Sharing our Lives With Brodie
My wife and I have had dogs for the whole of our 52 years of married life – and that has meant sharing our lives with our little furry friends. Because we usually spend a good part of our evenings watching television, it also means that our dogs have learned to become devotees of the screen as well – and our new puppy, our little West Highland White terrier, Brodie, is no exception.
He seems to enjoy watching sport (which is fortunate for all concerned, since we watch a good deal of it), and rugby in particular, and he is a great fan of the All Blacks – he gets especially excited if his namesake scores a try!
But what really spins his wheels is if he sees another animal, most of all another dog, on the screen. Despite the fact that we are convinced that he is unusually intelligent (what dog owners do not believe that about their pets?), he seems to think that what he has seen on the screen must be hiding behind the television set – or has somehow managed miraculously to escape on to the deck outside – and so what ensues is a good deal of barking and dashing around and jumping up on the screen in what is always a fruitless attempt to bring the interloper to account for itself.
Brodie is very sociable and likes nothing better than to meet other dogs for real, so his reaction is not a hostile one, but rather, we think, an expression of excitement and pleasure – he is hoping to meet a playmate or to make a new acquaintance.
His reaction is most marked when it is a dog that makes an appearance, but he reacts to any (apparently) living creature in a similar way – cats and horses are particular favourites, but even fish or insects or cartoon characters will do.
It is only when one has spent some time watching television with someone like Brodie that one realises how often animals – and especially dogs – appear on the screen. Dramas, soaps and documentaries will often find a role for a dog. And advertisers have grasped that a dog can help to persuade viewers to engage with whatever it is they are trying to sell and it is amazing how many ads feature a dog – so even the commercial breaks can be the occasion for a Brodie explosion of excitement.
We have got used to having our viewing (and listening) interrupted in this way and are reasonably tolerant of the fact that it is the critical moment of action or dialogue that is most often drowned out or obliterated by Brodie’s performance.
But the whole experience leads me to reflect on the interaction we have with our pets, and on the value that it brings, especially to children, in teaching us that we share our lives with other living creatures. Small children are just like puppies – in both cases, their initial perception of the world is that they are at its centre and that it was made just for them. Whereas puppies grow up naturally to reach a different view, however, children need help to do so.
The growing up process is essentially one in which the realisation gradually dawns on them that the world does not revolve around them, but is actually inhabited by a myriad of other people and creatures, all with similarly strong clams on its goodies. Good parents are the ones that aid this process, and having a pet in the family can help. Maturity is the state reached by those who grow up to understand the importance of the fact that we share the world with others and that our own interests do not and should not always take precedence.
So, my wife and I accept that, in addition to all the pleasure that Brodie brings us, the love and affection, the companionship, the long walks together, he also teaches us about life – that it is worth putting up with having to clear away his mess, with having our socks and underwear chewed up, with having our television viewing disrupted. It is a price worth paying for sharing our lives with another – and delightful – little creature.
Bryan Gould
23 August 2019
The Importance of Kindness
Television advertising has a huge impact on our lives. Even if we don’t recognise that, we know it has to be true, since otherwise why would advertisers spend so much on it?
Its significance, however, is greater than simply the influence it has on what we purchase and consume. It also has a role in reflecting back to us the values the advertisers assume we hold and the preferences we have.
That is why I am interested in – and encouraged by – what I detect is a recent trend in the themes emphasised by television commercials. I refer to the number of current ads that take kindness as their theme.
My first exhibit is a delightful commercial for a well-known chocolate bar. It features a small girl shyly trying to buy a bar, using various worthless plastic trinkets as currency. She watches carefully as she offers each trinket to see whether the shopkeeper will accept them.
The shopkeeper enters into the spirit of the transaction and eventually signals that he is satisfied with the price she offers. She gratefully takes delivery of the chocolate bar, takes it outside and gives it to her waiting Mum as a birthday present.
Then, there is the commercial featuring another small girl who is sent on her own for the first time to collect a litre of milk from the local dairy. She is welcomed back with a big hug by her family who have been texted by the shopkeeper to tell them that she made it to the shop and is on her way back home.
And then there is yet another small girl who is surprised and excited at being given a little puppy by her adoring father. And my final exhibit – a commercial by an insurance company which indulges in some wordplay involving the various usages and meanings of the words “kind”, “kinda”, and “kinder”, all in the attempt to persuade potential customers that they will be treated “kindly” when it comes to making a claim.
My reason for attaching importance to this welcome trend is that it signals, I think and hope, how powerful kindness can and should be in our daily lives. At a time when religious belief is declining – and, as a result, the moral touchstones apparently vouchsafed to us by divine instruction may be losing their force – we have both an opportunity and a need to establish from within ourselves a set of moral values that will both serve us well and convince our fellow citizens to act according to them.
The basis of my optimism on this score is not just the incidence of television commercials on the theme of kindness. We are fortunate in being offered signposts in this direction by some of our leading citizens.
I recall the much-lamented trade union leader, Helen Kelly, whose last words – sadly – on her death bed were “I just want people to be kind to each other”. And we have a Prime Minister who has become a world figure on the strength of the compassion she showed in the aftermath of the Christchurch shootings.
We each have it within our power to follow these examples and to adopt kindness as the fundamental moral value. That is where so many factors – our self-interest as a society, our instincts as social animals, the teachings we received at our mothers’ knees, our need to work with evolution to avoid obvious threats (like nuclear war) to the survival of the human species – would direct us.
And from kindness will flow so many other welcome and valuable moral values. Tolerance, compassion, generosity, sharing, empathy, helpfulness, honesty, trust, and forgiveness are all forms of kindness – that propensity to think of others, to put ourselves in their shoes.
If hard-headed business and advertising executives can grasp how powerful these ideas are, we should not be content to leave it to them alone to understand and know things about us that we do not recognise and act upon ourselves.
We will all be better off, as individuals and as a society, if we adopt kindness as our watchword. It is the best available guarantee of a successful future for our species and our planet.
Bryan Gould
19 August 2019
More Courage Needed
Most economists agree that a currently slowing economy could do with some stimulus – and they would also agree that there is no shortage of infrastructure projects which could be brought to productive fruition with help from that stimulus.
In view of the current practice of sub-contracting economic policy decisions to the Reserve Bank, many would no doubt see the Governor as the person best able to step on the accelerator; but Adrian Orr – having dropped interest rates to near zero – would almost certainly respond by saying that he has already deployed virtually all the weapons in his armoury.
He might also say that we task governments and finance ministers with managing the economy, and that it is their responsibility to step up to the plate – and on that point, he is surely right. His responsibilities are met, under current arrangements, when he sets the Official Cash Rate; it is then up to Grant Robertson to decide what to do with the monetary situation thereby created.
The first and most obvious avenue that opens up, with the cost of borrowing at such a low level, is a review of the government’s self-denying ordinance on increasing its borrowing. It makes no sense for the government to be reluctant to borrow, when it can do so at virtually no cost, and could thereby provide a shot in the arm for a slowing economy – as well as proceeding with economically beneficial infrastructure projects.
Sadly, Labour governments have often been unwilling to borrow when it would make sense to do so, for fear of being accused of profligacy, but this is to allow their opponents to set the agenda. The Governor’s whole point in bringing interest rates down, after all, is to encourage business to borrow and, by investing, thereby to stimulate production, employment and spending throughout the economy – so why shouldn’t the government do what it is clearly hoped others will do?
Only those who are ideologically opposed to the government taking a role in the economy could object. Why is borrowing by business to be encouraged as being good for the economy, whereas borrowing by government must be avoided?
We can go further. The case for the central bank making interest-free credit available for the purpose of publicly funding essential investment has often been recognised at other times and in other places as sensible and beneficial – and, in current circumstances, with interest charges virtually non-existent, it is surely a no-brainer.
It is hard to see what objection could be made. We are after all perfectly relaxed when the Reserve Bank presides over a monetary system in which the commercial banks are allowed to create almost all of our money out of thin air. We applauded the world’s monetary authorities when they practised “quantitative easing” – creating new money to strengthen the banks’ balance sheets following the Global Financial Crisis.
The central truth about money – that we create it and that it is our servant, not our master – is well encapsulated in the famous statement by John Maynard Keynes that “whilst there may be intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of land, there are no intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of capital.”
What Keynes is saying here is that we – that is, as a country or as a society – can do whatever we have the physical capacity to do and need not be inhibited by a lack of money because, if we are short of the money we need, we can create it – that a shortage of money is, for a sovereign country, never a reason for not doing something.
Many other countries around the world have followed this insight – not least, today, Japan and China – but, at various other times, countries like the pre-war United States re-arming under Franklin Roosevelt, and depression-ridden New Zealand under Michael Joseph Savage, when we built thousands of state houses and brought the Great Depression to an end in the 1930s.
When state-controlled Chinese interests buy up New Zealand enterprises, like Westland Milk Products, they pay for them using credit supplied to them cost-free by the Chinese central bank. We are too foolish and timid to use the same technique in order to protect our essential interests from foreign takeover – or just to get our economy moving again.
Bryan Gould
11 August 2019
A Post-Brexit Europe
In the 1960s, after I had graduated with a first-class Oxford postgraduate law degree, I joined the British Foreign Office as the top entrant of my year. There, I worked for a couple of years on European affairs and was eventually posted to the Embassy in Brussels.
After this exposure to the realities of what was then an emerging “Europe”, I concluded that joining the Common Market would be against Britain’s interests – but when I expressed this view on entering the House of Commons in 1974, I was immediately labelled as an “anti-European”.
I had to grin and bear this ridiculous label – all the more ridiculous, so it seemed to me, when I thought of my love for European art, music, literature, architecture and food, and the enjoyable holidays I had spent in France and Italy and Portugal, and recalled that my wife and I had met, fallen in love and married in Brussels, and that our son was born there.
That experience has led me to what to some may seem a surprising conclusion – that, far from being the promised land of European cooperation, the European Union is in fact the major obstacle to a fruitful and rewarding relationship between the UK and Europe.
The fact is that a full and proper recognition of what each has to offer the other – and especially what Europe has to offer us – has been obstructed by all the baggage that has come with it. To limit the possible forms our relationship could take to membership of the EU is to accept the whole unwieldy and uncompromising super-structure built by those intent on, despite early assurances to the contrary, creating a single European state.
It has meant accepting as the foundation stone of “Europe” a Franco-German deal that, from the outset, was inimical to our interests. It has meant accepting economic policies designed to serve the interests of multinational corporations and reflecting the neo-liberal convictions of German bankers. It has meant recognising the European Court of Justice as our supreme court, able to over-rule our own courts and strike down laws passed by our own parliament, and thereby removing from us one of the essential powers of a sovereign state.
It has meant being unable to control and protect our own borders, and unable to restrict the inflow of foreign workers. It has meant being unable to regulate our own trade relationships, denying us access to efficiently produced food and raw materials from around the world and leaving us powerless to defend British manufacturing against powerful competition from the Continent. It has meant paying a substantial annual subscription for the privilege of belonging.
Little wonder, then, that the “Europe” we were commited to was rejected in the 2016 referendum. But there is a corollary that promises a much brighter future for UK-EU cooperation.
With Brexit achieved and behind us, the way will then be clear to build a much more beneficial relationship for both parties. We can then give proper recognition to what has always been true – that we are historically, geographically, economically, politically, culturally and militarily part of Europe – a Europe that is not narrowly defined by the EU.
With the obstacles to cooperation removed, we can then, as a sovereign state, make a fresh start and build a mutually acceptable and rewarding relationship with our friends across that narrow body of water we call the Channel.
We can, as one sovereign entity with another, negotiate in good faith a sensible trading relationship that serves both our interests. We can focus on, and extend, what I like to call “functional” cooperation – that is, working together on issues where we can both gain from sharing our expertise. In matters of developing technology, research, communications, education, foreign policy, military preparedness, there is everything to be said for working together.
We can each bring to the relationship our own particular strengths. From the British side, this would mean deploying in the common interest the expertise as a financial centre developed by the City of London – there would seem to be no point, post-Brexit, in the EU trying to set up a comparable capability of its own, when it is already available on its doorstep and has experience of working in both interests.
If we can cast aside pre-conceptions and have the breadth of vision to recognise the possibilities, in other words, a new golden age for European cooperation is possible. We can each strengthen our “European-ness” in a cultural sense, and enjoy what each can offer. Brexit should certainly not be the end of European cooperation; it may well be the launching pad for a much closer and more fulfilling partnership.
Bryan Gould
13 August 2019
A No-Deal Brexit
What an extraordinarily depressing experience it is to be compelled to watch, at 12,000 miles distance, the contortions and machinations of the British political class as they set about their determined attempt to overturn the decision taken by the British people that they wish to leave the European Union.
The pages of publications like the Guardian are replete with articles by “constitutional experts”, exploring the various arcane ways in which so-called “democrats” could manipulate constitutional and parliamentary rules and practice so as to frustrate the will of the people by preventing a “no deal” Brexit— and all this supposedly in the name of democracy!
Let us be quite clear. The rearguard campaign to prevent a “no-deal” Brexit is merely a smokescreen for the real objective, which is to frustrate any Brexit at all and, in effect, overturn the referendum outcome. Despite protestations that they are committed to giving effect to the referendum, the Remainers’ actions tell a different story.
They calculate that, if the EU can be persuaded not to budge on negotiations for a deal, there will be sufficient opposition to a “no-deal” Brexit to mean that parliament will find a way to stop it.
The contempt they show for democracy is exceeded only by their arrogance – their conviction that they alone know best – and by their readiness to demonstrate that their true allegiance is not to British democracy and self-government but to the “ideal” of European union – and, in the interests of that ideal, that they are prepared to collaborate with the EU to ensure that no acceptable deal for Brexit is available.
Let us again be clear. A “no-deal” Brexit arises as a possibility at this stage only because the EU, in pursuance of their unspoken arrangement with Remainers, refuses to talk to, let alone negotiate with, a British government committed to withdrawal – a dramatic illustration of the extent to which, when we cannot even secure a position as a valid interlocutor on the issue of our own decision to withdraw, EU membership continues to mean a status of vassalage for the UK.
The EU are encouraged in this unreasonable intransigence by the continued efforts from Remainers to convince them that the battle to overturn the referendum result is not over and could yet be won if a deal is placed beyond reach. Defeated in the referendum and professing to abide by its outcome, they nevertheless demonstrate continually – and particularly to the EU – their determination at whatever cost to make it as difficult as possible.
What are the British people to make of this demonstration of contempt for them by their supposed leaders? For many, the sense that they are not being listened to – which, many believe, lay behind the referendum result – will simply have been confirmed.
Their confidence in democratic institutions and in their leaders will be further undermined. Their sense of being mere pawns, manipulated under a cloak of democracy in the interests of the political class, will have been validated.
What else are they to think, when so much effort is devoted by politicians to frustrating their wishes, and when what should be a reasonably straightforward proposition, that our EU membership should end, seems to be beyond our institutions to deliver and is not something that the EU is even prepared to discuss with those primarily involved?
Whatever we may think of a Boris Johnson government, there must be some sympathy with its position that terminating our EU membership, in its essence, must surely be something that is within the remit and power of the UK government – deal or no deal.
Whether or not there is a “deal” is as much the responsibility of the EU as it is of the UK. In the absence of any EU willingness to negotiate a deal, it cannot be the case that the UK is locked in – prisoners who cannot escape. A “no-deal” Brexit, when and if it happens, will have been engineered, not by Leavers, but by the absence of any alternative, brought about as a consequence of the Remainers’ collaboration with the EU to prevent an acceptable deal being agreed.
Bryan Gould
9 August 2019