It Could Be Said Newsletter #3
Boris Johnson's Self-Defeating Dividing Lines, FISH!, Unconscious Bias Training, Cyberpunk 2077, and Singing Cats
Is this newsletter late because I’m incompetent, was waiting to see if a Brexit deal was going to be announced on Sunday, or belatedly realised that due to my son’s birthday being last Friday that I should probably shift to a different day during the holidays a week earlier than planned. Well you take a bit from Column A, and a bit from…
Selsdon on the Keir
In scenes that strangely echo the country’s 1992’s exit from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, the British Government repeatedly said it wasn’t changing its mind on the Christmas coronavirus regulations before chaotically ramping up its efforts to sustain its position before suddenly and drastically u-turning. For Norman Lamont twice increasing interest rates on the same day, see London managing to go from Tier 2 to Tier 4 in less than a week. One wonders if George Soros discovered a way to short shares in Turkey wholesalers. The mess the Government got itself into is once again evidence of its fatal flaw throughout the pandemic - wilful optimism and refusal to plan on anything other than the best case scenario.
Oddly, the area where this failing is most visible is in the dividing lines that it draws against the Labour Party. Three days before his emergency announcement, Boris Johnson would accuse Keir Starmer of wanting to cancel Christmas. But of course Starmer hadn’t called for Christmas to be cancelled. All he had done was urge the Prime Minister to call an urgent review of the evidence, and offer his support if he decided to reduce or cancel the Christmas relaxation of the rules. Even at Prime Minister’s Questions he could only bring himself to say that it is “likely” such a relaxation was a mistake, before repeating his call for a review.
But despite this cowardly refusal to follow the logic of his own concerns, the idea that Starmer was pushing the Prime Minister to cancel the restrictions seems unarguable because of Johnson’s own accusations. Likewise the idea that Starmer was demanding a circuit breaker lockdown when the Government was considering one in September only sounds plausible because the Government kept accusing Labour of having that policy, long before Starmer dared suggest it in mid-October.
At the moment the ease with which the Government can define his positions is rebounding to Starmer’s benefit because they keep picking such ludicrous dividing lines. No one could blame Starmer, when he took a victory lap at Johnson’s expense at a rare Sunday press conference; “It was blatantly obvious last week that the prime minister’s free-for-all Christmas was a risk too far”. In that it reminds me of how Harold Wilson’s “Selsdon Man” jibe about the 1970 Tory Manifesto being an attack on the post-war consensus, something which helped give some character and energy to what was actually a typically listless presentation by Ted Heath.
Starmer would be wise to recognise that the platitudes that are now coming his way are unearned, and start worrying about why Boris Johnson’s caricature of him are accepted as fact by friend and foe alike. After all, Heath became a far less successful politician when Wilson started choosing his attacks more wisely.
This Week’s Top Five!
A new feature for the Newsletter - a mini-listicle! This time due to a discussion with @AMGarvey, five reasons why Brexiters talk about fish. Queue the David Letterman music….
1. All countries protect their farming and fishing industries to an unreasonable extent because the industries are unusually concentrated in rural areas that they dominant, hence magnifying their political clout. After all Brexiters aren’t arguing with themselves - the European Union is also saying that they will walk away from a deal over fish. In the case of Britain and France it doesn’t help that key fishing areas (Scotland/Cornwall and Brittany) have had fraught relationships with the national establishment and identity.
2. The emphasis in recent weeks has been on securing an agreement on catch quotas (how much of the fish caught in British waters goes to us, how much goes to the Europeans) but the weakening of Britain’s ability to ensure British ships were actually British owned and operated has also been a long running issue. This became particularly fraught after Spain and Portugal, with their more industrial approach to fishing, joined the EEC. That’s a particularly big issue as many of the ancillary jobs linked to fishing are reliant on where the catch is landed, where boats are serviced, etc.
3. Britain joining the Common Fisheries Policy really did rob us of the ability to increase the amount of fish our fishermen caught, because it happened at the same time as the process towards extending each coastal nation’s Exclusive Economic Areas from 6 miles off the coast to 200 miles off the coast accelerated. Regardless of whether you think it was a price worth paying, it is unarguable that we would have gained exclusive access to much more fish if we had never joined. However…
4. ….What is left out of the classic Brexiter narrative, was that the failure of Norway and Iceland to join the EU is the key reason that Britain was unusually badly hit by the adoption of the CFP, because whilst we lost the ability to kick European fishermen out of areas they had been fishing in for centuries, Norway and Iceland could do that to us. This I think has fuelled a desire to do the same to EU fishermen, even though the principle of grandfathering in longstanding fishing routes is clearly reasonable.
5. Finally, too many people forget that Euroscepticism is a movement that came from nothing to sudden victory. And somewhere in the folk and institutional memory of the movement is an affection for those who stood by the cause in the hardest of times. It’s for that reason that Tate & Lyle were looked after with the new sugar cane import quotas, and why even inland Brexiters have an affection for fishing communities that have long been hotbeds of Euroscepticism.
Unbiased on Unconscious Bias
The world of politics and equality clashed in an unusually direct way last week, with the Government announcing that they would be phasing out the use of Unconscious Bias Training within the Civil Service and would be urging other public sector bodies to follow suit. This was due to evidence collated in a recent review of the literature surrounding the effectiveness of such training, which according to the Government, proved that it didn’t work.
In a rather funny example of the Government’s inability to effectively draw dividing lines on equality issues, this was met with at worst a shrug. Even left of centre outlets covered the decision respectfully, acknowledging that the effectiveness of Unconscious Bias Training has been increasingly challenged by people who are genuinely progressive on equality issues. I thought this report by the Guardian caught the tone perfectly - taking the Government’s objections at face value before asking what they will replace the cancelled training with. I can imagine a Government that seems to view equality issues through an alarmingly Americanised prism would have been quite befuddled that there weren’t more howls of outrage.
But for all the gentle teasing in the previous paragraph, I think this is exactly the type of work that the Equalities Office should be doing. They’ve carried out the type of review that few organisations have the resources or the inclination to do themselves, and amplified those findings in a way that no one else could. What makes this more useful (not less), is these issues really have been thrashed out for several years, with something close to a consensus having emerged that the grander claims of Unconscious Bias Training aren’t true. But that couldn’t cut through because most practitioners didn’t know about the rather obscure psychological debates, and those that did had to weigh up other considerations. Not least amongst them was how to argue against something that many minority representatives were campaigning for because they felt it would better challenge stereotyping and microaggressions than other forms of diversity training, which can tend to be dry restatement’s of the Equality Act.
And that I think is the key challenge the Government faces now. They have marshalled the evidence to prove that Unconscious Bias Training should be scrapped, but now they actually have to prove that they can implement a more effective alternative. They’ve given people all over the country a nudge to look again at Unconscious Bias Training, now they need to give organisations a live example of what to replace it with.
New Podcast Alert
As always I was joined by Simon Alvey and Dr Luke Middup for the latest It Could Be Said Podcast. Our plans to wait for a Brexit deal to celebrate our 150th episode were repeatedly scuppered, but you can listen to our take on Boris Johnson’s tiers announcement here.
Old Man Yells At Cyperpunks
The big story in pop culture these past couple of weeks has of course been the thermonuclear implosion of the year’s biggest video game - Cyberpunk 2077. As an older, somewhat casual gamer, I’ve found the whole debacle oddly telling.
There are some which are just mean being an old man - contrary to what publishers have taught the kids, it’s not actually impossible to do effective games testing before they’re released to the public, you just need to invest enough time and resources to allow the games-testers to do their job and for the developers to incorporate their feedback. Likewise, the studio releasing a broken game so they could make the Christmas sales seems odd to me, given the fact that it is actually illegal to sell Cyberpunk 2077 to children. Would a twentysomething really be discouraged from buying the game if they have to use their own wages to purchase it in June next year? Could they not have salvaged a 2020 release by prioritising the next-gen versions, with ports to PS4/XBOX-1 coming later? And don’t get me started on people pre-ordering a game – with digital editions now standard, it’s almost always impossible to miss out on a game. I get FOMO, but I’m baffled as to how corporations manage to generate it when there’s no chance of missing out!
But the main thing that worries me is how self-important video games are getting. Leaving to one side the irony of a game celebrating rebellion against corporate overloads ending up being remember for poor working practices and miss-selling, the sheer time it took to develop was a warning sign. It’s eight year development cycle is longer than the time it took Shigeru Miyamoto’s team to design and develop the four classic Super Mario scrolling platformers, even whilst working on other games! And his games worked goddamit! Given the pace that computers evolve such a long gestation is always going to leave developers sucking air. Video games are an artfrom that uniquely demand quick development times.
The defence will of course be that the time is needed to develop the 175 hours of gameplay apparently contained with Cyberpunk 2077. But who really wants that much first-run gameplay? It’s been suggested that 90% of players don’t finish the games they purchase, something that robs them of the sense of achievement that comes from playing a game through to its conclusion. Compare that to Metal Slug 3, which provided me with one of my happiest lockdown memories I completed the game with my four-year old son in one sitting. Which of course we could, because the game was originally developed for the arcade. Likewise replaying old SNES and Mega Drive platformers on my Switch has reminded just how short even games designed for the home market, used to be.
It all feels like the success of Rockstar and Rocksteady has caused the whole industry to lose its mind. Surely a good rule of thumb is that if the average film costs at least £15 to buy on disc or digital, when it’s first released then video games shouldn’t feel compelled to go beyond four times the length of an average movie to justify charging £60. Which means ten hours. Shorter, sharper games would be easier to develop, easier to test, and easier to complete. That would surely make everyone happier than the bloated mess the industry, and its content, has become today.
Song of the Week
I’m a huge fan of Red Letter Media, having stumbled upon them when they released their Mr Plinkett review of The Force Awakens. One of the things I genuinely find fascinating is how three otherwise unheralded men in Wisconsin have carved a genuinely lucratively niche in pop culture through YouTube adverts, merchandise and over 9,000 patreons. And they’ve picked up other work too, such as two of them being voice actors for an online cartoon and singing this rather winsome take on Baby It’s Cold Outside.