Thrift

The missus repaired some clothes the other day. As well as breathing new life into old trousers and not blowing the housekeeping the way her shopping benders usually do, this enterprise had the additional benefit of allowing her to feel thrifty. With the economy looking likely to tank again and George Osborne cutting the public sector like... well like a right-wing ideologue, surely making a few savings of this sort should be the order of the day? Thrift is practical. Thrift is virtuous. Thrift is sometimes a bit sanctimonious perhaps, but basically good. Isn’t it?

The merits of thrift in fact depend on who you want to do good for. It doesn't take a genius to work out that if you’re saving money you’re not spending it (though I know a six-year-old who would disagree). It did take a genius to work out what this means and that genius was John Maynard Keynes. Though often associated with the “hike up tax then spend like a drunken sailor” left-wing of politics, Keynes had some pretty subtle insights into the nature of recessions. His most influential principle was that, when economies are flat-lining, something needs to stimulate demand and get the wheels turning again. You can give people tax cuts and hope they spend more but, tight-fisted buggers that they are, the public might actually save some of the extra rather than blow it all on an Amazon binge. At times like this someone else needs to step in and flash a bit of green. That fall-back spender is usually the Government (pay attention young Osborne), though what they do with all the DVDs, books and iPods is a mystery.

Though not the first to notice the downside of saving, Keynes offered the clearest statement of the so-called “paradox of thrift”. One way of expressing this is to say that I may benefit if I follow Marguerite Patten’s wartime austerity tips described at last year’s Seedy Saturday. I save and my quids are in. However, if everyone starts making do and mending, demand will contract and the economy will head down the toilet. Keynes would’ve used a more decorous image as he was a gentleman as well as a genius. Whether or not he would have been as much of a gentleman had he met the young Marguerite in the Blitz is unknown. He was also, after all, an associate of the metrosexual Bloomsbury Group.

So it’s personal gain set against group loss. Still Christmas is coming and we all have a chance to be economic heroes. You may be sick of shops putting up their displays at the end of summer, outraged at being told to get your last minute gifts in October, and mad at the excess of Mega-Monday, but if there was ever a time to splash out surely this is it. Even that dourest of puritans Gordon Brown thought spending was our patriotic duty. From Superdrug to Skylark, from Tesco to Tizz’s, your town needs you! 

John McGowan, 8th Dec 2011 

Pope Paul V

“BURN THE POPE!” I heard them cry. This was my introduction to the Fifth in Lewes, 20 years ago, deep in a banger-strewn crowd at the Cliffe bonfire. Being a cradle, though lapsed, Catholic it was hard to know what to make of it. Perhaps a slightly over-the-top protest at the conservative policies of the Roman Catholic church? Or possibly I’d misheard and the sentiment was merely to spurn the poor old Pontiff. Or it might even have been something to do with soap. It was hard to tell with all the noise. But craning my neck above the crowd there clearly was a Pope. Sitting on top of a big pile of sticks. What on earth, I wondered, was the trouble with the Pope that caused him to be incinerated on a yearly basis?

 Courtesy of Viva Lewes

I’m not sure whether I felt reassured to find out that this ritual had been going on since the 1670’s and that the Pope concerned was well past caring about his profile in Sussex. The Pope who is burned (the same one every year) is Paul V, head of the Catholic Church from 1605 until 1621, and who thus just managed to get himself in the frame to be in charge at the time of the Gunpowder Plot.

So was he really so bad? Well it depends on your perspective. For many he was a champion of the Counter-Reformation who re-established Catholicism in southern Europe and completed some of the greatest projects of the Renaissance, including St. Peters and the Vatican Library. For others he was an overbearing autocrat with an exalted view of the Church’s authority over secular powers. He succeeded in pissing off most European governments including that of Venice who, when they got a bit uppity about running their own affairs, found themselves excommunicated. His CV also included the first condemnation of Galileo for suggesting the earth might not be the centre of the universe. Probably not one to mention at an interview when you think about how things turned out.

Paul’s dealings with England were comparatively mild. He’d barely got his bum on the Papal throne by the time Catesby and Co moved into action and it’s not clear he was even involved in any plotting. English animosity seems to rest on a letter he sent to James I in July 1606 which by all accounts contained friendly congratulations on James’ accession to the throne. True, James had been King since 1603 so this might be considered a bit late but Paul had only been in office himself for a year or so and who knows what the post was like in the 17th century. The real reason the English take a dim view of Paul was that the he also condemned the  oath of allegiance James demanded of his subjects. If you’re wondering whether James was annoyed I ask you, is the Pope Catholic?

Of course James may also have been feeling a little sensitive after the latest in a sequence of several plots to assassinate him. It seems James wasn’t all that popular, with his main qualifications for kingship being that he was a Protestant and that he was prepared take a  relaxed view of his mother’s decapitation by the previous regime in return for supreme power. It’s strange then that we still celebrate the deliverance of the king Charles Dickens described as “cunning, covetous, wasteful, idle, drunken, greedy, dirty, and cowardly”. Still he was obviously relieved at the thwarting of the plot and decreed that “Henceforth and in perpetuity ye Rooks and DFLs of Lewes shall annually drink a bellyfull of local ale, bury your differences and shove fireworks up the backside of that bloke in Rome before torching him whilst making as much noise as possible”.

Or something like that anyway.

John McGowan

Normans

Photo: Alex Leith

Just to be clear; that’s “Normans” rather than Norman. For those who need to recalibrate (and everyone else) here’s a question: what do Lewes and Sicily have in common? Both obviously have a history of exporting dodgy people abroad: Tom Paine (seditious in France and the Americas) and the Cosa Nostra. There’s also a sense of separation from, and occasional superiority to, the country to their north. Do you deny it? However the answer on the card is the presence in both of Norman castles. We all know about 1066 but perhaps may be less informed about the Norman adventurers who terrorised the Mediterranean at the same time. Both Lewes and Sicily were subjugated by the Normans and have big stone towers to prove they lost.

Lately I’ve been wondering about the consequences of these invasions. In Sicily the Hauteville dynasty didn’t do too badly, turning chaos into a stable government which enhanced Sicilian prosperity for a couple of hundred years. Given that 1066 is so central in British history just what did the Normans do for us? Was it all the “Norman Yoke” with foreign usurpers destroying our English ways?

It’s more intriguing because, like an England World Cup campaign, it could so easily have gone the other way. While the continentals possessed the quality strikers (lance-wielding, blood-curdling cavalry), the English had their traditional defensive hard men (in this case tooled-up with double-handed dane axes). Indeed if Wayne Rooney... sorry King Harold hadn’t had an awkwardly-timed away game at Stamford Bridge, William I might be remembered (if at all) as simply another French tourist who got a good kicking in Hastings.

It is clear that the Anglo-Saxon nobility had a rough ride post-Conquest. Their estates were removed and given to William-the-Conqueror’s buddies, such as Lewes’ William de Warenne. Many left the country. For the average Sussex peasant though, one wonders whether one feudal overlord would have been so different to another.  It’s clear that English standards of living hadn’t really recovered since the Romans left. One minute a cosmopolitan international empire, with indoor plumbing and wine; the next, intellectual decline, sharing huts with animals, and tepid beer. Mightn’t the Normans actually have improved things with their central authority, stone buildings and wine back on the shelves of the offie?

Perhaps so, but it can’t have been easy for the dyed-in-the-wool Rooks, what with those Up From Rouens literally lording it over them. Like DFLs a millennium later, the UFRs probably pissed people off with their poncy soft-furnishing shops and slick, metropolitan free magazines. French rather than Old English became the language du jour (though clearly not enough to stop my spell checker questioning “du jour”) and England was very much an occupied country. Increased central power meant both more efficient tax collection and a decline in the democratic structures of what had been a pretty sophisticated government. Next time you’re in town take a look at the Castle again. Is it the sort of thing you build with a contented population? I can’t help feeling it’s more in the “I’m in charge so don’t f#@k with me” vein. It wasn’t only the toffs who dusted off their passports in the late 11th century.

Still, as we’re being told by our rulers today, short-term pain is the price of longer-term gain. And indeed, a mere 700 years after Norman hegemony established a coherent English state, there we were at the head of a global empire. Sometimes it just takes politicians with the courage to make the unpopular decisions and clear up the mess left by the last lot. We’ll all benefit in the end.

Now, which Norman were we talking about again?

Growing Your Own Vegetables

“If I could show you the cabbage that I planted with my own hands”

Thus spoke the Roman Emperor Diocletian, more famous for chucking Christians to the lions, but also someone who gave up ruling the world for the pleasures of his allotment. There are days when I fantasise about following his example, especially as it involved a palace in Croatia and a load of slaves. As well as the other pleasures of growing your own, it seems that it can end the careers of tyrants. What could possibly be the trouble with it?

It turns out you don’t have to look far. Only in fact to Lewes’ own Seedy Saturday. This is an event where you can think about interesting things to plant, the more sedentary joys of others planting things for you, and listen to Marguerite Patten reminiscing about digging for victory. Then you turn into the bookstall and find yourself in a survivalist fantasy land. Wall-to-wall self-sufficiency manuals full of advice on preparing for the apocalypse by getting in your brassicas.

The idea of us producing our own food to protect ourselves is an important part of many responses to current environmental concerns. For example the magazine “The Land” envisages an agrarian idyll where, following the collapse of capitalism, we return en-masse to growing food. An increased emphasis on food self-sufficiency is also a staple of our local Transition Town movement (they like the word “resilience”). The recent Climate Camp even invited me to “Grow my own Future”. Though I’m as fond of a metaphor as I am of a ripe Ailsa Craig and realise I won’t be picking juicy futures directly from my cold-frame, the implication is once again that growing your own is the way forward.

While this reasoning is seductive quite a lot is missing. For one thing food self-sufficiency leaves populations grubbing out a precarious existence vulnerable to climatic variations or crop failures. The opposite of resilience really. We protect against this by buying food from a number of sources and countries. We can do this because for 7,000 years or so (and especially since the industrial revolution) human society has been moving away from the mass of the population being involved in food production.  This fosters the development of income-earning and more diverse skills. We have modern medicine and science and art and philosophy and a reliable food supply because primarily we’re not all stuck on the land.

If you think the fossil fuels of capitalism are going to run out soon (though a more likely danger for our environment seems to be that they won’t) a kind of post-apocalyptic subsistence life might be one way to go.  At times it’s hard to avoid the impression that vegetable gardening has become the latest meaningless gesture for the environmentally pious. While home grown food can be great the benefits of not relying on it are even greater. So, while I’m going mulch spreading soon, I have to do a quick shop at the greengrocer first and strike a blow for a better world.

John McGowan, 5^th May 2011

Republicanism

A few years back during the Golden Jubilee, a lad in my village asked if our chimney could be used as an anchor point for some street party bunting. The source of the request allowed me to inveigh against monarchist feeling in much the same way that my elderly aunt would fret about homosexuality:  I wasn’t biased but it was sad to see it among younger people. I seemed to be a lone voice as the village was taken over by royalist fervour. It’s something of a relief therefore to be in Lewes for the Royal Wedding.  Here the heirs of Tom Paine are mustering just a single street party. Republican kudos for a town of 16,000. A quick look at the papers suggests though that this may not be the national mood. What, one wonders, is the trouble with republicanism?

It isn’t that we British necessarily have a tradition of deference. Quite the contrary; we’ve been overthrowing kings since the Battle of Lewes in 1264 (an extra republican feather in the town’s cap, though the victory was short-lived). Another near miss was the Peasants Revolt of 1381. If Wat Tyler’s mob had not arranged to negotiate with the teenaged Richard II at Smithfield (as opposed to, say, killing him) the history of Britain might have been rather different.  Regicides had better luck in 1649 with the beheading of Charles I. However, 11 years later a monarch was back: the hedonistic Charles II no doubt a welcome antidote to the Taliban-style government of the Puritans. The Brits got rid of James II in 1688 because they didn’t like the cut of his Roman Catholic jib. He was replaced by his daughter Mary (with William of Orange) and ultimately by the current dynasty leaping over 50 or so more eligible, but Roman Catholic, candidates. We’ve also been curtailing the  powers of the Sovereign since Magna Carta leading to the current “Constitutional” (all the trappings but little of the power) arrangement. The popularity of individual monarchs has yoyo-ed wildly (there were even assassination attempts on Queen Victoria) up to the last significant dip in the late 1990’s.

Despite all this we never quite seem to get rid of the monarchy itself. Perhaps the trouble is that most of our anti-royal feeling has not been about republicanism at all but rather about disliking the Sovereign's beliefs (James II, Prince Charles), behaviour (Charles I, Prince Charles) or personality (Henry III, Prince Charles). Rather oddly it’s still treasonable to advocate certain forms of republicanism. Perhaps more significantly anti-royalists continue to be marginalised as young (The Sex Pistols – at least they were once), cranks (Tony Benn) or troublemakers (Benjamin Zephaniah). Opinion polls suggest we’re still keener on the institution than a presidency (i.e. a retirement scheme for seedy political hacks). Politicians too find the royals useful and have been reluctant to act on proposals to reduce their religious and political roles further. 

Another displaced royal, King Farouk of Egypt is alleged to have said, "Soon there will be only five Kings left... Spades, Clubs, Hearts, Diamonds and England.” And who would bet against him. Though handsome young Wills hasn’t turned out quite as many would have wished, commoner Kate is looking like helping the Firm well into the post-Diana era. It seems that storming the Bastille may have to wait once again.