Book Review: The Promise of the Child by Tom Toner

The Promise of the Child, Volume One of the Amaranthine Spectrum by Tom Toner, Gollancz.
(I have received an advance copy of this novel from Orion Books to allow me to review it ready for publication of the paperback edition on the 13th of October 2016.)

A province where silver really does grow on trees is just one of the places which Tom Toner takes the reader to in this rich novel. (The local currency is made of silk.) There is also a civilization where artificial bees made with gold airframes are a sign of ostentation. Tom Toner isn't lacking in imagination.

After a Prologue set in fourteenth century Bohemia, the novel is set roughly twelve thousand years in the future, where humanity (or at least the semi immortal Amaranthine) have colonised a "firmament" within about twenty light years of the "Old World" (Earth). They have found planets with breathable atmospheres, (composition like that of the young Earth) but no sign of any life originating other than on Earth. An incredibly ancient spacecraft found frozen in the rings of Saturn turns out to have been crewed by Dinosaurs, also from Earth. The Amaranthine (divide and) rule over a number of races however: the dozen or so "PRISM" species of intelligent (and generally small) primates living on various planets and habitable moons, and the giant Melius, who are supposedly the genetically engineered offspring of the Amaranthine themselves.The Melius mostly live on the Old World. Many Melius are servants of the Amaranthine. The Melius also share the Old World with intelligent birds, who are servants of the Melius.

The novel is composed of several separate plot threads seen from the point of view of various individuals of various species, including Corphuso, a PRISM scientist and inventor of a mysterious machine known as the Soul Engine. Several parties plot to gain possession of the Soul Engine and its hapless inventor, not stopping short of large scale military actions and simple skullduggery in their efforts.

Most Amaranthine live in "Vaulted Lands" that is, planets hollowed out with an artificial sun at their centre to act as small Dyson Spheres. One of these habitats is deliberately destroyed, and the Amaranthine face a real threat to their power and even existence. The Amaranthine are traditionally ruled by their oldest individuals, and because they are only semi immortal this means that their rulers tend to be dangerously close to senility. However, there is one, Aaron, seen in the fourteenth century prologue, who not only appears to be older than any of the "Perennials" but also seems to be unaffected by any form of senility. After centuries of his standing near to those who rule, it seems to be time for Aaron to take over the reins himself and save the Amaranthine, but this doesn't seem to be his chosen course. He still prefers to chose someone else and help them. There are also rumours that Aaron does not have a shadow.

A Melius "Lycaste" lives a fairly blameless life by the sea, but is inveigled into going on a disastrous shark hunt by his friends and then finds himself apparently murdering a government official. He goes on the run and ends up, through a nightmare adventure and drumhead trial, in the Melius second city of Vilnius just as a Melius warlord prepares to attack it in the latest phase of a long running civil war. Aaron is also in Vilnius, and the plot threads, like the novel's characters, converge on the city. There is a huge battle as PRISM armies invade from spaceships even as the Melius fight each other, but the Soul Engine may prove more significant than that.

The Promise of the Child is an absorbing and accomplished novel, and it argurs well for the rest of the Amaranthine Spectrum when it appears.


The link at the top of this review goes to the Net Gallery page for the novel. This one goes to the Amazon page for the novel.

PS:
While you are here, feel free to look around the blog.

Dystopian Spin Against Brexit

The author's dystopia "Pilgrim Process" features a  tactic used by the would-be dystopian regime when it wants to make abrupt and profound changes to society, such as the introduction of multifunction ID cards and capital punishment. (The political consensus is against capital punishment until one day it strangely isn't.) There is an orchestrated outpouring of spin, not just from those one might expect to campaign for a change, but also from those whom the public might trust never to do so. Politicians suddenly reverse a position they have held to all their life, newspapers change allegiance and not only is there an overwhelming volume of spin all of a sudden, but it is all coordinated and dozens of apparently unconnected commentators and organizations speak as one. This may ring a bell with anyone who's experienced the current barrage of anti-Brexit spin put out by David Cameron's "Remain" campaign and its many unexpected friends around the world. Newspapers suddenly backing a position at odds with their reader's habitual preferences may strike a chord with anyone who has seen a copy of the Mail on Sunday recently, with its increasingly fanatical pro EU slant so totally at odds with its mainly Eurosceptic readership and the weakly proBrexit stance of its weekday sister paper, the Daily Mail.

In the nineteen forties, George Orwell wrote of "words falling on the issues like snow". This is more like a violent hailstorm, but the truth and the real issues are still apt to get buried.

This hailstorm of propaganda is not a panic reaction, because it was David Cameron and nobody else who decided that there would be a referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union in the first place. Mr Cameron went out of his way to court a debate, upon which he has poured out spin like a biblical plague. What's being decided here is not whether or not the UK will leave the EU, but whether or not any important issue will ever again see a civilized and reasoned debate. It is nearly impossible for anyone but the government to win a "debate" conducted in this manner. The number of individuals and organizations which are orchestrated into a perfect storm of propaganda is too great for anyone less than a government to pull it off. The opposition are left trying to wave banners in the teeth of a hurricane. 

PS:

Pro Brexit campaigners have tried to raise the issue of Turkey joining the European Union, only to be slapped down with the line that Turkish membership is "probably" decades away. This is revealing, because it's certainly not being said that Turkey will not join. Until recently it was German policy that Turkey should not join, but certain difficulties with Russia may have made the powerful Turkish army suddenly welcome in the peace loving EU.

PPS: The vote was for Brexit, of course. However, the dystopian spin hasn't gone away and Tony Blair, for example, has repeatedly declared that the electorate will change their minds and be given another vote, where they will of course vote to remain in the European Union and sign up for any and all of its new schemes and wheezes. It's extraordinary.

Defence of the Realm: Britain on Mr Putin's Chessboard

Diplomatic Situation

Last year, some politicians and military historians were concerned that the British public might, in 2014, forget what the world went through in 1914 to 1918: the period of the Great War. Even as recently as three weeks before the publication of this article (during the Sochi Winter Olympics) it looked as if the main reminder of that pivotal time in human affairs would be the BBC's programming efforts, with both national and regional programmes on the history and background of the Great War. And the nearest a flood weary British public was getting to empathy with their ancestors in the trenches, was an acute anxiety about the supply of sandbags.

But on this weekend, the beginning of March, 2014, the rolling news channels are bringing us back to 1914 with a bump. Though the pre-recorded discussions about the possibility of another world war, based on what went wrong in 1914, all concentrate on tensions between China and Japan, the emerging diplomatic train crash is in Ukraine. A more dangerous place than a group of uninhabited islands, and from the British point of view, close to home geographically and even closer to home historically, because the Crimean War was in many ways the prototype of the Great War, with the advent in Europe of the sort of industrialised siege warfare fought at an eye-watering cost in blood and treasure that the Americans would shortly experiment with between themselves.

Although most readers will have seen glib presentations by earnest young British historians trying to prove that the Great War was Britain's fault, the truth was that Britain had spent the opening years of the twentieth century repeatedly intervening to stop war breaking out between the great powers over the Balkans, and what finally allowed it to happen was a blithe assumption by the British Cabinet that their Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, could go on doing this indefinitely, a determination on the part of Austro-Hungary to consolidate its grip on the Balkans, recently bartered for with the Ottoman Empire without the slightest reference to the people of the Balkans, and a belief on the part of the German government that 1914 was a window of opportunity to clip the wings of both the Russian and French Empires at the same time.

Although Winston Churchill, then the First Lord of the Admiralty, is portrayed by the "Britain's fault brigade" as the cabinet member most eager for war, he only realised that war was more than faintly possible only a few days before it broke out. He was listening to Edward Grey reading out the German-approved ultimatum which Austro-Hungary had delivered to Serbia, and about twenty minutes into this document, he realised that this was the sort of demand issued by warlike kings in ancient or Biblical times, and it was more extreme than any diplomatic paper which had been published in Europe for some centuries. Serbia was being faced with a demand that she should meekly agree to stop existing, on account of an assassination carried out by a group of mostly Bosnian private citizens. Happenstance had it that a Serb fired what turned out to be the fatal shots, after Bosnians had thrown what turned out to be ineffective bombs. Austro-Hungary and Germany knew this, but their differing ambitions both required a Serbian capitulation, so that was what they demanded. By any modern standard, Bosnian and Serb grievances against Austro-Hungary seem perfectly valid, too: they didn't want to pass from one Empire to another, they wanted to be Bosnia and Serbia.

Even so, Britain could and probably would have evaded war, had Germany not decided to invade and crush Belgium, a declared neutral country, simply to shave a few days off their timetable for the invasion of France, which was one of Serbia's protecting powers. Had France and Russia not been Serbia's protecting powers, Germany would have had no interest in the Balkans at all. As it was, Serbia looked like a good pretext for a lightning war of aggression against Germany's two main European rivals.

With Serbia being a pretext for aggression in the first place, the hammer blow which landed on Belgium was completely unprovoked by anything which Belgium had done, and all that France and Russia had done to provoke war was insist, mostly through diplomatic channels rather than practical military action, that Serbia not be brutally crushed.

Though the patterns and alliances in 2014, vis a vis Ukraine, are different, the danger is very similar. Britain and America want all the parties to adhere to agreements made in 1994, and to the basic principles of international law. Russia in 2014, like Germany in 1914, has objectives which are incompatible with both and sees no reason why she shouldn't use force, the scale and brutality of which will be determined by operational convenience, as an attractive alternative to adhering to legal principles which will not give Russia what she wants. Britain and America, Germany too, are walking into the same trap as Russia and France did in 1914. They are advocating reason and high principle in the face of a great power that favours force.

Unlike Britain and America, Germany anticipated the current situation, or something approaching it, and she had a strategy. Which was to shelter the Ukraine from Russia by swiftly drawing Ukraine into the European Union. However, Germany completely sabotaged that strategy's chances of success a couple of years in advance, by making clear, with French support, that she absolutely would not countenance Turkish entry into the European Union, then or ever. Without Turkish membership and participation in EU policy making, there is little practical help or shelter which the EU can extend across the Black Sea to the Ukraine. Vladimir Putin's obvious riposte to all Germany and the EU's protest and bluster over Ukraine is "you and whose army?" If the answer to that one had been "well, the Turkish army" we might have seen a new thing on Earth: a conciliatory Kremlin.

Defence Capability

It's not just the diplomatic situation which is beginning to resemble 1914. Just over a decade after the Boer war, Britain entered the Great War with an army that was pitiably small by contemporary European standards, and with the Royal Navy assumed by the cabinet to be completely capable, when in fact it tended to lack the unglamorous capacities that would be needed the most. In particular, there was only token investment in any capacity to patrol Britain's coastal waters and protect coastal shipping. Then, as in 1939, everyone assumed that the railways were the backbone of British industry, but the reality in both world wars was that London, not the North and Midlands, was Britain's most important industrial area and all the railways running into London simply couldn't keep London supplied with enough fuel, food and raw materials to fight a war. The balance of the supplies were brought in by coastal shipping and many key industrial plants were built on the Thames with their own wharfs. Newspaper printing presses had newsprint delivered directly by ship, coal, wheat and timber tended to reach London by ship rather than rail, too.

The Royal Navy had a lot of battleships and heavy cruisers, but some apparently powerful classes of battleship were largely useless in practice because there was so little difference in power between main (12") and secondary armament (9.2") that gunnery officers were unable to determine which splash was due to which battery and therefore they were helpless to correct their own fire. The biggest cruisers tended to have a small number of very big guns rather than a large number of smaller guns; coupled with the basic range-finding and gun-laying technology of the day, this made it difficult to get the range of a target by "straddling it" before it had moved far enough for any range obtained to be meaningless anyway. (A ranging salvo fires each gun in in (rapid) turn, each set to a different range. By counting which shells in the sequence go either side of the target, the gunnery officer obtained the true range and could then fire a "broadside" of shells fired almost together to actually hit the target. The Glorious class cruisers had just four huge 15" guns: in battle, they obtained few, if any, hits. In WW2, the cruiser HMS Exeter with just six 8" guns, did critical damage to the fuel system on the German Pocket Battleship Graf Spee with just two accurate hits on the only weak spot in the target's armour. The Glorious class could have been effective if the guns had been stepped down a size to allow enough of them (at least six) to be carried to get the target's range in one salvo. The "smaller" Edwardian cruisers tended towards fearsome assemblages of 9.2" guns mounted all over, and unable to all bear on the same target for effective ranging salvos and destructive broadsides. Their captains might have sneered at HMS Exeter, half their size and with just three twin turrets mounting puny 8" guns.

In the years before 1914 and the outbreak of war, the Royal Navy concentrated its creative attention and not just its money, on the biggest ships and the biggest guns. If it had been a little more flexible, a little more heedful of small things, the Battle of Jutland in 1915 might just have ended the war. As it was, enough of the German fleet returned to port more or less intact to prevent the allied blockade being extended into the Baltic, and to pose an ongoing threat to Britain's coastal towns and vital coastal shipping. The biggest single reason for the German escape was that the Royal Navy's Grand Fleet fired too many shells which missed, the second reason was that insufficient attention had been paid to the detailed design of the shells themselves, so that many of the hits obtained did only superficial damage. Jutland left the German Navy badly shaken, but it wasn't destroyed and the British taxpayer had the right to expect that it should have been.

After Jutland, the Royal Navy put more of its money into destroyers, torpedo boats, gunboats and even motor launches, because these could swiftly protect coastal towns and coastal shipping from raiding forces, as well as protecting Atlantic convoys from U-boats. By 1939 and the outbreak of WW2, the destroyers were again too few in number and the torpedo boats, gunboats and launches almost non-existent. The whole capability, including seamanship skills and tactical understanding, had to be rebuilt under constant attack from German S-boats. See Peter Scott's book, "The Battle of the Narrow Seas" if there are any copies to be had.

In the present day, the MoD has recently announced an order to build three modified (ie: 90 metres long instead of 81 metres long) River Class patrol vessels. These will not only replace the three existing 81 metre River Class vessels, it is anticipated that they will be the only Royal Navy vessels routinely patrolling UK home waters. When it comes to patrolling all the seas, Atlantic, North Sea and Irish Sea, from Guernsey to the North of Shetland, three vessels is definitely not a crowd.

The 90 metre River Class, though, is close to being the right type of vessel for the job. It is five knots faster than the older 81 metre ships, can carry a bit more in the way of troops or cargo, and larger Merlin helicopters can land on its rear deck, as well as Lynx and their "Wildcat" replacements.  (Though, the Navy does not have large numbers of fully equipped naval Merlin helicopters, and the twenty-five Merlins now being transferred to the Royal Navy by the RAF are all troop/cargo aircraft without radar, sonar and serious weapons capability. If any helicopter can be found to operate from a River Class ship at all, it's likely to be an Agusta Westland Wildcat.) 

The rear deck, which is for cargo and salvage as well as helicopters, is coupled with a big crane, and although this is perceived as being mainly of use in civil emergencies, the swift salvage of intelligence material from sinking ships and downed aircraft can prove pivotal in war. In WW2, not only did the capture of code books and equipment from German and Italian vessels swing the tide of naval warfare in favour of the allies for months at a time, the capture, by a German commerce raider in the Indian Ocean, of an admiralty report into the vulnerability of Malaysia and Singapore to Japanese invasion, proved invaluable to the Japanese officers planning just such an invasion and it also affected Japan's decision to go to war against Britain and the United States in the first place. But to have one ship in the right place at the right time to pull off that kind of coup, it is necessary to have more than three of them at sea.

The problem with the River Class, though, is armament. There is almost none, though the 30mm cannon is powerful in the minds of MoD spokesmen talking up the protection of the Falkland Islands by HMS Clyde. The Royal Thai Navy has an almost identical vessel fitted with a much more powerful 76.2mm gun, but a bigger gun is going to look like grotesque overkill if used on any sort of pirate or smuggler's vessel, and yet against a Russian frigate, say, a ship with a 76.2mm gun is unlikely ever to close to within effective range before being sunk by a hail of guided missiles. It would be better to keep the 30mm gun, or perhaps replace it with the 40mm CTA gun now being fitted to the Army's Warrior armoured vehicles (more effective gun, but same size mounting.) An anti-surface capability should come from the careful integration of a small number of vertical launch missile tubes into the ship's superstructure. To give the patrol vessel a chance of survival should its patrol bring an encounter a front line enemy warship, without making it look warlike and threatening as it goes about its peacetime duties.

Corvettes of about the same tonnage as the River Class patrol vessel can be equipped with up to eight launch tubes for the Exocet MM40 block 3, which would allow engagements at a survivable range of 180km or so. The new Perseus missile being procured for the Royal Navy's new type 26 Frigates, is designed to fit the same launch tube. That would allow patrol vessels in or near the UK's coastal waters, to hold seaborne threats off at quite some distance. 

The River Class, as they stand, are not equipped with any sort of anti-air missile system, either. This is partly because there is no space, not necessarily for the missiles themselves, but for the target tracking system they would normally require. Variously the tracking system is a radar or optical device, it is generally big, expensive and complicated, and apart from being a potential point of system failure, target tracking systems are a source of radar or laser emissions which allow the enemy to keep track of the vessel's location as it undertakes evasive action; enemy anti-radar missiles can even home on the target tracking system and put the vessel's defences out of action very easily if they don't do worse damage. 

The new Seaceptor missile is designed not to need a target tracking system onboard the launch vessel. It can be launched on the basis of a fix from a surveillance radar alone (and the 90 metre River Class can have one of those with no problem) or even a non-radar sensor, or networked data from third party sensors such as on an AWACS aircraft, another ship, or even a (naval) Merlin helicopter. Once the Seaceptor is launched, the surveillance radar (if used) can immediately cease transmissions to avoid betraying the vessel's evasive actions or attracting anti-radar weapons. It is very compact, and subjects the launch vessel to minimal rocket blast when launched. A pack of three Seaceptors will fit in the same space as a single launch tube for legacy weapons such as Seawolf or MICA, and it provides Seawolf-type precision out to similar ranges as the now obsolete Sea Dart system from the old type 42 destroyers. Fitting the new River Class Vessels with six to eight unobtrusive 3-round launch packs is a no brainer, which means that only the British Treasury is likely to object. It would transform them from sitting ducks in the event of a significant air campaign against the UK, to a threat which attacking aircraft would have to avoid. 

To make the River Class vessels pose a threat to an enemy nuclear submarine, perhaps lurking with the intention of tracking and sinking Britain's nuclear deterrent submarines as they leave their bases for their patrol areas (this is a problem that's highly likely to occur at some point) what's needed is a two round launcher for the Sting Ray anti-submarine torpedo and a reasonable sonar installation, which is likely to be useful in all sorts of other ways during peacetime. 

These changes (and an increase in numbers of a small and cheap vessel) would make the River Class a genuine rather than a purely symbolic protection for the UK and any shipping in its waters, and it would not greatly change their unthreatening appearance or operating costs.

The main problems with the Royal Navy's "Major Warships" such as the type 45 air defence destroyer and the forthcoming type 26 frigate or "global combat ship" are numbers and a decision not to actually fit all the equipment the type 45s were designed to carry. When the type 45 was being designed, the assumption was that twelve of them was the minimum necessary procurement, this was whittled down to eight and the Cameron government has actually capped production at six. None of them so far have been fitted with any anti-ship missiles, though the modular design allows such missiles to be fitted in more than one way and of more than one type. The excuse was that the type 45 would always be protected from surface threats by a couple of type 26 frigates. All well and good, but those were planned on the basis that somewhere between nineteen and twenty-one of them would be procured, and the Cameron government has committed to a maximum of thirteen. Which means that the type 45s cannot expect to always be escorted by a pair of type 26s, and therefore need some kind of anti-ship missile, which they were designed to carry.

The RAF's problems can be stated much more succinctly: they have the right types of aircraft in service or on the way, but have been cut much too far in terms of aircraft numbers, bases and manpower. Also, critically, there has been a change in doctrine which now states that the RAF will never have to fight from its home bases, so they don't really need any ground or air defences. In the light of current events, the most dangerous and unjustified assumption possible. The triumph of political dementia over military reality.

The army has largely conquered the age old problem of poor kit in inadequate quantities, but now, like the RAF has been cut to too small a size to protect the country against any serious European threat of the kind which is now jumping up and down on the Ukraine, secure in the knowledge that the West can and will do nothing to stop it. It also suffers an equally serious doctrinal lunacy to the RAF's "not fighting from its home bases" in the way that "reserves" are being used to compensate for the loss of tens of thousands of full-time regular soldiers.

There is no problem with having an army with a large reserve element, if the regular element is large enough to deal with small crises without needing those reserves to be mobilised. But the current doctrine is that it will now be routine, for reserves to play a part in routine deployments and the immediate response to military emergencies. This reverses the meaning of "reserve" and it's very dangerous. Reserves are part of the civil economy, the more capable reserve soldiers are, the more important their civilian jobs are likely to be. If they have to be mobilised every time the Foreign Secretary needs a show of force to back up his wise words and gentle insistence, the MoD will be constantly pulling the rug out from under the country's economic recovery, and in the case of a major military emergency, it will cause significant economic (and social) disruption before the first shot is fired. 

This gives aggressive foreign powers an attractive mechanism for weakening Britain as a whole: just engineer a constant stream of low-level military confrontations and watch British industry get fed up with the constant absence of key workers.

The Royal Navy needs more than three patrol vessels, and they must be modestly but effectively armed to the point where they can protect themselves and credibly threaten aggressors and intruders. It needs to fully arm and equip its Type 45 destroyers, and the number of Type 26 frigates must be reviewed upwards a bit before shipbuilding capacity is cut to fit the low number and a higher number becomes impossible to obtain.

The RAF needs at least some increase in strength, even more urgently it needs to retain or recommission enough airbases to maintain a bit of redundancy and resilience in the face of attack, and it must be able to defend those airbases and train to operate from them whilst under attack, as it always used to do.

The British Army must retain sufficient numbers of regular troops to deal with small wars and the beginnings of large ones, without drawing on its reserves from the very outset. It must also develop an intelligent mobilisation strategy, so that when it does draw on its reserves, it doesn't shut the civil economy down in the process. This could involve the creation of a civilian reserve of retired or semi-retired skilled workers who could be tasked and perhaps even trained in advance, to help the employers of reserve soldiers keep their businesses -and the country- running during a general mobilisation. 

Buy to Rot: How Virginia Water and Bishop's Avenue Have Become Billionaire Slums

On Christmas Day, 2013, the author attended the short morning service at a small and very multi-racial, vibrantly non-conformist church in the billionaire's enclave of Virginia Water, in Surrey. None of the congregation seemed to be billionaires, and the basic village businesses near the Church were in slightly dilapidated buildings, largely from the sixties and seventies. All around the wider area, though, comfortable 1920s and 1930s English houses with decent-sized gardens had been bought up, demolished and replaced by glittering mansions, usually with at least an underground car-park and often a multi-floor basement containing extensive leisure facilities. Almost all, if not completely all, of the property investors commissioning such works are foreign nationals, or offshore trusts or shell companies, all of which seem to indicate ultimate foreign ownership, by persons who require several layers of shielding between their finances and any light of day.

With all this prosperity and "investment" of billions of pounds on luxury housing going on all around, why did the basic shops and amenities around the Church look so down at heel? There were some boutique-style shops around somewhere, but the local retail economy did not approach that of Beverley Hills, though the apparent net worth of the mansion owners in the area would appear to be a high multiple of the net worth of Beverley Hills, if not the whole state of California. There was utterly incalculable wealth, but less apparent local prosperity than might be found in Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire, or Leeds in Yorkshire. At some point I asked what turned out to be the crucial question: "How many people live in all these mansions?" to which, the reply was "almost nobody lives in them, though that one on the corner isn't quite so bad because the owner does come and have a dinner party in it almost every month." It quickly became apparent that, despite the expenditure of several billions of pounds on packing mansions onto the plots of former middle class family homes, often by sinking three or four stories into the ground first and then balancing a two-storey mansion on top, the local economy was operating at a tickover compared to when the ordinary middle class homes had been lived in, by well-off but not wildly-wealthy ordinary middle class families. The multi-racial non-conformists had a church in the billionaire's enclave, because it had been unwanted and available when they were looking for a home. Most of the worshipers lived in other villages and towns nearby. But they were the only real sign of life in what, in the eyes of the UK's government and our political elite, is the runaway success story of Virginia Water, because so much money has been invested and, frankly, buried in the ground. Quite possibly never to be seen, or used, again.

In the Hampstead area of North London, the most exclusive of many billionaire's rows in modern Britain is Bishops Avenue. There are sixty-six mansions there, many of which are, or were, fairly tacky 1930s equivalents of the modern Virginia Water mansions, built on the sites of 19th century houses of much greater architectural worth. Of those sixty-six mansions, only three are currently believed to be fully occupied and at least sixteen are derelict having been empty for decades. See Daily Mail article here. The thirties do seem to have been when the rot set in for Bishop's Avenue, in the sense of millionaire tat replacing genuine quality, but the practice of buying or building mansions there and then abandoning them to literally rot, seems to have started in the post war period.

In the past few years, the majority of non-social new-build apartments in London have been sold overseas without even being advertised for sale in Britain. Ministers have been proud of the fact that 100,000 homes had been built and sold in the past year, but are completely silent on the issue of how many of them were sold or rented to British residents, or even new immigrants, and how many are in the hands of overseas investors who scarcely even visit Britain, let alone reside here. Since whole apartment blocks have all been sold out, often being completely sold out "off plan", and yet remain silent and largely unlit at night, it would appear that the majority of new apartment homes in London are not even making it as far as the overgeared "buy to let" market that would have snapped them up back in the nineties. They have been bought, from brand new, to rot. Meanwhile, the effect on local retail businesses and amenities is even more marked than in Virginia Water: they close, because there is no-one there. This is the real reason why property developers either fight tooth and nail, or exercise considerable guile, to avoid  their "section 106" planning obligations to provide infrastructure and amenities to support their large "residential" developments, because they know from the outset that there will be no residents in the foreseeable future.

Even if this didn't pose an economic danger to Britain and even if it wasn't worsening an acute social problem of housing affordability and availability, the waste of space, energy and resources would be grossly offensive. Since it does pose a grave economic threat and the affront to those struggling to buy, rent, or find these homes advertised for the likes of them to even aspire to, is almost off the scale, there's a imminent threat to social order inherent in all this, let alone a threat to social and economic mobility. It is a catastrophe, perceived as success in the minds of our ruling elite, those minds being as far from the reality of our everyday existence as the sands of Mars.

And then, earlier this week, the BBC's Robert Peston published an article and broadcast a film, about the economic and social situation in China. And the film in particular rang a deep resounding bell with all of the problems noted above, approximately once for every minute of screen time.

To take just a couple of examples:
To begin with, the boom in construction projects in China was sustained by the Communist Central Government's directive to the banks that they should lend freely. When that lending rose to dangerous levels, the central government directed that the banks should back off a bit, for the general good. But regional and city governments had become dependent on the gravy train of massive residential development and white elephant projects (there are dozens of HS2-type railway projects instead of just the one we have in Britain) to keep their supporters sweet and stay in power, so regional and city governments promptly created "shadow" banks to keep the credit boom rolling. Now the credit boom was not only out of the control of the Communist Central Government; Beijing no longer even has any reliable information on how big the credit boom actually is. Things are not exactly the same in the other Asian superpower, India. But there are equivalent very bad ideas at work. And in other major Asian powers as well. Casino economies in five or six different flavours. And because officials in positions of public trust should not be lapping up quite so much gravy in any of the major Asian powers, their share has to be hidden and not just "invested". Hello, Virginia Water! Perhaps that's why, in leafy Surrey and even in Park Lane in the middle of London, every Millionaire or Billionaire's home now has to be made into a concrete iceberg, with more floor space below ground than above: the wealth mustn't be too visible, don't you know. What happens when the current once in 250 year groundwater levels seen all around London, work their way through the clay to the centre, isn't yet clear, but one way or another, it will become clear by the end of 2014. At least their billions of pounds of "investment" has made space for billions of gallons of excess groundwater. The most expensive drainage sumps in human history.

Then, paradoxically, there is the issue of unoccupied property. This was highlighted in Mr Peston's film, but seems not to have made the cut in his webpage article. In short, one Chinese expert stated, with some authority, that despite China's huge population, massive internal migration and widespread aspiration towards better standards of housing than previous generations enjoyed, something like 15% of residential property in China is unoccupied, and the rate of occupancy is lowest where the market value is highest. Remember Bishop's Avenue, the most exclusive address of all, with just three out of sixty-six properties enjoying full-time residency and sixteen of them actually falling down?

(The author wouldn't be surprised if the true unoccupancy rate for British residential property proved close to 15%, too. Certainly, there were known to be 800,000 empty homes in the country about five years ago, since when officialdom has tried not to let us have a reliable figure. But with a building rate of 100,000 homes a year and in some areas whole developments of that being sold into complete unoccupancy, the empty home figure, were it known, is bound to be on the rise.)
 
Britain's political elite are snugly certain that it is absurd to worry about all this: never mind where the money came from, and what problems and risks it leaves behind in its country of origin: it is being invested here, so that's fine.

But it isn't being invested. The people who have sent this money here, are doing two things with it, and neither of them counts as investment:

They are hiding the money, because they broke various laws to get it and they face penalties ranging from public disgrace to a bullet in the back of the neck, or the gallows or a lynch mob, for being seen to have it when the music stops.

Secondly, Chinese "investors" in particular are able to perceive that what they have been doing is to gamble on the Chinese property market with false credit raised through the unregulated shadow banks. And their solution is a typical gambler's one: they are covering their bets with fresh bets of equal value on the much smaller British property market. The ultimate consequences of that particular attempt at "double or quits" could be dire enough to bring the world to war.

Britain and China, as nations, must agree to blame and punish the property gamblers and willfully complicit property developers for those consequences, and not each other. Or this will indeed all end in mutual hostility, as China and probably other Asian and Middle-Eastern states attempt to recover stolen money from Britain, that has all been sunk in once-glittering assets which are then worth next to nothing.

PS:
The author now has an author's page on Amazon.

Inculcated Reflex and Disaster, Part 1: Shibboleths and HS2 Failure.

It's a curious paradox that, in order to be accepted into any intellectual circle, or any circle which aspires to intellectual status, an individual must learn to suppress original thought. If we can understand this paradox, we can understand how really great disasters happen, supposedly "without warning".

Acceptance into an intellectual circle is dependent on other intellectuals accepting that you are indeed one of them, and this is why the Nobel Laureate Prof. Richard Feynman refused membership of a sort of secret society for gifted people (which seemed to operate in every major college and university in the United States and possibly beyond), because the only point of membership was to assert one's intellectual status, not to make or facilitate any new discovery or insight. Unfortunately, very few of the world's intellectual elite share Feynman's insight; that membership of any self-defining elite can swiftly destroy your worth and usefulness as a person.

Now, the fact that acceptance into the circle is dependent on the other individuals in it, accepting that you are one of them, means, actually, that each one of them is as nervous of his status as you are. Therefore, they can only agree with your views and ideas if their survival instinct tells them that others will agree with you, too. So, although as a new member you are required to pronounce whatever the local shibboleth happens to be, there is also a  super-shibboleth at work, which threatens to expose and disgrace any establish member who accepts your pronunciation of the shibboleth when others don't.

In Britain, the Royal Society is, in theory, a collection of the nation's brightest and best scientists. In practice, like most similar organizations, it is instead a collection of the most influential British scientists. The Royal Society selects and refines its influential membership through a number of shibboleths, the most currently important of which is rejection of any sort of serious British space programme, especially manned, as a threat to "real science" or just an absurdity: something so ridiculous that all credibility is lost merely by suggesting that it is possible, let alone desirable. Something set up by King Charles the Second to oblige his ministers to become forward looking, inquiring and imaginative, has become a mechanism for opposing and covertly sabotaging the "wrong kind" of progress. The Royal Society stands a barrier between Britain and the second half of the Twentieth Century, let alone any part of the Twenty-first, when it ought to be getting its sights set on the Twenty-second Century by now.

The mechanism by which shibboleths disable a person's capacity for original thought is scientifically explicable: our conscious minds and our subconscious minds work in parallel all the time, and the primary task of the subconscious mind is the avoidance of danger. The sub-conscious mind does not analyse and understand things: it reacts to danger. It's definition of danger is harvested from the experiences of the conscious mind, but without the conscious mind usually being aware of what it is programming its subconscious "watchdog" system with. Shellshock is what the subconscious mind does when there is overwhelming danger which the conscious mind cannot evade or even understand, for a period of time. If the conscious mind knows it might die at any minute, and it isn't supplying any precise definition of what the signs are of the situation it must avoid in order to stay alive, the sub-conscious mind demands a reaction to almost everything.

For members of an elite, membership becomes the core of the individual's self-awareness and eventually the sub-conscious assigns any threat to that status the same significance as it would to a threat to life. The sub-conscious promptly does what it is there for, and speeds up the individual's responses to shibboleth-type situations by making the reaction happen before the conscious mind thinks anything through. Anything touching on matters which are perceived as crucial to the elite, is dealt with by developing a set of inculcated reflexes ("Pavlovian" is nearly but not quite the right word) which guide the individual away from the perceived danger as if it were a cliff edge or a fire. The fatal flaw of the human sub-conscious, is that this can condition the individual to ignore or even actively oppose, the very kind of warning to which he should be paying urgent attention: see the housing market-driven banking crash of 2008, or Stalin's refusal to allow Soviet forces to deploy or even make any preparation for Hitler's "Operation Barbarossa" in 1941, despite being given two weeks warning and a quite reasonably accurate German order of battle by British Intelligence. The heroic outcome: the Red Army managing to halt and then defeat the German army just outside Moscow only by stupendous effort and massive sacrifice even with the help of the weather, should have been a routine and inexpensive annihilation of German invasion forces in summer while they were still safely hundreds of miles from Moscow. It was a Shibboleth of Stalin and the whole politburo, that the British were untrustworthy. manipulative liars, and that shibboleth killed millions of Russians. British Intelligence handed Stalin a chance to win the war before the Wansee conference, that launched Hitler's "final solution", had even taken place. Nearly all of the genocidal violence which the Jewish population experienced before the Wansee conference, occurred in the lands which Stalin lost control of primarily because he ignored British warnings.

And the cryptographic breakthroughs which allowed British Intelligence to offer that warning in the first place, wouldn't have been possible if the Nazis and German military leadership had not developed an "Enigma shibboleth" which made questioning the security of their encryption protocols seem like an act of disloyalty.

Once the proposed HS2 high-speed railway between London and Birmingham achieved "all party support", which in this case is defined as the leaderships of all three "main" political parties agreeing to support it without consulting their back benchers and membership, the necessity, benefits and inevitable success of HS2 immediately became a shibboleth of the British political elite. Precisely because of the importance of the matter, because the technical risks are significant and the financial risks are absolutely gigantic, the political elite started to ignore or reject anything which made anything of any of the risks or the huge unfairness with which half a million households must be treated in order to push the project through. 

This is the real reason why the Transport Secretary has just invoked what amount to war powers to keep secret a report, submitted to the Cabinet in 2011, which warns of the risks of HS2 failing in financial and political terms. (The risk of a purely technical failure: some part of the project proving technically impossible, has not yet even been considered so far as can be discerned by any document in the public domain.) Patrick McLoughlin claims that he is acting to protect the confidences of those civil servants who prepared the report, though he has no such respect for those who have authored material in support of the project and he publishes their work widely and freely. The truth is, he is acting to protect, not the process by which the report was prepared, but the process by which it was ignored by the political elite, acting on their inculcated reflexes.

One doesn't need to know what the report says to know why it has to be secret: if it raised serious doubts, or issued some grave warning, and ministers (with the support of the opposition leader) had decided to press ahead anyway, based on a reappraisal or some fresh evidence, that would be perfectly respectable and there would be no call for secrecy. The reason for keeping such a report secret for so long can only lie in how that report was dealt with in the decision-making process and not in its content. Perhaps campaigners should amend their freedom of information requests to cover the way the report was considered after being submitted, rather than anything which involves its content or the privacy of those civil servants who compiled it?

Although the blog author does not know of any equivalent report covering technical, rather than financial, risks to the HS2 project, any plan which involves a river diversion near where the A52, important existing railways and the proposed HS2 railway all intersect the river Erewash, must have been subjected to some well-informed scepticism by one or more engineers by now. The apparent silence on this issue suggests that there is another report, so threatening to the HS2 shibboleth, that even its existence has been kept secret. There is, however, a set of outline descriptions of the civil engineering challenges for each bit of track: Please accept the preceding link as acknowledgement of the source of the extract below.

3.5.4
In the vicinity of the station and Toton Yard, the existing Trent Junction to Chesterfield (Erewash Valley) line would be diverted to pass through the proposed new station on the modified existing network, and this line would lie to the east of the high speed alignment along this length. Trains from the high-level lines would also be able to bypass the new station by utilising the new rail flyover that passes over the high speed alignment, and rejoining the Trent Junction to Chesterfield line alongside Sandiacre after passing through Toton Yard.

Toton station to Trowell

3.5.5
North of Toton, the high speed route would reduce from six tracks to four and then two tracks, and it would then pass under the bridge carrying the A52 Brian Clough Way over the current railway (2). The extent of the alteration of the lateral positioning of existing lines, as well as the introduction of HS2, would require that the existing bridge be demolished and replaced. As the A52 could not be closed for the duration required to achieve these works, either a new permanent off-line bridge would be constructed or a temporary off-line diversion and associated temporary structure would be needed.

3.5.6
North of the A52, the River Erewash would require diversion over approximately 100m to avoid conflict with the realigned existing lines.

3.5.7
Further north from the A52, Derby Road crosses the existing lines (3). There is insufficient vertical clearance under this structure to accommodate the new high-speed lines, and the horizontal positions of the high speed and realigned existing lines would conflict with the supports of the existing structure. The structure would therefore have to be demolished and replaced about 2m higher.

3.5.8
North of Derby Road, the route would rise in level, climb out of the Erewash Valley, and swing eastwards to run parallel to the M1, north of Stanton Gate. About 550m north of Derby Road, the route would cross the River Erewash, the Erewash Canal and the realigned existing Erewash rail lines, on a 780m viaduct (4).

The blog author is somewhat inclined to bet that one of the sections of HS2 most likely to halt the entire project for technical reasons, is highlighted above. Note that the A52 has to be permanently realigned merely to allow the river to be moved in order to allow the existing railway to be moved to allow the HS2 line to be built without a low radius bend in it. This is entirely a consequence of ministers setting a specification for a very high track speed of 400 kph, (for prestige reasons and no other), when the need they are supposedly meeting is one of capacity. Even the brief summaries of engineering challenges are so vast in aggregate that he cannot be sure that there are not dozens of other sections like this. Despite the utter indifference of the political elite to any problem besetting a shibboleth project, the civil service is methodical and the blog author expects that they will have commissioned reports and assessments, or will do so shortly. The blog author is also quietly confident that the political elite will ignore these in their own decision-making and suppress news of their existence in order to avoid the political embarrassment of using war powers to prevent their publication.


PS:
The above should also give some clue as to why a degree of privacy is essential to mental health: if a person is concerned (or knows for certain under many regimes) that any thought they might voice, or note down, can be heard, observed or recorded and then used against them in some way, then conscious attempts at self-censorship will turn into a reflex by which the sub conscious mind attempts to keep the conscious mind out of trouble by stopping it from thinking at all. It's not just a question of the harm that may be done by intrusive surveillance by the state: many elite groups and cults require candidates and members to open their whole lives, including their innermost thoughts, up to constant scrutiny and in many cases systematic and relentless criticism. It's almost impossible that such a process will fail to do damage.

Cameron's Gay Marriage Bill and Dystopia

See bottom of article for update.
This article isn't about the rights and wrongs of gay marriage in general: it is about the Bill currently going through Parliament, what it might be intended to achieve, and how the kind of sexual revolution it purports to be part of, fits in with dystopian societies as envisaged by the leading dystopian writers: Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. The author has read B.F. Skinner's "Walden Two" and isn't disposed to deal with it here, as it's too much of  a paean to experimental psychology to offer much insight into anyone's future in the real world. (For example: making the great psychologist's disciples put teacups on strings to avoid spilling any tea.)

The columnist Suzanne Moore has said that the bill offers conformity rather than equality, which may be true in a way, but it's also a reminder that the institution of marriage in general has some very prominent and formidable foes.

A much more insightful quote, which betrays thought rather than reflex, comes from the Labour MP for East Ham, Mr Stephen Timms:

Children are at the heart of marriage... but they are barely mentioned at [all in] the Bill. The Bill aims to open up the benefits of marriage to people excluded from it at the moment but it is doing [that] at the price of taking away a significant part of its meaning.

There have also been some much loved national figures declaring their determination to take advantage of the Bill's provisions at the earliest possible opportunity, and nobody with a heart would, for instance, want to deny Alice Arnold the undoubted joys and privilege of Clare Balding's hand in marriage.

Supporters and many opponents of the bill have used a great many words, Mr Timms who is a critic of the Bill, but not necessarily its ostensible intent, has used very few.  His concise analysis is that the Bill all but ignores the primary purpose of marriage and diminishes its meaning. The latter is probably a reference to the Prime Minister's inexplicable determination that the Bill will be used to remove all legal meaning from the words "husband" and "wife" with their resulting deletion from all kinds of official forms. This aspect isn't recognised or acknowledged by many supporters, either of the Bill itself or gay marriage in general, and it may actually prove a disappointment to many gay couples:

Miss Balding's publicly stated reason for wanting to marry Miss Arnold rather than be satisfied with a civil partnership, is that she dislikes "civil partner" as a term for someone she loves very deeply. If the Bill is passed as drafted, and implemented across all other affected legislation in the manner the Prime Minister has indicated and stubbornly demands, then Miss Arnold will never actually be acknowledged as Miss Balding's "wife" for any official or legal purpose. All spouses will be something very similar to "partners" and that's precisely what Miss Balding dislikes about their current arrangements.

It's an instance of equality being achieved by taking something away from heterosexual couples without actually giving homosexual couples the full deal they yearn for. Careful note should be taken when the authors of the Bill are utterly unmovable on awkward and frustrating details which don't seem at all necessary to their declared purpose. 

If it's inappropriate for one woman to be the wife of another (and how equal is that?) can't we mine the world's richest and most expressive language to adopt a nicer and more elegant word for it and let heterosexual couples remain "wife" and "husband" in the eyes of the law, too? The last thing Miss Balding seems to be asking for is any linguistic camouflage for her loving relationship with Miss Arnold, or for everyone else to have to adopt the ugly terminology imposed upon it.

George Orwell saw that language was not merely a powerful tool, but a deadly weapon in the wrong hands. If gay marriage is to be a positive institution, then the associated language needs to be elegant and expressive of love, rather than giving one's partnership status in a purely bureaucratic way which expresses nothing whatsoever. And yet, this is the part of the Bill upon which the Prime Minister has his heart set and he has made it clear that no compromise or change whatsoever will be accepted. The most negative aspect of the Bill, is something that he strongly desires. That will bear further discussion when we get around to dystopian societies, below.

If the meaning of marriage is being changed, indeed nullified, by the Bill, what of the purpose of marriage? As Mr Timms noted, children are barely mentioned.

 This may be because for a homosexual couple to have children other than through adoption, either a third party has to be involved, or they must have access to a level of technological intervention which has is not yet feasible, but obviously might be, one day.  In theory, the third party might be involved only until a child is conceived or handed over, with the homosexual couple assuming full and sole responsibility for it from that point on. Except that laws, which the government (and indeed, the opposition) have no intention of changing, forbid any such thing, for any straightforward way of achieving this. No male who donates sperm in the United Kingdom to allow a lesbian couple to have a baby, can legally surrender all responsibility for the child, no matter how strenuously the lesbian couple may draft and sign agreements to that end. And an amendment to existing laws, going through the works even as the gay marriage Bill begins its legislative passage, will make it impossible for sperm donors' rights to fatherhood of their donor children, to be signed away or otherwise denied. Not quite a barrier, but perhaps a lifelong annoyance and a pretext for legal action or official intrusion at any time.

For some reason, and equality can't be it, though extreme wealth might be, some male homosexual couples have been able to jointly father children by surrogate mothers (usually or solely outside the United Kingdom so far as the author knows) without apparently sharing any long-term rights or responsibilities with the surrogate mother or egg donor (by no means necessarily the same woman). Presumably, English courts are perceiving  this process as a form of adoption, or perhaps because of the wealth and status of the handful of couples so far involved, not perceiving it accurately at all. Legalities aside, surrogate motherhood is a (very) rich man's sport. Paradoxically and ludicrously, the only way a lesbian couple, married or otherwise, could achieve the same undiluted rights over and responsibility for, their children, would be if they, too, involved a surrogate mother, with neither of the lesbian couples carrying the child, but possibly one donating an egg via IVF, and then effectively adopting the child when the surrogate gave it up.

The passage of the current Bill, will not allow a married lesbian couple to have undiluted and unqualified charge of children which either of the couple carry in their own womb, conceived with the aid of  a sperm donor. Technology might one day allow a technical work-around for the law, but it's not possible yet and is likely to be eye-wateringly expensive when it is. As long as the embryo has a detectable biological father, English and Scottish law duly detects him and assigns him rights and responsibilities.

The stumbling blocks for most lesbian and gay couples wishing to raise a family of their own as a married couple, don't lie in the marriage laws at all, but in other pieces of legislation, which Mr Cameron's government has no intention of changing, other than to make them tighter, as with the tweak to the law on sperm donors' rights and responsibilities.

Conversely, adoption by gay couples has been made much easier, thanks to a concerted and single-minded effort by three successive governments, which also had the effect of removing nearly all Christian adoption agencies from the field. Three prime ministers and governments including all three "main" political parties unswervingly followed the same path. Making gay adoption easier at the same time as making it somewhat awkward for gay couples of average wealth to contrive to have their own children, seems to be the subject of a somewhat unlikely political consensus.

So, to sum up what the Bill, and other measures happening separately but concurrently, would appear to do: it materially and detrimentally affects heterosexual married couples far more than is being headlined, and advantages lesbian and gay couples who wish to be married and "normalised" a great deal less than most of them appear to believe. If the purpose of marriage for gay couples is to raise a family, as it has always been for heterosexual couples, then other laws and official attitudes will have to change a lot more than seems likely at the moment, unless the family they are to raise has been taken away from somebody else. On this score, the Bill grants lesbians and gays an illusion of progress and nothing more.

A cynical interpretation would be that the probable outcome is the intended outcome, and that the gay rights lobby is being used as cannon fodder for a disguised attack on the institution of marriage, and by implication the Christian Church. This would be the very opposite of what Mr Cameron claims to be his intent, not that it'd be the first time he or his immediate predecessors have claimed one thing and done the precise opposite. The gay rights lobby, like all cannon-fodder, is unlikely to gain from the experience, but can console itself by blaming and witch-hunting "bigots" and "Christians" for any frustrations and disappointments which are already inherent in what is being proposed.

For any analysis of would-be dystopian regimes, an understanding of "divide and rule" is essential.

The other key quality of the Bill, is that it stirs up trouble out of any possible proportion to the minimal advantages it bestows upon the minority it purports to benefit. Whether there might be a much smaller minority which might benefit much more, is another question.

How all this ties into Dystopia:

First of all, we have to consider how fictional dystopias, as in "Brave New World", "1984" and Zamyatin's "We", as well as real-world dystopias such as North Korea and the former Argentine Junta, see families and marriages as a platform for raising children. In the case of "Brave New World" and "We",  families do not really exist, except that the elite castes in Brave New World retain surnames, often ones with a high reader recognition factor, such as "Rothschild". In "1984" and the real world North Korea, families are seen as essentially disciplinary units, though not in the same way.

In "1984" marriages are tolerated only for couples to have children, and those who fail to produce any are under official pressure to divorce and move apart by a significant geographical distance. In real world North Korea, whole families are routinely imprisoned, tortured and killed for the "crimes" of one individual. This does not happen in "1984", at least as long as the family members follow the rules about denouncing traitors. When Winston Smith, to his surprise, finds himself sharing a holding cell at the Ministry of Love with his super-loyalist neighbour, Parsons, Parsons express pride in the fact that it was his little girl who reported him for muttering "I hate Big Brother" in his sleep. What Parsons is expressing, of course, is relief that his daughter has the ruthless instincts necessary to survive under Party rule. 

In the same scene, two women in the holding cell are probably lesbian lovers, and it's also pretty obvious from the context that this is their crime. 

It is explicit throughout "1984", that marriages are solely for the purpose of producing children for the Party. And the Thought Police officer. O'Brien, who interrogates Smith, claims that the Party is seeking a scientific means of removing all pleasure from the act of procreation. (This puts the Party in line with the traditional ethos of Fettes College, which is that pupils are to lust after everything in life, except sex. Money, power, acquisition of great art, but no sex. If you want to understand our possible future, it does no harm to take note of what's taught at the schools which educate our would-be rulers.) In that kind of context, lesbians have no future at all, and male homosexuals would probably have to be very, very useful to the Party to survive. Which would mean they'd need to be the most ruthless and treacherous beasts around.

In "Brave New World" children are produced entirely on an industrial basis, and entirely to plan. There are no families as such, but elite genetic lines  are recognised and perpetuated. There is an awful lot of sex, especially orgies for the elite, and even the drudges are encouraged to perform, (only with each other), but affectionate relationships are deeply unfashionable for most, out of the question for the elite, and tolerated only for the lowest castes, who are all deliberately mentally handicapped anyway. Clumsy relationships between members of the lowest castes are a source of patronising amusement for those who supervise them. Love is almost universally seen as a weakness. Sexual "freedom" is taken to the extreme where it must surely be oppressive.

In "We", children are again effectively an industrial product, though there's not really a caste system, more a differentiation by a "Number's" area of expertise. Sex is by arrangement and absurdly formalised, but anyone can ask for a ticket to have sex with anyone else and there's no absolute right of refusal: the only leeway is the arrangement of a mutually acceptable appointment. Everyone lives in glass apartments, and blinds can be lowered during sex at specified times, not at any other time, or for any other purpose. When D-503 commits a rape, his female victim is desperate, not to protect herself, but to get D-503 to observe these social rules.

It's worth noting that in his follow-on to "Brave New World", "Brave New World Revisited" (an extended essay rather than another novel) Aldous Huxley states that his dystopia, Orwell's and Zamyatin's,  despite their differences, could all be the same dystopian society at different stages in its evolution.  (With Huxley's own work representing a period between "1984" and "We"). The author would also like to point out that Orwell's pre-war novel "Keep the Aspidistra Flying" whilst not a dystopia in itself, could have sown the seeds for much of the post-war "Ad Man's Dystopian Science Fiction" such as "The Space Merchants". A lot of the subliminal manipulations which preoccupy Huxley in "Brave New World Revisited" are not there in "1984" but are on view in "Keep the Aspidistra Flying". Written a long time before anyone but Orwell had really cottoned on to the marketing industry's tricks.

So, a dystopian regime still fighting for its existence resents both the energy wasted in sex and any affection for anyone but Big Brother, but needs children to raise as cannon-fodder, so a loveless, mechanical but productive  marriage is the ideal.

A dystopian regime facing no external threats, able to produce children industrially to order, but still seeking to refine its control of human society, outlaws marriage or any kind of genuine affection, except for the least mentally able castes. But its citizens at all levels are required to have regular sex and consume recreational drugs, the elite needing to be the most heroically hedonistic of all castes.

In "We", a dystopian regime which has, or at least thinks that it has, conquered all that Earth has to offer, bestows a lot more superficial freedom than the more primitive dystopias, but is still jealous of anyone harbouring affection for anyone but the Benefactor, and to some degree his secret police, the Guardians. (D-503 rather admires, in a not quite sexual way, the one Guardian that he knows personally, and it seems that either the Guardians are designedly attractive, or that society is somehow deeply programmed so that all Numbers tend to admire the Guardians.) So anyone can ask to have sex with anyone else, presumably even including Guardians, but it has to be done in a completely unromantic way, as a way of dealing with a physical urge. Anything deeper, is suspect and dangerous.

In a way, the population of the City in "We" is composed exclusively of the elite caste from "Brave New World", even though "We" was written a generation earlier. Huxley may have been consciously trying to work out how mankind might have gotten from the nineteen thirties to "We", but it's also worth noting that "We" is indeed a society where only the elite have survived and there is no underclass within the City, which is completely independent of the world "beyond the green wall."

So, dystopian regimes are not necessarily "sexually repressive" and may indeed make sexual activity mandatory. It's evident that any celibate citizen of Huxley's world will be swiftly corrected in some way. Anyone who avoids recreational drugs will be dealt with even more swiftly! A polar opposite of the Taliban, but just as oppressive.

It isn't at all hard to see a great deal of Huxley's "Brave New World" in where we are at the moment, but it's quite not so easy to see much of his dystopia in where Cameron's Gay Marriage Bill might take us.

There is a significant echo of Orwell's "1984" in the way that the Bill will strip the emotional and spiritual meaning from heterosexual marriage, making it in effect just a form of partnership to create children.  That was always its purpose, but never its sole meaning. But the purpose, having children, is notably absent from the Bill itself.

"We" a world where only the elite survive, is visible in the way that very wealthy male homosexuals will be free to go to California with an enormous wad of cash and reproduce via surrogates in a manner not available to most others; the somewhat more direct route to reproduction available to lesbians being subject to at least a (recently strengthened) legal deterrent if not yet a ban. In the real world, it is perhaps the deep ecologists, rather than the gay rights lobby, who come closest to actually wanting the world of "We". Because it is they seriously propose eliminating more than 90% of the human population -and totally controlling the reproduction rights of the survivors, along with complete societal control over the raising and education of what few children they are allowed to have.

There are disturbing echoes of classic fictional dystopia in Mr Cameron's Bill and where it seems designed to take us, but the most powerful parallels are with a real world dystopia, which we haven't really discussed in detail yet:

Argentina under the military Junta, and other Falangist states, such as Franco's Spain.

We enter dangerous and heretical waters as far as liberal political thought is involved here, because Margaret Thatcher fought a war against the Junta (no matter how hard her Foreign Secretary and his ministers of state had tried to sell the pass first) and this means that the Junta was a victim of Thatcher and can't have been as bad as the lying Tories make out.

No, they were much worse. But the way in which it was worse still isn't grasped by anyone much outside Argentina, to this day.

There was no widespread racial genocide, the original colonial River Plate Province government having done most of what was necessary in that direction (only 1% of Argentina's population has native American origins, and they dare not use native American names). There was extreme nationalist rhetoric, but it wasn't particularly racial. Economic control was exercised by the traditional Peronist method of having state-controlled (not exactly state-owned) combines in charge of each major industry, though trade unions were banned rather than being state-controlled, as in Peron's day. Economic control was pretty much as it had been under Peron: the real difference lay in the pioneering mechanisms of social control, which Peron hadn't seriously attempted, though General Franco had, in Falangist Spain.

Again, because what Franco did wasn't really understood outside Spain (except for Argentina, of course) what happened has largely gone unnoticed. 

The Argentine military  Junta exercised social control through the adoption of children.

Loyalists, and promising potential loyalists, were given children to adopt. Dissidents with children disappeared and their children were those adopted by loyalists. The fate of the vanished children was used to blackmail friends and relatives of vanished dissidents into silence, though there was never the slightest intent on the Junta's part ever to give the children back.

Those who were considered delinquent rather than dissident, had been at risk of losing their children before the Junta even came to power. This had no doubt given officials some useful practice.

The vanished dissidents were indeed murdered by the thousand, how will be described below, but all were aware before they died that their children had been taken away from their relatives and would be brought up by their opponents, to believe and stand for the opposite of what their natural parents had believed and stood for. If grandparents and other relatives tried to track the children down, or demand their return, they were threatened with death and quite often killed.

 The method of execution was unusual: condemned couples, and they often were couples, who'd been held separately, would find themselves reunited at an airfield, only to be sedated. Some of them do seem to have been forced to sign documents relating to their children before being sedated. More as a way of forcing them to be aware of what was being done, rather than because their permission was being sought. Outer clothing, sometimes most clothing, would be removed. They would be taken to a twin-engined utility aircraft (not usually a large one) with a military doctor and a couple of "cargo hands".

The plane would fly out over the South Atlantic, the doctor would administer an injection; this seems to have been a muscle relaxant to prevent any struggle which would endanger the crew during what happened next. No authority has said the dissidents were unconscious at the last, merely incapacitated. With the dissidents unable to struggle and the aircraft flying at height over a strong ocean current well out at sea, the two cargo handlers would toss the dissidents out of the cargo door, one by one. The fall was from a great enough height to break the bodies on impact with the sea and carry them under. The ocean current having been well chosen, nothing identifiable survived by the time that current would have brought anything back to land. The removal of clothing, and especially shoes, must have played an important role in the elimination of the bodies, because floating shoes and overcoats have sometimes protected feet and other body parts from marine animals and decomposition for many months.

This was a far more expert process than many assume: it was brutal, but the evidence was at least as thoroughly destroyed as in the gas ovens in Nazi concentration camps, and the method did not require any equipment specific to mass killing at all. The aircraft used could have delivered flour or other essentials to remote communities, and sometimes they probably did.

As well as the terror of falling from a great height, and nobody has ever suggested that the dissidents did not know that this is what was in store, nor can anyone say they were unconscious when they fell, they would have known that their children, had they any, were to be brought up by the enemy, to stand for the complete opposite of what they stood for. No Jew died in the holocaust knowing that his children would be raised as Nazis, merely that they were probably dead already. In God's hands, not the Devil's.

Relating the Junta's social control methods to Cameron's Bill:

Legalizing gay marriage in a legislative and bureaucratic climate where, for all but the wealthiest, gay couples will encounter disincentives to build families by any means other than adoption, creates a huge demand for children to adopt. Ministers have already exploited a scandal over the sexual grooming of children in (privatised) local authority children's homes to state that a much higher percentage of children taken into care will be adopted. This means that there is going to be a presumption against returning them to their natural parents in most circumstances.

If all these newly married gay couples are to have the children they yearn for, in the way in which the government is prepared to let them have children, then someone else is going to conceive, bear and lose those children. The recent case in Rotherham, where a foster-couple famously had three children snatched away from them "for being UKIP supporters" was actually more notable for the fact that the children in question had been taken from a Slovak immigrant couple on the most questionable of grounds.

The "necessary" secrecy surrounding all workings of the family courts, has been used to conceal from the British public the fact that there have already been diplomatic protests from the Slovak government about the very high number of Slovak families living in Britain who have had their children taken into care and offered for adoption. The grounds on which any child is taken is, of course, a secret protected by the family courts. But some local authorities are seizing children from certain ethnic groups on an industrial scale, and others, notably in Norfolk and Suffolk, are using the slightest suggestion of a learning difficulty or other minor handicap on the part of the natural parents, as a pretext for taking children away.

Just as the Gay Marriage Bill promises to make about a tenth of the adult population into adoptive parents, the State seems already geared up and tooled up to go out and grab enough children to satisfy that demand. Once that practice is established, we can probably take it as read that protesting, about anything, will make it more likely that your children will be taken. Already seems to be the case, in fact.

General Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri Castelli would have been proud of David Cameron.

Update:

 It seems that behind the layers of secrecy associated with the family courts system, the adoption and fostering sector in the UK has been in the process of realignment towards a new goal since circa 2007.

Many of the web posts relating to this have been killed, apparently by court order.

However, there are web discussions taking place outside UK jurisdiction that might give readers a legal starting point. Go to the link and work outwards from there. This author isn't going to give readers any directions or conclusions, because it's not yet clear what's really going on. But it doesn't, so far, seem at all incompatible with his conclusions, above.

Pilgrim Process

This, the author's Dystopia, is published by him at both Kindle Direct Publishing and Smashwords (in several useful formats). The latter makes it available via a number of affiliate libraries, to include Sony in due course. It is already available via:

Diesel e-books.

Barnes and Noble "Nook"

Kobo


For any reader who does not own a dedicated e-reader device:
Amazon do a downloadable free reader for PCs and Mac, Android etc. that will read their normal "MOBI" format e-books, and Adobe do a very acceptable free "Digital Editions" reader for PCs etc. to read the EPUB (and PDF/A) editions available from Smashwords and most of their affiliates.

Dedication

The work is dedicated to Alan Myers and Sadie Martineau. A very useful website of Alan's work, including his Literary Guide and "Famous People" which are are must for anyone researching literature or culture in North East England, could once be found, but The Alan Myers Website seems to have disappeared, probably because there's nobody paying the subs.

Sadie was not such a public figure and there is currently no website in her memory. Alan's article on Yevgeny Zamyatin is a recommended read for anyone who's finished reading "Pilgrim Process".

The cover illustration is by Laura Hoerster.

The author also has a Smashwords page which will have news of future publications.

The ISBN for the Kindle Direct Publishing edition is 9780957157606

Review.
Pilgrim Process has been reviewed, on Smashwords by Dr Joel Huberman and by Kitty Hundal. 

Update 11/03/2017: Originally written in 1996, this novel predicts a global version, the "Monetary Accounting Unit" or MAU, of what is now being referred to as the "Fedcoin" that is, an electronic currency that's not even paper.