for the preservation of freedom and security in Europe, prevention of an adversarial power from dominating the Middle East, with the US leading the world in AI, biotech, and quantum computing.  

•  What are America’s Available Means to Get What We Want?

A nimble political system, the world’s leading economy, financial system, technology, military, and network of alliances, enviable geography, cultural influence, courage, willpower and patriotism. 

In addition, President Trump is re-instilling a culture of competence, rooting out “DEI” (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) practices, unleashing energy production, reindustrialising, cutting taxes, deregulating, and investing in science and technology. 

•  The Strategy

“President Trump has cemented his legacy as The President of Peace…  A world on fire, where wars come to our shores, is bad for American interests.”  The US will cultivate peace through strength, while respecting other sovereign nation-states.  The US will protect its own sovereignty, and not allow any power to become so dominant that it threatens US interests.  America will be pro-worker, and expect allies to treat the US fairly.  America will be a meritocracy with no “favoured group” status, but global talent will not be allowed to undercut American workers.  The era of mass migration is over.  Core rights, freedom of speech, religion and conscience, must never be infringed. 

“The days of the united States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.”  NATO countries must spend 5% of GDP on defence.  This is “burden-sharing and burden-shifting”. 

The President will seek peace deals, even in countries peripheral to immediate core interests, if it increases global interests, and opens new markets. 

The US will work to strengthen the economy, through balanced trade relations, access to critical supply chains and materials, reindustrialisation, and a revival of the military-industrial complex.  American energy dominance will be restored.  America will preserve and grow its financial sector dominance. 

The paper concludes with a discussion of five global regions.

1.  The Western Hemisphere

America will enlist and expand partnerships.  There will be serious pushback to non-hemispheric competitors. 

•  Asia

America will rebalance the economic relationship with China, combating, with the help of allies, unfair and predatory business practices, and while focusing on deterrence of war in the Indo-Pacific.  The US will invest in military and dual-use technology, including undersea, space, and nuclear.  “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.”  The US will not allow a competitor to control the South China Sea. 

•  Europe

Europe’s problems include insufficient military spending, economic stagnation, “civilisational erasure”, the activities of the EU and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, out of control migration, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birth rates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.  “The continent will be unrecognisable in 20 years or less.”  Certain European countries may not remain reliable allies.  Europe needs to regain its civilisational self-confidence.  The US needs to engage diplomatically to manage European relations with Russia, and to mitigate the risk of conflict between Russia and the European states.  The US wishes to expedite a cessation of the war in Ukraine. 

•  The Middle East

President Trump’s June 2025 Operation Midnight Hammer significantly degraded Iran’s nuclear programme.  Progress towards a permanent Israeli-Palestinian peace has been made.  The US can work with Middle East partners to advance economic interests, and to open up new markets.  The Strait of Hormuz must remain open, and the Red Sea navigable. 

•  Africa

The US will transition from a foreign aid paradigm to an investment and growth paradigm. 

That’s it.  What do you make of it?  I can’t say anything surprised me. It was an iteration, and reiteration, somewhat repetitive, of things we’ve been hearing over the past year, and during the previous Trump administration.  If I had to summarise it in half a dozen words, these would be “America First – make America great again.”  The meaning throughout is reasonably clear, though the language is rather too abstract for my taste.  On page 12, for example, on the topic of the US working with allies, this sentence appears:

“The model will be targeted partnerships that use economic tools to align incentives, share burdens with like-minded allies, and insist on reforms that anchor long-term stability.”

That sentence could have been generated by AI.  Perhaps it was. 

The tone overall is supremely self-assured, and self-confident.  It certainly lacks humility.  The references to the activities of the President are somewhat sycophantic.  Much is asserted, with little underlying argument or back-up.  Then again it is a policy document, outlining a strategy as it now is, rather than how it evolved.  It is quite possible to read it and conclude that it is coherent, plain, straightforward, pragmatic, and reasonable.  It is a rah-rah call to patriotism.  Why shouldn’t people be encouraged to excel, to be the best they can be? 

All well and good.  I should therefore try to explain why I incline to think that the National Security Strategy is tosh, and a load of old codswallop.  Bigly.    

“The world works best when nations prioritise their interests.”  That is perhaps the key sentence in the entire document.  The idea is that if we are all primarily out for ourselves, there will be an international balance of power as if guided by an invisible hand.  But would we support such an idea if it were applied to the individual?  Would we regard as honourable a person who only looked out for “Number One”?  All of the world’s established religions, moral philosophies and codes of ethics argue against selfishness, and regard indifference to the wellbeing of others as being directly opposed to the way in which “the world works best”.  When G. K. Chesterton was asked what was at heart wrong with the world, he replied, “Me”.  He had humility. 

The trouble with prioritising national interest is that it creates a highly competitive, “dog eat dog” world in which powerful nations strive to be “A number one, king of the heap”, happy to sit at the top of what is likely to be a pile of excrement.  That leads on to another key sentence of the NSS:

“We reject the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States, and subsidise out adversaries.”

This, despite the fact that the scientific world is virtually unanimous in believing that manmade climate change is real, and an existential threat.  The trouble for the current US administration is that recognition of this fact would, and should, rather curtail the ambition to exploit the US’ enormous resources of fossil fuels.  Refusal to face this fact is of itself an ideology.  Climate change cannot be real, because it contradicts this latest iteration of the American Dream.  Once you recognise the imminent threat of climate change, you are obliged not only to curtail mining activities but also to cooperate with other nations, allies and adversaries, in order, for example, to keep the increase in average global temperatures since the pre-industrial age to under 1.5 degrees Celsius.  No nation can do this alone.  Some people argue that there is little point in worrying about climate change when countries like the US, China, and India ignore it.  That is a non-strategy, a strategy of despair. 

The current US administration is happy to cooperate with allies, but only insofar as this serves, or is perceived to serve, the US national interest.  Another key sentence:

“(Previously our elites)… lashed American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty.”

The document does not have a good word for international institutions.  The United Nations does not get a mention, nor the World Bank, and certainly not the Conference of the Parties (COP).  The EU gets a poor press, as does NATO.  The attack on Europe is a contumely, blistering in its contempt.  But there is no criticism of Russia.

All in all, the NSS is all about the accumulation, for the US, of power, and wealth.  The US may not be an empire, but it is certainly an hegemony.  “We should be headed from our present $30 trillion economy in 2025 to $40 trillion in the 2030s.”  The rich get richer.  Money, in fact, is the predominant preoccupation of the NSS.  Everything is seen in terms of a business deal.  There is no reference to any ethical framework or moral code, beyond a couple of references to something nebulous called American “decency”, which, whatever it is, is taken for granted.

Poor Americans!  What a ghastly dystopia awaits them.  Perhaps it has already arrived.  The US reminds me of “Pottersville”.  In the celebrated Christmas movie It’s a Wonderful Life, James Stewart spends a lifetime putting self-interest to one side in favour of helping people who one way or another are in trouble. A series of personal misfortunes leads him to the brink of suicide.  He is not a praying man, but in despair, all that is left for him is prayer.  He believes his life has been futile, but his guardian angel shows him what the world would have been like if he had never existed.  In particular, the small town in which he grew up and lived is turned into a repository of tat, of tasteless kitsch, as a result of the profiteering of one Henry Potter (no relation to J. K. Rowling’s creation).  Pottersville is hell on earth.  America is fast becoming Pottersville.  There is a long tradition in Hollywood of the quiet, unassuming man, or woman, who takes on an adversary not because of a business opportunity, an eye for the main chance, but because something is happening to society which is fundamentally wrong.  Garry Cooper, James Stewart, Tom Hanks.  Who, and where, is such a figure now?

In fact, the idea that there might conceivably be something rotten in the state of the US is entirely ignored in the NSS.  No mention of interpersonal violence against the backdrop of the 2^nd Amendment; no mention of a profound societal rift between Republican and Democrat, with no apparent attempt to “reach across the aisle”; no mention of poverty, and the increasing gap between rich and poor.  All of America’s woes are perceived as external threats, adversarial manoeuvres coming from beyond its borders.  And in terms of foreign policy, other than a belief in the survival of the fittest, there is no consideration of what must surely be the most important, the most critical question of our time: how can we best get along together, without destroying ourselves, and the planet?   

Yet there is hope.  Winston told us that America could always be relied upon to do the right thing, after it has exhausted every other possibility.  I think of President Trump as Shelley’s Ozymandias.  In form, Shelley’s poem is really a sonnet.  I print it in full here because it seems extraordinarily apposite:

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert.  Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

All these years ago In  2^nd MB, in the dreaded dissection room, a cold echoing chamber suffused with the aroma of formalin which never leaves you, Dr Chinnan would blunt dissect with remarkable rapidity through the layers of fascia and muscle, to expose a nerve.  “Here is the nerve. It has a name.  Never mind the name!”  And Richard Feynman as a boy used to go on nature walks with his father, who was not academic, but who had an insatiable curiosity about the world.  He would say the same thing as Dr Chinnan.  This plant has a long Latin name, and people think they know about it because they know the name.  But just because you can name it doesn’t mean that you know anything about it.  And Bertrand Russell wrote a seminal tract on, among other things, nomenclature, On Denoting.  Just because you can name things in a fashion that is syntactically correct doesn’t mean that you are making any sense.  The present Queen of France is dead. 

Yet naming, labelling, seems to have become very important to us.  Are you a woman because, despite your 46XY chromosomal endowment, you know deep down that you are?  Does the activity of Israel in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank constitute genocide?  And, this week especially, do one in four children carry the diagnosis of either autism, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder?  Wes Streeting the Health Secretary in England was minded to suggest that these days such conditions are being overdiagnosed.  On the contrary, said many consultants in child and adolescent psychiatry, they are being underdiagnosed.  The health secretary backed off, to an extent.  He is more than happy to take on the BMA, but less inclined to get offside with the medical profession as a whole.  On Any Questions last week Shami Chakrabarty commended him for eating a large slice of humble pie; something of a morganatic, or backhanded compliment.  I’m not sure he did.  He ordered a review.  He is clearly concerned that once a young person has been labelled with a psychiatric diagnosis, he or she is liable not only to be signed off, but written off, removed from the workforce, and put on benefits effectively for life.     

But is this urge to append a label to everything helpful?  Woman, genocide, neurodiversity… You can debate definitions endlessly, but these debates are purely semantic, and often rather recherché, like how many angels can dance on a pinhead, or how many daughters had Lady Macbeth?  Better put these issues to one side, and go deeper into exploring the fine grain of human problems.  Should a 46XY individual have the right to enter a sport’s dressing room designed for 46XX individuals?  Has the response of the Israeli government to the attacks of October 7th 2023 been proportionate?  Would a young person who cannot sit still and concentrate benefit from some extra help? 

The number of neurodiverse diagnoses has skyrocketed since Covid.  People wait an age, even half a lifetime, for the diagnosis, and another age for any form of intervention.  Have the number of cases really increased, and if so, why?  Are they merely being better recognised, or are people truly being overdiagnosed?  My hunch – and it is only a hunch – is that all of the above are true.  Much has been said about the deleterious effects of Covid, and the associated lockdowns, on mental health.  But, as has been pointed out, the increase in child and adolescent mental health problems started before Covid.  I’m more persuaded by the recognition of the malignant influence of electronic devices.  I remember attending an RSNO concert last year when a mobile phone went off during a performance.  Maestro Sondergard begged the audience not to bring their contraptions into the concert hall.  “They are making us all ill.”  That I think is, literally, true. 

In many ways society is much kinder now than it was when I were a lad.  I recall some of our teachers were very free with the use of the tawse.  One teacher administered a spelling test once a week, the ground rules being that two mistakes earned you two strokes of the belt.  I doubt if he had ever heard the word “dyslexia”; I don’t suppose that at the time, anybody had.  Another conducted forty minutes of Religious Education once a week, in which the class was required to memorise two verses from the Psalms.  At the end of the period he would select a pupil at random to give a recitation by heart.  Failure to be word perfect evoked the same dire punishment, and he was a ferocious belter.  At the time, I don’t suppose ADHD appeared in DSM 1.  Still, I’m glad I attended school then and not now.  I couldn’t bear the integration of the digital world, social media, and information technology into education.  I’m quite sure it would have driven me, literally, mad.

Are the psychiatrists overdiagnosing?  Actually I think the entire profession is overdiagnosing.  Everybody is on the spectrum of something.  No one is normal, and there’s none so queer as folk.  You go to the doctor with your own agenda, only to discover that the doctor has an agenda of his own, and it is a desire to place you somewhere on the spectrum of something.  I wrote the other day in this blog about a lawyer who said to a room full of doctors, “You think when you consult us that you are inviting us into your world.  On the contrary, it is we who are inviting you into ours.”  Nowadays a GP might say the same to a patient.  Before you know it, you are being screened, and vetted, and put on the spectrum of pre-hypertension, pre-diabetes, pre-hypercholesterolaemia, pre-you name it.  I don’t suppose practitioners working in mental health are any different. 

I was never taught to practise in this way.  Medicine used to be clear cut.  Patients either evinced a clinical sign, or they didn’t.  They either had a diagnosis, or they didn’t.  Of course you might argue that the concept of “diagnosis” was, is, entirely a human construct.  In reality there must be a spectrum of normal to abnormal, from health to a sickness which is mild, moderate, or severe.  And there must be, temporally, a point at which normal becomes abnormal.  You might argue that pinning a diagnosis on somebody is the same as pinning a label on them; it’s a semantic exercise.  The truth is that the diagnosis, the label, is not the end of the story.  Here, practitioners in somatic medicine can actually learn a trick from their psychiatric colleagues.  In the template of the classical psychiatric consultation of history and mental state examination, the diagnosis is immediately followed by an entity known as “formulation”, a reasoned application of the diagnosis to the unique circumstances of the individual patient.  This is what we need to do; apply the data extracted from the “case” to the unique individual before us.  Every diagnosis, and every ensuing treatment or management plan, is custom-made.  But individuals are in danger of being anonymised and swallowed up within populations.

So Dr Chinnan and Prof Feynman were right.  What’s in a name?  It’s only a heading.  What matters is the underlying formulation.  We might all learn from the psychiatrists, not just other doctors, but politicians, “influencers”, polemicists, culture warriors…  Ask the question, what’s actually going on here?  Think pathophysiologically.                                                                 

It’s official.  The Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year.  Actually they are two words.  Rage bait.  Surely it should be one word.  Doesn’t ragebait look more digital?  Ragebait has been described as the evil twin of click bait.  As you surf the net, or a million and one social media platforms, something catches your eye that is going to put up your blood pressure.  The curious thing is that, knowing that something is about to make you very angry, nonetheless you click on the link.  Of course, ragebait works.  You do click on the link.  That is the reason why ragebait is word of the year.  All the clicks have been counted, and cannot be ignored. 

Although it’s a phenomenon of the digital word, there is really nothing new about ragebait.  For as long as newspapers have existed, sub-editors have conjured provocative headlines to draw your attention to something that is bound to cause outrage, to make you splutter into your cornflakes.  What that outrage might be depends upon the political leanings of the newspaper, and its readership.  Single mum on benefits has twelfth baby.  Buckingham Palace pays less council tax than 20 Old Kent Road.  The headlines resonate around, but do not cross between two disconnected echo chambers. 

There are other manifestations of rage.  Now that we have moved into the season of Advent, we may shortly expect to see trolley rage in the supermarket.  To anybody who has lived for the last couple of years in the Gaza Strip, trolley rage must seem absolutely inexplicable.  Then there is road rage.  Every motor vehicle is fitted with a horn, a means of drawing attention to one’s presence, and to a potential hazard.  But car horns are usually sounded, often protractedly, in order to express outrage at another driver’s perceived infringement, real or imagined.  Sometimes the driver under attack responds with an equally prolonged blast of his own horn (the driver is usually male), and suddenly we are in the midst of a contretemps, as unseemly as the spectacle of two men brawling in the street.  The other day I saw a guy being tail-gated by a horn-blasting Audi around the skirts of Stirling Castle.  He was so irritated that he slammed his brakes on, causing the Audi to crash into his rear bumper.  Two men emerged from their respective cars, but I didn’t hang around to observe the outcome. 

I’m not sure where to find my car horn on my Skoda Enyaq.  Somewhere on the steering column.  I really must find out.  But I’ve never had cause to use it.  Temperamentally, I like to think I incline more towards placidity than rage.  But I don’t fool myself.  I too get tail-gated, through our village’s 20 mph zone, and sometimes feel inclined to stop dead, get out and take a baseball bat to the Audi’s windscreen.  It could all turn on a dime.  There but for the grace of God…

And for sure, I’m susceptible to ragebait.  My least favourite radio programme is When it hits the fan (BBC Radio 4, Wednesdays, 4.02 pm.)  I say “least favourite”.  So why do I bother listening?  It’s a programme about PR, Public Relations, a world which I frankly detest.  Yet I listen in, regularly, with sickly fascination.  Ragebait, you see.  It’s only for fifteen minutes, I tell myself.  (The podcast is longer.)  On one level it’s good listening.  Two PR gurus, David Yelland and Simon Lewis, have worked in the field at the top level.  They are clearly masters of their brief, and they are very good at having a blether.  November 26^th’s programme was entitled Power, PR and the “Epstein Class”.  Now that President Trump has allowed access to the late Jeffrey Epstein’s emails, there has been a media feeding frenzy over their content.  Apparently they are a window on the world of the great and the good.  This is how the top drawer communicate with one another, in succinct sound bites.  The more top drawer you are, the less you need to say.  This has nothing at all to do with Epstein’s sexual exploitation and criminality.  Yelland and Lewis were at pains to acknowledge how grotesque all of that was, and then to lay it to one side.  No.  The emails were a demonstration of how power works.  Epstein made himself a multimillionaire by building up a network, and trafficking information.  We thought we knew where power resides, over here, for example, in Westminster, or the British Establishment.  We thought we knew who runs the world.  But no.  These emails, this exclusive chat room if you will – here reside the people who run the world.

This world is very mobile.  Many of the emails start, quite simply, with the question, “Where are you now?”  Somebody on the New York Times has described these exchanges as “nomadic bat signals”. Then there is the exchange of information.  Or at least a taster, much like click bait.  I know why so-and-so met DJT (the president elect) at such-and-such golf course.  Apparently this piece of information gives the bearer something known in the PR world as “edge”.  Anyway, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, apparently the age of the email is over.  All the movers and shakers have ditched it, gone under cover, and moved over to obscure platforms where their succinct messages can be encrypted.      

It occurred to me that “edge” could easily have been word of the year.  Perhaps it would be sexier in German.  Vorsprung.  You know.  Vorsprung durch Technik.  But how hellish it must be to have one’s life dominated by the constant pursuit of “edge”.  You can never be out of touch, off line, whatever the obscure platform you are using, for fear of losing edge.  That is precisely why adolescents are addicted to their devices.  In their own social world, they are in constant fear of losing edge.  It’s a PR disaster to be out of the loop.  The Australian Government, which recognises that the influence of social media upon young people has been malignant, is trying to ban ten specific platforms for use by people under the age of 16.  Of course teenagers are much more tech-savvy than their elders, and will find a way round it, if they want to.

But that’s the trouble with living your life through a smartphone or a computer screen.  The pursuit of edge is fundamentally puerile.  It’s quite a thought that the people who – at least according to Yelland and Lewis – run the world, have been infantilised. 

One of the most depressing images in our political life is the sight of an MP sitting on the green benches, or an MSP in the chamber at Holyrood for that matter, staring, preoccupied, at their smartphone.  I wish our politicians would dump social media, the preoccupation with image, dump their SPAVS, log off, and speak truth to us directly, in syntactically correct sentences with principal and subordinate clauses, and not in emoji-strewn nomadic bat signals.  The medium is not the message.  A pox on your PR.         

In the 1970s, when the French film director Bertrand Tavernier filmed the cult movie Death Watch, starring Romy Schneider and Harvey Keitel, he chose Glasgow as a backdrop to his nightmare vision of where Reality TV might take us.  He filmed in the West End, and I recall a panning shot of Romy Schneider walking past my aunt’s house and around the crescent that joins Crown Road North to Crown Road South.  In fact, Tavernier visited my aunt, looking for a location for some internal shots.  In the end he didn’t opt for 4 Crown Road North, and I suppose my aunt should have been gratified that M. Tavernier remarked, “The ’ous – it is not sufficiently… decayed.” 

Since then, Glasgow has become a favoured location for film directors, not just because, no doubt, the price is right, but because the architecture within the grid system of Glasgow city centre can reasonably easily be converted to resemble somewhere like Philadelphia.  Brad Pitt filmed World War Z here, and I recall crossing a George Square full of zombies smoking cigarettes and waiting for the next take.  Now Batman, aka Robert Pattinson, is haunting the Necropolis; plenty of decay there.

George Square is currently fenced off, apparently being refurbished.  The statuary has (temporarily, we are told), been removed.  There is a rumour that they might not all be replaced on their pedestals.  Not so long ago there was a proposal that all the statues be placed in museums, with accompanying plaques apologising for Glasgow’s links with the slave trade.  Sandy Stoddart, Sculptor in Ordinary to Her Majesty, wrote a blistering critique of what he saw as an act of philistinism, perhaps not unlike the proposed demolition of the Red Road flats which was to take place during the opening ceremony of the last Glasgow Commonwealth Games.  The destruction of people’s homes was to be turned into un coup de théâtre.  Stoddart’s scorn for this proposal was expressed in I think the finest letter to the Herald I have ever read.  You sense a common theme.  A dumbing down.

Glaswegians are inclined to mock statues.  The Duke of Wellington sits on a horse outside the Gallery of Modern Art, a traffic cone permanently on his head.  (Actually, I have a notion the cone has been replaced by a chicken, a smaller cone on the chook’s head.)  Apparently Banksy admires the traffic cone.  It’s a reflection of Glasgow’s anarchic bravado – dead gallus.  I don’t.  The statue is, after all, a work of art.  Would you deface the Mona Lisa?  Even some people in Extinction Rebellion have stopped pouring tomato soup over Rembrandt and Van Gogh.   

There is an article by Philip Rodney in yesterday’s Sunday Times, “Glasgow desperately needs an intervention”, with its subtitle, “Andrew Neil was right about the city being mired in managed decline”.  Naturally, as a Glaswegian, I bridled.  Didn’t Glasgow shine last week, at Hampden Park?  Four glorious goals.  I particularly admired the last one, lofted into an empty Danish goalmouth from the halfway line.  Wha’s like us?  Dam’ few, an’ they’re a’ deid. 

But you know, Mr Rodney is right.  The city centre is a mess.  An obstacle course of mud, bollards, and barricades.  It has been like that for so long, certainly since the Art School went on fire, perhaps even since St Andrew’s Halls went on fire, that it feels permanent.  The tragedy is that the decayed environment conceals those elements of which Glasgow should be proud.  On Saturday evening, for example, I attended the RSNO’s concert in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.  Quite magnificent.  The RSNO is on top form.  In the first half we heard George Antheil’s A Jazz Symphony, and then George Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F, arranged for Jazz Trio and orchestra.  Conductor Patrick Hahn swapped places with pianist Frank Dupree for the Antheil, and there was a bit of dumb crambo as the pair swapped Hahn’s black dress shoes for Dupree’s white sneakers, apparently the dress code for the jazz trio, including Jakob Krupp on bass, and Obi Jenne, on drums.  Then they swapped back for the piano concerto.    

I was initially a bit ambivalent about the prospect of hearing the Gershwin in the guise of Frank Dupree’s arrangement.  But I was completely won over.  The jazz idiom, in the context of Gershwin’s fusion of jazz and classical styles, was completely convincing, both within the trio, who included a cadenza of dazzling virtuosity, and within the orchestra itself.  As an encore, the trio was joined by the RSNO’s percussionists, and an array of bongo drums etc, for a rendition of Caravan which brought the house down.  Follow that!

Well, they did, in the second half, with Rachmaninov’s Third Symphony.  I love late Rachmaninov.  Such nostalgia.  A five star occasion.  It was recorded, so you can catch it on BBC Radio 3 on December 4^th. 

There is no crit in today’s Herald, which I think is regrettable.  The attendance at the concert was, shall we say, modest, and I wondered if a cold night, plus the obstacle course of mud and bollards, had put people off.  But in Glasgow, of all places, we need to trumpet our successes. 

I can draw another contrast, with my latest visitation to the Far East.  Last Thursday was my medical school class’s 44^th reunion, in Edinburgh.  It was the first one I ever attended.  They have been held more or less every 10 years, and for the 10^th anniversary I was in New Zealand, for the 20^th, in the Isle of Skye, which strangely felt more remote.  By the 30^th, I’d just got out of the way of it.  Then the 40^th was postponed, due to Covid.  So we reconvened last week, and I thought if I didn’t go, I might not get another chance.

I’m so glad I went.  We met in the afternoon at the entrance to the old Edinburgh Royal Infirmary on Lauriston Place.  It closed early this century, moving to a new site in Little France.  The medical wards at the back of the Infirmary, overlooking the Meadows, were converted into flats, but the surgical wards went to rack and ruin and could well have been demolished.  Instead, they were converted into a learning hub, the Edinburgh Futures Institute.  What a transformation.  It was surreal, to pace these well-worn corridors.  I had a coffee in the Canopy – the old Emergency Department.  No sense of decay here.  No managed decline.

In the evening we met in the City Chambers, on the Royal Mile just opposite St Giles, for dinner.  A sweet occasion.  On several occasions I chatted with people whom I had not seen for over 40 years, and it was as if we were resuming a conversation from last week.  How could this be?  I think we must have all been bonded by a shared experience which was certainly intense.  A baptism of fear and intimidation.  We seemed to hold simultaneously in our heads the notions that we had been institutionally bullied, yet we had experienced a Golden Age, before computerisation, digitalisation, and managerial pseudoscience tore Medicine apart.  We had each been asked to supply an anecdote, a reminiscence of undergraduate days, for publication, and I was struck that the majority of us, myself included, recalled something from 2^nd MB.  That gruelling year.  I remarked to a friend that we must all be suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  PTSD.  He laughed, and didn’t disagree. 

These hoary old snake oil salesmen, Messrs Cut & Splice, have landed the BBC in trouble.  Apparently they joined up two of President Trump’s remarks, fifty minutes apart in a political speech, to make it appear that he was inciting his followers to storm the Capitol, after he refused to recognise the result of the 2020 presidential election.  This happened a year ago, but has only now come to light, thanks to the investigative reporting of the Telegraph.  President Trump has signalled that he intends to sue the BBC for “between one and five billion dollars”, and, on board Air Force 1, he thanked a Telegraph reporter for his paper’s exposure of “fake news”.

During the past week the BBC has spent an inordinate amount of time introspectively mulling over the whole saga.  In News, it’s always a problem when the reporter becomes part of the story.  But it’s clearly a big story, because the Director General and the Head of News have both resigned.  Allegedly the cut and splice episode is merely the tip of the iceberg, and apparently the BBC is, culturally, deeply dysfunctional.  Run by a bunch of liberal lefties, according to some.  That would certainly imply that the Corporation would be anti-Trump.  Biased.  Not so, says an opposing faction.  Look at the amount of air time they afford Mr Farage!  Champions of the BBC often point out that if the charge of bias is being laid from all sides, then the BBC have probably got the balance about right (by which I mean correct, rather than politically conservative).  There’s a massive Conspiracy Theory doing the rounds, that the current scandal is merely the culmination of a prolonged concerted attack on the public broadcasting service by its competitors in the private sector, jealous of the clout that the licence fee affords the BBC.

Bias (Chambers) n a one-sided mental inclination; a prejudice; any special influence that sway’s one’s thinking.   

Speaking as a doctor, erstwhile emergency physician, I can’t help feeling it’s all a storm in a teacup.  Nobody died.  (Well, I say that, but people did die, on January 6^th 2021, at the Capitol.)  But now, unless there is a settlement out of court, we have the prospect of hearing the case of Mr President versus the BBC, perhaps in the jurisdiction of Florida.  Teams of lawyers will “deploy arguments”.  What a ghastly, dismal prospect.  It could run for months, perhaps years.  Irrespective of who “wins”, it will cost a fortune. 

I have a rule of thumb about going to law: don’t do it, unless you absolutely have to.  Don’t get enmeshed in that imbroglio.  I’ve read my Dickens; I’ve read my Kafka.  The endless case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce.  Joseph K., spending an eternity before the door to the court, waiting for it to open.  When working in New Zealand I was required, on a number of occasions, to give evidence in court, thankfully only as a witness (but there but for the grace of God go I), usually in cases of medical “mishap” or “misadventure”.  On some of these occasions, somebody did die, or on other occasions incurred life-changing injuries.  On one occasion, for example, the case involved a child who had been sent home from the emergency department with a diagnosis of “tension headache”.  In fact, the child had meningitis, and succumbed shortly afterwards.  You see, that puts the charge of cutting and splicing a tape into some sort of perspective.

I never felt that the combative nature of legal procedure, with a prosecution, and a defence, was a particularly effective way of getting to the truth of a matter.  The procedure of the hospital Morbidity & Mortality (M & M) Meeting always seemed to me to be far more informative.  Here, the facts of the case were presented, and then discussed.  Doctors tried to formulate a coherent account of everything that had happened, chiefly in order to learn, and in order to avoid a recurrence of the episode in question.  Of course, if there is a stark difference of opinion, particularly with regard to a burden of guilt, then a combative scenario becomes inevitable. 

Another anomalous feature of court procedure with regard to medical misadventure was the stark contrast between the constraints of time suffered by a usually harassed and overworked emergency physician, and the temporal latitude enjoyed by the court.  The court might take a week to consider a critical decision that a doctor had felt obliged to take during a fifteen minute consultation.   

If I happened to be taking part in the “Cut’nSplicegate” M & M Meeting, I would want to hear the facts of the case.  What is the error?  Who committed it?  What was the motivation?  Was the cut and splice a slipshod editorial happenstance or was it designed to mislead?  Was there editorial oversight and if so, what was the chain of command?  Did the alleged misdemeanour actually cause harm?  What, indeed, was its resultant morbidity, and mortality?

Call me naïve, but I would suppose that men and women of good faith and good heart could answer these questions during the course of a morning.  Why is going to law so expensive?  I don’t remember ever being recompensed for attending an M & M Meeting, or a court case, or a hearing before the General Medical Council.  What is so expensive in law?

Obfuscation.

Then there is the question of compensation.  Has somebody been damaged to the extent they need $5,000,000,000 to make up for it?

I always remember the advice I heard from a lawyer speaking at a meeting in, of all places, the Ayrshire hotel that was to become Trump Turnberry.  He said, “When you seek the help of lawyers, you imagine you are inviting us into your world.  But it is quite the opposite.  We are inviting you into ours.”

And it’s a different world altogether.  To most of us, it is unrecognisable.                                 

Republicanism has been very much to the fore recently in the letters column of The Herald.  The catalyst for this seems to have been the coincidentally simultaneous publication of a book about Andrew Mountbatten Windsor entitled Entitled (another one word title – it’s such a cliché), and the memoir of the late Virginia Giuffre.  There seems to be a widespread disgust at the perceived royals’ sense of, well, entitlement.  Somebody wrote in to suggest that the monarchy be abolished, as well as the House of Lords, as well as the devolved governments, as well as Westminster, the latter to be replaced by a new Parliament built right at the geographical epicentre of the isle of Great Britain.  To this I responded:     

Dear Sir,

I was very interested to acquaint myself with your correspondent’s vision of how Great Britain might evolve constitutionally, were the monarchy to be abolished (Could this be the beginning of the end of the monarchy? Herald, November 4).  The abolition of the House of Lords and the devolved governments, and the relocation of Parliament to Lancashire, all sound quite logical and rational, but the proposed model doesn’t seem to me to take national culture, or cultures, into account.  This reallocation of powers is a table-top exercise, rather reminiscent of the Sykes-Picot agreement between the UK and France in 1916, the Balfour Declaration the following year, or the Stalin-Roosevelt-Churchill carve-up of Eastern Europe at Yalta in 1945.  Remember how well they all went.  You can’t redraw the map in a national-political-cultural vacuum.  Moving Parliament to Dunsop Bridge is not much different from throwing a dart at a map, blindfold. 

Like it or not, the only thing that glues Great Britain together as a national entity, is the monarchy.  If King Charles receives his P45, or as we say north of the border, his jotters, then I think the likeliest outcome would be that Scotland, England, and Wales would become independent countries, and the island of Ireland would unite.  Whether or not such an outcome would be propitious, nay felicitous, I lay to one side.  But the Establishment at Westminster understands it, and that is why it will do everything in its power to protect, preserve, and maintain the monarchy.  This is the real reason why the naval officer formerly known as Prince has been so ostracised, and vilified.  It is not merely the monarchy which is in danger of foundering; it is the entire Ship of State.  

Yours sincerely…

The Herald kindly published me, under the headline Why we need the monarchy.  As a seasoned writer to the newspapers I have grown used to the fact that the editorial headline is beyond one’s control.  So I wasn’t much fazed.  But I thought the headline was ill-chosen.  My stance was neither royalist nor republican, just as it was neither unionist nor nationalist.  My topic was rather the modus operandi of the Westminster Establishment.  Its deepest instinct is for self-preservation.

Robert Harris wrote a novel about Captain Dreyfus, which won the Walter Scott prize for historical fiction.  Dreyfus was accused, unjustly, of being a spy, found guilty, and banished to Devil’s Island.  In a scene at the beginning of the book his epaulettes are ceremoniously, unceremoniously, removed.  This is essentially what has happened to Andrew.  He has been “de-epauletted”.  He has lost his naval rank.  But I don’t think he is required, thus far, to return his military campaign medals.  That would surely be a step too far.  It is said that he served in the Falklands War with distinction. 

I thought of him yesterday on Remembrance Sunday.  I take it he wasn’t present at the cenotaph, though, not having turned my telly on for weeks, I wouldn’t know.  I attended the service at Dunblane Cathedral.  The cathedral was full.  There was a strong military presence.  The two minute silence was introduced by a bugle playing the Last Post.  The lessons were read, most eloquently, by the Deputy Lieutenant for Stirling and Falkirk, representing HM the King.  The Old Testament lessons was from Micah.

And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

The New Testament lesson was from St. Matthew.

But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also…

Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.

I always find the Service of Remembrance a very moving occasion, but, you know, it contains a fundamental cognitive dissonance which every minister of the church must struggle with, preaching Christ’s gospel to people who are training for war.  Such dissonance seems especially resonant, or perhaps to clang, to reverberate, in our own time. Jesus said, “Resist not evil.”  Really?  Our culture, the culture of western European and dare I say American democratic tradition, is founded on the notion of resistance to evil.  Popular culture, the movies, are shot through with it.  Gary Cooper resists evil in High Noon, when everybody else has backed down and turned a blind eye.  In The Man who shot Liberty Valance, John Wayne advises Jimmy Stewart, “You’d better start carrying a handgun, pilgrim.”  In The Magnificent Seven, Yul Brynner says to the villagers who have hired him and his men to protect them from evil (I paraphrase), “You need to kill, and carry on killing, even when you’ve forgotten the reason.”  In The Untouchables, Sean Connery says to a colleague, “You carry a badge?  Then carry a gun.”  And to Kevin Costner’s Eliot Ness, “You wanna stop Capone?  He puts one of your men in the hospital, you put one of his men in the morgue.  That’s how you stop Capone!”  Then, for two minutes in every year, we silently resolve to turn the other cheek.              

Most apologias for Christ’s teaching emphasize the distinction between the evil deed and the evil doer; hate the deed, but love its perpetrator.  In Victory, as Winston put it, Magnanimity.  (But first, Victory.)  I’m not sure about such interpretations.  President Reagan once said that if you need to explain yourself, you’ve lost the argument.  I have a notion that Our Lord was moving on an entirely different plane, one of deliberate self-sacrifice, and when his disciples said they would follow him to the ends of the earth, he gently told them that they didn’t know what they were letting themselves in for.

My generation has been incredibly lucky.  No call to arms.  We have all read our Wilfred Owen and I believe that we have not, by and large, been seduced by the faux-attractiveness of war.  But that which we have taken for granted is looking increasingly fragile.  The drones have reached Belgium.  The sabres are rattling.