Thomas Friedman talking at the Bristol Festival of Ideas…

Last night, Moira and I went to hear Thomas L Friedman (why do people insist on using their middle name initial?) talk about his current book ‘Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations’ as part of the excellent Bristol Festival of Ideas. The pre-talk blurb described it thus: “In today’s changing world of Brexit and Donald Trump’s promises of walls and tariffs, Friedman argues that it is only openness to ideas and trade that will allow us all to thrive. He addresses the need for politically moral leadership…”.
Born in 1953, Friedman is an American journalist, internationally-renowned author and three time Pulitzer Prize winner. He currently writes a weekly column for The New York Times.
I went along with an open mind… ‘this could be inspiring or really, really depressing’!
Well, it proved to be an absolutely fascinating, stimulating evening. He spoke for 45 minutes, without notes. Evidently, he’d been giving this talk around the world since last May… but suitably updated in the light of Mr Trump (and Brexit)! He’s a confident, articulate and engaging speaker.
I can’t begin to summarise Friedman’s wide-ranging talk… so I’ll just highlight a few things that struck me.
He talked about the significance of the year 2007: Steve Job launching the iPhone; facebook; Kindle; The Cloud; YouTube; the beginnings of Airbnb… followed, somewhat ironically, by the worldwide economic recession of 2008. Although we didn’t perhaps notice at the time, digital globilisation and the exponential growth in microchips were transforming our lives.
The pace of change and the pace of new ideas is almost overwhelming… or, as Friedman put it: “Google lives in the future and sends us letters home”.
He talked about the way many of the large Corporations were moving – analysing the capabilities of their employees and being prepared to train them, free of charge, in areas where they needed specific help or improvement… BUT for them to undertake the training in their own time… and if they didn’t fancy that, then they’d be given a redundancy package and removed from the organisation. Corporations see life-long learning as CRUCIAL.

Friedman talked about politics (and specifically US and UK politics)… and how our current political parties are designed to think and work “with an old situation”… in his view, they needed to be “blown up (not literally, hopefully) and re-started… "the age of acceleration is going to be just too fast for them”.

He talked very briefly about taxation… feeling that the current systems should be abandoned in favour of universal carbon taxes and sugar taxes.
He talked about us living in a world where “one of us can kill all of us” (he didn’t specifically mention the Trident ‘deterrent’ but, clearly, implied that such policies were hugely outdated and ineffective).
He talked about ethics; about a cyber world where no one's ‘in charge’; and, perhaps somewhat strangely in the context of the evening(?), about the need for us all to live by the old ‘golden rule’ (“do unto others as you would have them do unto you”); about the need for ‘strong families’ and ‘strong communities’(?)… and about ‘applied hope’. There were lots of things I wanted him to explain more fully, but time didn’t allow… yes, I know, I should have bought his book!
It was all inspiring, fascinating stuff… but even now, writing this the morning after, I’m not sure if his words made me feel depressed or encouraged. They’ve certainly underlined my own naivety in some areas… or, as Friedman put it: “naivety is the new realism”!

bristol festival of ideas: shami chakrabarti and owen jones

I just love the annual Bristol Festival of Ideas… always challenging and thought-provoking (eg. Richard Holloway’s talk four years ago has had a profound influence on how I see a whole of range of things). Last night, Moira, Gareth, Alan+I went to two talks at @ Bristol: Shami Chakrabarti (director of Liberty, UK’s leading civil rights organisation) and Owen Jones (writer, columnist and commentator)… and they were both simply brilliant.

SHAMI CHAKRABARTI:
She’s an incredibly impressive lady. In an hour-long question-and-answer session (which she handled with authority and dignity - as well as demonstrating her vast knowledge and intellect), it perhaps wasn’t surprising that one of the main issues raised was the present UK government’s threat to abandon the Human Rights Act in favour of its own self-styled British Bill of Rights. She talked passionately on the subject and gave example after example of some of the devastating implications of the government’s mooted proposals. Other subjects raised, in a wide-ranging discussion, included the bedroom tax, slavery, the House of Lords, Corporations (eg. TTIP), torture and respect for privacy. The packed audience was completely captivated by her and duly showed their loud and enthusiastic appreciation at the end of the session.
OWEN JONES:
Over the past year or so, I’ve become a great admirer of Owen Jones’s writing (he’s a regular columnist in The Guardian). Yes, he’s left-wing. Yes, he’s young (30). But he’s also incredibly bright… and he talks an awful lot of sense (well, in my view at least). He’s recently written a book – “The Establishment: And How They Get Away with It” – and this formed the basis of the session. He talked for an hour (the first half an hour about the things included in the book and then another 30 minutes of questions-and-answers). He’s a remarkable and very gifted young man. He’s the sort of person who has the ability to express concerns on behalf of many of us who have become disillusioned with “establishment politics”. With certain exceptions, he doesn’t have a particularly high regard for our current batch of politicians (of whatever party)… in a recent article in the Guardian, he described them as “technocratic, rootless, soulless; a professionalised morass of time-servers who see ministerial posts as springboards to nice little earners on corporate boards; manoeuvring constantly not on the basis of political principle but for shameless self-advancement”!
There was nothing particularly startling (or new) in what he said last night (eg. lobbyists who fund the thinktanks that influence the government, or the owners who appoint the editors who set the political agenda, or the tax accountants who get seconded to the civil service that decides how much their clients will pay), it’s just that I found myself agreeing with point after point he was making (and so did the vast majority of the full-house attending last night). His talk was very much a “call to arms” – to scrutinise the powerful (the corporations, the politicians etc) in these austere times and to redress the balance away from the poor, who are all too often (according to politicians and much of the media) blamed for our current financial predicament. Amen to that!
We all need people who make us think, who give us hope, who challenge us… and who encourage us to make our voice heard. Chakrabarti and Jones CERTAINLY did that last night!