vendredi 26 février 2016

The EU And Memoirs

Exmples
One counter example can destroy a thesis but one good example can iluminate a point. Way back in July 2012 I described the example I'd been searching for but never until then found to illustrate the Year 2000 computer problem. Now I think I have the example Iwant to illustrate the immigration dilemma. The focal point was a discussion we had in the English conversation class on the subject of immigration, at which a full range of views was expressed. My example is as follows.

If soemone knocks on your door late at night, cold, wet and hungry, you can if you are kind let them in, dry them, warm them up and feed them, before sending them out into the big wide world again. Over a period of, say, a year, you could do that a hundred times or more without seriously disrupting your life or that of your family. It helps if the incomers know and respect your way of life but a few who don't shouldn't present a major problem. However, if 100 cold, wet and hungry people all knock on your door at the same time, then you have a problem however kind you are. The problem is exacerbated if they don't know your culture. That, I think, is a main part of the current immigration problem in a nutshell.

EU Referendum
So the referendum on Britain remaining in the EU will take place in four months' time. I am in favour of Britain staying in, in part for some very selfish reasons. I greatly value my life in France, helped in no small part by various cooperative agreements between Britain and France made through the EU. If Britain opts out I can apply for French citizenship since I already have the basic qualifications but having those is not necessarily a guarantee of acceptance.

I often criticise the EU in these posts and don't retract any of the criticisms. I think the EU is badly in need of radical reform. I haven't been paying much attention to David Cameron's negotiations as I have regarded them as largely irrelevant but he does seem to have gained an important point: the national power of veto against any further steps to increase political integration. In fact, I suspect that he gained this point because many other countries in the EU want it for themselves. The EU bigwigs undoubtedly want an EU as integrated as are the states of the USA but I doubt that is possible and, more importantly, I doubt that the people of most European countries want it either.

I'm not able to comment on the economics of Britain being in or out. They are as opaque to me as they seem to be for even qualified commentators. That is obviously a most important question for Britain but much less so for me, although it concerns my children. I think that the very best things that the EU has achieved have been arrived at through close cooperation, cooperative agreements rather than integration. And I would like to see the EU achieve much more of the same, as I think it can do. To do that, however, it will have to undergo reform and I think Britain could play an important role in pushing it towards that. The link between the EU commission and the people of Europe has been broken and needs to be repaired. That is a role I would like to see Britain play but it could do it only from inside the EU.

Memoirs
I have decided to write my memoirs and am a fair way through doing so. The idea occurred for three reasons. Firstly I suggested to a friend the same age as me, who had had an interesting childhood, that she should do so for her grandchild. Secondly, I have just finished reading a book, Stoner, a fictional biography of an inconsequential American academic which proved a good read. And thirdly I am interested in gauges of how much the world changes between generations, for instance between my mother's generation and that of my children. My mother lived in her early life some 50 miles from the sea but got to see it only when she was 17; she was in her 40s when she first went abroad. I saw the sea when I was too young to remember and first went abroad when I was 16. My daughter first went abroad and saw the sea when she was 9 months old, in France, and had her first birthday in California. 

Another example is when I was talking to friends and their 14 year-old granddaughter on the terrace outside the Bar du Pont.  The granddaughter had a mobile phone and I asked her if she knew it had a small computer inside it.  She did.  I said that when I had first worked with a computer in 1965, one much less powerful than that in her phone, it would have been too large to fit in the whole of the Bar du Pont and its terrace.  She had difficulty believing that.  Those kind of perceptions get lost between generations.
My memoirs will not be for publication, on paper or electronically. They are for my children (and me). I hope they will offer a clarification for them of why I am what I am and some insights into how the world was before they were born.

lundi 1 février 2016

Health And The EU

Health Services And The NHS
In my last post I related a good experience that friend Steve had here with the French health system and implied that he wouldn't have had as good an experience with the NHS. Friend David in Scotland responded with an equally good experience that his wife Hazel had with the NHS there. I'll recount it in his own words.

“Hazel woke up one morning with a very painful eye. She got an appointment with the GP at about 10am. The GP said she needed to go to the Eye hospital and she would make an appointment. We returned home; at about 12 midday the phone rang and it was the GP to say she had got an immediate appointment so we drove to the Eye hospital . It was difficult to park so I dropped Hazel off saying I'd circle till I found a parking spot and then come in to the hospital to see how she was getting on. I circled a couple of times and then as I passed the entrance still looking for a parking space I saw Hazel coming down the steps having been succesfully treated and feeling fine. We were back home by 2pm . This is the story I always tell to anyone who knocks the NHS and there have been many other occcasions when we have been well looked after and not had to wait very long for treatment.

Maybe first class and speedy treatment happens only in Scotland but I suspect the media love to publish horror stories and these have coloured everyone's views of the NHS in England. There have been a few letters in the “i” (my favourite newspaper) of similar stories of good and rapid treatment even for minor complaints.”

I think David makes a useful corrective comment and have to admit that I never had any cause for complaint at the treatment I received from the NHS when I was in England. However my core point remains. It simply isn't economically viable for any national health service to offer a complete range of treatments for every ailment; indeed, as the average age of the European population increases so it will become decreasingly viable, both for health and ancillary care services. So there has to be some form of limitation, some form of compromise to produce an optimal solution. The question is: how can that comromise best be made? Totally ruling out any factor (as a matter of principle) doesn't make finding a good solution any easier.

Spring Already?
We've had a week of unusually clement weather. Flowers that don't usually appear at this time of year are merrily blooming, I've been playing boules in the afternoons in my shirt sleeves and Mont Ventoux has no visible snow (from down below) on its summit. I've never before known Mont Ventoux to be bereft of now at this time of year; it doesn't bode well for the winter sports trade at the ski stations. A sign of global warming or a blip? We'll have to wait around 300 years to get a decent perspective on that but don't have that long if we need to do anything about it.

The EU Again
I am in favour of the UK remaining part of the EU but have to admit that recent events make me sympathise with those in the UK who want the UK to leave. David Cameron's attempts at renegotiation strike me as a largely irrelevant side show, window dressing rather than addressing the core issues. EU President Juncker has been reported as complaining of the lack of action by individual members of the EU over the immigrant crisis. Lack of action by individual members? What about action by the EU? The EU has spent billions of euros creating embassies all over the place for no purpose that anyone can sensibly define. It wants to create a European armed force that could take no action at all unless 28 countries with differing agendas could agree to it. It seems more and more that the EU wants an ever expanding budget to create an ever larger bureaucracy but, when practical problems arise, it wants individual member states to resolve them. That doesn't bode well for a pro-EU result from the UK referendum.

The cost per capita in the UK of EU membership is already high and seems bound to get higher. So what is the return if the EU can't act on practical problems? If Greece is pushed out, as seems likely, and the UK opts out, the cost of membership per capita for other countries will rise steeply. Is that what is needed to get the EU to reform itself? Because it will surely have to then.