Local oppressors: so much better

The Mail led the way in highlighting how NICE, the Government’s drugs rationing body, was denying life-prolonging treatments to cancer patients purely on the grounds of cost. ... Of course, the NHS does not have unlimited funds, and on occasion patients must be told No – however heartbreaking this may be. But these decisions must be taken by doctors who know the person best. Not by bureaucrats sat in regional offices. (‘One more injustice’, editorial page, Daily Mail, 21 November 2010. )

And how is that supposed to help? Instead of an explicit universal prohibition, a subjective decision will be made by ‘your’ doctor who has his own reasons for knowing how much he will enjoy depriving you of something you will really suffer from not having. He may know that you are middle-class, send your children to non-state schools, have a high IQ, and so on. Just how much each individual doctor hates a particular characteristic is variable, but I do not see any advantage in that.

Better to have a blanket prohibition based on some objective criterion, however arbitrary, and to have to pay to get the refused treatment if you do not qualify. You are over the age of 57, or you are over 6 foot tall? Then you do not qualify for the free medication, and can only get it by paying for it. Actually it is quite likely that many of those refused the treatment would be willing and able to do so, as they would be more likely to fall into the category of bourgeois over-achievers or intellectuals, who are more likely to be refused things than those who are regarded as acceptably down and out.

There is certainly no advantage to the individual in having decisions about himself made by members of the local community who think they know him well, compared to having them made at a distance by bureaucrats. It is not that the latter are likely to be well-intentioned towards him, but that the damage which is intended can be more accurately directed by members of the local community, including one’s ‘own’ doctor.

In my own case, I was prevented from taking advantage of the legal possibility of taking exams (including degrees) before the ‘normal’ age, by the hostility of the local community, including some relatives, who knew too much about my father and myself.

The most I ask of society is that it should express the will of the majority in a blind and imperfect way. That would at least give one a sporting chance of survival. (Celia Green, The Decline and Fall of Science, 1976, p. 173)

A very poor deal

The Great Pensions ‘Swindle’ by Arthur Seldon (*) was published in 1970. I have never found this book at all easy to read, as Arthur Seldon was himself a politician and finds various arguments for and against different forms of taxation and redistribution far more meaningful than I do, as they depend on many unexamined assumptions.

However, in the course of discussing some past debates, he draws attention to two fundamental weaknesses in the state pensions system.

(1) That universal pensions could not be affordable at the proposed level if the annual out-payments had to be taken from taxation on a year-by-year basis, i.e. if no cumulative fund were built up to provide a capital basis, out of the income of which pension payments would be made.

Beveridge, in 1941, said at one point:

“It seemed to me right to make pensions as of right ... genuinely contributory; for pensions there must be a substantial period of contribution.”

The “substantial period” he recommended in the Report was 20 years. This advice [i.e. to build up a fund] was ignored. (p. 58)

People were misled, at least initially, into believing that they were paying into a contributory scheme, and that what they eventually received would reflect what they paid in.

However, Arthur Seldon’s book makes it clear that this was never in line with the ideas of many politicians. Should people be able to get better state pensions by contributing more? That was a controversial idea even then, and by now surely few would support it openly.

(2) The other way in which the state pension scheme was always a swindle (on the electorate by the government) was that the contributions paid in would have been enough to pay for much higher pensions. People are seldom aware of the potency of compounding interest, and if money is invested and the interest ploughed back as increments to the original capital, over a period of years the original capital is multiplied by a factor which is surprising to the unsophisticated.

I have done a rough calculation of this effect, and it comes out that if you save one tenth of your salary (assumed constant for simplicity) for 40 out of 45 years, compounded at 5%, then at the end you will have saved a capital sum capable of generating (at 5%) about 75% of your salary in perpetuity. By contrast, what the state currently takes in as National Insurance contributions is well in excess of 10% of people’s salaries, whereas the basic state pension it pays out is equal to only about 20% of the average national wage.

In 1970, Seldon’s comments on the Crossman scheme which was then proposed, included the following:

The only thing that is clear is that most people would be paying, as tax-payers and consumers, more than they think they would as employees. Young people especially will be paying in contributions for 30 or 40 years that could have brought them really high pensions if invested at high yields of interest. (p. 78)

The relevant departments of my unfunded independent university are effectively censored and suppressed. They have been prevented for decades from publishing analyses of the complex issues involved, while misleading and tendentious representations of them have continued to flood out from socially recognised sources. I hereby apply, for financial support on a scale at least adequate for one active and fully financed university research department, to all universities, and to corporations or individuals who consider themselves to be in a position to give support to socially recognised academic establishments.

*Arthur Seldon, The Great Pensions ‘Swindle’, Tom Stacey Books, 1970

The pensions swindle and euthanasia

The Daily Mail is working on the idea that we should not want to live beyond a certain age and should be pleased for the qualified sadists (medical doctors) to do us in when they think fit. Cilla Black does not want to live beyond the age of 75, it is said, and now Max Hastings comes out with ‘Thanks to medical science, most are in better shape than any previous generation of our age.’

The idea is, no doubt, that it is on account of ‘medical science’ that one in six will become a centenarian. If I get there it will certainly not be on account of 'medical science, as I have always shunned the medical ‘profession’, which has become ever more stupid, unprincipled and sadistic over my lifetime (as I gather from accounts of other people’s experiences).

When IQ was admitted to exist, it was also admitted that high IQ was correlated with longevity, whether as a result of genetic factors or because people with a realistic and forethoughtful approach to life were more likely to avoid the hazards that often led to death at earlier ages.

Most of us would say that we shall not want to continue if we lose our minds: it is tragic to see very old people who have lost contact with reality vegetating for years in the lounge of a care home, head drooping or staring blankly into space. The irony is that when we reach this state, we become incapable of making rational decisions about our own future or anything else.

Better by far (in my opinion) to have no ‘care homes’ at all, at least none financed by the state. What happened before the onset of the Welfare State was that if a person became too dysfunctional to support himself, and had not enough savings of his own or supportive relatives, then he succumbed to adverse conditions and was found dead at home or on the streets without having fallen into the clutches of the medical ‘profession’. Conscious or subconscious motivation of his own may have gone into his failure to provide for and protect himself, but he was not, on the whole, exposed to having decisions made for him by doctors concerning whether it was in his interests to go on living.

No doubt there is a hidden link to the pensions swindle here. Governments do not wish to go on paying the pensions that people were promised, so they need people to agree to euthanasia. Journalists such as Max Hastings, or entertainers such as Cilla Black, must therefore give a strong hint to the population that it would be sensible to let doctors pull the plug when deemed appropriate. They must provide a (notional) example to others by saying they might choose this option for themselves, though they need not necessarily stick to their suggestion when it actually comes to it. I believe it is what modern politicians and economists would call ‘a nudge’.

After two-thirds of a century of Welfare State ideology more people than ever before are reaching the age of 100. They live longer because, among other things, they are provided with money to buy food whether they could otherwise pay for it themselves or not, and medical treatment for all diseases, including obesity and alcoholism, whether or not they could or would pay for it themselves. Also they are prevented by legislation from exposing themselves to various risks which they might not themselves have avoided. And so they are at less of a disadvantage in comparison with the few who would live to a hundred anyway on account of high IQs and/or realism and forethought. Doesn’t that sound fair?

But then, having protected the dysfunctional from the consequences of their accident-prone ways of life, there is too large a population to be provided for out of taxation, so all must have their life-span curtailed, including those who are still functional and would have been so anyway. What could be fairer than that?

From cradle to grave – the social workers will be waiting to whip away your baby if they think there is a risk you will not look after it in the right way; the doctors will be waiting to put you down if they think you would prefer not to go on living, or would prefer not to if you had the right attitudes.

Socialism is incompatible with individual liberty. Capitalism alone protects it.

How the hell can I go on holiday?

In connection with the previous post, my colleague Fabian has commented to me that nowadays, even if someone felt as I did about the hopelessness of their position in being deprived of an academic career, they would feel too inhibited to admit it, perhaps even to themselves.

In fact I myself wished not to violate social taboos, but I was certainly very strongly aware of the hopelessness of my position as the dominant and overriding consideration in my own mind, and it is not realistic to give accounts of what I said, in these early situations, which often had such far-reaching consequences, without mentioning my own mental processes.

I was always having to find alternative ways of replying to questions without breaking the social taboo. So when Lady McCreery asked about holidays, I might, if a direct and natural reply had been possible, have said, ‘How the hell do you think I can go on a holiday at all, when I have been thrown out without a usable qualification, I have no tolerable way of earning money or of drawing income support (as I would not be supposed to be qualified for any job that I could accept) and my college will give me no support in any plan to get a qualification or to get appointed to do anything that I really could do, whether supposedly “qualified” or not?’

So my reply about curling up with a book on theoretical physics has to be seen as an attempt to say something that was true, but not too violating of social taboos, and which would probably have been true even if I was on a suitable academic career track. I never did set much store by changes of scene per se, and the holiday I remember as having got quite a lot out of when I was eleven had included the reading of H G Wells’s Outline of History, and a popular introduction to atomic physics.

If I had been in a normal life I might have considered going on holiday for some particular variation of intellectual input, and because other people considered it a natural thing to do, probably something like the summer school at Grenoble University which I had been prevented from going to when I was 15. So I might have been able to reply to Lady McCreery, ‘Oh, I usually like going to France or Germany, but I might go to Italy next year.’

As for Lady McCreery’s description of me as ‘patronising, offhand and humourless’, to the extent this was not just projection, whatever in my manner seemed to her to support such a description may well have arisen from my awareness of my horrific position, in which I certainly had no social identity. My position was exceedingly grim, and to the extent that my outlook came across, she might easily describe it as humourless. Comfortable or cheerful it certainly was not.

Similarly, when I met Charles’s sister Sarah, if I had had any normal social identity by which to be introduced, I might have avoided the humorous self-dramatisation. As it was, what I said was true of the underlying realities of my position, and would have been so even if Charles had been able to introduce me as an Oxford professor of physics, chemistry or anything else. In that case, there would have been no need for me to give any further account of myself.

Since the time the events described took place, I have observed many other illustrations of the type of behaviour referred to (in fact it has been a constant feature of my life ever since I was thrown out), and I have concluded that it is part of a general syndrome. People seem not to notice your bad position, talk to you in ways which call for responses from you that are incompatible with that position, and then express surprise or contempt when you do not make adequate responses of the required kind – or, when you make efforts to do so without entirely denying the facts of your life, they mock those efforts. It is pragmatically useful to assume that they are not really unaware of the underlying realities, but that they are enjoying the fact that they can put you under socially sanctioned pressure to distort yourself, and can denounce you to others if you fail to do so.

An MP and the Education Minister: joking about my position

With regard to the events described by Charles McCreery in the previous post:

I always felt that I was in a most unnatural position of intolerable deprivation in having been thrown out of Oxford with no recognition of my need to get back onto a normal university career track (meaning normal for me) as soon as possible.

And so when anyone started to talk to me as if getting to know me, or even interacting with me about something, I was always surprised at their failing to recognise the obvious, and not saying ‘What a terrible position you are in! We must find a way of helping you to get back.’

When they did not show any signs of recognition and instead talked to me about holidays, or criticised the way I interacted with people, I was always shocked and amazed, although I said nothing. I was not in a normal life, and until I was, nothing like holidays, or concealing my awareness of people’s hostility towards me (I was called ‘tactless’ for failing to make my antagonists sound sweetly reasonable), could be expected of me. A down-and-out living in a packing case cannot be expected to welcome visitors to tea in the same way as a person living in a semi-detached with lace curtains.

And then again, if a person is in a terrible position so that their only chances depend on someone being prepared to make an exception in their favour, surely responsible influential people would be especially careful not to say damaging things about that person. Obviously the ‘Celia of the universe’ slander, like so many others, could only be damaging to any chance I had of a benefactor recognising the anomaly of my outcast position.

Charles refers to his conversation with Norman St John Stevas in the presence of the then Education Minister – just the sort of person that I thought should be interested in hearing about how so anomalous a situation could have arisen, and feel it his business to remedy it. But here was Norman talking about me, in front of him, as being associated with a ludicrous slander that distanced me from any possibility of being regarded as an exceptionally able, but otherwise perfectly normal and respectable, academic who was only prevented by an egregious anomaly from re-entering a suitable career at a senior level.

A student of the universe

The following is an account which my colleague Dr Charles McCreery has sent to the prospective biographer of his father, the late General Sir Richard McCreery, which describes two further episodes concerning my interactions with his family.

I attach a copy of a piece which Dr Green blogged recently which refers to her first (and virtually only) meeting with my mother.

This occasion dates to a time when, as I have already mentioned, far from cutting myself off from my family, I was attempting to include them in my chosen line of work, and before I had realized that these attempts were futile, indeed counter-productive, inasmuch as they were used by my family to generate fresh canards of a destructive kind.

In this instance my mother emerged from the meeting (I had left them alone together) looking triumphant, and saying: ‘I sized her up immediately: completely humourless’.

In fact it might be argued that it was my mother who had displayed the sense of humour failure on this occasion. During the interview she had asked my colleague where she went for her holidays. Dr Green had not been able to afford a holiday for years; or perhaps I should say that, having been driven out from Somerville without a research grant, she had chosen to save every possible pound from her small salary from the Society for Psychical Research towards being able to buy a house in Oxford.

To avoid making my mother appear tactless, Celia had replied to the effect that her idea of a holiday was to curl up with a book on theoretical physics.

My mother reported this exchange to me with apparent glee, as if it supported her ‘humourless’ assessment.

My family apparently suffered a similar sense of humour failure following my sister Sarah's first (and, again, virtually only) meeting with Dr Green. The latter is given to making layered or provocative remarks of a would-be humorous nature to people she considers open to such things, and on seeing my sister for the first time she felt, rightly or wrongly, that my sister fell into this category. Accordingly, she introduced herself to my sister by saying, ‘I am a student of the universe from Oxford.’ Both elements of this statement were true on a literal level, since my colleague specialized in theoretical physics during her first (maths) degree. It could, of course, also be taken on a more philosophical level, if someone was so minded.

This utterance became transmuted by my family into something not at all humorous, and seriously damaging, namely ‘I am Celia of the universe’. This slanderous version proved to have much more staying power than the real one. Decades later (in 1987), I met Norman St. John-Stevas (as he then was) while he and the then Secretary of State for Education and Science, Kenneth Baker (now Lord Baker of Dorking), were queueing outside the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford to vote in the election for Vice-Chancellor of the university. Norman came out with: ‘And how is Celia of the universe?’ This was despite the fact that Dr Green and I had met Norman on more than one occasion in the intervening years and we had both corrected him in person as to what Celia had actually said. Clearly the risible and slanderous implications of the distorted version had far greater appeal.

As my colleague remarks in another of her published aphorisms: ‘The mature person never tells the truth when a lie will do.’(1)

(1) Green, C., The Decline and Fall of Science, Hamish Hamilton, 1976, p. 169.

Civilisation and capitalism

Capitalism is often referred to pejoratively, as in this quotation from popular author Oliver James.

Selfish Capitalism, much more than genes, is extremely bad for your mental health.

Oliver James is an Old Etonian who has managed to succeed in modern society, but who does nothing to help us, who have been less fortunate than himself.

Last year my colleague Dr Charles McCreery attended an Old Etonian reunion dinner at Blenheim Palace at which Oliver James was supposed to be present, although Charles did not see him there. Charles was attempting to raise awareness of our situation among the Old Etonian population, but neither Oliver James nor any other of them has taken any interest in finding out about our needs for help of all kinds.

* * *

Civilisation does not arise because anyone wants or appreciates it. It is an unstable and accidental by-product of commercialism, superimposed on a population which has a long-standing property-owning (capitalistic) hereditary aristocracy. Until the commercialism arises, the aristocrats do not arouse hostility on a significant level, because their abilities are fully engaged in stressful and excoriating activities, such as defending and running their estates, fighting in wars, etc.

With the advent of commercialism, however, some of them start to be free to use their abilities in ways to which they are well-suited, which they are getting something out of, and which may lead to extensions in the understanding of reality, such as scientific enquiry, exploration or composing music. This arouses hostility because they are seen as ‘too happy’ (as I was before I was prevented from taking the School Certificate exam at 13) and they are then described as ‘leisured’ and ‘idle’.

The next stage is that democracy sets in, partly on account of the idealistic respect for individuality which the ‘privileged’ elite has started to develop. Unfortunately, this transmission downwards of aristocratic values, such as self-determination, means that the incipient civilisation is doomed. Instead of liberating autonomy-loving instincts, the extension of freedom liberates destructive impulses. The possibility of owning property on a scale sufficient to provide freedom of action is rightly recognised as the most important thing to be destroyed, and society heads back to a state of communistic tribalism.

This is the inevitable result of democracy; the majority of people have no interest in maintaining a situation in which at least a few people have the freedom (i.e. capital) to use their abilities in a way which suits them, so capitalism and thus individual liberty become eroded, as is now happening. This is in spite of the fact that a relatively civilised society was in some ways advantageous to the general population.

* See here for an interesting twist on James’s affluenza theory.

The absurdity of the ‘social tariff’

Recently there was a proposal that the winter fuel allowance, paid to those over 65, should be effectively means-tested by being paid only to those who already qualified for some other means-tested benefit. Those receiving the basic state pension, but not the supplementary income support, would stop receiving it, thus noticeably increasing the disadvantage of not qualifying for the supplement.

Probably this was considered too obvious a form of means-testing, so this benefit (winter fuel allowance) was continued as payable to all over a certain age, regardless of their assets. But what has now been surreptitiously introduced is another form of energy-related concession, which will (effectively) be means-tested: the so-called ‘social tariff’ of the energy companies.

One is now informed that if one is over 60 one ‘should be better off’ on the ‘social tariff’, though one can only find out if one is eligible by ringing up one of the energy companies. So now, presumably, there will be less need for pensions to be adequate, since all who cannot ‘afford’ energy will not have to pay for it. This will therefore probably drop out of the ‘cost of living’ used to assess pensioners’ needs, in the same way that the cost of healthcare has dropped out of it, since you are supposed to regard the ‘free’ NHS as an acceptable alternative to medication for which you might formerly have wished to pay.

No, the newspaper says, if you are on the ‘social tariff’ the supplier will not worry if you are late paying your bill but (although the newspaper does not say so) they may of course notify the social services to see if you would not be better off in a ‘care home’. As, of course, they might when you make your first telephone call to them to find out whether you are eligible for the ‘social tariff’ .

When the state pension started to be effectively ‘means-tested’, and to ‘wither on the vine’, I thought that however far it fell below one’s real needs it would at least have to preserve some relationship to the cost of the most basic physical needs. But no. Never underestimate the cunning of governments.

How about food and clothing suppliers being made to set up ‘social tariffs’ as well, so that the cost of food and clothing will vary according to the means of the purchaser?

Then it would not matter if the basic state pension is clearly inadequate to pay for the costs of living in food and clothing, as well as gas and electricity.

More on the state's infidelity

I wrote previously about what the government has now announced it will not pay to Christine and Fabian by delaying the age for receiving pensions, although they are both already fully paid up (or very nearly so) after decades of hard work in making qualifying contributions out of a low and often non-existent income without ever getting into debt. Only of very recent years has the threat arisen of changing the pensionable age from that which was known and expected throughout those decades.

Of course, old-fashioned private pension schemes could not get away with breaking their contracts in this way. Perhaps modern ones can if the government legislates that they must. The government itself, of course, can claim that it cannot afford not to without damaging its provisions to the real needs of foreign aid, the medical and educational oppressions, and social interference of every kind. It would not do at all if someone were rewarded for conscientiousness in making voluntary contributions by getting a pension of greater value than the benefits which could be claimed by the unforethoughtful. You might call that elitism.

Recently a new pension scheme was proposed which would not depend at all on contributions made, but only on some years of residence in the country. Those who had made contributions under the old scheme would receive their pensions under the old system, which would be less.

With a bit of delayed reaction time, it started to be suggested that it might not be fair for those who had paid contributions to get less than those who had not, and I think it has now been reluctantly agreed that those who had paid into the old system would get their pensions upgraded to the level of the new system.

The changing face of paternalism

In my piece about Christmas Benefits, a lady receiving benefits is quoted as saying that if the government gives her money she has a right to spend it as she pleases and should not be criticised for doing so. Evidently there is sufficiently general sympathy with this view of the matter for many people like herself to continue receiving similar forms of support with no detailed enquiry into the use that is made of them. (I am not suggesting detailed enquiries should be being made. Apart from anything else, it would be prohibitively expensive. In principle I agree that if the state gives an individual enough taxpayers’ money for him or her to save out of, that is the individual’s business. The problem is that it is not realistic to go on paying benefits on this scale.)

The attitudes which I have encountered throughout my life, and certainly from the time when I was prevented from taking the School Certificate exam at 13, have been diametrically opposed to the permissiveness and generosity which is shown to people in the position of the Christmas Benefits lady.

When I was 21, thrown out at the end of the ruined education with no usable qualification, I found that I could get a research grant from Trinity College, Cambridge to do a postgraduate degree, which I hoped would get me back on to an academic career track. Rosalind Heywood at the Society for Psychical Research, presumably not yet in focus on my unacceptable outlook, and thinking of me as of any other impoverished young student, suggested at that early stage that I should apply to the Parapsychology Foundation in New York for supplementary funding, to which she would evidently give her influential support. I remember discussing with W H Salter and Sir George Joy in the office how much I should apply for, and Salter said in a throwaway manner, ‘Americans always give enormous grants. See what you think you really need and apply for twice as much.’

In fact I saved money throughout the period of my postgraduate degree at Oxford (in spite of taking more taxis than other people would have done) by making the most economical arrangements possible, and continuing with the policy which I was already applying to my paltry SPR salary of regarding only half of my income as available for spending.

At various stages during my postgraduate studies, Rosalind became suspicious and tried to force me to give an exhaustive account of how every penny was disposed of. I was not very good at making up an acceptable cover story. I am sure that many students spent a lot more than I did, but I was not in focus on their most expensive activities, and most of what I spent the money on was unacceptable.

Eventually, at the end of the Trinity College grant, it became necessary to obtain funding for the next stage. I did not conceal from my chief supporters, Sir George and Salter, that I had saved a couple of thousand pounds. Both of them, at different times, appeared shocked at my saving money, but the income from my capital was clearly trivial, so Salter, overcoming his horror and dismay, filled in ‘negligible private income’ on application forms for funding.

However, no funding at all could be obtained from any source, and all prospective support broke down. So I was forced to finance myself and any associates without any outside funding, and without being eligible for ‘income support’ since, as I have explained before, I could not apply for ‘social security’ as I was not considered qualified for any job that I could have accepted.

The rigorous withholding of support continued for years, in fact until the present day, and I suppose the idea was that I would be forced to run down my small capital until even that tiny piece of independence was destroyed.

At the end of the seven-year covenant from Cecil King, Lady Hardy (wife of Sir Alister Hardy and sister of the Bursar of Somerville) asked a friend of mine what we were going to do when the King money ended. Would we be leaving the house in the Banbury Road? ‘Well, no,’ my friend said. ‘We will be continuing to live there as before.’ And, my friend said, Lady Hardy’s face dropped unmistakeably, which implies that Lady Hardy was anticipating as a pleasurable experience my being thrown out on the streets without a salary or a roof over my head. Being deprived of this anticipated pleasure was enough of a disappointment for this to show visibly in her expression.

One may contrast this situation with Miss Bookey’s apparent pleasure and enjoyment of my joyful happiness on having the opportunity to get ahead in the Lower Fifth.

At the end of the King money, one might have expected senior academics, enquiring into the position of much younger people attempting to do progressive research in a situation of great difficulty, to be doing so in order to examine ways and means of replacing at least some parts of the vanishing support, so that the aspiring and hard-working young people could carry on.

In fact everyone was always obviously pleased at any misfortune that befell us, and obviously displeased at any disaster we managed to avert.

Miss Bookey, and the Reverend Mother before I was prevented from taking the School Certificate exam, clearly represented an attitude that had only been possible to an earlier generation, of being pleased to see an exceptional person deriving benefit from their ability, and being glad to have the opportunity to help them do so.

You could call both attitudes paternalism, in the sense of thinking you know what would be ‘right’ for someone. In one case you think it is right to help them, in the other that it is right to ruin them.

Your name will be up there one day

The following is an extract from a piece which my colleague Dr Charles McCreery has sent to the person who is planning to write a book about his father, the late General Sir Richard McCreery. It gives some background to my post about the sacrifices of sadism, which refers to his father paying his Eton school fees.

I started to read when I was three. By the age of five I was reading Biggles books, of which there were a large number in the house. When I was four and my sister was six we acquired a governess, Miss Gigg. At first she gave us lessons separately, on account of the age difference (my sister is a year and nine months older than I). However, it soon became apparent that I was able to keep up with my sister academically, and the governess gave us lessons together.

In this context it may be relevant to mention that I was told that the whole of my sister’s boarding school (St. Mary’s, Wantage) was once given an IQ test, and that my sister came top.

When I was sent to boarding school at the age of nine, I came top of the introductory class and my colleague Celia Green remembers me telling her soon after we met (in 1963) that the lady who took this class, Miss Wright, on one occasion looked at a list of boys who had won scholarships to public schools in the past and said, ‘Your name will be up there one day’.

However, my parents gave me to understand that the reason for my apparent exceptionality was that I had had a governess from the age of four. They then colluded with the headmaster to prevent me from taking a scholarship to Eton.

As one of Dr Green’s aphorisms points out, ‘It is very easy to make someone into a failure; you have only to prevent them from being a success.’

The Food of the Gods

The following text is from the last page and a half of H G Wells’s The Food of the Gods. When I was twelve I regarded this as the most inspiring passage of prose I had ever come across. I still find it expresses something I can feel identified with.

‘It is not that we would oust the little people from the world,’ he said, ‘in order that we, who are no more than one step upwards from their littleness, may hold their world for ever. It is the step we fight for and not ourselves.’

‘We are here, Brothers, to what end? To serve the spirit and the purpose that has been breathed into our lives. We fight not for ourselves, for we are but the momentary hands and eyes of the life of the World ... Through us and through the little folk the Spirit looks and learns. From us by word and birth and act it must pass – to still greater lives.’

‘This earth is no resting place; this earth is no playing place ... We fight not for ourselves but for growth – growth that goes on for ever. Tomorrow, whether we live or die, growth will conquer through us. That is the law of the spirit for ever more. To grow according to the will of God! To grow out of these cracks and crannies, out of these shadows and darknesses, into greatness and the light!’

‘Greater’, he said, speaking with slow deliberation, ‘greater, my Brothers! And then – still greater. To grow and again – to grow. To grow at last into the fellowship and understanding of God. Growing. Till the earth is no more than a footstool. Till the spirit shall have driven fear into nothingness, and spread ...’ He swung his arm heavenward: – ‘There!’

His voice ceased. The white glare of one of the searchlights wheeled about, and for a moment fell upon him, standing out gigantic with hand upraised against the sky.

For one instant he shone, looking up fearlessly into the starry deeps, mail-clad, young and strong, resolute and still. Then the light had passed and he was no more than a great black outline against the starry sky – a great black outline that threatened with one mighty gesture the firmament of heaven and all its multitude of stars.

The state’s infidelity

copy of a letter to an academic

Apart from means-testing the pensions, i.e. depriving Charles and me together of about £4,000 per annum, maybe more – which we would have been getting if the means-testing had not been introduced – the pensions due to Christine and Fabian have been delayed by a total of 9 years, thus depriving us of at least £50,000 (9 x present pension as reduced by means-testing) which the government should have paid to us if pension qualifying ages had not been retrospectively changed.

Thus the means-testing and change in qualifying ages together have deprived Fabian and Christine of at least £70,000 which they were due to be paid on reaching their former qualifying ages, both being fully paid up, or very nearly so, in terms of qualifying years (i.e. years in which requisite contributions have been made).

This income would not have been adequate to set up a satisfactory residential college with at least one research department, but the future loss of it is a serious drag on our continuing attempts to make progress towards the start of our 40-year adult academic careers.

Benefits Christmas

The Daily Mail has an article about a mother with four children, living on benefits, who is planning to spend a large sum on giving the children a good Christmas.

Benefits Christmas: Single mother Eloise spends £3000 to give her four children EVERYTHING they want for Christmas. And guess what? You're paying for it.

... she’s not a member of your average working family. She’s on benefits, meaning that effectively it’s your money which is paying for her children’s Christmas - Xboxes and all. Moreover, as far as Eloise is concerned, it’s all entirely fair - in fact, the merest hint of a raised eyebrow at her circumstances is enough to make her see red. ‘It makes me furious when people criticise how I choose to spend my money,’ she says. ‘Taxpayers seem to feel that they have the right to tell people on benefits how to spend their money,’ she adds. ‘They don’t - the government decides what people like me are entitled to, not the taxpayer. If it’s offered to us, then of course we’re going to take it and we shouldn’t be criticised for doing so. Frankly, I believe it’s my right to do what I want this Christmas with the benefits I deserve. ’

The Daily Mail journalist points out that ‘it’s your money’ (i.e. taxpayers’ money) ‘which is paying for her children’s Christmas’.

Working out what she receives in ‘handouts’ per year, the journalist makes it come to £21,528. That includes free school meals, but does not include the free ‘education’ and medical ‘health service’ which is accessible to all, including those who are contributing to the cost of it by paying taxes.

Including the cost of free ‘education’ for four children and free ‘health care’ for five people might, perhaps, double the figure representing how much it is costing taxpayers to support this family. It is scarcely surprising that the country is bankrupt.

It is a fact of genetics that if conditions arise which favour the survival of life forms (plants or animals) with certain characteristics, a subgroup of the species soon arises which is increasingly well adapted to the favourable conditions and increasingly numerous. For example, subgroups of various birds have developed which are adapted to deriving their support from bird-tables supplied by human beings, probably becoming in the process less well adapted to supporting themselves in other ways.

There is no reason to suppose that the situation can be remedied by offering those living on benefits inducements to work. The only possible solution is to scrap the Welfare State altogether, including state education and medicine.

That is, it is the only solution that could possibly work; but I am not supposing that there is any possibility of its being implemented by a democratically elected government.

Brief analyses such as these should be being expanded into research papers, but this is unlikely to happen unless Oxford Forum is supported.

The right and wrong kinds of inspiration

Bel Mooney in the Daily Mail wrote recently about the Inspirational Women of the Year awards. (Nobody had nominated me.) Typically, the nominees had suffered a severe setback in life, such as major physical injury, but continued to live with apparent enthusiasm, setting up a charity to provide help and counselling to people with similar injuries.

‘It does require putting your own moans last’, Bel Mooney said. ‘They identify a need and just go for it. As Katie Piper said, “You can look to the left and to the right and see people with far worse problems.”’

Clearly someone who responds to a bad situation in their own life by trying to ameliorate it, as I did, is taking their own ‘moans’ seriously and hence cannot qualify for approval or admiration, although they appear to qualify for unlimited opposition.

My colleague Charles McCreery’s mother, Lady McCreery, was well aware of what made women qualify for being regarded as ‘inspirational’. She went every year to the lunches at which these awards were made, being a close acquaintance of the Marchioness of Lothian, who ran them for some years, having started them.

When Charles brought her to meet me, soon after I first met him, Lady McCreery took an instant dislike to me. Of course, it is quite possible that she had already gathered from other statusful people that I was persona non grata. On the face of it, it might appear that I was not doing anything very different from what had been done by acceptable people regarded as ‘inspirational’, in responding to adversity in my own life by setting up an independent academic institution for research in previously neglected areas.

Lady McCreery told Charles that she had got me taped at once. I was, she said, ‘patronising, offhand and humourless’.

Far from wishing to bring my efforts to the attention of the Marchioness of Lothian and other supporters of inspirational women, she proceeded to stop at nothing to thwart my efforts.

Social outsiders, their parents and their siblings

I have known some other people who suffered, as I did myself, the consequences of living in a society that is hostile to individuality, especially that of the exceptionally able. In such a society the ‘educational’ system is geared to deprive the able of opportunity and to turn their families against them, unless, as very often happens, they (the individuals) can be turned against their families, blaming them for ‘pushing’ them, and they become dropouts.

Parents may not realise that society has become different from what it was before its transformation by the ‘Welfare State’, and that it is now necessary for them to protect their children from the destructiveness of teachers and of the ‘educational’ system in general (as well as from doctors, social workers, etc).

Other members of a person’s family, as well as the parents, are likely to be turned against them. Any sign of being ‘got down’, or feeling bad about the position into which they have been forced by the system, is taken as a sign of ‘having problems’, which is supposed to imply a need for ‘help’ (i.e. interference) as there cannot possibly be any objective cause of difficulties. This enables the person's siblings, or others, who may be jealous of their real (if maltreated and suppressed) ability, to stick the knife in.

If the opportunities with which the educational system has left them are ultimately too unsuitable, so that they are driven to attempting to do something under their own auspices instead of within the system, they are regarded as not needing help since that is not a ‘proper’ job or way of life.

Of course this is much to the advantage of any sibling, who will get larger shares of any handouts from which their outlawed brother or sister is now excluded.

Socialism and slavery

So many things turn up, and so fundamental, that I should be writing about and am prevented from doing; but this is just the downfall of civilisation, and it is meant to destroy people like me.

So just a brief note. I recently saw something on the French television about the cholera in Haiti, said to be so virulent a strain that it will be years before Haiti is free from it. I did not follow this exactly; some of the woman commentators speak very clearly, but this was not one of them. But the gist of it certainly was as follows: people whose ancestors had been slaves were so angry about the past history of the island, and about the social inequalities which persisted, supposedly as a result of it, that they had been putting cholera into the water systems so that it would spread to all parts of the island.

This would be in revenge (revanche) for the slavery (esclavage). It sounded as if they were just helping the epidemic along, rather than having started it in the first place.

So this is what the modern ideology has brought Haiti to, as a supposed improvement on its former state. There will evidently be a larger proportion of people who fancy having power over other people as doctors, and a fair percentage of the population will continue to lose their freedom to the disease, whether or not they ever recover from it, and whether or not they do so without falling into the hands of the medical profession. There will be many more doctors, one supposes, than there ever were landowners with slaves working for them. And it is not likely that anyone will acquire any freedom to do more than keep themselves physically alive and contribute (by taxation) to the support of the doctors and nurses, and their slaves.

Is this not an epitome of what socialism is aimed at?

Can retrospective legislation ever be ‘fair’?

Herewith some brief notes on some of the issues which arise in connection with recent terrible proposals concerning pensioners. I could and should be able to write much more about this and to get it published; only lack of financial support prevents me from doing this. People coming to work here on a voluntary basis would to some extent enable us to do more.

In the Daily Mail of 17 November there is an article about how governments etc. are letting down pensioners by providing them with no way of getting an income out of their savings.

The author of this article suggests that pensioners might be allowed to invest in special bonds paying a ‘decent’ rate of interest, but that the investment should be limited to a maximum of £20,000, so that ‘wealthy’ pensioners would not be able to benefit unfairly by getting an income which they did not really ‘need’. As usual, ‘need’ is defined in a way which implies that no one receiving more than about the level of income support can possibly be in ‘need’ of more.

Of course, most people with some capital must have suffered from the credit crunch, as the powers-that-be wanted them to do, since we know that the aim of modern society is to prevent those who have above average ability from acquiring any freedom of action to go with it.

In another article in the same issue of the Mail, about how pensioners can ‘sensibly’ get more income from their savings, investing in ordinary shares is described as ‘dangerous’. However, it is a lot less so if you have realistic information about what you are doing.

Over the years, we have invited many people to come and live near us so that they could do some work for us on a voluntary or paid basis, and also get the benefit of the information which we receive and discuss, which is relevant to investment and other financial matters.

* * *

The Pensions Minister Steve Webb, defending the raising of the age at which state pensions will be payable, especially for women, has argued that everyone was living longer, so it was ‘only fair’ that they should start to receive their pensions at a later age. This, however, presumes on the modern view of pensions as a ‘contract between the generations’. Originally people were supposed to be paying, with their contributions, for the income that they would eventually receive, which would be paid out of the income of a fund to which they had contributed. In such a situation, of course, the fund would go on being there even after any particular person had stopped drawing from it, for the benefit of future pensioners, and it would be constantly amplified by the contributions of those who did not live long enough to draw on it at all.

In fact, this fund never existed; see the book The Great Pensions Swindle previously referred to. Nevertheless, people were paying contributions into a supposed scheme which had undertaken to produce a pension bearing some relationship to the cost of living, or to the average wage, at a certain definite age, and this was something which people took into account in deciding whether to pay contributions into this scheme or not.

If it was wished to change the age at which pensions would be paid out, on old-fashioned principles it would be necessary to start a completely new scheme which only applied to people who started paying contributions after the new scheme had started. Retrospective legislation, or retrospective change in legislation, is unprincipled, but this is an idea that has been lost sight of.

Ros Altmann, the Director General of Saga, the association for over-50s, has criticised the postponement of the pension age, especially for women, not on the grounds that it is (in effect) retrospective legislation, but because the changes are too rapid and do not give those who are approaching retirement age ‘enough time’ to think about how they can arrange their affairs to compensate for the change.

One might think that an association of people over 50 would have old-fashioned enough ideas to stand up for principles, such as the principle against retrospective legislation. However, the majority of those who are over 50 now have spent most of their lives under the auspices of the modern ideology. In order to have been born before the onset of the Welfare State in 1945, a person would need to be over 65.

Open letter to a former associate – an Oxford classics graduate

We were sorry when you went away. You know we had a high opinion of your abilities and you were a tremendous asset. Since you left things have gradually got better in certain ways (not because of your having left, of course), and we regretted that, having been with us for so long through many difficult years, you left before we could provide you with even the advantages with which we are now able to provide people.

Building up in so antagonistic a society has been very slow and painful, and above all we find it extremely difficult to get people to work here for any length of time. We have to pay what seems to us quite a high hourly rate for any work we do get, and I always regret it when we pay people who are nothing to do with us, when we would prefer to think that we were helping to improve the position of someone who might be permanent.

If you were to move to Cuddesdon I think we could help you to become increasingly prosperous financially, and we are always aiming to help people here to become property owners. When I remember the sorts of things which you did when you were here before, and appeared not to mind doing too much, I think that any of these things would be extremely valuable to us now, and they are particularly difficult to get people to do, as everyone nowadays seems to be thinking in terms of pretentious and ostensibly highly skilled things, which they are not in fact good at.

We remember that you are a car driver and that could be very useful.

I hope you will consider coming. We would try to make things as good as possible for you if you did. Also please mention us when you are talking to anybody else. I think there are a lot of people these days struggling to get by on pensions, benefits, or otherwise, who could supplement their income fairly painlessly by coming to live nearby and doing a few hours a day of regular work (or more hours, up to full time, if they wanted to).

A teacher from the Dawn of Time

As I was precocious and read a lot, when I was ten I was certainly as familiar with the pre-1945 world as someone born ten years earlier than I was. This was a very different world, qualitatively, from the post-1945 world. However, in spite of the apparent advantages of the pre-war world, the current ideology must have been incubating within it, and I did not get any support except from people who were a good deal older than I was, more like 40 years older than ten.
When I went to the Society for Psychical Research I was initially supported by Sir George Joy and Helen Verrall (Mrs Salter) in plans which others opposed on account of my lack of social status. And those who were most instrumental in my being promoted to the Lower Fifth when I was thirteen, a maths mistress called Miss Bookey and the Reverend Mother, were both something like 40 years older than I was. All three of us were living in a world view distinct from the current one, but the modern ideology was already active and soon asserted itself.

Celia Green with her parents,
William Green and Dorothy Green, c.1947

Miss Bookey enacted the role of the teacher who could see what opportunities would be good for her inexperienced pupil, and exerted herself to bring them about. You could call this paternalism in the old-fashioned sense. I never experienced anything like this attitude again.
Miss Bookey started to teach me when I was eleven at the start of the Lower Fourth year (second year of grammar school). She appeared to be enthused by my exceptionality and was quoted as having said admiring things about me (e.g. that I was ‘luminous with intelligence’). At the same time she appeared actively to like me.
I remember an incident which, subsequently, I took as an indication that she already had it in mind to get me into a higher form. I asked her for some information about geometry which was not provided by the thin and very introductory book used in that form. ‘It isn’t in your book,’ she said. ‘In the higher forms they use a much larger geometry textbook. Wouldn’t you like to be working from the larger book?’ She peered at me as if trying to read my mind. ‘Oh yes, I would,’ I said uncertainly, wondering what was the relevance of this. Was she going to offer to lend me one of these books?
Nothing appeared to come of this at the time, but some time later, probably about a year later, the Reverend Mother proposed to my father that I should be moved up a year, and when this had happened Miss Bookey (who did not teach the Lower Fifth which I had entered) came up to me in the playground looking very happy and pleased with herself, and asked me how I was getting on.
‘Oh, it’s wonderful,’ I said, ‘Everything is fine. I am just amazed that I am still getting As. I really thought that when I moved up I should be prepared to get Bs and Cs at first.’
‘Oh no!’ she said. ‘You could never get Cs.’ And we parted on that note of congratulatory admiration.
I remember also, as an incident that somehow expresses the outlook of a bygone age, that when I had been told I was going to be moved up a year I received a message from the Reverend Mother asking whether I had done any maths in advance of that which had been done by the form I was in.
I went to the Reverend Mother’s room and said that I was afraid I had not, and (a bit apprehensively) that I hoped this would not make any difference to my being moved up into the Lower Fifth. The Reverend Mother was, like Miss Bookey after the move, looking very happy and pleased with herself. ‘Oh no,’ she said laughingly, putting on an act to a teacher who was sitting in the room. ‘It won’t make any difference to that. But it might affect whether you move up to the Upper Fifth. I was wondering whether to move you up two years straight away.’
Actually I had constantly asked my father to help me get started on later chapters in the maths textbooks, as well as on topics that were completely beyond them, such as trigonometry and calculus, but he had always refused on some pretext or another, such as that I could not do calculus until I had done more algebra first.
In languages, my father had been unable to hold me up, as he could not prevent me from proceeding to more advanced reading. He had given me some initial help in visiting Foyle’s Bookshop to pick out the very easiest readers, although there were sometimes signs that he disapproved of what I chose to read.

Simon Cowell's £165m: is it enough?

Discussing the rivalry of two people called Simon Cowell and Simon Fuller, today's Mail on Sunday Review quotes someone as saying: ‘This is not about money – both men have more money than they could spend in their lifetimes.’ They are said to have £165m and £350m respectively. Well, that is taking a distinctly limited view of what they might want to do in their lifetimes.

Suppose, like me, they need to set up an independent university to be productive in many areas of research, starting with just one residential college, at least one scientific research department with laboratories, a few departments for purely intellectual research in philosophy, history, education, etc, and a university printing press to publish books. I do not think £350m would go all the way to setting up such an establishment and running it for long, as deriving an income from capital becomes ever more hazardous.

But do not get me wrong. I would be very pleased to be given any lesser amount and would make the most productive use of it that I could.

In the same issue of the Review, there is a two-page article by a salaried academic called Ian Morris about his own tendentious and fashionable views, reminding one of the burning need for a historical department to be set up under my auspices to publish criticisms of such views, along with a more realistic account of the rise and ongoing fall of Western civilisation. The article in the Review is introduced by this paragraph:

Last week, historian Ian Morris revealed how, at the end of the last Ice Age, a simple accident of geography gave the West the advantages that led to it dominating the world for the last two centuries. His argument forces us to accept that our success was nothing to do with superior brains, leaders or culture – and that the East is on the brink of taking over. That idea may be hard to get used to . . .

No, it isn’t hard to get used to. It has been prevalent for a long time. What would be hard to get used to would be the accounts of the situation that my history department would publish if it were able to. And it should be able to; only financial support is needed to make it so.

Professor Ian Morris is at Stanford University, where research on lucid dreams was carried out for decades by salaried academics, and may still be being carried out – without any funding being offered to me to enable me to continue contributing to the development of this field of research, which had been initiated by me.

Lucid dreams: watching others get the benefit

copy of a letter to a journalist

When you came you asked me whether I regretted having written the first book on lucid dreams, and I should like to answer that in writing. It may be too late for your article, but I am often asked similar questions by journalists, and maybe when I have written it down it can go in my forthcoming book.

In my previous letter to you I referred to academics who make applications for funding for a project, don’t get any, and then find someone else is doing a similar project. Do you suppose they regret making the application? Of course with hindsight they may think that if they had known the outcome they would not have bothered. However, they could only have found out what the outcome would be by making the application, so in a sense I suppose they do not regret having made the attempt.

My position about lucid dreams is similar. I had no wish to write a book about lucid dreams, and would not have done so if I had had any way of proceeding with actual laboratory research on lucid dreams or on anything else, but all the possible sources of funding with which I had contact were impervious. So I made what was in effect an application for funding. I had no way of doing that except by publicising to the world my acquaintance with this potential field of research.

Of course, the academic who finds his ideas being copied has no cause for complaint. His ideas are not protected by patent or copyright, and if he makes them known to the personnel of a grant-giving body they may leak. There is no law against insider dealing in this area. In any case, even if there were, he would find it difficult to pin anything on anybody, unless his application drew on unpublished material known only to himself and this clearly appeared in the design of the other person’s project. This is very unlikely to be the case, and if specialised information is not involved, the other academic can always claim that he thought up the project independently. Great minds are said to think alike, and mediocre ones certainly do.

And, of course, it does the rejected academic no real harm (unless you count emotional bitterness as harmful) to see someone else implementing his ideas. In this respect, however, the emotional pain has been decidedly more severe in my case in relation to lucid dreams than that of the average rejected academic is likely to be. The academic has his status and salary; a certain modicum of lifestyle and intellectual activity is assured. I was attempting to compensate for my lack of these things by getting funding to enable me to live a decent academic life, and this was a desperate long shot at best.

It therefore caused me some intensity of despair to observe that one of my long shots had in fact succeeded to the extent of providing other people, already safely on academic career tracks, with a field of research. As the minimal funding which had made possible the writing of the book had run out, there was no way in which I could hope to improve on the application for funding which I had just made. A person on a desert island cannot exactly say that he regrets having fired a distress rocket without success; he understands what led him to do it, and in the same circumstances he would do the same again. But if I had known what the consequences of initiating this field of research would be I might have refrained. The expansion of work and interest in this field can only appear to someone in my position as a cruel mockery of it, a refinement of torture which I could have done without.

Update

I am applying, and shall continue to apply, for Professorships and Research Lectureships in psychology and other subjects – without as yet having ever been shortlisted – in order to develop the possibilities opened up by my pioneering work in lucid dreaming and other areas.

I continue also to apply for funding for a residential college cum research department within which to carry out research work, to increase the claim of myself and others here to fully salaried senior academic appointments in Oxford, Cambridge or overseas universities of approximately equivalent status.

An appeal to Harvard

I try to know as little as possible about what research or pseudo-research is being done in subjects in which I am being prevented from doing research myself, including (and especially) those which were initiated by our pioneering work in those fields. The work we did when we had the Cecil King money was intended to obtain funding for further work in those fields in circumstances equivalent to those enjoyed by salaried academics, either immediately associated with an adequate appointment in a university, or leading to one as rapidly as possible.

Actually the work on out-of-the-body experiences and lucid dreams, although as groundbreaking as it could possibly be in such bad and constricted circumstances, led to no positive result for me at all.

Instead, research started to be done in these areas by academics who already had salary, status and access to facilities etc.

Now I see, blood-boilingly as usual, an item in the Daily Mail about ‘research’ on lucid dreams at Harvard, etc. What their psychological advantages are supposed to be, and what sort of people are supposed to have them.

I have already put on our website a request for all those who have ‘worked’ on lucid dreams, as part of a normal salaried career, to make a contribution of at least £1000 per annum towards supporting me and enabling me eventually to do something, bearing in mind that I have to provide myself with an institutional environment and ancillary staff.

I hereby make a further appeal to those researchers at Harvard who are able to make comfortable careers in an area that probably would not exist at all without my efforts, to make a similar contribution, in recognition of the injustice which keeps me in a position of constriction and inability to develop the area which I pioneered.

I also appeal to anyone interested in the advancement of scientific knowledge to contribute as substantially as possible to the costs of setting up a research department within my organisation.

A cottage with a view

copy of a letter to a salaried academic

Things go on here without getting any better, and without anyone ever responding to our appeals for help of all kinds.

At the moment, for example, there is a way in which someone could give us some help, although we know that in general people do not want to give us any help, and want us not to get any.

A cottage very near to us is up for rent. We are very constricted for space and if someone were to rent this cottage and let us have the use of the whole of it, or some rooms, it would be a great help and a great relief. This is a pleasant village with good views and near to Oxford, so someone could use it as a second home for holidays, or come to live in it sometimes when they were visiting us, say as a senior supporter or a voluntary worker.

We might have a bit more success in getting temporary workers if we were able to offer them free accommodation in a nearby house.

Anyway, it would be a great help. We are too short-staffed at present to consider renting it ourselves; also, the rooms are a bit too small for one of us to want to live there on a permanent basis. It has no garden to speak of, but a patio-style area where one can have pot plants, with views over a valley. The village pub is a few minutes away and its food is not too unhealthy.

I know it is probably hopeless to tell people about this. However, I may be able to put this letter on my blog, although so far that has always been fruitless too.

A strange remedy

In a recent Daily Mail editorial, under the title ‘The cheats who give welfare a bad name’, there is a reference to the case of an elderly couple, married for almost 50 years, who were found dead in their unheated home during the winter. Their death is ascribed to their having been ‘too proud and independent to accept offers of help from the social services.’

A fictitious pride and independence seems to be the only motivation that subscribers to the modern ideology can consider. It is at least as plausible to suppose that it was a thoroughly sensible sense of self-preservation. The couple could not accept offers of help without exposing themselves to the scrutiny of social workers, and at the age which they had reached they must have been aware of the possibility that they might be considered no longer fit to retain their independence, and might be incarcerated in ‘care’ homes. Very likely, if this had happened, they would have been separated. They may have quite deliberately decided that they would prefer to die together, and at liberty.

I do not mean to suggest that it is only the possibility of separation for married couples which makes the final loss of independence appear to some people as a fate worse than death.

The only realistic way to make situations of this kind significantly less likely is to return to an un-means-tested State pension, at a level that is likely to be adequate both for heating and for domestic help of a non-interfering kind. The cost of adequate pensions could surely be easily met by significantly reducing the army of social workers who now poke and pry into people’s lives, or even eliminating this army altogether.

The Daily Mail would like us to believe that the reluctance of old people to apply for help from the social services has been increased by the ‘rapidly growing army of benefit cheats’. So, the Daily Mail suggests, we must have ‘much tougher and more rigorous assessment of those who seek benefits’.

This will mean insisting on the same standards of efficiency from civil servants as those expected of employees in every well run private company.

It will mean far more rigorous checks on claims – handled with sensitivity so as not to deter those in genuine need.

The only real solution is to abolish the system of benefits completely. Such a system is sure to lead (as it has done) to an ever increasing population of dependents, and an increasing prevalence of dishonesty. (The dishonesty is inevitable, and not necessarily conscious.) Tougher rules are more likely to increase the level of dishonesty than to decrease the number of applicants. As it is, for example, many must apply for unemployment benefit who realise, at least subconsciously, that they have no intention of remaining in a job for more than a few days.

Treacherous parents and a treacherous fund-raiser

Further to this, here is another piece of history which my colleague Dr Charles McCreery has sent to the person who is planning to write a book about his father, the late General Sir Richard McCreery.

Herewith an account of a meeting in 1965 between myself, my mother and our then fund-raiser, Charles Scott-Paton, together with some of its sequelae. In writing this account I have referred to copies of letters, contemporary with the events described, from Scott-Paton to Sir George Joy (our chief Trustee at the time), from my colleague Dr Celia Green to Scott-Paton, and from Scott-Paton to Celia Green.

* * *

In the following account I describe some of the damage which my parents did to our fund-raising campaign in 1965, the effects of which are felt to the present day.

Far from ‘cutting myself off’ from my family, as they liked to make out, I made great efforts to keep in touch with them, and indeed rope them in to our war effort, in the first year after finishing my degree.

At that time we were employing a professional fund-raiser, Charles Scott-Paton, in an attempt to build up the charity’s financial position. Since 1963 the charity had been in receipt of a seven-year covenant from the publishers of the Daily Mirror, IPC, arranged by its then Chairman, Cecil Harmsworth King. At the outset Cecil King had said that his covenant was intended merely as a ‘pump-priming’ operation, and we were therefore attempting to get the charity set up on a more adequate scale. Cecil King himself had referred to various organizations, including the Gulbenkian Foundation, from which he might be able to get us more substantial funding in the future, if we could demonstrate productivity on a small scale.

I conceived the idea of taking my mother to meet our fund-raiser, Scott-Paton, thinking that he would be impressed by her social status, and she in turn would be impressed by his professionalism.

Scott-Paton worked from home, in a house in Hampstead. To my astonishment, my mother and I had scarcely sat down in his presence before he immediately launched into a disavowal of any identification with our project, and stated that he had only taken us on as clients as a favour to his friend, Charles Gibbs-Smith (Keeper of the Department of Public Relations at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and a friend of one of our Patrons, Mrs Mary Adams, a former Head of Television Talks at the BBC).

I had been making regular visits to Scott-Paton from Oxford, as part of the planning for the launch of our fund-raising campaign with a function at the English Speaking Union, and I had never heard him speak in this way to myself. In the circumstances (we were paying him to promote our charity, so one might have thought he was answerable to me and my colleagues, not to Gibbs-Smith or my mother) this struck me as a betrayal.

Meanwhile, my mother sat listening attentively and with evident approval, not intervening at all with any remarks that might have counteracted his treachery and given him pause as to whether he was adopting the right line to her.

It should be borne in mind that I had invited both my parents to be Patrons of our charity, and they had accepted these positions, so one might have thought that my mother had a moral obligation to keep our end up when in public relations situations such as this.

This meeting continued as it had begun, with Scott-Paton and my mother reinforcing each other’s negative attitudes, and myself a mortified onlooker, largely silent while they talked across me to each other. I found it impossible to intervene to retrieve the situation, because to attempt to do so would have involved explicitly disagreeing with one or both of them as they expressed their ‘reservations’ and negativities to one another. Instead I was forced to watch as they carved me up in front of my eyes.

A sequel to this meeting with Scott-Paton was that my mother either initiated or propagated a slander to the effect that our charity was ‘in financial difficulties’. As with the drug-taking slander that my parents were later responsible for triggering, it is not clear who first thought up this slander. My mother tried to make Scott-Paton sound responsible by claiming she had got the idea from ‘reading between the lines’ of a letter Scott-Paton had written to her; while Scott-Paton, when taxed with this, claimed that it was my mother who had introduced the idea to him.

Needless to say, to imply that we were on the verge of financial collapse as an organization was likely to be a strong deterrent to anyone considering supporting us financially.

Soon after this episode our relations with Scott-Paton broke down completely, and the function at the English Speaking Union, for which invitations had already been sent out to the Press and potential donors, had to be cancelled. Scott-Paton sent in his final bill with notable alacrity, as if fearful that he might not be paid.

Up to this point Scott-Paton had held out the prospect of being able to arrange a charity premiere for our benefit at the Mermaid Theatre, then run by Sir Bernard Miles. Nothing more was heard of this thereafter.

I should make it clear that although in the preceding account I refer primarily to my mother, my father would have been fully complicit in the damage that was done to our fund-raising efforts. In matters such as this my mother never acted without my father’s approval. Indeed she was often at pains to emphasize the identity between her views and my father’s, both in family matters and about life in general.

I should also like to make it clear that I consider that my siblings owe me immediate reparation for the slanders and disinheritings, as follows:

Each of my siblings to make over to me a fourth part of any inheritance they received from my parents or any other member of my family and from which I was excluded. The sum to be calculated as follows: the size of the initial legacy to be compounded at the rate of 10% per annum from the date of receiving the inheritance up to the present day, to allow for inflation and the accrual of interest on the capital over that period.

Similar considerations apply to any lifetime payments or gifts any of them have received from my parents or other relatives, such as help with school fees, the gift of farms, London flats, etc. For me to consider restoring normal relations I require that a fourth part of the value of any such fees, property, etc., be paid to myself, with accrued interest and adjustment for inflation as described above.

The retrospective pensions swindle

I have a book entitled The Great Pensions Swindle* which, 40 years ago, made some useful points about the likely unreliability of state pensions. The following, however, is unrealistic:

The breaking point is not postponable indefinitely. The resistance to periodic increases in ‘social insurance’ contributions will begin all the sooner when the ‘contributors’ realise they are paying not insurance contributions but an income tax. (p.128)

In fact, no significant realisation arose that “National Insurance” contributions were just a form of income tax, which increased the Government’s current spending money. Otherwise the book anticipates very much what has happened. What happens when a future generation decides it prefers to spend its money on what is fashionable at the time (overseas ‘aid’, social workers, ‘universities’, etc.) rather than providing a former generation with the pension it thought it was paying for? The pensions are 'too expensive'; they are suddenly means-tested, and paid at ever later ages.

Not least, let it be clearly understood that ‘right’ (to the pension) and ‘contract’ are two more good words that have been made misnomers. A ‘right’ to a pension that a man acquires by saving for it is unambiguous. The ‘right’ a man has to an income when he can no longer work is of a different kind. The word has been re-defined to mean a moral right or claim on society. But transfers of income from one age-group, or class, or generation, to another represent decisions by one group, or class, or generation, to help another in time of need. No group, or class, or generation has a ‘right’ in any absolute sense. ...

In civilised parlance ‘contract’ means a voluntary agreement between two parties each of whom thinks it will gain. There is no such voluntary agreement between the generations on pensions. Indeed, there can hardly be one since future generations cannot be consulted; and if they could they would hardly agree since the terms are loaded against them. (pp.129-130)

* * *

Retrospective legislation has become increasingly frequent, and by now no one seems to remember that there was ever anything against it. It used to be said that the individual had a right to know what was legally open to him (in taxation, etc.) so that he could plan his affairs to secure the best outcome in view of his own interests and priorities, as he conceived them to be.

The recent changes in the ages at which state pensions become payable is really an egregious example of retrospective legislation, and directly affects people in as bad a position as we are. If a company which offered pension schemes were suddenly to announce that all its pensions were to be paid two years later, those who had been paying into the schemes might well wish to sue it for breach of contract. When the government does the same thing, no legal redress is available. This has happened recently and seems likely to happen more, so that my junior colleagues’ pensions recede as one approaches them. The age at which one of them will start receiving her pension was first shifted from 60 to 62, and then again to 64. Another’s pension was shifted from 65 to 67, and seems likely to be further delayed to the age of 68.

Thus the state has already deprived us, who are trying to build up towards an adequate academic institutional environment, of seven years’ pension money, i.e. £35K at today’s pension rate.

I have previously pointed out how means-testing of pensions retrospectively reduces the benefit received in return for contributions paid. This means nearly two thousand pounds per person per year. The proposed tax of £20K towards the cost of state ‘nursing care’, whether such care is received or not, was first proposed as a tax on estates on death, but is now suggested as a capital levy to be paid by every pensioner on reaching retirement age. If that were made retrospective, so that it applied to myself as well as to my colleagues, that would represent an additional confiscation of £80K.

There are several other examples of abandonment of principles, and I should be able to write about them at length, because they are actually very serious, although no one else appears to recognise this. If Oxford Forum were provided with adequate funding, we could be writing and publishing analyses on this issue which are currently being ignored in favour of the usual pro-collectivist arguments.

‘We hereby apply for financial support on a scale at least adequate for one active and fully financed research department. We make this appeal to all universities, corporations and individuals who consider themselves to be in a position to give support to socially recognised academic establishments.’ Charles McCreery, DPhil

* Arthur Seldon, The Great Pensions Swindle, Tom Stacey Books, London, 1970.

A Registrar of Oxford and other deflating gas-bags

This is an account of past events which my colleague Charles McCreery has written, and sent to someone who is planning to write a book about his father (the late General Sir Richard McCreery). My account of the same events has already been blogged.

At some later date I may give an account of how relations with my parents came to break down in 1965, about a year after I took my first degree, and how in my opinion this rupture was deliberately brought about by my mother, by her behaviour over a period of about a year, in order to justify the subsequent disinheriting that was carried out by various members of my family.

Meanwhile I wish to give an account of how my parents were responsible for triggering a slander that I was taking drugs.

Some time between the breakdown in relations between us in 1965, and my father’s death in 1967, they went to visit Oliver Van Oss, then headmaster of Charterhouse school, ostensibly to discuss the breakdown in relations, but in my opinion more likely in the hope that he could put pressure on me to resume relations on their terms. He had been my tutor for modern languages at Eton, but I had only seen him once, briefly, in the five years since I had left Eton. He was therefore not in a position to shed any further light to my parents on why I was currently not willing to see them than I had already done in writing myself.

As a result of the natural evasiveness of people caught propagating criminal slander, it was never definitely established who initially invented the slander that I ‘must be taking drugs’, i.e. whether it was my parents themselves, Van Oss, or one of the academics who passed it on, as described below. My own surmise is that it was most likely Van Oss who thought it up during, or prior to, the interview with my parents. Knowing him as I did I could imagine him producing the hypothesis to make up for his lack of insight into the situation, and, by making me responsible for the breakdown in communication, to let them off the hook. (Clearly no one as statusful as my parents could have been responsible for the breach by virtue of reprehensible behavior on their part, so it must have been me.)

However, even if it was Van Oss or one of the other academics who invented the slander, that does not exonerate my parents as they clearly were quite willing to accept the ‘explanation’ and certainly did nothing to prevent it circulating, as it proceeded to do.

The reason for the slander beginning to circulate round Oxford and elsewhere was that Van Oss was too cowardly to approach me directly. Instead, he approached a friend of his, John Butterworth (later made Lord Butterworth of Warwick), the Vice-Chancellor of Warwick University. The ostensible reason for this choice was that Butterworth had been Bursar at New College during my time there as an undergraduate. However, although I had known him by sight through seeing him around the college, to the best of my recollection I had never exchanged two words with him.

Butterworth evidently felt even more lacking in social leverage than Van Oss where I was concerned, and he passed the buck to a friend of his, namely Sir Folliott Sandford, then Registrar of Oxford University, whom I did not know at all and would not even have recognized if I had passed him in the street. Sandford, like his two predecessors, also lacked the moral courage to approach me directly, and instead approached one of our academic Consultants, Dr Graham Weddell, a physiologist at Oxford (later Professor of Anatomy). Even Weddell, whom I had also never met, failed to approach me directly but instead rang up my colleague Celia Green to describe what had been going on.

Following this telephone conversation between Celia Green and Dr Weddell I myself spoke to each of the participants, including Dr Weddell, on the telephone. Their reactions were instructive. I would say that each of them in their various ways sounded ‘caught out’, as if they had not reckoned with being called to account by the object of the slander himself.

None of them attempted to deny their involvement in circulating the slander. Oliver Van Oss’s manner I would describe as sheepish. I had previously, i.e. during my time at Eton, known him as an authority figure, and had never before experienced him in such a subdued and defensive mode in relation to myself. I remember having an image of him, either during the conversation or subsequently and as a result of it, as a sort of deflating gas-bag or balloon.

Sir Folliott Sandford admitted quite abjectly that there was not a shred of evidence for the slander, that it was pure speculation, and that it had been started in order to explain the rift between me and my parents.

The person who came nearest to adopting an aggressive attitude was John Butterworth. After I had repeated my expressions of disgust at the irresponsible way he and the various other academics had propagated this slander, he started to complain that I was disrupting his social arrangements – he was either preparing or conducting a dinner party of his own or due at someone else’s. I pointed out to him that the likelihood of permanent damage to my career and reputation as a result of his and others’ slanderous activities might be accounted of more importance than any temporary inconvenience to his social life.

Snatching winter fu-el

The age at which the elderly can claim winter fuel payments, worth £250 last year for the over-60s and an extra £150 for those over 80, is all but certain to be raised to cut some of the £2.7 billion annual costs. ... The handouts could also be restricted to less well-off pensioners who claim other benefits. (Daily Mail, 18 Aug 2010, from article ‘Bonfire of the middle class benefits’.)

After the state pension had ceased being independent of means-testing, additional payments for specific purposes were introduced from time to time, supposedly to reduce the hardship of those who now received significantly less than those with fewer savings.

But such specific items are vulnerable, and it is now proposed that the winter fuel allowance should be received at a later age than before, and also possibly be paid only to those in receipt of other benefits (i.e. with sufficiently small savings, and receipt of some other benefit to prove it).

Thus the proportion of the pension that is free from means-testing is to be decreased, and the extra percentage which I would receive if my savings were small enough will be increased. At present I would receive 36% more per annum if I were poor enough; if the fuel allowance were made dependent on means-testing, that would increase to about 40%.

As a matter of fact, even if I were eligible for the income supplement I would probably forgo it, and I think that pensioners as a whole should think very seriously before applying for it, since it can only be got by exposing yourself to scrutiny by those who may decide that you are no longer fit to live in independence, but should be incarcerated in a care home for your own good.

Since writing the above

Today, 19 August, I read that it is proposed that winter fuel payments to pensioners should be delayed to the age of 75, which means that those on reduced (means-tested) pensions will have their annual payment cut by about 5%.

There are criticisms that this will cost lives. For those of us who are still trying to get started on our adult careers by building up the capital necessary for an academic institution, it is simply an extra handicap, making an already grim situation just a bit worse.

The sacrifices of sadism are the greater

It may be observed that General McCreery was prepared to spend a good deal of money (Eton fees for five years) to prevent Charles from being at Eton as a scholar, which severely damaged his prospects in life, as well as his well-being throughout those years. If Charles had got a scholarship the fees could have been saved, which was not a negligible consideration even for the McCreerys, to judge from his father’s complaints about the costs of servants, central heating, etc. (*)

In fact, it appears that his parents wished to spend that much money to prevent Charles from getting the advantages out of his ability which he could have done. Cf. my aphorism:

It is supposed that self-sacrifice is the prerogative of altruism. On the contrary; the sacrifices of sadism are the greater.

* It was not a foregone conclusion that scholars did not have to pay fees, and the McCreerys might have wished to pay the fees for the social prestige of being able to pay even if Charles had got a scholarship.

My ineligibility for social security

It is important to emphasise that it was my ineligibility for so-called social security that placed me so much at the mercy of everyone’s hostility. I couldn’t pretend I was seeking a job because I wasn’t regarded as qualified for any of the many academic careers the requirements of which in reality I could have fulfilled. This certainly seemed to me very terrible. Going to the Society for Psychical Research made me aware that there were neglected areas of potential research, and I hoped to make use of them to work my way back into a university career. As a first step, I would set up a research institute to provide myself with the necessary conditions of a tolerable academic life.

The fact that I could never draw ‘social security’ (although it would have been pretty horrible to do so, even if I could have done) always made me vulnerable to the worst social pressure.

When I had resigned from the SPR, I did not have even a minimum of income to provide the barest physical survival, so I was forced to seek funding from the research committee of the SPR, and Rosalind Heywood used this situation to make me do the most pointless and tedious sort of ‘research’. If I had been able to draw ‘social security’ as an unemployed person, it is easy to imagine I might have preferred even going along to sign on once a week to undertaking the sort of ‘research’ that the SPR was prepared to pay me a pittance for doing.

The story that I had deliberately turned my back on a university career in order to do research which I found ‘interesting’ in poverty and social degradation became dominant and persists to the present day. I suppose that it was initiated by Rosalind and/or Somerville. It has a woman’s touch about it.

I remember a conversation I had with Salter before the plan for the research institute in a house provided by the Coombe-Tennants began to break down.

‘Would you have really wanted to have an academic career?’ he said.

‘Well, of course!’, I thought, but I said, ‘It was the research I really wanted to do anyway, so if this place gets set up it will be as good as I could have got out of a university career.’

‘But you wouldn’t really have wanted to teach, would you? A university career would mean you had to do teaching.’

‘I don’t mind about teaching, actually,’ I said, ‘although I would want to be doing research as predominantly as possible as soon as possible. But I have taught various people in Somerville unofficially in various subjects, and if that is what you have to do to get the academic lifestyle, its OK.’

‘But you were teaching people you chose to teach yourself, and if you had an appointment you would have to teach everybody,’ Salter insisted, as if he was proving that I really could not have wanted a normal academic career.

I wondered why he was making so analytical a distinction, which did not seem characteristic of the way his mind usually worked.

Of course, I had hoped to be able to start higher up the career ladder, and I should have been able to do so.

In retrospect, I could see that Salter, probably already under Rosalind’s influence, was working towards the idea that, since some of the things in an academic career did not appeal to me, I deliberately preferred ‘doing research’ in poverty and social degradation, which I suppose is the standard ‘drop-out’ position. And, of course, if I was doing exactly what I had freely chosen to do, everyone was let off the hook about thinking that I might need any help or support of any kind.

Slandered by academics (part 1)

It is probable that widespread slanders had been spread about me and my incipient research institute from the time I was thrown out in 1957, but one seldom had direct evidence.

However, it happened that one of our Consultants, Graham Weddell, a physiology lecturer at Oxford, rang me a year or more after Charles McCreery had graduated in 1964, at which time he (Charles) had called a halt to communication with his family so as to recover from the run-down state he had got into as a result of his mother’s constant pestering.

Dr Weddell sometimes seemed a somewhat tactless person, who revealed inside information, perhaps to gain the confidence of the person to whom he was talking. On this occasion, he said, ‘They are making an awful lot of fuss about your research assistant.’

I was nonplussed and thought of various part-time workers we had employed whom I had not known very well, and wondered what any of them might have done.

‘Can’t I at least know who it is you are talking about?’

Weddell seemed to hesitate. ‘Well, he has a very important father and his father is beside himself about his drug-taking.’

‘You mean Charles McCreery, son of General McCreery?’ I said, surprised. ‘There is no question of his having ever taken drugs.’

After a bit more reiteration of this, Weddell seemed to accept it and said that it must have arisen from the association of ideas between parapsychology and drug-taking.

I had reservations about this, because when some really damaging slander or piece of hostility against us was revealed, and we gave our side of it, people always found it easy to brush it aside with, ‘Oh, it’s just the subject’ (‘the subject’ being parapsychology). Actually I thought that was a rationalisation, and the reasons for the hostility were more profound. But I went along with the idea on this occasion, partly to show that we did not regard ourselves as part of some ‘parapsychological’ population.

‘I suppose it has not helped that Steve Abrams* has been in the papers recently,’ I said. ‘He has been going to the Home Office to tell them that marijuana ought to be legalised since he claims it is an aid to creativity for writers.’

I asked who had been saying these things about Charles, and Weddell gave me the names of three people whom Charles subsequently proceeded to tax with it by phone: Oliver Van Oss (headmaster of Charterhouse), John Butterworth (Vice-Chancellor of Warwick University) and Sir Folliott Sandford (Registrar of Oxford University).

* an American parapsychologist with a research organisation in Oxford

More about this episode can be read here.