I DON'T LIKE ULYSSES

Ralph Fiennes, Juliet Binoche as Ulysses and Penelope

I dare he does not care. He is long gone and is no longer in a position to worry. Maybe that is his secret of his survival, not caring about other people’s opinion of him. I have never warmed to Ulysses, however, and my opinion of him has been brought into focus by a new film called The Return in which Ulysses is portrayed by that fine actor Ralph Fiennes. The film only looks at his return to Ithaca and ignores the various adventures he had on the way back from Troy.

It was Ulysses who thought up the idea of cramming a group of soldiers into the wooden horse which was left as an apparent gift to the Trojans but turned out to be a trap, releasing them into the city they had supposedly besieged unsuccessfully for ten years until they appeared to leave to go home. In fact, they returned to destroy the city and its inhabitants having tricked their way into it before leaving the wooden horse as a supposed gift.

This trick gave us the phrase ‘beware of Greeks bearing gifts’. It was not bravery in battle or superior siege weapons which led to the Greek victory but a rather sneaky sleight of hand thought up by Ulysses. This resulted in an orgy of massacre (and probably rape) by the victorious Greeks. They made sure that all the Trojan males were killed – even the babies – and all the women enslaved after they had sacked the city, leaving no trace of Troy.

 

Then Ulysses begins his long journey home, taking another ten years and having numerous adventures on the way, as described in The Iliad. All his men are killed in this journey until he limps back to Ithaca to reclaim his crown and his long-suffering wife Penelope and their son Telemachus. This is what The Return is about - not the adventures, both military and romantic - that kept him from returning for so long and convinced people that he was dead.

 

Penelope is surrounded by suitors who want to marry her. Not only they are all killed by the returning Ulysses, but the servants who looked after them, most of whom were female, were strung up and hanged. This is what turned me against the so-called hero of the story, the killing of the servants, who were only doing their job in serving the men who were wooing their mistress. This incident is, interestingly, left out of the film. Only the suitors die.

 

Maybe this is a modern way of looking at the story, feeling for the workers, who would surely have been put to death by the suitors themselves if they had refused to serve them and remained loyal to their absent master. The servants were dealing with the reality of the situation, not the impossible ideal of a man returning after being away for two decades. Of course, Ulysses does return but the servants had to deal with the situation as they found it.

 

They had a living to earn, after all, and had to deal with the situation they were in, not one that might occur sometime in the future. Killing the servants as well as the suitors served to cleanse the court thoroughly as their king returned home. Ulysses could start anew with a clean slate, with just his wife and son by his side. No account is given of his death, which surely happened, unless he discovered the secret of immortality as well.

 

In a way, he has done, of course, living beyond the story of what happened at Troy and on the journey home. Ulysses is the ultimate survivor, being a warrior – he dispatches his enemies ruthlessly in the films, even as they beg for mercy – and a clever schemer who does not declare his identity as soon as he comes home, but allows to people think of him as an old drifter who is only recognised by his dog, who cannot speak of his knowledge to humans.

 

Fiennes, who is an excellent actor on screen and stage, plays Ulysses as a survivor, who shelters with a slave, as he slowly but surely reasserts his kingship in Ithaca and disposes of his enemies. This motley crew does not seem very realistic to me. Although Penelope (who is Helen of Troy’s sister) is a great beauty, surely they would in reality have pursued younger and more fertile women, especially in the unforgiving Mediterranean climate.

 

However, this is letting the truth get in the way of a good story, anathema to film-makers around the world. Ulysses has to battle for his crown and ruthlessly dispatches all the suitors with the bow he has managed to thread to prove his worthiness. They die with a whimper as he and his son dispatch them, saving the last blow for the most sympathetic suitor who accepts his fate and is killed, despite Penelope’s pleas, by Telemachus.

In those days men did not expect to die in their beds and to survive you had to be a killer. Being a pacifist was not enough to ensure survival and so Ulysses has to dispatch those who were after all trying to usurp his place. But the servants as well? We live in an egalitarian age when their feelings and motives are taken into account and getting rid of them seems unnecessary and over-vengeful. No wonder the film-makers left that part out.

 

Films and stories demand a high body count these days and a man strolling back to claim his crown unopposed would not have made much of a story. Still, I think that killing the servants was unnecessary and have never forgiven Ulysses for doing so. The film-makers probably agreed and cut this part out of the story, as much to make him sympathetic as to control the length and killing in the film. Still, I have never forgotten - or forgiven - it.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

 

 

ON THE EXISTENCE - OR NOT - OF GOD

Always smartly dressed: Richard Dawkins
 who rather curiously converted me to God

The very fact that I am asking the old question about the existence of God (or god if you are an atheist) shows that, in a way, he does exist. If I ask if He exists then I am bringing him into being. The question is probably better put – does God exist as a concept or as a being. It is probably better to ask, how much is God a concept and how much is he a being? Did God invent people or did people invent God. Which came first – the chicken or the egg?  

I have always believed that people invented God rather than the other way around. This is not to disparage belief, merely to say that it is a prerequisite of living. A part of the process of coming into being is to think that we are not alone, that we are part of a larger plan emanating from a deity who remains unknown. God does not interfere in our daily lives or he (He?) would not have let horrors like the World Wars claim so many millions of lives.

 

How could a benevolent God who was watching over and controlling us allow so many young men be cut down by machine gun fire as they climbed out of the trenches. How could so many innocent Jews – women and children especially – be slaughtered in gas ovens at Auschwitz and similar concentration camps, their bodies burned after death to dispose of them without any kind of proper funeral or burial, just tossed away like so much rubbish?

 

When you see the terrible things human beings have done to each other and which Nature does to us in the form of earthquakes and natural disasters it is hard to believe in an all-controlling and benevolent deity who has our best interests at heart. After Charles Darwin’s ideas were eventually published – he kept them under a staircase so as not to upset his pious wife – we gradually began to believe more in chance and less in a just god.

 

Nowadays, people are increasingly indifferent to religious belief. They ignore the idea of a deity and an afterlife and accept, for all the talk of being ‘in a better place’ after death, that we live in our bodies until we die and we can only expect oblivion afterwards. I think this indifference is far more of a danger to religious belief than the atheism of people like – to quote a famous example – Richard Dawkins, who takes a more approach to the question.

 

Yet, it is surely because atheists are often very moral people that we still maintain some kind of belief in a deity, a greater power than a purely human one. I like Dawkins the scientist and read one of his books, The Blind Watchmaker, once. He presents the Darwinian idea that human life gradually evolved on this planet rather than it being created by a greater power. He is backed up by Darwin and geology so his arguments remain hard to contradict.

 

In his book, however, Dawkins makes several moralistic comments which have a kind of almost undergraduate flavour about them – against the boiling alive of lobsters and in favour of abortion rights, for example. It is these which spoke most loudly to me and which I remember best of all, long after I have forgotten the rational scientific arguments he makes.

 

Take the boiling alive of lobsters. Afficionados of their preparation (of which I am not one) believe that the flavour of the finished product is improved by boiling them alive rather than killing them quickly. Just say you were given the choice at a restaurant between boiled alive lobster and the quick-killed variety. This is not too crazy an idea, by the way. We have the choice between free range and factory farmed chickens when we go shopping for example.

 

A scientist believes that taste and smell are senses that developed to tell if food was poisonous or had gone off and might make you sick if it did not prove fatal. This has now developed to the extent that people spend thousands of pounds on meals and wines to go with them. They also have extended their moral senses to give priority to free range foods or to eschew animal and meat products entirely by embracing vegetarianism and veganism.

 

Yet science is factual rather than moral. It does not give priority to moral considerations when choosing, for example, to embrace quick-killed or gradually boiled alive lobsters. One is merely supposed to taste better than the other. Our sense of morality helps us to make the decision here and morality developed as a mechanism to make it easier for us to live together. Put bluntly, moral people tend to make better neighbours than immoral ones. 

 

This sense of morality has now been extended to non-human species who are afforded rights they could only have dreamed of once. These are not universally adopted by humans (which is why many still boil lobsters alive). Scientific investigations may explain this process but, in doing so, it also explains them away. If analysis tells us that we are acting in a purely moral way, we can just as easily reject this morality in order to enjoy better-tasting lobster.

 

Despite being a classic fence-sitting agnostic, I am sure that it is right not to boil lobsters alive (even if Woody Allen can make a good joke out of it in Annie Hall). I join the team of both atheists and believers who want their lobsters killed humanely and quickly, even if this results in a poorer taste. Yet I do so not because science is telling me to – science is indifferent to the matter – but because God is saying that this is the best way to behave.

 

So I believe in God even if I accept that he/she/it is a largely human creation. The most pious person would probably admit that form of his belief is partly an accident of history and geography and, if he had been in a different time and place, he would have followed a different path. Yet the most militant of atheists would be hard-pressed to explain why he or she adopted a very moral position if it was not partly due to the existence of a higher power.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is DiaryofaTouristGuide,blogspot.com

 

NOBODY'S PERFECT

Billy Wilder's tombstone in Hollywood

I have often wondered what a successful relationship consists of. I can hardly claim to have had a particularly good record in this field, although I have been with my partner for nearly a quarter of a century now. We got together early in the twenty first century, which is now in 2025 a quarter over. I have a memory of going to see the new century in with my family on Dartmoor but it turned out that was one of last we things we did together.

We have certainly had our ups and downs in that time, almost splitting up at one stage and never formally tying the knot by getting married. However, we realise that we are both much happier inside a relationship than outside one and, after a while, you get tired of looking for the ‘right’ person and settle for what we have in front of us. So there is a part of any successful relationship that is settling for what you have got and stopping the search.

 

That does not sound very romantic, I would be the first to admit. When you are young you tend to believe that there is somebody meant for you and it is just a question of finding them. As you get older, however, you realise it is more a question of making choices from what is available. A lot of this comes from deciding that, in the old cliché, no-one is perfect and coming to terms with someone’s imperfections is the way to nurture a relationship..  

 

The film Some Like It Hot ends with just this thought as the Tony Curtis character admits to the man determined to woo and marry her that (s)he is really a man in disguise. (To cut a long story short, she and Jack Lemmon are trying to escape from murderous gangsters and think that the best way to do so is to dress in drag.) The film, which was made in the late 1950s, actually anticipates some of the transgender debates raging at the moment.

 

It is a frothy sort of film but. It has stood the test of time and pays rewatching today. The director Billy Wilder spoke with a foreign accent throughout his life, even when he was making films entirely in English later in his career. He was born in 1906 in Poland and moved to Hollywood to escape the Nazis, directing dark films like Double Indemnity and The Lost Weekend as well as light comedies. He was surely one of Hollywood’s great film directors.

 

The phrase ‘Nobody’s perfect’ is inscribed on Wilder’s gravestone. It is not actually the full epitaph (photograph above) and was meant to be a joke but there is a good point there. Nobody is perfect and the secret of having a long-lasting relationship is to STOP LOOKING FOR PERFECTION. There is a temptation to believe that somebody who is just right for you is out there and achieving happiness is just a matter of finding them.

 

But surely the secret of a good relationship is coming to terms with the other person in it, their imperfections and all. Both my partner and I want to be in a relationship while my ex takes the attitude that being on your own is better than being with the wrong person. It was, of course, this perfectionism that I fell for but was unable to live up to. Nobody, however, could have done that so she remains alone while I am with someone.

 

Each to his (or her) own. Yet I cannot help feeling that it is better to be with someone than otherwise. To have someone for company and conversation, for practical help and support and the feeling that you do not have to try too hard. I feel no envy towards those who are in the singles marketplace and are still out there looking for a new partner. It is, if nothing else, it is simply too much like hard work and I am happy to have left that all behind.

 

That may sound unbearably smug of me but it is genuinely the way I feel. As Saint Paul says in his letter to the Corinthians, 'When I was a child, I talked like a child. I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the way of childhood behind me.'

To be searching for a partner – or to be on your own – seems someone childish to me as I embrace my old age. Searching for someone new – too late, too late for all of that now.

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com 

Edwin Lerner

WHAT YOU DO NOT WHAT YOU MIGHT DO

The three victims of the Southport killings 
 

This article is about the killing of three young girls at Southport last year and the person who committed the crime. He has deliberately not been named in it so as not to boost his profile. Instead I have included pictures of the young girls who were victims of this terrible crime.

 

Now that the killer’s punishment has been handed down – fifty two years in jail, no less – we begin the hand-wringing exercises. Politicians queue up to both condemn the killer and to say something like ‘it must never happen again’. The problem is that it is very difficult to prevent it happening again for the simple reason that in our society you are imprisoned for what you actually do – not for what you might intend to do at some future date.

 

Of course, no politicians can say this. They would have to admit that they were powerless and could not stop a poor, deluded person killing others in order to make the world a better place and possibly helping them to get to heaven in the process. There is just the small matter of spending the next fifty two years in jail before you can achieve that: eighteen years growing up and becoming a person, the rest locked up in a cell with little company.

 

It is worth emphasising this point because politicians are in the business of creating a perfect world. Unfortunately, the world is actually far from perfect and our freedoms have to be hedged around with protections, which sadly include the freedom to do evil things – like killing innocent young girls while they attended a dance class. He intended to kill all the adults and others attending the class and would have done so if he had not been stopped.

 

The only way he could have been prevented from killing those girls was if he had been locked up in advance. We then move towards the sort of situation imagined in that Spielberg film Minority Report in which people are arrested before they have a chance to commit a crime. Forget about human rights and the presumption of innocence and old-fashioned concepts like that. Lock them up first to prevent criminal activity.

 

To be fair, Minority Report is a science fiction film set in the future, featuring psychic characters who can predict crimes (‘precogs’).  As far as I know, precogs do not exist (yet) and the story can be safely stored in the fantasy category. Precogs have a 100% success rate and the business of putting people on trial and judging whether they had committed a crime or not. The fact that the crime had not yet been committed could answer that dilemma.

 

The government does have a programme called Prevent which aims to stop people being radicalised into terrorism. The official description says it is, ‘a national initiative … that aims to prevent people from becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism. It's part of the government's counter-terrorism strategy, CONTEST. The extent to which the killer of these poor girls was a radical or simply a nutcase is disputed but Prevent seems like a decent idea.

 

Whether it is successful is open to debate. For all we know, they could have prevented plenty of similar massacres like the one recently at Southport but I think it is unlikely. Such programmes inevitably find it hard to convert people who have travelled down the path of extremism. Eight people were killed on London Bridge and Borough Market in 2017 by men who actually met with each other at a supposed terrorism prevention centre.

 

I do not think that we should abandon such measures, but let us be honest. They have limited success in what they are tyring to do. It is simply impossible to lock everyone who might attack another who we all (except the killers themselves) regard as innocent. ‘This is for Allah,’ the killers shouted as they killed bystanders in Borough Market in the 2017 attack. Yet Allah did not ask them to kill people and should not be blamed if they do so.

 

We tend to lump people together and a lot of people will blame all Moslems for thse killings. Yet, Moslems are, on the whole, law-abiding and hard-working people who do not deserve being lumped with the fanatics who perform these killings. I remember that there used to be a DIY shop run by a Moslem family which closed up at around midday every Friday so that they all could go to the mosque on what was their holy day.

 

I never resented this if it happened when I was in the shop buying something, even though it meant I would have to come back later. Good for them, I thought. They are showing that something is more important than making money. In this case, it was religion, which some customers might not sympathise with, especially if it was Islamic, but I liked the way that they simply stopped for a short time and thought about God rather than Mammon.

 

That was – for many – a positive side of Islam. The negative comes out in the acts of terror that can strike at random and with devastating suddenness. It is all very well identifying those who could potentially commit a crime but punishing them before they have done so is against the rule of law. This means that they have to commit the crime before they can be punished, as the killer of these girls did – suddenly, viciously and with little or no remorse.

 

Allowing someone to commit a crime inevitably means that there will be victims and my heart goes out to the parents of these girls. Who could be more innocent than a young girl at a dance class? Who could be more guilty than the person (usually male) who attacks and kills them? Yet, until their murder has taken place, he has to be regarded as innocent. No amount of hand-wringing can alter this, even if it means we have to allow evil to flourish.

 

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

Edwin Lerner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

NEW YEAR'S EVE REFLECTIONS

2025

As 2024 draws to a close, I have been reflecting on what has happened throughout the year. This is customary for me, although I usually ignore all the parties around the New Year event itself, having long expressed indifference to it. An early night will do me fine. I may stay up to watch the fireworks on the television but I will not be toasting the New Year in and definitely not singing Auld Lang Syne as 2025 starts up.

Why so Scrooge towards New Year? Whereas the north of Christ seems like something worth celebrating, even if we live in largely secular age and his being the son of God seems a bit of a stretch to the agnostic-atheists who live in it. I do go to church occasionally and quite enjoy it but I find it difficult to believe in any sort of afterlife. Apart from anything else it would seem a bit dull being perpetually nice to one another for eternity.

I know that my body is starting to decline now and, although I fight this off as best I can, this progress seems inexorable. Sooner or later the decline will bring about my death. I am more or less reconciled to this although I have always wanted my body to get there before my mind also begins declining. Having seen the effects of dementia on my grandmother and even my father, who had a very sharp mind, I have no desire to go through it myself.

I wake up at six every morning - often woken by the alarm in my phone - and do my exercises in an attempt to strengthen my knees and hold off the effects of ageing. I have done that every day except once since the physio gave me them and my youngest brother tells me in his somewhat bossy way that doing them is 'a good thing'. It is one way to start the day, I suppose, and makes me more flexible than I used to be, It certainly beats getting a new knee fixed.

One of the reasons I feel Scroogish towards New Year is that many of my friendships are fading as I concentrate on family more. Friendship sued to be very important to me and I counted lots of friends, many of whom I have lost touch with in recent years. This does not seem so important, however, as I have little interest in singing along with them. I am happy to see my daughter and son in the period around New Year and wait for my partner to come home.

She is in Ireland on tour now and, although she is looking forward to stopping work so that she can spend every day with her beloved horses, I have little interest in retirement, which I always felt was overrated in any case. I am rather dreading having to give up work because of dementia or disability and want to fend off that date as far as possible. I have no intention of retiring, although I accept that I may be retired as people decide I am too gaga to work anymore.

My grandfather on my father's side - I never knew me maternal one who died before I was born - said that he would be dead within six months of being forced to stop work. That happened more or less as he predicted once he had sold his stationery business and was eased out by the new owners of the business he had built up. Much the same applies to me, I think, and one of my main preoccupations is what to do with my private pension, which I have not touched yet.

Still, I should not complain too much. I have my health - sort of - a fine family and I can still work in what is probably best described as 'semi-retirement' in which I still get paid for work I love and  can pick and choose to a certain extent how much I work. In practice, I tend to accept jobs which are offered to me and do about 100 to 120 a year, which is ample for me. As they say, I should count my blessings as the sun sets on another year.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is )diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

FOUR MORE YEARS OF TRUMP

Victorious again - Donald Trump

I cannot say that I was particularly surprised when I woke up to find that Donald Trump has been re-elected to the presidency of the USA. The opinion polls put him and his opponent Kamala Harris neck and neck but he won quite comfortably in the end, carrying all the swing states and winning both in the electoral college and the popular vote, which he actually lost quite heavily to Hilary Clinton. This time he won on both counts fairly easily. 

Why was this? Obviously, Harris is a woman of colour and, although America was prepared to elect a black man to the presidency – and Barack Obama campaigned valiantly for her – the country would not elect a woman, even a gun-owning one, to the office. Sexism is stronger than racism it seems and people would not admit this, even to an opinion poll questioner. This applies especially to black voters, probably both male and female.

 

There were other factors too. A large number of Moslem voters would not turn out for her because her boss Joe Biden was a strong supporter and supplier of arms to Israel. Prices kept on rising, bills were increasing and improvements in the economy had not registered strongly enough. American voters were more interested in paying the bills rather than saving the world. Let us not sneer at them – most people around in other countries are the same.

 

Trump, despite not yet being in office at the time of writing, is already saying that he will increase tariffs on goods coming from other countries, particularly Canada and Mexico and its biggest trading partner China. This is an attempt to stem the flow of drugs like fentanyl into the country - as well as illegal immigrants. That was one of the main issues in the election, stopping people coming into a country that has always relied on immigration.

 

This is one of the many problems Trump will face when he takes office. There is a real tension between his promise to put America first, to secure the borders from illegal immigrants and to protect American workers from cheap imports on the one hand and the support of neoliberal people on the other hand. The neoliberals believe in free trade and market forces and Trump has promised to protect the American people from these forces.

 

Trump sounds good. He knows how to work a room simply by telling people what they want to hear. However, he relies on backing from people (mostly men) who may agree with his conservative agenda but who also support free trade and are quite happy to buy goods from the cheapest supplier whatever their country of origin. This is a fundamental contradiction that will not disappear – free trade versus the protection of American jobs.

 

Trump’s message to those who voted for him – keep working in the jobs you have done for generations and do not worry about things like the environment – is very different to that of those who bankroll him. Sooner or later, the tension between the two will become obvious and I have a feeling that market forces will prevail, as they usually do. Whenever I go to the shops, I tend to go for the cheaper option if the goods are of similar quality.

 

The ability to work a room is an often underestimated quality but it is essential for those who want to be elected. I have to admit that Ronald Reagan was good at it. The old actor spoke well and I was naïve enough to think that he was speaking off the cuff when he was really reading his speech from an autocue. In my defence, it was some time ago that I heard Reagan speak and I was not familiar with this machine at the time. I soon learned.

 

Who else had the ability to work a room? Bill Clinton, who had very good ratings when he left office, had it but I do not think that his wife Hilary did so. (Bill would never have made the mistake of labelling potential voters as ‘deplorables’.) George Bush junior had it but George Bush senior did not. JFK and Obama had it in a rather lofty way while LBJ had it in a down-home way – but lost it, I believe, because of Vietnam, a war he could not defend and which eventually cost him the chance of re-election when he dropped out of the race.

 

The elephant in the room, of course, is Adolf Hitler, who had the ability to inspire the German people into thinking he was their saviour. It is said that even well-meaning liberal Germans who went to his rallies became carried away with patriotic fervour once they heard him and started screaming for revenge against the enemies of the fatherland. The ability to convert people who, in their sober selves, would disagree with you is obviously priceless.

 

The Nazis, incidentally, were very sexist, believing that women were best employed as mothers and housewives, staying at home and producing male soldiers for the German army. In that, they had something in common with Trump supporters. He is reported to be something of an admirer of the German leader and the belief that women were better off at home rather than in jobs or on the campaign trail is something right-wingers all share.

 

People often look back when they vote, trying to recapture a lost golden age when men went to work at traditional jobs and women stayed at home and did not worry about things like equal pay. We live in a forward-looking society, however, in which women sometimes earn more than their partners and are not content with being housewives. Trump will find this when he eventually stops sounding off and starts making real-world decisions.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

 

  

 

 

MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

George Orwell at the BBC

It is Halloween tonight and was going to write about how it is taking over from the communality of Guy Fawkes night soon after on the 5^th November. Then again, I was going to write about what is happening in the Middle East but Howard Jacobson has done that much better in UnHerd, which is worth considering, even if it does give voice to a lot of conservatives I disagree with. Also I have already explained why I am (still) a Zionist. (Go here to see why.)

Instead I am going to talk about different types of equality. The essay title comes George Orwell’s book Animal Farm and I have never been quite sure if ‘more equal’ means superior or inferior. In any case, it refers to how true equality is easy to wish for but extremely hard to obtain. The book ends with the animals in charge of the farm talking on equal terms with the neighbouring human farmers and the onlookers being unable to tell the difference.

 

This occurred to me when I remembered a female film director saying that as women made up half the population of the world, they should be directing half the films, instead of a tiny fraction of them. Female film directors are actually more common these days but men still outnumber them when it comes to directing, particularly the big blockbusters which make Hollywood its money. There is nothing like the bottom line to overcome feminism in films.

 

My reaction to the statement that women should make half the films as they make up half the population is, do you think that half the people sent to prison should be female. No? So it is only the good stuff you want half of and the bad stuff can be left to men to dominate. There is actually quite a strong lobby saying that women should be kept out of prison altogether. That means giving them carte blanche to commit crimes so I don’t support it.

 

That is a little unfair but it does raise the question of what sort of equality you want to promote – equality of reward or equality of opportunity. They are basically incompatible. The best analogy is probably with a race. With equality of reward, everyone finishes at the same time or, in practical terms, we all get paid the same whatever we do. With equality of opportunity, everyone starts at the same time but passes finishes at different times.

 

In practical terms, this means that we all get paid different amounts, depending on our talents, determination, hard work and ability to persuade people to pay us different amounts for what we do or make. Entrepreneurs prosper and also-rans get by, often with a little help from those same entrepreneurs willing to share their wealth with others. Put simply, capitalists like equality of opportunity while socialists like equality of reward.

 

I know that it does not work that way in practice, of course. Successful people naturally want to pass on some of their good fortune to their offspring and give them things like private education which give them an arguably unfair advantage over those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds. To create true equality of opportunity you should have 100% inheritance task so that everyone does start from the same place. Good luck with that.

 

However, the argument has been effectively won by capitalism, which gives everyone the freedom to create wealth for themselves and for their families. In a society in which a teenager can become a millionaire by creating an app, there is not much hope for state-organised socialism, which simply did not work. Privilege, instead of wealth, was passed down to succeeding generations and those who disagreed with this were silenced - or shot.

 

Apart from fascism, particularly if you were Jewish, the worst sort of society to live in during the twentieth century was a top down communist one in which dissent was forbidden and all were expected to toe the party line. Because there was what turned out to be a purely theoretical equality of reward in such societies they increased the absurdity by claiming to be ‘democratic’ while genuine democratic states were labelled as capitalist and corrupt.

 

Socialism, I believe, can work but only as an opt-in system such as existed on a kibbutz where wealth if genuinely shared. This is not an opt-out society which few people had the chance to leave unless they, ironically, were particularly talented and had a skill in sport or performing that was in demand in the capitalist west, in which case they could defect while ordinary people had to stay at home and endure the privations of opt-out socialism. 

 

In western democracies, the main debate is not whether socialism should be imposed but how much it can be tolerated in a society that allows people to amass wealth but then taxes them on how much they earn. Politicians of all parties have learned that people do not have much tolerance of high levels of income tax and, no matter what lip service is paid to ear-marking taxes for the NHS, people simply will not vote for parties they think will raise taxes.

 

This is why the Labour party in Britain has devised ever more ingenious ways to raise taxes without increasing personal tax rates. This was demonstrated in yesterday’s budget, in which the country’s first female Chancellor of the exchequer Rachel Reeves raised tax without apparently taking more from the wage-packets of ordinary workers. Britain, by the way, has had to wait much longer for a woman chancellor than for a female film director.

 

Tax rates are now pretty much the same whatever party is in power and certain things are taken for granted, like free healthcare. The main debate is now how much socialism is to be combined with a capitalism economy. Capitalism works better for at increasing prosperity, socialism at distributing it and we are just discussing how much of the latter should be combined with the former. We do this every five years or so in what are called elections.

 

This is the chance for the ordinary citizen to put a mark against what he or she believes in – and they should take it even if they think all politicians are grasping opportunists. The main job of the politician is to decide how much money can be taken from the average worker to help those who are less well-off. The answer is not much. We may celebrate equality of reward but, when it comes down to it, we seem to prefer equality of opportunity.

Edwin Lerner

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