Blog of Richard Zybert – Fighting my frustration

19th July 201720th September 2017

Open Letter To My MP

Dear Preet Gill,

As a constituent of Edgbaston, I would like to offer you warm congratulations on being elected to Parliament.

I would like to share with you some of my thoughts on Brexit. I don’t believe that MPs should blindly follow their constituents’ wishes, but I consider it my civic duty to express my opinion and I hope that you will find some of my arguments convincing.

I apologise for the length of this letter, but I found it difficult to be more concise.

I strongly believe that Brexit is bad for this country. The economic arguments are overwhelming, but I think there are other issues that are as important as economy.

EU is an attempt of changing the continent of Europe into a place where state-to-state conflicts are a thing of the past, where issues are resolved by negotiations and compromise. It doesn’t all go smoothly – how could it if these nations were killing each other for about 1000 years. But it is a great idea – and in the whole it is working – it is unthinkable today that there would be a military conflict between Germany and France or Italy and Austria (not to mention Germany and Poland).
Even Greece in all her trouble is certainly not in danger of being invaded – which makes a great change as compared to previous centuries. To achieve this it isn’t enough to have a trade relationship. Open borders and free movement of people is absolutely essential – without borders, there is nothing to attack or defend. It also requires solidarity – stronger nations help others to catch up.

The idea that we now declare that we don’t want to be a part of it is sickening.
And all the empty declarations that “we are leaving EU, but we are not leaving Europe” mean nothing.
Like in any divorce – the process takes over, it is “us and THEM” and maintaining decent relations after this is really hard. We are not going to be friends as we were before we got married.
We are separating ourselves from the cultural roots that were with us for centuries.

All of this doesn’t leave us unchanged. The only way we can justify any of this is by convincing ourselves that we are BETTER THAN THEM. This nationalistic, jingoistic rhetoric spills into racism and xenophobia.
All of this slowly filters through to international media and informs other nations view about us. And it doesn’t matter that we are not all racists (not even a majority) – the impressions count.

I believe that the whole Brexit agenda is driven by a quite small minority of people who actually believe the “us better than them” argument. They managed to win a small majority in the referendum and are now blackmailing everybody else by the “will of the people” slogan and “enormous backlash” threat.
Both of these are spurious. The 4% win in an ill-defined and badly argued referendum is not “the will of the people”. Not to mention the fact that the franchise was defined so as to exclude the people who have real interest in the outcome – 16-17 year old, EU citizens in the UK and UK expats for more than 15 years.

The threats of dramatic consequences if the “will of the people” is ignored are also overplayed. Even ignoring the fact that opinion seems to be moving against Brexit now – it is not clear what exactly is the danger.
It is obvious that – whatever happens – Brexit is not going to bring the benefits the Leave campaign promised – so – we can assume that the 52% who voted for it are going to be bitterly disappointed when it happens. Together with 48% who didn’t want it in the first place. That is just about everybody.
On the other hand – if it doesn’t happen – at least 48% will be happy. The 52% may get angry – although – by then, many of them will realise it was a mistake.
So – the political argument here suggests that we should not do it – in order to minimise the number of unhappy voters.

I conclude from this that the most sensible route is to withdraw the Article 50 letter before it is too late (before March 2019).

What I believe prevents this course of action is inaction in Parliament. There are many short term political reasons not to rock the boat – in both main parties. Whips, jobs, tactics (to make sure that the other side is blamed for whatever happens). Pressure from constituents also plays a role here.
However – this is serious – the whole future of the nation is at stake and there is not much time to save it.
I believe that at some point all MPs must act simply according to their own beliefs. If this Parliament sits there and allows the nation to commit suicide, the history will judge it.

Best Regards

Richard Zybert

28th December 2016

Bloody Experts!

Radio 4 Today programme had Michael Gove ranting about experts again. And they put reasonable Stephanie Flanders against him… simply no contest.

It is infuriating!

And nobody asked him who is mending brakes of his car and plumbing in his house – not to mention his body. I hope he consults experts.

He was saying that we have to demand facts from experts, rather than taking them on their word… but – he ignores the fact that that is exactly what experts do, in contrast to politicians – base their statements on facts. When he was asked about the £350m for NHS on the Leave bus, he said “we will see” – suggesting that this doesn’t require facts. And the difference between him and the experts is that he KNOWS that this number is false. So – he is not mistaken, he is lying.

He also said that now the responsibility lies with those in power – how convenient! He doesn’t have any power, so we should not blame him for anything.

I wish the Today program would bring somebody who could argue on behalf of experts.

The real difference between experts (I mean, real experts, not just people who pretend to be experts) and politicians is that the politicians’ job is to try to make us believe in something, experts’ job is to tell us what they think. A lying expert is no expert, a lying politician is.. – well … a politician.

Understanding of scientific process also tells you that experts are never really wrong. It is our (media, politicians etc.) interpretation of what they say that can be wrong. If a weather expert says there is 75% probability of rain tomorrow and then it doesn’t rain, the expert wasn’t wrong – it was the bloke who said “experts say it will rain”. Richard Faynman famously said that science is a technique of managing uncertainty. Unfortunately this is not convenient for political one-liners. But blaming people who provide expertise for the fact that we chose to quote snippets of it out of context is dishonest.

Gove also called the experts elite – I am thinking of some lonely researcher crunching numbers – to be called elite by Michael Gove – it is unreal!

23rd December 201627th April 2019

Are we scared?

Every time I turn on radio or open a paper I am bombarded with news that should make me run into a bomb raid shelter and stay there. But I don’t – none of us does.

Have we lost fear or is it that we don’t believe what we are told anymore?

I think it is a little bit of both.

When I think of the cold war (or should this be “first cold war” as we seem to be entering a new one now) – I wasn’t scared then. When I was 10 – the nuclear shelter under a small apartment building where my parents lived was the ideal place to play hide and seek – this is my memory of cold war.

Also, I think, over time we learned not to worry too much about stuff we can do nothing about. This may be a dangerous trend as it is often too easy to assume we can do nothing about stuff. Global warming is the prime example – with everybody else pumping all sort of crap into atmosphere – it is easy to think that what we do doesn’t matter, so we do nothing and don’t worry too much.

However, while I am not scared, it is hard to escape depression when you look around. I would not even mention terrorism – it is obvious, we all see what it does and nobody has any idea how to deal with it. But the new cold war is almost as depressing and almost as hopeless. At times one is tempted to think that in the end Trump trying to sound friendly towards Putin may be a sign that there could be a way of avoiding cold war… – until you realise that Trump is simply trying to realign US – a cold war against China may be the new idea.

Does it matter? It probably doesn’t. Cold war is a bad idea, and it is a much worse idea today than it was in the 50s. One redeeming feature of the first cold war was its ideological context. Both sides tried to prove that their political and economic system was better than the other side. Much of that was done with propaganda and misinformation. Some of that was done with stunts like sending dogs into orbit or people to the moon. However, I believe that cold war had some influence on smoothing of some glaring problems in both systems. It is very difficult to prove direct causality, but we saw easing of the most extreme injustices in the west – health service, welfare, civic rights – and at the same time, we saw Soviet Union making some careful compromises to consumerism. We can laugh at Lada cars, but – this was the first time they actually produced a working car that people could buy.

The problem is… we won. They are gone – North Korea and Cuba are not really an ‘opponent’ in a cold war. So – a new cold war is not going to be the same, there is no ideology behind it – market economy in some form dominates in Russia and China now – whatever the details of the political system. This makes the cold war simply about power. It could be the Syrian conflict or a trade war between China and US – I cannot see what’s in it for us. So – we win it or lose it – would it make any difference?

That is why – I am not scared, but I am depressed by that.

22nd December 2016

MoreUnited

Today the croudfunding appeal of MoreUnited.uk ends.

Last time I looked there was £270000 there. Really impressive. 8000 members in a short time. This really could help…

22nd December 2016

Welcome

This is to start my personal blog.

Like just about everybody in 2016 I get frustrated on a daily basis. Short of treating blogging as a therapy – I still think it may help.

And – if I manage to encourage somebody to actually read that – so much the better.

Richard Zybert