Stained Glass Museum – Ely

Did you know that there is such a thing as Information Warfare? You probably did, but you just didn’t know it had a name.

I was listening to the radio yesterday and the subject cropped up. That’s BBC Radio 4 in case you might be under the misapprehension that any other station is worth listening to. I listen to it for the 15-30 minutes it takes me to queue in traffic jams after dropping Julia off at woodturning. Otherwise, noise does not feature greatly in my life. I don’t need it to function and if I want to listen to the inane chattering of barely evolved humanoids (sometimes called DJs, presenters or, for phone-in purposes, “listeners” I can go and listen to monkeys in a zoo).

Sometimes I listen to music on You Tube, in case you are thinking I completely lack culture, but mainly, I don’t. I also like the words more than the music. And I like them to be English so I can understand them, so that cuts out classical music and opera. I suppose that’s why I’m a poet rather than a musician. Being tone deaf also plays a part.

Anyway, I digress. I have two ways to go now. One is to carry on discussing “malign influence” and the undeclared war between Russia and Europe. The other is to discuss the picture in my head, which is J D Vance as a monkey. I don’t really know why.

I’ll go with malign influence. It’s about the propaganda war between Russia and some of its neighbours, specifically Finland and Sweden. The Finn’s developed a policy of teaching their young people to distinguish between truth and misinformation by showing them how to evaluate information. Of course, we would never do it in this country because it might teach the population to think for themselves and spot political chancers.

It was part of a group of reports about how some countries are making progress in the modern world – updating medical systems, looking after the elderly in a more cost-effective way (or simply just looking after them at all), building better social housing and (in the case of Finland and Sweden) accepting that we are at war with Russia and that young people need to be taught to resist unreliable information.

That, of course, gets me onto one of my favourite subjects. Countries with low levels of raw materials and industry (like the UK, these days) have traditionally been big on education.

I’d like to see the UK getting to grips with educating people. I’d also like to see them teaching them how to use social media properly. That’s not by banning them from using it. How will you learn if you can’t use something. All you will learn is that there are ways of getting round things and that you don’t need to obey the law.

That’s not helping build a responsible and progressive world.

Sorry, I will try to avoid unseemly seriousness in future posts.

Angel with Spear, 1860s. By N H J Westlake or J M Allen. St Michael’s and All Angels, Derby