Scratch them and they seethe . . .

A few months ago I wrote a letter to a local paper, the Argus, about the industrial schools controversy. Now, for whatever reason, the argument was somewhat cut in editing, although the conclusions remained unchanged. My only disagreement with the process is an aesthetic one—that it left the letter looking rather like a bad haircut (something that I am in other circumstances more than familiar with).

The letter as it appeared—and indeed as it was written—was somewhat ambiguous. It was hard to say on which side of the controversy I was coming down. Indeed I had no overriding interest in the matter—what I was interested in was the process by which it had after so many years suddenly come to dominate the headlines.

We live in the age of a new mythology. On the one side the old, restrictive, cruel, right-wing world of things as they allegedly used to be; and on the other the new liberal world of compassion, compassion, compassion—an over-brimming compassion for everything seemingly weak and endangered and oppressed in the world.

Now I can give a snapshot judgement on the merits of the two positions, having in my working life (and as a trade union representative) had experience of both regimes—and, paradoxically, I would have to say that the people with the most ‘nature’ in them were those who nowadays would be branded as ‘conservative’ or ‘illiberal’.

It was with the declaredly ‘liberal’ managements and managers that one had the most trouble. Even in situations where the argument went beyond any matter of right or wrong and cut to grounds of pure compassion—with such people it was as though they had been innoculated against any possibility of making a humanitarian response in real life.

And the thing is that this peculiar dichotomy between practice and theory does not seem to have been an exception, but is rather part-and-parcel of the whole liberal identikit.

I append some quotes from The Art of Hating by Gerald Schoenewolf Ph.D (Jason Aronson Inc., 1991), a psychoanalytical appraisal of the liberal character. As will become obvious in reading, by ‘liberal’ is meant, in this context, basically those who espouse the modern progressivist agenda.

“Today’s liberals are cut off from their feelings and enmeshed in words and ideas. Out of touch with their core, they feel incomplete, and politicize their feelings, looking to an outside source to provide them with security. They demand that their views be applied to all of society, and they compensate for emotional detachment through declarations of brotherhood with people they have never met, trying to solve their personal conflicts by curing the ills of the world. They tend to be educated, rather than working-class people. They are drawn to passive rather than active pursuits . . .

“. . . Liberals use their facility with words, as well as a self-righteous and sarcastic tone of voice, to defeat and destroy opponents. They fling around words like ‘bigot,’ ‘sexist,’ ‘racist,’ and ‘homophobic’ in order to shame and silence detractors, and they address them in a tone of voice that suggests that the opponent is evil for even thinking, much less saying things that go against the liberal ideology. The more psychologically disturbed liberals are, the more they cling to the notion that liberalism represents all that is progressive and good and right, and can never be questioned . . .

“. . . Malcolm Muggeridge . . . a British literary critic, in an allusion to the liberal’s narcissistic insistence on ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ and denial of aggression, wrote that ‘Liberalism will be seen historically as the great destructive force of our time, much more than communism, fascism, Nazism or any of the other lunatic creeds which make such immediate havoc.’ In a sense Muggeridge may be right, insofar as societies generally start out conservative but become increasingly liberal as they decline.”

At the Ceide Fields . . .

On the north Mayo coast I met the knowledge
that there are lives that must be hard held
against despair
as a fractious horse;
lives without hope,
or even the prospect of hope,
corkscrewed into a barren landscape like stumps of bog oak;
with none of the consoling, hidden vistas
of a gentler country,
where people can fool themselves
as to what lies around
the next bend.

And I realised that, in this situation, man both reaches God
and pushes him out
to the utmost valenced limit
of his understanding.

We have become too crowded by God,
been made too familiar,
like the press of burnoosed Arabs in a souk,
so that he has become a Novocain that doesn’t work,
a watered penicillin,
the bleat of priests repeating formulae at a funeral.
We can no longer see the forest for the trees,
due to too close a magnification on the gewgaws,
the statues,
the rosary beads . . .

Out here, in the hard life,
if you want to see God, it’s not in the chapel,
it’s away there on the horizon where the sky meets sea.
For this is the only God that could make sense in the situation,
implacable, harsh, refusing to bend the knee
to the prayers of men,
dropping them in it to see how well they swim,
and, whatever about the soul, judging the body accordingly,
granting survival to the sole extent
that they have tried themselves to the exhausted limit
and can do no more.

That is not to say that you cannot find God in the chapel,
the softer side of him,
the downy, sparse-bearded visage of the Son.
But the God of fear, the God of anger, the God
who is the beginning of wisdom,
he is below here at this moment,
white-headed as a Friesian bull,
rooting at the pilings of the cliff-face. (2004)

* * *

[I reprint also a section of a document written contemporaneously with the above poem and to an extent explanatory of it:]

‘ . . . Famine apart, any effort to eke out life on this Mayo coast must have at the best of times been a precarious thing. What was the religious or philosophical outlook likely to have been of a people forced to live over generations in such conditions of elemental hardship?

Life has a tendency sometimes of testing a people almost down to destruction, until all there is left is a nub of those who will not permit themselves be easily destroyed. And more often than not the sole thing found unmelted in the ashes of that process is the keen, clean hardness of a people’s faith in God and resignation to his will. Not the volitionless resignation of fatalism, but instead a recognition of the presumption of any attempt to second-guess God in the matter, and the need to always deliver of one’s best efforts in the struggle for survival.

In such a world, in which no kindness or mitigation is to be expected, it would seem natural that God would in a certain sense be pushed back a remove - not out of disrespect or unbelief, but rather as an electron might be displaced outwards in the shells of an atom. This is not a place where conventional piety is liable to prosper; the only prayers possible of answer here are those of sweat and hard work, with no guarantee at all of success as the final outcome. In such a situation people tend to cut their idea of God to suit their circumstance. The God of the remote places tends to be Himself remote, harsh, inflexibly just. He is a God in His way as forbidding as the bare horizons and grey seas. He is a God Whose ways are mysterious and into Whose hands is resigned the fate of all human endeavours. He is a God liable to be seen as helping those who help themselves, and, if intervening at all, only doing so in circumstances where the individual has exhausted all possible effort.

As to the practical matter of a philosophy conducive to survival in the Mayo of the 1840’s, where, according to one contemporary commentator, the great famine took on “its most appalling form”, there are recorded “instances in which Cottiers had buried potatoes, with the View of preserving them for Seed - and . . . had actually allowed members of their Families to perish of want and had suffered the sorest extremities of hunger themselves, sooner than betray their cherished hoard.” (quoted in Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, OUP, 1985). Once you get over the immediate visceral reaction to this report, you may begin to see here a universal lesson in the logic of survival in hard times.

If the cottiers mentioned seem cruel, they were cruel from the most understandable of motives: the need to try and secure the survival of at least a portion of their families, even at the expense of their own lives and health, and the lives and health of other members of their families. Yet saving the potatoes for seed offered no guarantee of success: if the next season’s harvest failed – and the potato crop had failed in successive years in 1845 and 1846 - then all the effort and suffering would have been in vain. It is a problem worthy of the philosophical subtlety of Pascal. Yet the answer is simple: only those prepared to make the terrible sacrifice of keeping back part of the potato crop for seed had any realistic hope of survival. In taking the steps that they did, the cottiers were not guaranteeing the remaining members of their families survival, but rather the possibility - the chance - of survival, all other things being equal.

Nor was it simply a matter of consuming or not consuming the potatoes: also involved was the physical effort by a starving people to get the saved seed into the ground, and tend it, and watch over it on tenterhooks, anxious all the time that it would not betray their hopes.

Should the following season’s harvest fail, then those who ate the seed potatoes were no worse off than those who saved them: both were likely to perish. However if the harvest was healthy, those who gave into hunger and ate the seed were, at best, likely to be reduced to begging of the charity of their more strong-minded neighbours. At worst they were reduced to a death of slow starvation. In either event, they had lost the possibility of control of their own destinies: unwilling or unable to take the hard decisions necessary to help themselves survive, they were reduced to a futile reliance on God or fate or luck.

The principle involved here has applications in all fields. For example, you have the student who hasn’t studied for his exams and hopes to get through on pure luck. He may well succeed; there are known instances of it. On the other hand, you have the student who has prepared diligently. He should succeed, but it is also quite possible that he will fail. There are many instances of this as well. Yet the overriding fact is that the odds are stacked heavily in favour of the student who has through his own efforts tried to achieve the customary preconditions for success. The feckless may well on occasions succeed and the diligent fail – but the fact that such instances are generally found to be worthy of comment is evidence of how clearly contrary to the normal state of things they tend to run . . .’

Trust Me, I'm a TD . . .

It is interesting the way that politicians are currently trying to back into the thicket of the public service by way of camouflage. ‘We’re all public servants now!’ seems to be the cry.

Several months ago there was a government TD on the radio—I can’t remember exactly who—an ex-minister perhaps, I think—speaking in self-righteous indignation at the suggestion that politicians hadn’t made a sufficient financial sacrifice. ‘We took the same cut as the rest of the public service’ was the substance of his response.

Now when I hear the term ‘public service’ what springs immediately to mind are people such as those working in hospitals or the civil service or mending our roads—people in the main working for ordinary salaries in ordinary jobs with fairly limited career paths.

The fact is that, whatever the technical definition may be, politicians are not public servants. They are in fact the public leadership, the leadership of the state, and they benefit accordingly. They are individuals who have put themselves forward to be the eyes and ears and warning voice for the rest of us as we move forward into an uncertain future.

Except that in the current case they have, almost without exception, proved to be collectively blind, deaf and dumb—more candidates for handicapped parking stickers than elected office.

Now by some miracle they seem to have been restored to full capacity and are going to lead us sure-footedly through the worsening economic blizzard.

The terrible thing is that there is no rational alternative.

Horseman, Pass By . . .

I can write of the liberal agenda, of the ‘new morality,’ because I’ve been in the belly of the beast. Actually, that’s not true—I was never really part of it—more a fellow-traveller.

And I am not claiming any merit in this; rather the reverse. Russell had the excuse of his infatuation with reason; his wife, Dora, conveniently found in the ‘new morality’ a higher calling. I had neither of those excuses. If I embraced, or appeared to embrace, the liberal agenda, it was simply because it suited me at the time to do so. I never had any ideological or emotional commitment to it, but rather a pragmatic one. It was a tool too good to pass up in pursuit of more personal and immediate satisfactions.

But nonetheless I was there—I pitched my tent in the same field as the sexual revolution and was a close observer of it and some of its main players during its seminal period—from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies, and thereafter, intermittently, for a few further years.

So I know of what I write . . .

Rendering an Account . . .

Following on from an earlier posting on Bertrand Russell (see October 2nd: The Heart is the Matter . . .)

While Russell tried to bend his will and flesh to a progressivist ethic that proved ultimately to be uncongenial to him, his wife, Dora, had no such problem. The progressivist ethic rather than being a hardship to her encompassed all her deepest yearnings. The ‘new morality’ was Dora written in programmatic form.

Dora believed what she believed because she wanted to believe it. At one level, the ‘new morality’ was a rationalization, and hence a justification, of her emotional and instinctive drives and her need, in the face of conventional morality, to assuage them.

Nor did this involve, as it so often does, an hypocrisy. It didn’t represent a private vice, but rather a public call to action. Dora wore her heart (or whatever) firmly on her sleeve and refused to compromise, even when life turned bitterly against her. She comes out of Monk’s book in many ways as a much more sympathetic and human figure than does Russell.

By contrast, Russell believed in the ‘new morality’ because he ‘reasoned’ himself into it, admittedly under influence of Dora. Both, in their different ways, were wrong. Russell put too much faith in mechanical abstract reason; Dora, rather than finding truth, instead invented a ‘truth’ of her own, one that jelled with her own desires and instincts, and persuaded herself that it was in some sense universal.

Yet in substance the ‘new morality’ wasn’t really that new at all. The aristocracy had, for example, been practicing a form of open marriage for years. According to the formula, it was the duty of the well-bred wife to provide an ‘heir and a spare,’ beyond which she could live much as she liked. As A.P.W. Malcomson noted in The Pursuit of an Heiress: Aristocratic Marriage in Ireland 1740 – 1840, ‘adultery on the part of the wife was a routine fact of upper-class life and was practised on an extensive scale . . .’

But in this form it was a private vice—something that was tolerated and that official society averted its eyes from, unless compelled otherwise by some foolishness or inappropriateness of behaviour on the woman’s part. In which case, all the familiar social devices of disapproval and ostracism were likely to come into play.

Such upper-class adultery was also a private vice in another way, insofar as it represented something of a ‘closed shop.’ Outside of aristocratic circles, it was something generally not spoken of, and certainly not something to be preached or recommended to the ‘lower’ orders.

By contrast, the Bloomsbury group of the early twentieth century, which was upper-middle-class rather than aristocratic, tried to, among other things, ape in extended form the aristocratic practice minus the hypocrisy. There seems to have existed the intention of a rather painful honesty among its members with regard to their liaisons. Monk catches the fervid atmosphere of it all, when he speaks of Gerald Brennan as ‘one of the links in a subsequently much-discussed chain of Bloomsbury romantic entanglements: he was in love with Dora Carrington, who, while married to Ralph Partridge, was in love with Lytton Strachey; Strachey, meanwhile, was besotted with Partridge, who, in turn, was in love with Frances Marshall, whom . . . etc. etc.’

The thing is that the Bloomsbury clique was firmly elitist—one of its members, Desmond McCarthy, attributed its eventual demise to ‘a considerable infiltration of inferior persons’— and while not inclined to hide its light under a bushel, nonetheless seems to have had no great orientation towards propagandizing its values and practices.

The ‘new morality’ wasn’t new in another sense too. At most, the Russells merely delivered a new formulation, a new rationalization, for an existing strain of social belief and practice rooted in Marxism and radical feminism (something to be dealt with in a future posting). What was important about their role was mainly Russell’s status as a major intellectual figure and the added influence that this could bring to any beliefs he seemed to espouse.

The ancient Aryan society of northern India was organized in the form of four castes. The most important caste, as was recognized by all of the others, was the peasantry—the shudra or ‘foot’ of society, the foundation upon which society was built. Without the agricultural surpluses produced by the farming caste there could be no priestly caste or warrior caste or merchant caste. The whole existence of society was bound up with the health of its ‘lowest’ and broadest layer.

In like manner, for modern society, the working and farming classes and the small business class ultimately provide the basis for all the rest. The health of the overall society—whether it is to be a house built on sand or one built on solid ground—depends in the last resort upon the health of its productive sectors.

The aristocratic and upper-middle-class practices that we discussed above were in the main private practices—they had little or no active orientation to those outside their immediate social circle or class. People privately pursued pleasure within the norms laid down within their particular classes or cliques—which they were entitled to do.

The Russells, both committed to socialism, by comparison were active proselytizers. They believed that the world could be improved through a ‘struggle against conventional morality and the established order.’ They both, especially Dora, believed in what they were doing and propagandised for it relentlessly—Russell in his writings and lectures; Dora in her activities, especially among working-class women. So fervently did they believe in their program that they set up a pioneering school, where children were to be educated ‘in the light of the “new philosophy”, rather than under the yoke of the old superstitions of religion, patriotism and conventional morality.’

The question ultimately is not about the bona fides of the Russells or their right to promote the things that they believed in—which right of course they had. Rather it is about the efficacy of their programme. Viewed over a reasonable historical distance: Did it succeed in delivering what it sought to deliver—certainly in educational terms, future generations that were to be ‘fearless, independent and free’? Or did it deliver something else entirely?

The subsequent history of the Russell children, who were guinea pigs to the educational and child-rearing theories of their parents, raises a major question mark over the whole programme. Both children and grandchildren were to pursue lives inexorably marked by suicide and madness—although the latter may have been exacerbated by a strain of congenital insanity believed to run through the Russell line. In retrospect, the immediate children consistently blamed their experimental upbringing and the effects on their childhood lives of the ‘new morality’ for their later problems.

Over the intervening ninety or so years the philosophy that the Russells (among others of their contemporaries) espoused has become paradigmatic. It underlies the world we live in now. It pours through innumerable channels into the eyes and ears and minds of every member of every class. Unless you were to shut yourself up in a nunnery—and even then . . .

But at least we are in a position now to assess it objectively—to measure it against reality and see to what extent it has succeeded or failed in its programmatic promise to deliver a new paradise—entailing a free, fulfilled and happy life for all. And, if it has failed, to examine to what extent the whole project was a delusional, self-serving fantasy to begin with, or the product of an untethered reason, or both.

By Way of a Filler . . .

A section from part of a discussion document written by me on 10th October 2008, that has, I like to think, a relevance broader than the immediate and obvious circumstances in which it was composed:

‘ . . . By now it has become a truism that the first thing a country long at peace must do when it goes to war is sack the general staff, who, through the times of quiet, tend to have been promoted, not on the basis of their military virtues, but because they play a wicked game of bridge or know someone who counts or else are eminently clubbable. This, of course, is by way of a joke, and is no doubt offensive to the normal run of general staffs. But it is nonetheless indicative, I suggest, of a deeper truth.

People are generally quiescent—when times are good and times are quiet they are prepared to let things sail on without giving them too much thought. But in a crisis, when their interests or safety or livelihoods are threatened, they demand leaders who are capable of cutting straight through to the root of the problem and solving it—rather in the manner of Alexander the Great and the Gordian Knot. But, at the same time, they are never comfortable with such leaders, even the ones that are successful. People desire strong and charismatic leadership—but only in situations that demand it. There is nothing as wearing to the popular consciousness as an adventurous and ambitious leader who continues in power beyond the period of the necessity of his being in power, no matter how capable. The people of France were long sick of Napoleon before his final demise; likewise with Hitler. The fate of Churchill after the Second World War is too familiar to need repeating.

In actual fact, people as a rule prefer mediocrity—and ‘mediocre’ doesn’t refer to the worst; it is a sort of halfway house—neither good nor bad, just average. If the mediocre are capable of rule, then the times must be stable. It is a bit like the canary in the coalmine: if the canary is standing upright on his perch and preening himself, then everything is ok. If he starts swaying on his feet, then watch out! Mediocre leaderships are a natural concomitant of peaceful and prosperous times—people don’t want anyone who is likely to endanger the stability, and, in turn, the stability means that no great ability or initiative is demanded of politicians etc.

A less pejorative term than ‘mediocre’ might be ‘technician.’ One could imagine a factory where successive generations of technicians walk around in overalls with an oiling can, greasing the workings of a machine built long before their time. They themselves possess no great creative mechanical facility—but then they don’t need to. As long as the machine keeps working everything’s fine. And then one day the machine, as it were, starts spitting blood . . .

Most of us in the developed world have lived our lives under the rule of exactly such technical elites, competent in their own way, and able to cope so long as the general backdrop remains relatively unchanged. But the problem is that the backdrop is changing—and changing in such a way as to seem to threaten us with consequences beyond even our worst imaginings. I may be wrong on this—certainly, I hope I’m wrong—but it seems to me that the world is lurching into some fin-de-siecle crisis that is beyond our control and which must work itself out in its own way, whatever that way may be . . .'

Slightly More Russell . . .

Another quotation from Bertrand Russell—one that sums up what it is that I was trying to say in the last posting and in some of the previous postings on the dangers of relying purely on theory and abstract thought. The italics at the end of it are mine:

‘In my second marriage, I had tried to preserve that respect for my wife’s liberty which I thought that my creed enjoined. I found, however, that my capacity for forgiveness and what may be called Christian love was not equal to the demands that I was making on it, and that persistence in a hopeless endeavour would do much harm to me, while not achieving the intended good to others. Anybody else could have told me this in advance, but I was blinded by theory.’

The Heart is the Matter . . .

The passage I recently quoted in relation to Bertrand Russell [27th September: Synchronicity or What . . .?] describes a perceived gap between Russell as philosopher and Russell as man.

Russell as philosopher is described as ‘the man of pure intellect who is cut off from all feelings.’ And this is the conventional view of philosophers in general: people who have risen above the common herd and who exist in a rarified atmosphere of pure logical thought, following, as philosophy lecturers like to say, ‘the argument wherever it might lead.’

In other words, they are perceived as people whose head rules their heart—having decided on the rational course of action in any situation, they bend the human side of their nature to act in accordance with their will, and not the other way round.

Russell makes an interesting case history as to the extent such a thing is in actual fact possible.

Famously, he was engaged in an ‘open marriage’ with his second wife, Dora. The terms of this were that each could continue to see others outside the marriage and, somewhat implicitly, if any children were born as a result of such liaisons on Dora’s part, they would be recognized by Russell as his own.

Dora seems to have been the leading proponent of this arrangement. Russell, it must be said, as sometimes strangely happens with ‘great’ men, was arguably something of a suggestible old sod. But the fact that he had a stated philosophy that after five years any woman becomes boring and due for trading in may have encouraged him to think that he and Dora were working along common lines.

In fact, they weren’t.

Nonetheless, Russell, aided by Dora, sought to knit a rationalist theory to justify their state of affairs. ‘The New Morality,’ as it was called, represented a call to arms for ‘progressive’ people, that involved undermining ‘traditional attitudes to religion and morality,’ and spoke for a new society based on reason in which people would be free to satisfy their every need without, in Dora’s words, ‘those confounded silly jealousies.’

[I should point out here that I have no particular interest in and no opinions to offer on Russell’s and Dora’s domestic arrangements. The thing that I am after is the extent to which the Olympian ideal of a world ordered purely on reason—unbuffetted by the frustrations of life and our inherited animal natures—is possible. On the evidence of Russell’s case, it is not.]

Russell was never comfortable with the arrangement he had entered into, although, gamely enough, he continued to write and preach in support of it, and practise it. The breaking point seems to have come when Dora became pregnant by someone else, someone whom Russell [now Earl Russell] deeply despised. Even then he tried to bend himself to the ethic he had forged and gave his name to the daughter who resulted. But at that stage, it seems, the marriage was definitely ended. Nor were matters helped by Dora getting pregnant for a second time by the same man.

The extent of Russell’s descent from the Olympian ideal—and from the progressivist ethic advanced by him in the 1920s—is indicated by a remark attributed to him in his old age, concerning the ‘daughter’ he had originally legitimized: ‘I have no second daughter. That was my wife’s child. It took me ten years to get the bastard out of Burke[‘s Peerage].’

Is it possible for human beings to rise above the tides of life to a serene world where pure and selfless thought becomes the sole motivator of our actions? The case of Russell, doyen of liberal opinion for much of the twentieth century, suggests no.

What about the saints? Perhaps. But if I remember my reading of the Confessions correctly, their perfection was due mainly to the grace of God. Man on his own behalf, according to Augustine, was capable of achieving very little. And in the case of the saints, often what seems to have been involved is a process of transformation, a change of nature or character, and not simply a rigid enforcement of the will—an escape into an atmosphere (and I am snatching purely at memory here) of ‘freedom, perfect freedom.’

I remember several years ago hearing someone talk about their time working in a nursing home in the North. He was describing a retired Presbyterian minister who was suffering from dementia. ‘You should hear the language of him,’ he said. ‘And the nurses can’t go in on their own or his hands are all over them.’

And as is the way of these things, I found myself in an instant forming a picture of the man. I saw him as someone who had bent his life to doing the right thing, as he saw it, and avoiding the wrong—thus ‘proving’ to me that it was possible to live a life of hard subjection to the will. But there had been no process of transmutation involved—or to use the Freudian term, sublimation. Rather it had been akin to stuffing a suitcase full of one’s dirty laundry only to have it burst open on the station platform. The moment his mental functioning began to falter all the old repressed desires and instincts came tumbling out of their storage space unchanged.

Now, as I say, this image is purely a work of the imagination. Yet I have a strong feeling that it presents an accurate picture of the reality. From time to time, when I still think of him, I genuflect in recognition of the strength of will and the self-discipline involved in shaping oneself over such a long time to such an uncongenial task—at the same time I recognize what seems to me the utter futility of it.

[The raw facts in this posting come from the two-volume biography of Russell by Ray Monk and published in paperback by Vintage in 2001. In some subsequent posting—and if there is anybody out there to read it—I would like to look at the matter from the viewpoint of Dora Russell, for in its own way I think it has much to say for the whole process of abstract philosophical reasoning and the assumptions that underlie it.]

Public Sector Cutbacks

The thing about being seen as a soft touch is that you are likely to be touched again and again until you make it plain that you’re anything but. The public service has no choice but to react to the threat of pay-cuts—after having already been hit by a previous pay-cut in the shape of the pension levy. Whatever action is taken has to sting sufficiently to make the government think twice about targeting them again. Otherwise there is no point in taking action.

The trade unions are in a somewhat different situation. They are concerned about wages and pensions—especially their own wages and pensions. This is quite understandable in the circumstances. The great fear of the unions at the moment is that a failure to adequately respond to the threat of new pay cuts will lead to a haemorrhaging of membership. The trick the unions have to pull off is to convince their public service membership that they are going all out against any further impositions, while at the same time skirting the possibility of any Armageddon-style confrontation as might reveal a lack of clout.

A hard line to draw—never mind to walk!