Cotroceni scandal, seascapes and white wine – all in a Bucharest day’s work

Sun still striking 30 here in Bucharest at midday. A lazy morning determined a journey to the Cotroceni Palace to see the seascape exhibition put together by the famous collector and painter Parizescu; we knew that security was strict but were still annoyed with the injunction to remove the camera from the rucksack (signs clearly indicated that a personal camera could be used for 4 euros but I wasn’t sure that the collection would make this worthwhile).

In the event I was wrong - the room whose brick ceiling looked like a cathedral but which is in fact the original kitchen turned out to house the most amazing little collection of early 20^th century Romanian classics (Artachino, Pallady, Popescu, Ressu, Steriadi) and had me scurrying back to the gatehouse for the camera – having checked with 2 pleasant curators that this was OK. At which point the Romanian system clicked into action – a phone call was made to someone and I was denied permission to photo – although the notices clearly say that only the grounds and church are banned……

Furious, I returned and tried to get an explanation from the overbearing woman – who would only say that as the collection didn’t belong to the Palace, photos were not permitted…..She did agree to make a telephone call to the Director who apparently told her to have my camera brought up from the gatehouse……smiles all round……

Then, after a little picnic at the neighbouring Botanic Gardens, off to sample some white Romanian wines. The incredible price, range and quality of wines in neighbouring Bulgaria has meant that I am better informed of the wine scene there than here in Romania – good quality bottles of wine are 5-8 euros in Romania but 3-5 euros in Bulgaria.

Of course all Romanian cities are well endowed with wine "crameries” where you can get good regional wine from the barrel for just under 3 euros a litre. Hence my consumption of Romanian wines has tended to be restricted to the more common wines from Dealul Mare, Recas and Murfatlar – although I will buy bottles from the great Cotnari and Husi range in Moldova and I did find this week an excellent Riesling (in Lidl) for 4.5 euros (20 lei) from the Satu Mare vineyard of Ratesti  

I have attended 2 of the recent annual Sofia November wine weekends and frequently consult the great little Catalogue of Bulgarian Wine produced each year by T Tanovska and K Iontcheva. Significantly, despite its much larger population, Romania does not (a far as my researches indicate) have such a publication …the glossy coffee table book recently published purporting to be about Romanian wines is just a sloppy bit of PR work........Perhaps I'll learn more at the big wine fair in Bucharest 2-6 November this year. Big date - it will be my first such Romanian event - insallah!!

So it has been much more difficult for me to make an assessment of what the wine market offers here in Romania. I decided it was time to rectify that. The Dealul Mare vineyards are in the Carpathian foothills only an hour’s driving north of Bucharest – this site offers a nice introduction to what’s on offer - and this blog also gives some useful technical notes on some of the better wines  

But I wanted to see what was available here in Bucharest so chose Ethic Wine’s Tasting Room just 5 minutes drive away…...which is both a shop and wine bar. For 15 euros I had a taste of three great Romanian whites – Liliac Feteasca Alba (near Targu Mures); Bauer Sauvignon Blanc (near Craiova); and a Iacob white cuvee from the Davino vineyard at Ceptura (Dealul Mare), But, surprisingly no titbits were on offer to help sharpen the tastebuds - and only a few slices of bread were offered when I asked. A strange sort of "tasting room"!

Probably the most comprehensive guide to Romania’s wine and vineyards is the CrameRomania website which includes this list of about 130 romanian vineyards
And the Dionysus wine bar looks worth checking out

FAST READING AND SLOW WRITING

As an avid reader for more than half a century, I have become more and more aware of the shortcomings of most recently-published non-fiction books.

Their bibliographies may look impressive and their chapter headings riveting but the books increasingly suffer, in my view, from the following sorts of deficiencies –

- They are written by academics

- who write for students and other academics

- and lack “hands-on” experience of other worlds

- the author’s speciality indeed is only a sub-discipline – eg financial economics

- the focus is a fashionable subject

- written with deadlines to meet commercial demands

- making claims to originality- but failing to honour the google scholar adage of “standing on the shoulders of giants” (despite – perhaps even because of - the extensive bibliographies)

I now have a litmus test for any book which catches my eye – actually not one but three -

 1. Does it reveal in its preface/introduction and bibliography an intention to honour what has been written before on the subject?

 2. Indeed does it clearly list and comment on what has been identified as the key reading and indicate why, despite such previous efforts, the author feels compelled to add to our reading burden??? And can you, the reader, identify any obvious gaps in that list?

 3. Can the author clearly demonstrate (eg in the introduction or opening chapter) that the book is the result of long thought and not just an inclination to jump on the latest bandwagon?

All of three years ago, I wrote about “slow books” - I wasn’t aware of the phrase - it just came to me in a creative flash. I was not really surprised, however, to learn that the phrase had already been coined – although fairly recently as I see from this March 2012 article in The Atlantic and this (rather local) 2009 website. In 2009 there was even a small book entitled Slow Reading 

Let me push, however, for a wider definition of a “slow book”. 

"Slow food" is an entire process - it is the preparation, production and consumption. And abhors the formulaes, specialisation and slave labour which the logic of modern production and ownership systems require eg in MacDonald's and Amazon.

Similarly "Slow books" stand against marketing and "commodification" (sorry about the word!) and are about the relationships of real authentic people - whether as writers, readers, craftsmen or suppliers.
update; a review of a new book - Slow Reading in a Hurried Age

I will now reveal – exclusively for you – my ten tricks of fast reading and comprehension. They are very simply expressed -

General

- Read a lot (from an early age!)

- Read widely (outside your discipline)

- Read quickly (skim)

- If the author doesn’t write in clear and simple language, move on to another book asap. Life’s too short……Bad writing is a good indicator of a confused mind

For each book

- Mark extensively (with a pencil) – with question-marks, ticks, underlines, comments and expletives

- Read the reviews (surf)

- Identify questions from these to ensure you’re reading critically

- Write brief notes to remind you of the main themes and arguments

- Identify the main schools of thought about the subject

- Check the bibliography at the end – to see what obvious names are missing

My Three Years in Uzbekistan

Uzbek’s dictator has died – having held on to office for some 30 years, His replacement could well be someone I knew from my 3 years as Team Leader of an EU-funded Civil Service Reform project in the country between 1999 and 2002 - Shavkat Mirziyoyev who served as governor of Jizzakh Region from 1996 to September 2001, then as governor of Samarkand Region from September 2001 until his appointment as Prime Minister in 2003, a position he has held until now.

The project was required to have 2 “pilot regions” which were his two of Jizzakh and Samarkand. He was chairman of the project’s Steering Committee…….

Ours was quite a large team which was attached to the Cabinet of the President’s Office – indeed we were supposed to be inside their building but it was blown apart by a bomb a few month’s before I arrival so we had to put up with a big office overlooking the scaffolding as it was refurbished.

I had some amazing experiences in the country whose atmosphere was quite unlike anything I have experienced elsewhere – with a fascinating combination, for example, of ornate tea ceremonies and hard drinking. Early on Al-Queeda gained some Jizzakh mountain passes near its capital Tashkent (this was before Craig Murray’s time) which put them off-limits to us for some months. I acquired a taste for painting there – as well as rugs and terra-cotta figurines. 

Some people might consider it dubious to be involved with work in such regimes but I felt privileged to be allowed to stand in a classroom of the Tashkent Presidential Academy for Reconstruction and present to civil servants the sort of perspective about power enshrined in Rosabeth Kanter's Ten Rules of Stifling Innovation - and also to lay out the European experience of developing local government over the centuries. One of the papers I did then was Transfer of Functions - the West European experience 1970-2000 and can be accessed on the link - all 60 pages......
Coincidentally or not, the esteemed President decided a few years later that political science was not an acceptable subject and had its study subsumed under the title of "Spirituality and Enlightenment"! 

The Search for Democracy

In 1977 I published a little book called  The Search for Democracy – a guide to and polemic about local government in Scotland  which was written around some 40 questions community activists and students were putting to me about the new system of Scottish local government which had arrived in 1975. I was in a fairly unique position to deal with this since I had, for some 3 years, been occupying one of the leading positions in the country’s largest local authority – Strathclyde Region

Not least of my puzzlements was about the source and nature of power. And the story told by one of the architects of the British NHS (Aneurin Bevan) about his own search for power - from his own municipality through trade unions to the heights of the British Cabinet - used the powerful metaphor of the onion. As each layer peeled away, there did not appear to be a heart!

Like Bevan, I have been peeling away various slices to try to get to "the heart of the onion" eg (in Scotland) as community activist; manager of community development projects; political science academic; local councillor; local manager; - then since 1990 foreign consultant (capacity development; civil service reform); change management expert; trainer.......

The subtitle to part I of the book was “Birthpangs or Death Throes?” The questions the book explored related naturally to those organisations which most immediately impacted then on ordinary people
As, in later years, I dealt with higher levels of government, the questions changed.....And, as local government has become emasculated, so the questions which people raise have perhaps become more pertinent....

But, for the moment, treat this as a history lesson...........

·         - What were the new Districts and Regions supposed to achieve?

·         - Why do we seem further away from these goals?

·         - Will the new system not produce conflict and delay?

·         - Are the new councils not too large and distant?

·         - Does the public get value for money?

·        - How much "fat" is there?

·         - How much freedom does local government has?

·         - Will a Scottish parliament not require the abolition of one of the tiers?

·         - What do councillors do?

·         - How do people become councillors?

·         - What sort of power do they have?

·         - Who are they accountable to?

·         - Are party politics really necessary?

·         - How does the party system work?

·         - How does the committee system work?

·         - What are its deficiencies?

·         - Where does power lie?

·         - Why are so many obstacles placed in the way of those wanting help and advice?

·         - Will community councils make any difference?

·         - What have councils done to improve their services?

·         - How do councils know if their policies are working?

·         - how might voluntary organisations/community groups play a bigger role?

Forty years on I am still, it seems, “searching for democracy”….. but, as the various papers in this website show, the questions have become global. 

Indeed at the start of the new millennium I had been so concerned about its erosion that I had drafted a paper around a set of rather different questions an updated version of which - Guide for the Perplexed – I placed on a website some years ago…… 
There it has languished, still unfinished…….but a recent exchange has encouraged me to pull it out again and do a bit of minor updating…..

it’s now called Mapping the common ground and is a fairly rare overview of what has been written over the years about the democratic malaise from which we have been suffering for the past 2 decades…
Please dip in - and let me know what you think!!

Update; it's now morphed into "Dispatches to the Next Generation" which you can access at the top right corner of this blog

The Fear of Old Age

“Forever Young” has always had a special resonance for me – not simply because of my surname but rather because of what has been  my disinclination to think of how ageing might affects me.

A couple of posts last August, eg Intimations of Mortality and Facing up to our Mortality were perhaps the first indication of how my attitude was beginning to change – identifying and excerpting from three important books -

- Being Mortal – illness, medicine and what matters in the end; by a very literate and humane American surgeon, Atul Gawande (2014);

- Ammonites and Leaping Fish – a Life in Time; by British writer Penelope Lively (2003) – a short but delightfully-written musing on what it is to be “old”. This article is a selection of the first half of the book from which I have extracted this - 

I think there is a sea-change, in old age – a metamorphosis of the sensibilities. With those old consuming vigours now muted, something else comes into its own – an almost luxurious appreciation of the world that you are still in. Spring was never so vibrant; autumn never so richly gold. People are of abiding interest – observed in the street, overheard on a bus.

The small pleasures have bloomed into points of relish in the day – food, opening the newspaper (new minted, just for me), a shower, the comfort of bed. It is almost like some kind of end-game salute to the intensity of childhood experience, when the world was new. It is an old accustomed world now, but invested with fresh significance; I've seen all this before, done all this, but am somehow able to find new and sharpened pleasure.

- Out of Time – the Pleasures and Perils of Ageing by British feminist and sociologist Lynne Segal (2013) I found rather too self-indulgent but the late-lamented Jenni Diski reviewed it superbly in the link the title gives , with this part focusing on the politics - 

One of her primary concerns is the war between the generations. The one in which, to our surprise, we are now the old and tiresome. But this time, there are worse accusations being chucked around. We are the baby boomers, the demographic catastrophe waiting to happen that is now happening. Baby boomers lived their youth in a golden time.
Far from having to go into tens of thousands of pounds of debt, we had free tuition and decent grants to live on while we received a higher education. The generation that bore us and lived through the hardships of war and austerity, while disapproving of us, also provided us with welfare benefits that allowed us to take time off from earning a living, to play with ideas and new ways (we thought) of organising socially and politically, of exploring other cultures, drugs, craziness, clothes and music.

Now, this free time seems mythic. If we wanted jobs, there were plenty of them. If we didn’t, we benefited in a way that would be called scrounging now (it was then, but no one stopped it).
 We are costing a fortune as we age and we’ll go on to cost much more because medical science has promised us twenty more years of some sort of life than our parents expected.Our pensions, the medical expertise and equipment, the time and energy needed to care and cater for a disproportionately large aged population: all this, the young have been told, is coming out of their earnings and limiting their wellbeing. We got grants to do up houses we bought cheaply. They can’t get a mortgage. Workers to our queens, they are providing our good life, in suburbia, beside the sea, in sunny Spain, filling hospital beds, out of their taxes.

We take our pensions, our cold weather payments, foreign holidays and cruises, while the young struggle to find jobs to pay for our needs, our strokes, our previously unhealthy lifestyles that caused the sicknesses which the impoverished NHS is obliged to cure.
Segal, quite rightly, doesn’t blame the young for their anger, but mostly the media for provoking it. ‘Older people lived the “good life”. Why should the young have to pay for it?’ the Guardian asks. ‘Crumblies should stop whingeing and claiming priority over a scant welfare budget. We created this me-first world, now we should give something back,’ says 74-year-old Stewart Dakers. 

Some articles I archived in 2012 and 2013 show that the physical side of ageing was beginning even then to register on me – particularly “Daddy Issues”; a review of the “Amour” film; a shocking commentary about Japanese attitudes; and a piece on the loneliness epidemic  

I notice that I now have a dozen or so books on the theme of ageing and death including a solitary humorous take on the subject - Growing Old – the last Campaign - by Des Wilson (2014). The link is actually to a powerful defence of the elderly from the resentful anger which Diski refers to – written by Wilson who was the most famous British campaigner of the second half of the century

The British philosopher John Gray reviewed last year a couple of important books on the subject -

The Black Mirror: Fragments of an Obituary for Life; by retired British gerontologist, poet and polymath Raymond Tallis (2015) - and

The Worm at the Core: on the Role of Death in Life; by American psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski 

Both books cite the work of the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker The Fear of Death (1973) (whose work is now undergoing something of a revival) who suggested that flight from death is the driving force of civilisation. Many of humanity’s greatest achievements, as well as its worst crimes, can be understood as attempts to ward off mortality.

Tallis’ book is a complex philosophical read as indicated by this Spiked Online review

Tallis is a convinced atheist – not the all-too-familiar kind, typified by Dawkins, which rants on incessantly about the evils of religion, but the rarer, more intelligent variety that finds the very idea of God empty and incoherent.

The Black Mirror, he tells us, “is, ultimately, a work of praise and gratitude”. It is true that the book contains many invocations of beauty and joy: “ploughlands bordered with bare hawthorn hedges scribbled on low dark and grey skies rifted with brilliance”; the simple pleasure in existing on a dull Wednesday afternoon. Overall, though, the mood is melancholy, heavy with regret for how much of the life that is gone was left unlived. Pursuing “some dream of changing the world (and of course his prospects in it) for the better”, the author “allowed himself to be indifferent to an April evening, glistening with dew and birdsong, that could have become itself in his consciousness”. Now it is getting late:

The German television channel Deutsche Welle actually contains the best take on the second book’s theme in an interview which allows the authors to explain their theory about how we handle our existential fear of death which they call, curiously “terror-management” 

For most of human history, most people didn’t have all that much. Life was short; you spent most of your waking hours trying to find something to eat. And in the absence of the technology for mass production, most folks did not accumulate all that much. The primary mode of production was that we had to make stuff by hand. If you were a shoemaker, you made an entire shoe - and if you made good shoes then you could feel justly proud for your accomplishments. 

And then the industrial revolution comes along. And on the one hand, mass production gives us the capacity to produce high quality goods at prices that many people can afford. On the other hand, the division of labor just radically shifted the nature of work. Now, you don’t make a whole shoe any more, you just slap the heel on it. And that’s what you do for eight hours a day for forty years. You don’t own a shoe; you take no pride in slapping the heel on it. And consequently, there is no longer the capacity for acquiring self-regard by virtue of what you literally do. From humans as makers to humans as takers - a radical shift from valuing yourself by your accomplishments in terms of what you tangibly produce to valuing yourself by abstract figures in a bankbook..... 

And one thing that we can do is buy a lot of rubbish. Another thing we can do is to take the death anxiety and to pin it on other people either in or outside of our culture - and to just say “oh, these are the all- encompassing repositories of evil”. It used to be the communists. And now, it’s Islamic terrorists. Domestically, we used to hate the hippies – but they are okay now, because jeans cost 200 bugs and the hippies are hedge fund managers. So then, we hate homosexuals, right? But they are ok, so now, we hate old people or we hate people who don’t speak English and so on... So, what will we do with those folks? Well, belittle them or we try to convince them that our way of life is better or - when that doesn’t work - we just kill them.

And I actually unearthed (and downloaded) today The Loneliness of The Dying a short book written by the famous Anglo-German sociologist Elias Norbert in 1985 –

John Gray perhaps puts it best –

Religions have their afterlives, while secular faiths offer continuity with some larger entity – nations, political projects, the human species, a process of cosmic evolution – to stave off the painful certainty of oblivion. In their own lives, human beings struggle to create an image of themselves that they can project into the world. Careers and families prolong the sense of self beyond the grave. Acts of exceptional heroism and death-defying extreme sports serve a similar impulse. By leaving a mark, we can feel we are not just fleeting individuals who will soon be dead and then forgotten.

Against this background, it might seem that the whole of human culture is an exercise in death denial. This is the message of Stephen Cave’s thoughtful and beautifully clear Immortality: the Quest to Live For Ever and How It Drives Civilisation (2012). A more vividly personal but no less compelling study of our denial of death is presented in Caitlin Doughty’s Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: and Other Lessons from the Crematorium (2015), in which the author uses her experience of working at a Californian funeral parlour to show how contemporary mortuary practice – removing the corpse as quickly as possible, then prettifying it so that it almost seems alive – serves to expel the fact of death from our lives.

update; 
In October, this fascinating review about longevity
And, in December , https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/15/old-people-dementia-death-social-care-costs; and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fixed_Period 
On December 31, Joseph Epstein penned this magnificent ode to approaching 80
In January this first part of a series

Celebrating what has gone before

Every now and then I contemplate christening the elegant old house which has been home for me these past 7-8 summers – walkers occasionally give it an admiring glance but I discovered yesterday that it has acquired not only a new status (in a superbly produced little guide about traditional houses and skills in the area – entitled Carpathian Gate) but also a name "Burlacu Lucia".

A couple of charming young women arrived yesterday and presented me with a plaque about the house for installing on the fence at the road " (although I will have to question the idea that the house is late 19^th century) - also a couple of copies of their little booklet in Romanian. 

They belong to a small foundation (The Centre for Mountain Ecology) which is doing the sort of work Daniela and I were bemoaning was all too little evident in the country....this is another example of their work from their site http://cem.ro/galerie/case-fundata/. 

One of the women was actually German, married to the Romanian who heads up the NGO

As you can imagine, I'm delighted that there are some people around here celebrating traditional architecture and skills.......For someone who earned his money these past 25 years from preaching the “modernist” agenda, I have developed quite a respect (if not passion) for the “old ways”… A few years back I did a couple of posts about this subject - http://nomadron.blogspot.ro/2012/06/village-tradition-and-solidarity.html and http://nomadron.blogspot.ro/2012/06/getting-under-skin.html and a little section of my library here is about village life this past century in various parts of Europe eg

- Geert Maak's Island in Time (2000)

- "Thin Paths - journeys in and around an italian mountain village" (2012) beautifully written with black and white photos giving it a WG Sebald feel...
The full list of such books can be found on a post I did last year about some of the relics found in our house when we bought it in 2000 and the extent of the work Daniela did to bring it back to life  

At my age it becomes particularly important to celebrate memories and traditional skills..I therefore liked the booklet on "craftsmen" on the NGO website - which reminded me of a lovely little booklet/notebook I have from 2010 ("Calet de notiste despre mesteri si mestesuguri" (ARHITERRA) which lists about 100 craftsmen throughout Romania - unfortunately it doesn't give a website although it does contain a reference to this French site .

Sirnea is a bit "off the beaten track" compared with the other nearby villages you will find in a lovely little glossy produced recently about a local poet and scupltor - "Legenda Branului". Indeed the village is almost in a bit of a "time warp" - which gives it an additional charm for me....that's the wrong word - but the life these people lived needs more recognition eg my old neighbour Viciu (age 89) down the hill was the postman in the 1960s and 1970s and delivered the mail on horseback - from Bran!!! He lost his wife last year and has this year been living with his daughter in Bran. It would be great if people could talk with him about these days and record it in a proper book about village life in the middle of the 20^th century……..
Some of you may be interested in these flickr photos I uploaded today of the area as experienced last month by 3 relatives who spent a couple of weeks based here

Academics who produce the goods

In the 2 posts I did after the 23 June Brexit result, I tried to give a sense of how subsequent events were covered by some of the UK, European and American “writers” I respect (whether in The Guardian, LRB, Eurozine, der Spiegel or New York Review of Books).

A strong theme which emerged in their comments was the extent to which balanced analysis has been replaced (in both the tabloids and social media) by shrill partisanship and the careless treatment of “facts”……. Everything these days is “relative” – there is always a different perspective – the world is too confusing - so it’s not worth listening to “the experts”……

Exactly how this translated into electoral behaviour is powerfully shown at page 15 of a fascinating presentation made at the LSE by a Professor only a week after the result - After the EU Referendum – what next for Britain and the EU?

Bear in mind that some 90% of the public advice given (by economists and global think-tanks) on the economic aspects warned of the very tangible damaging effect which Brexit would have on British investment, shares and employment. “Project Fear” was a term which had been skilfully used by the Scottish nationalists during the 2013-14 Scottish referendum to try to belittle the arguments of those who argued for Scotland to remain in the UK. And this was the term which was duly trundled into use this year to make light of the dangers of withdrawing from the EU.

The difference, however, is that a huge 42% of those polled in the last few weeks of the 2014 Scottish referendum campaign considered that they would be “worse off” in an independent Scotland (3 other options were given - "better off", "no difference" and "don't know"). 
In June of this year – despite several official estimates which put a very tangible figure of several thousand pounds as the annual cost per earner of Brexit – exactly half that number (21%) gave that judgement about British withdrawal from Europe. 
By contrast almost half (45%) of those polled in early June this year for the UK referendum considered it would make “no difference” to them economically (compared with only 22% of the Scots 2 years ago)

In other words, “Project Fear” worked in 2014 but totally failed in 2016

Are the Scots more gullible (we did after all vote strongly for remain)? Can the same trick not work twice? More probable is Hix's more nuanced argument about the new social divide between the "precariat" and professionals - life is so bad for so many people that threats of it getting worse have lost meaning......they just want to kick out......  

Simon Hix’s presentation can be viewed on Youtube – and I really would recommend that you follow both the video and the power-point presentations since he gives the best analysis I have yet seen of the reasons for people voting the way they did - as well as an excellent assessment of what happens now. 

It clearly helped that he was part of a multi-disciplinary team of academics who travelled around the country talking to ordinary people about the issue...it's clear that he learned a lot from the exercise. And (despite his own views - he is after all a Professor of European politics) he is emphatic that "Brexit means Brexit" 

Academics get a bad name for talking down to us in abstruse language but the same research website The UK in a changing Europe has several excellent articles eg this one written in the aftermath of the vote by the indefatigable Richard Rose

And one more positive example of what academics are capable of if they turn their minds sufficiently to the real world is this 13 page memo published today by 2 British academics “Getting out Quick and Playing the Long Game 

A ‘three step’ Brexit solution, including an ambitious transitional arrangement, is key to meeting the aspirations of the British people and reaching a mutually beneficial long-term relationship with the EU. This would see the UK leave the EU towards the end of 2018 and enter a transitional arrangement, possibly lasting until 2024, which would offer the time and space needed to more coolly and calmly negotiate a long-term agreement. The outcome of the EU referendum laid down the general parameters required for such a transitional agreement:

1. Parliamentary sovereignty should be restored. All EU law would be transposed into British law and a ‘Petitions Committee’, comprising a variety of representatives, should be empowered to hold hearings on whether an EU law should be repealed or amended on the basis of a petition from a certain threshold of British citizens or companies. The UK should no longer be subject to the formal force of the EU Court of Justice’s judgments.

 2. Crucially, this committee should involve not only the ‘usual suspects’ from stakeholder society – though devolved administrations, local government and key interests should be involved. It should also reach out to groups that are not usually involved in exercises such as this but who turned out in force to vote in the referendum.

 3. A joint UK-EU commission could assess whether countermeasures were appropriate if judgments or interpretations by British regulatory bodies departed from EU law. These countermeasures could have consequences for UK exporters’ access to EU markets.

 4. Free movement of EU citizens cannot carry on in its current form. A compromise would be only to grant residence to those who have an offer of a full time job and a new income threshold for those seeking to bring their families to the UK, as is the case for UK nationals seeking to bring in a non-EU spouse.

 5. The UK should no longer formally contribute to the EU budget. The UK’s net contributions could be replaced by direct UK bilateral support to the poorer EU member states.

 6. Scotland and possibly Northern Ireland will need a closer relationship with the EU than other parts of the UK. This could involve keeping EU law in place in Scotland, including free movement of person, in return for participation in the work of the Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER) in Brussels.

 The hurdles to such a transitional agreement should not be underestimated. Nevertheless, it could appeal to EU partners since it secures a quick Brexit and allows a high degree of economic predictability while negotiating a longer-term deal. Within the UK, such an arrangement would allow the broadest possible participation in the process of untangling the UK from EU law and responsiveness to unpopular EU laws, whilst securing an orderly exit.

The Sleep of Reason produces Monsters

Global events have struck me dumb…Brexit did not so much surprise as shock me – into a deep depression. But it’s not so much the result per se as the new tone of global politics of which this is simply one expression – any pretence at reason has been surrendered to the exercise of brute power and stirring of visceral hatreds as evident in Trump’s victory and events in Turkey, Nice and Munich…..let alone Baghdad and Kabul

They’ve apparently been talking in the US for some 5-6 years about “post-truth politics” but it was an important recent article argues that technology is at the root of the new drift 

It was hardly the first time that politicians had failed to deliver what they promised, but it might have been the first time they admitted on the morning after victory that the promises had been false all along.

This was the first major vote in the era of post-truth politics: the listless remain campaign attempted to fight fantasy with facts, but quickly found that the currency of fact had been badly debased.The remain side’s worrying facts and worried experts were dismissed as “Project Fear” – and quickly neutralised by opposing “facts”: if 99 experts said the economy would crash and one disagreed, the BBC told us that each side had a different view of the situation. (This is a disastrous mistake that ends up obscuring truth, and echoes how some report climate change.)

Michael Gove declared that “people in this country have had enough of experts” on Sky News. He also compared 10 Nobel prize-winning economists who signed an anti-Brexit letter to Nazi scientists loyal to Hitler. It can become very difficult for anyone to tell the difference between facts that are true and 'facts' that are not…

For months, the Eurosceptic press trumpeted every dubious claim and rubbished every expert warning, filling the front pages with too many confected anti-migrant headlines to count – many of them later quietly corrected in very small print. On the same day Nigel Farage unveiled his inflammatory “Breaking Point” poster, and Labour MP Jo Cox, who had campaigned tirelessly for refugees, was shot dead, the cover of the Daily Mail featured a picture of migrants in the back of a lorry entering the UK, with the headline “We are from Europe – let us in!” The next day, the Mail and the Sun, which also carried the story, were forced to admit that the stowaways were actually from Iraq and Kuwait.

 A few days after the vote, Arron Banks, Ukip’s largest donor and the main funder of the Leave.EU campaign, told the Guardian that his side knew all along that facts would not win the day. “It was taking an American-style media approach,” said Banks. “What they said early on was ‘Facts don’t work’, and that’s it. The remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success.”

 Twenty-five years after the first website went online, it is clear that we are living through a period of dizzying transition. For 500 years after Gutenberg, the dominant form of information was the printed page: knowledge was primarily delivered in a fixed format, one that encouraged readers to believe in stable and settled truths.Now, we are caught in a series of confusing battles between opposing forces: between truth and falsehood, fact and rumour; between the few and the many, the connected and the alienated; between the open platform of the web as its architects envisioned it and the gated enclosures of Facebook and other social networks; between an informed public and a misguided mob.

What is common to these struggles – and what makes their resolution an urgent matter – is that they all involve the diminishing status of truth. This does not mean that there are no truths. It simply means, as this year has made very clear, that we cannot agree on what those truths are, and when there is no consensus about the truth and no way to achieve it, chaos soon follows.

Increasingly, what counts as a fact is merely a view that someone feels to be true – and technology has made it very easy for these “facts” to circulate with a speed and reach that was unimaginable in the Gutenberg era (or even a decade ago). ……

There are usually several conflicting truths on any given subject, but in the era of the printing press, words on a page nailed things down, whether they turned out to be true or not. The information felt like the truth, at least until the next day brought another update or a correction, and we all shared a common set of facts. 

This settled “truth” was usually handed down from above: an established truth, often fixed in place by an establishment. This arrangement was not without flaws: too much of the press often exhibited a bias towards the status quo and a deference to authority, and it was prohibitively difficult for ordinary people to challenge the power of the press.

Now, people distrust much of what is presented as fact – particularly if the facts in question are uncomfortable, or out of sync with their own views – and while some of that distrust is misplaced, some of it is not.

update; I now see that there was talk in Britain even in June of "post-truth politics" - and that I must have borrowed my title for this post from a post on 23 June by Chris Grey