The Times Companion to 2017

by Ian Brunskill

  Then, as so often happens in India, the whole thing descended into a frightful muddle: queues outside banks and money-changing facilities, money being stripped out of mattresses and a sudden collapse in economic activity. Part of the chaos was due to the fact that the Reserve Bank of India isn’t able to print the new notes fast enough to replace the ones coming out of circulation. The deadline for consumers to hand in their old notes is a week today, but it will take many more months for the new notes to hit the streets.

  The deeper problem is that so few Indians use the banking system, so they cannot exchange their money. Less than half the population deposited money in a bank account in the most recent year; in most countries the proportion is closer to 90 per cent. For this reason alone, it is hard to think of a country less suited to the abolition of cash than India.

  The real victims of demonetisation are not wealthy ne’er-do-wells, who long ago shifted their money out of cash and into other currencies and assets: gold, Treasury bonds, apartments in London and New York. No, the real victims are, as so often, the poor. Rural wage growth has now collapsed; wider economic growth and investment has dropped sharply. And no surprise. For in economic terms, Mr Modi’s policy is, as one Indian economist put it, a little like withdrawing 85 per cent of the blood from a patient’s body and only replacing it slowly, a few drops at a time.

  The upshot is that, for the time being, schemes like this will probably remain the preserve of crackpot economies. As if to underline this, a few weeks ago the Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, cancelled a swathe of banknotes in his own benighted country.

  This is a shame, for there is much to be said for demonetisation — in the right circumstances. In developed economies with complex financial systems, where most transactions are processed electronically, via credit cards, contactless payments and bank-to-bank transfers, cash is increasingly irrelevant. What was once a critical means of exchange is increasingly the resort of the paranoid, the criminal, the tax evader.

  India is an example of how not to do it, but handled right, handled gradually and sensitively, with safeguards to ensure savings are protected and all of society can carry on spending, demonetisation could work in the UK. Let’s start gently: abolish the £50 note and take it from there.

  WILD SWIMMING IS A RARE SPLASH OF FREEDOM

  Edward Lucas

  DECEMBER 26 2016

  URBAN CIVILISATION has many advantages. But it also chafes. So most mornings I shed my clean, comfy and well-regulated life, along with my clothes, for a dose of discomfort, dirt and mild danger.

  It takes the form of a brisk swim amid waterfowl and weeds in the Serpentine, the man-made lake that spans Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. To the outsider the conditions might seem spartan. The water temperature is about 4C. The facilities comprise a cramped, unisex changing room and a cold outdoor shower. Wetsuits are frowned upon.

  This may sound like the morning routine at a harshly run boarding school. But for club members, it is an earthly paradise.

  Part of the reason is a simple physiological response. All exercise lifts the spirits and immersion in cold water has extra benefits. As the body senses danger it sends neurotransmitters racing round the bloodstream, increasing alertness and producing waves of euphoria. Ice baths are now the treatment of choice for sports stars such as Mo Farah, Andy Murray and the England rugby union team.

  The aesthetics are good too. At this time of year, a glint of sunlight bounces off the mist and sparkles on the ripples. Swimming backstroke, you see sky, swans and the last tints of autumn hanging on the trees.

  The worries of the day ahead melt away with each stroke. You focus on breathing, the angle of your stroke, the kick of your feet, the distance travelled. If you are lucky, you may see a carp flit under you or a bat overhead. JM Barrie’s Peter Pan seems a plausible presence. The ducks, geese and swans look at you incuriously, far closer than you would ever see them on land.

  But there are deeper pleasures too. The Serpentine is unsupervised. The only strict rules are about not swimming under the ice, or during thunderstorms. Other regulations — about where you can swim and when you must be out of the water — are obeyed, but not enforced. In short, you can drown if you want to.

  Such trust and freedom are rare privileges these days. Modern life shields us from the risk of potential unpleasantness, at the price of strictly enforced rules. But when you join the Serpentine swimmers, you sign up for the risks, including “serious injury, heart attack, infection, drowning or accident”. A separate, well-lawyered clause absolves the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs of any liability for infection with salmonellosis, shigellosis, amoebic dysentery, poliomyelitis, hepatitis, streptococci pseudomonas or staphylococci. It adds leadenly: “These are only some of the possibilities; there are others, including Weil’s disease and botulism.”

  As it happens, my fellow club members — who range from the superfit to the podgy — all seem exceptionally healthy. We may imbibe the odd accidental mouthful, but nobody can recall any serious illness caused by swimming in the Serpentine’s admittedly murky waters. A bit of duck poo in the water (or in the worst case sticking to your swimsuit) adds to the feeling of authenticity.

  Newcomers do get friendly advice about not swimming too far away from the enclosed area in the coldest weather. First-aiders abound, with a particular emphasis on how to deal with hypothermia (don’t wrap the victim in an insulating foil blanket: it will keep the warmth out and the cold in). The real point is that you are allowed to judge the risks yourself and that almost everyone does so sensibly.

  That gives “wild swimming”, as its devotees call it, a counter-cultural tinge. After a few months of the Serpentine, my local indoor municipal swimming pool seemed unbearably regimented. The chlorinated water was cloyingly warm and tasted like medicine. The eagle-eyed lifeguard and the strict rules against running, jumping and diving squeezed most of the fun out. Scowling fitness freaks made it abundantly clear that I did not belong in the fast lane, while the rest of the pool was too crowded to enjoy.

  “Serpies”, as we are called, are a self-policing community.

  Co-operating with other people in a small space (the changing room is half the size of a squash court) fuels considerate behaviour. You keep your possessions on one peg, change neatly and discreetly, make space for others and avoid loud cliquey conversations.

  We need more of this sort of thing. The law — thanks to a landmark judgment in 2005 — is on our side. In that case, the swimmers in Hampstead Ponds won the right to swim unsupervised early in the morning (The Corporation of London wanted to ban swimming unless a lifeguard was present). The Health and Safety Executive says, quite reasonably: “If people choose to swim in places like ponds or lakes then it is normally reasonable to expect them to take responsibility for their own safety.” Moreover, almost every attempt to sue landowners for accidents arising out of swimming has failed.

  Whereas swimming is in overall decline in Britain, the open-water variety is hugely popular. A splendid inland bathing beach has opened at the Rutland Water reservoir. The Lake District is a swimmer’s dream; aficionados have favoured spots on the rivers Dart, Stour, Nene and Trent. The Lower Ddwli Falls in the Brecon Beacons is one of 20 idyllic bathing spots on the Fechan and Mellte rivers.

  But all too often officious caution prevails among guardians of our welfare. As the author Chris Ayriss argues in his book Hung out to Dry, Britain lags way behind other countries in its approach to aquatic freedom. We have barely a dozen officially designated inland swimming locations. Germany has 1,900 and France 1,300. Yet figures for drowning are almost the same. Though whirlpool baths (especially when drunk) are far riskier, outdoor swimming is unfairly stigmatised as dangerous, an approach epitomised by the Royal Life Saving Society’s killjoy slogan: “Don’t get in, you might not get out.”

  We should be encouraging the opposite: Get in, you don’t know what you are missing. You exercise not only your muscles, but the
freedom and responsibility that our forebears took for granted. Use them or lose them.

  CHILDREN OF THE INTERNET ARE HAPPY TO LIVE A LIE

  Oliver Moody

  DECEMBER 27 2016

  FAKE NEWS HAS an awful lot in common with online pornography. Both are Technicolor illusions that owe their appeal to looking truer than the truth. Both are threats to the supremacy of established media organisations. And both, it seems, will soon have been subject to failed attempts at regulation by people who think they know it when they see it.

  In Germany, a large part of Angela Merkel’s party wants to make the spreading of fake news a crime. The British government says it is “considering the implications” of the phenomenon and may not be far behind. Last month the internet unhinged itself with reports that Facebook was testing its credibility scores for articles, until that too turned out to be fake news.

  Everyone agrees that somebody, somewhere, ought to do something to shelter the public from this polluted deluge of information. The account of “post-truth” that has been told over and over again this year is that lying politicians and a lying press have abused people’s trust so badly and so repeatedly that it is hardly surprising if they should seek out other versions of events.

  But what if this story is wrong? What if intervening to protect people from baseless clickbait would be more than an incursion into freedom of speech — what if it might actually make things worse? A study from Stanford University suggests that the problem runs much deeper than is generally thought. The fault lies not so much in Moscow or Palo Alto as within our own minds.

  The researchers found that 80 per cent of middle-school pupils could not tell an online news story apart from a piece of native advertising that had been sponsored by a bank. A third of high-schoolers endorsed a fake news tweet about Donald Trump’s polling data over a genuine tweet from Fox News. University students did little better. “Overall,” the academics wrote, “young people’s ability to reason about the information on the internet can be summed up in one word: bleak.”

  The findings matter to everyone. These teenagers are the children of the internet. They have also grown up with a comparatively clean species of public life. Their political consciousness has been defined by the presidency of Barack Obama. For them, the words Watergate, Monica Lewinsky and 45 minutes are historical phrases. It is not that these young people have been jaded by decades of spin and mendacity. It is simply that they cannot — or, worse, will not — discern fact from fiction, or reporting from advertising. They do not have the mental wherewithal to find their way around the modern world.

  This is unusual. For most of history the human nose for nonsense has been about as keen as it had to be. The impulse to make a bad thing sound good is probably almost as old as language, and since the emergence of the first democracy 2,600 years ago the public has been locked in a verbal arms race with the people who wanted to be their masters.

  The ancient Athenians dedicated an entire science to the dissection of rhetoric. The Romans raised propaganda to an art form, with Cicero’s brother publishing a treatise on pamphleteering and the emperor Augustus cladding his soundbites in marble and the hexameters of star poets. The American Revolution and the Great Reform Acts in Britain were followed by huge improvements in the education systems of both countries.

  We used to keep up, more or less, with the diet of misinformation we were fed. And now we don’t. The post-truth age is not an age in which politicians and journalists have suddenly begun to lie with abandon. It is one in which it no longer matters if they get caught.

  What has changed? It is hard to think of an answer that does not start with the boundless and trackless ocean of stuff on the internet, and on social networks in particular. But there are older cultural forces at play, too. Over the past half-century the argument from authority has died a slow death. The simple fact that things are printed in The Times or uttered by a secretary of state is no longer regarded as any sort of indication that they are true.

  This is not necessarily a bad thing. It was never an irrefutable argument anyway. But into its place has crept something much worse: a shrugging indifference that would be called nihilism if only it had the intellectual energy. If there is no universal authority and everything you read is flawed, you may as well just read things you agree with.

  It is not truth that has died in the post-truth world: it is our appetite for truth. The only proper response is to get it back. So teach young people source criticism. Teach them statistics. Teach them about cognitive bias. Teach them the virtues and the pitfalls of expertise. Teach them to cover newspaper editorials in red pen marks. Teach them to fill their ears with things they don’t want to hear. Teach them, above all, to mistrust the little voice that says something must be right — because it probably isn’t.

  In the end we must all be as responsible for our own critical thinking as we are for our votes. No one else can save you. Not Angela Merkel and not Mark Zuckerberg. Not some factory of penny-a-click magical realism in Macedonia. Not even David Aaronovitch. It’s just you, on your own, against a fathomless tide of scarcely differentiated truths and lies, clichés and insight, omission and distortion and clarity. Best of luck.

  HOW I CONQUERED MY MORBID FEAR OF FLYING

  Melanie Phillips

  DECEMBER 27 2016

  EVEN WITHOUT STRIKE action or weather delays, getting through an airport can be a miserable impediment to an appropriate holiday mood. The endless queues, the screaming children and the tedious security checks constitute an ordeal to be dreaded.

  For many years I would think wistfully about how much I would like to experience the airport ordeal. For I was for several decades paralysed by fear of flying.

  It’s hard adequately to describe the devastating, overwhelming symptoms of this fear. It’s a conflation of claustrophobia, vertigo and agoraphobia in one triple whammy of hyperventilating, heart-fluttering, cold-sweating terror.

  For many years I simply never got on a plane. I went everywhere by car, rail or boat. Eventually the restrictions became too irksome. Holidays in Brittany began to lose their appeal. The family wanted to go to California. There was a business trip to Spain I couldn’t dodge. So I forced myself to start flying.

  It was hell. Every sound the plane made, every change in the engine note (and I was sensitive to the slightest alteration of timbre), every vibration and of course every bump was a source of fresh terror.

  What exactly are you frightened of, people would ask. Take-off? Landing? Turbulence? All of them.

  Actually, in some ways it was worse at cruising altitude with no turbulence. That was when, with the plane appearing to glide along with no effort, the sheer unnaturalness of it and the feeling that inside this metal shell I was simply suspended in nothingness would become overwhelming. I would talk compulsively to the poor soul sitting next to me. Sometimes I would involuntarily clutch their arm in terror. Much worse than the resulting embarrassment was finding that this passenger might be sitting with eyes clenched shut and lips moving in prayer.

  In those unguarded days before 9/11, crews would take frightened fliers into the cockpit. Unfortunately, this made it even worse. The view from the wide windows was simply horrifying, just a white or blue void into which we were steadily plunging.

  Patiently, I was told how safe flying was. The odds of a plane crash are one for every 1.2 million flights, with the odds of dying put at one in 11 million. By contrast, your chances of dying in a car or traffic accident are one in 5,000. Even on flights that crash, 95.7 per cent of passengers survive.

  So did that help? No. Factual evidence cannot address a phobia that is, by definition, irrational. About 30 per cent of the population, including some very well-known folk, are said to have a fear of flying. That didn’t help either. The fact that so many people were terrified of this activity must surely prove that there was something wrong with it after all.

  There are clinics that treat this particular phobia. I wouldn’t go nea
r them in case they might persuade me that flying was safe. For similar reasons I wouldn’t take any medication to get me through the flight. This was because I believed my fear was well founded. It had to be; otherwise why would I be frightened? So it followed from this that if I was persuaded otherwise or had my fears subdued by drugs, I would be putting myself in danger by flying. Sounds crazy? It was an aspect of the phobia.

  Today, though, I am a frequent, and relatively tranquil, flier. So how did I crack it?

  A number of things helped. I used a flight relaxation tape, which played all the sounds associated with flying and required you to relax every muscle when particular sounds provoked most alarm. The concentration required to do this on the plane helped to distract from the terror.

  A book published by one of the suspect clinics turned out to be excellent. It not only taught me about aerodynamics but got right inside the phobia. You think that what’s outside the plane window is nothingness, it said, but it’s not nothingness; it’s air, and air is a substance with properties, like water, and it has currents, just like the sea.

  Obvious to some, maybe; but for me it helped to deal with that terrible feeling at 35,000ft that you have lost all connection with the world and are adrift in a terrifying emptiness.

  British Airways crews were not only kind, but their high professionalism was immensely reassuring. So much of the fear of flying is about the lack of control and absence of trust. I trusted BA pilots because of their wonderful British voices on the intercom, calm and clear with slightly flattened classless vowels.

  They would chattily run through things such as altitude, weather and arrival time and then they’d say, “And you might also like to know that at Lord’s, England are now 106 for three”. A plane flown by such a pilot just couldn’t fall out of the sky. The problem was that, while BA got me to fly, I thought planes would fall out of the sky if they weren’t flown by BA.