Africa in 2010

We are not African specialists. If we want information about political risk South of the Sahara or in the Horn of Africa, we will turn to one of our clients, Pasco Risk Management, based in South Africa, or perhaps to a political contact or two of our own here in London or in East or West Africa.

But what we do understand is how the West has viewed and is viewing its position in Africa and the effect that recent economic problems in both the US (where instability persists) and Europe (which is deeply troubled) are having on the public acceptability of its forward engagement on the Continent.

There is a push and there is a pull in this. Both push and pull are driven by economic considerations that are beginning to overwhelm the 'idealism' that often gave cover to 'realpolitik' in the wake of the internal liberation of South Africa and derived from rage at examples of genocide and famine elsewhere.

The issues are complex and this is a note and not a paper. You could do worse than read Pasco's own on-the-ground assessments of the situation from an African perspective.

We have two sets of comment to make - first, about the very limited weight that progressive values now have for a Western policy that is definitely on the defensive because of resource constraints and, second, the limited ability of the West to effect its aims through its pivotal states strategy.

Pressures on the Humanitarian Impulse

Progressive and humanitarian drivers for Western intervention should not be regarded overly cynically. They were based on an ideological commitment within New Labour and this derived from the personal position of individuals whose political teeth had been cut on the anti-apartheid movement.

This British perspective would not have mattered in itself except that this progressivism 'worked' well with other drivers - Southern Baptist solidarity with Africa in Black America and a more general liberal determination in Europe that a colonial mentality must be replaced with a humanitarian one.

The high point of this general attitude was represented by liberals like Blair and Kouchner in France and to a lesser extent by Fischer in Germany and the Clinton administration. Adaptation to the opportunity presented for intervention by the Al-Qaeda strike on America was a natural one.

Unfortunately, after the initial success in Sierra Leone, liberal interventionism has undoubtedly been an expensive failure in the Middle East and West Asia while African states have increasingly resented the neo-colonial implications of what is essentially a centre-left imposition of values from the North Atlantic.

It is probable, though, that the policy could have struggled on so long as the electorates of the West were sentimentally directed to giving aid and assistance to their 'little brown brothers' - but that all changed with the near collapse of the complex economic system that underpinned Western largesse.

Three Realities

Three factors have now pushed their way to the head of the queue for Western policymakers: migration; growing disillusionment with the effects on the ground of intervention and of NGO engagement; and simple lack of hard cash and credit to disburse.

In each of these cases, the economic crisis in the West has played its role, taking the moral high ground away from the liberal progressives and returning it to those who question why scarce resources should be redirected to regimes that are now perceived to be capable of looking after themselves.

Migration is the most interesting because, although threats to the system from the nationalist Right have not emerged as serious electoral challenges except in particular conditions, the racist and nationalist underground is undoubtedly growing in strength and self-confidence.

Most migration and most terrorism is actually internally generated from within the West but, just as frightened Americans fear the flow of impoverished Mexicans from the South, so Europeans are unnerved by the flow of Africans into their cities.

The original progressive theory about this was that investment by Europe in Africa would create opportunities for Africans and the migrants would no longer need to flow North. To this was added the theory that Africans merely joined Asians, Arabs and Jews as the latest positive contributors to culture.

This was optimistic because, for many Africans, the poorest conditions in a European city were always going to be potentially more secure than conditions at home and the migrants were often 'post-modern': deracinated individuals rather than entrepreneurial pioneers for village communities.

The paradox of tighter border controls is that the criminal and a-social or desperate and trafficked elements are more likely to get through than families on the move and there has been a determined attempt by liberals to avoid an analysis of this lest it come up with 'racist' results.

But a great deal of the responsibility for migration into Europe lies with the greed and rapacity of Europeans themselves and Africans, with access to the internet as much as anyone else, have been educating themselves about radical interpretations of their own history.

Notoriously, Spanish industrialised fishing fleets have been raping the traditional fishing grounds of West Africa while the scale of oil pollution in some areas of the Nigerian Delta (greater than in the Gulf of Louisiana as we write) has been having similar effects on populations there for half a decade.

The Effects of the Crunch

There was always a faction of the liberal intelligentsiya that was relaxed about migration, seeing it as creating constant economic growth under globalisation. Another faction was ideologically perfectly happy to see Africans drive down Western wage rates as a form of global redistributionism.

The credit crunch of 2008 has pulled the rug out from both of these very influential factions (trickle down and redistributionist both) while the consequences of the crisis have affected the West and Africa equally in their relations with each other.

Inward migration from Africa was now a potential political threat (especially when overlaid with cultural and identity fears). The European electorate was not going to tolerate increases in expenditure overseas, to deal with the effects of recession in Africa, at a time of major public sector job losses.

Interestingly, and to widespread approval, Prime Minister Cameron in the UK has ring-fenced international development funds alongside health and education (helping to force even more draconian cuts elsewhere) but very much on the basis of more effective targeting and accountability.

What he was doing, as a 'soft' conservative himself, was taking aid off the political agenda for cuts until it needed to go back on again but also removing international development from its Blairite position as an integrated part of foreign policy and defence.

The days of doling out cash for political or strategic purposes are now over for the British and its humanitarian focus has been detached from grand policy in order to be treated as a moral imperative in its own right. If things get really bad in the UK, it will be cut because it will now be easier to cut.

Ressentiment

Quite separate from all this, there has been a growing distrust of NGOs and Governments as suppliers of aid. This is not coming from within the West (where critics have easily been pigeon-holed as right-wing miserabilists) but is the leaching back into the developed world of emerging world resentment.

Irritation with aid being used to patronise Africans alongside stories of waste, failure and of the 'fat cats' who appear as salaried do-gooders (from the perspective of some observers) merges with concerns about the tendency to use NGOs as soft power fodder in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia.

The criticisms may not be wholly fair (but nor are they wholly unfair either) yet the suspicion grows that aid is a job creation scheme for otherwise unemployable Western graduates and for scions of the traditional middle class. Many Africans see this as District Commissioners by the back door.

Western policy towards Africa at this level is thus a confused mess, reminiscent of the patronising involvement of young EU officials as inefficient satraps in Eastern Europe as the communist bloc fell apart. Disillusionment spreads, then as now, back from field workers into the heartland.

Of course, the issues are not cut and dried. Despite the values agenda, the US in particular, including private sector philanthropists, have all undertaken major programmes affecting healthcare and life chances (especially for women) in a highly positive way.

But the impression remains for many in the West that, just as they are fearing for their jobs and homes, substantial resources should not be directed to supporting the middle classes of other countries when it is quite clear the help is not always welcomed.

However, it is important to note that there is no movement to end aid but only a growing indifference to claims of the need for aid and intervention that makes it much more difficult for political interests to direct public funds towards foreign policy or security ends.

Strains

So, if we see a drift of public interest (World Cup notwithstanding) away from Africa and African affairs towards a stance of relative unconcern (there is no animus in this towards Africa at all), economic pressures also limit what the West can do in terms of hard power.

In one sense, the Western public has grown up and the shifts show maturity and generational shift. Younger politicians do not have anti-apartheid activism and resentment of imperialism to worry about and can escape guilt as Middle Europeans are now escaping from Holocaust guilt.

African music is now established in the world music repertoire, African writers sit comfortably alongside Latin American magical realists on the shelves, Ghana was supported by many white British in the World Cup and racism is psychologically inconceivable as a concept to middle class kids under 30.

But, self-evidently there are less resources to play with - in Europe, where the engine of European growth, Germany, has found itself bank of last resort to economically maladjusted smaller partners in the European Union, and in the UK which is running not to face its own crisis in the next year.

In the US, Obama will not be thanked if he spends a great deal on Africa rather than on the Gulf Coast, now hit by two successive disasters in Katrina and the BP oil spill, while US unemployment remains high and may even be rising again.

Finally, the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan are just not going to go away. Afghanistan is a true disaster, involving payments not only on military campaigns but to a corrupt and corrupting puppet regime and major subventions to Pakistan simply to keep its military on side and its economy from collapsing.

Pivotal States

US strategy in Africa (as pointed out by Pasco) was based on containing insurgency, controlling energy supplies (and we add the free access to mineral reserves vital for strategic purposes) and countering Chinese and Indian influence that might remove the continent from the Western to the Eastern sphere.

The methodology for control was based on 'pivotal states' theory - i.e. supporting strong stable states in each major sub-zone and encouraging them to go out and police the surrounding areas, presumably at their own expense but with Western aid and in alignment with Western values.

Placing the unusual Uganda/Rwanda complex to one side, the original postulated key states were Nigeria, Ethiopia and South Africa and all were expected, under Western guidance, to adopt liberal anti-corruption regimes and to manage their sub-region - later in an African Union context.

All three have been disappointments. The surrounding countries have gone their own way willy-nilly as either failed states or as independent countries following their own paths - they will go with the highest bidder, increasingly China. And, of course, Congo remains a great yawning gap in the system.

Nigeria has remained such an anxiety in terms of its long term stability that the US has now switched its attention to Ghana. At one point, before its recent troubles, Gazprom looked as if it would be taking a strategic position for Russia with the help of Libya and Italy by capturing control of Nigerian gas.

Ethiopia is the strongest state (perhaps) but at the cost of any programme of liberalisation, despite constant Western pressure, wheedling and largely idle threats.

However its intervention in Somalia was abortive - the African Union contingent sit in Mogadishu like rabbits in the streaming headlights of the insurgents.

South Africa seems to have been treated by Western liberals as if it owed them something for their support against apartheid. It didn't and it doesn't.

The peaceful transition to democracy was a remarkable achievement but its very tranquillity and compromise meant that serious issues of economic inequity have not been handled. Too many powerful interests had needed to be mollified. Now, as Pasco reports, the ANC is stirring again.

Capital accumulation by the new black elite was meant to result in trickle-down but the global credit crisis has put paid to that. An expectation of the West that South Africa would put scarce resources into a neo-colonial liberal intervention into Zimbabwe was thus disappointed and quite rightly so.

The Meaning of the US Presence

Africom, meanwhile, is now basically an anti-insurgency operation operating from enclaves which it controls because deals have been struck - Djibouti is effectively a grant from the rump of the old French Empire. It does dirty deeds in a war between the US and fanatics that passes most Africans by.

The US is now engaged in a process of constant and often very expensive negotiation that often comes down to little more than the containment of sworn enemies and the maintenance of the sea lanes that take oil and gas from the Gulf and West Africa to Western refineries and holding installations.

The lesson of all this is that there is no 'Africa' except in the imperial imagination of Westerners brought up on the carve-up at the Berlin Conference. There are many Africas - sovereign states with sovereign interests who still need to stabilise themselves before they start stabilising their neighbours.

A nightmare for the West might be a serious political collapse in a key state or a massive humanitarian crisis in a small state that the Chinese relieve faster and more efficiently than it can. The US and UK scuttled from dabbling in the recent Ethiopian elections for fear of precipitating such a problem.

This state of affairs - growing African intransigence at Western interference and Western economic retrenchment - will not last forever. Each of the pivotal states remain a potential partner of the West according to the original theory but the real aims of any African country must be a different from 'ours'.

South Africa can look across to Brazil and envy its inclusion alongside India, Russia and China as one of the BRICS. Nigeria and Ethiopia, too, would not want less status in the world than Australia. It might take thirty years but these three countries will want parity not patronage.

[These views are entirely those of TPPR and are not to be construed as those of Pasco Risk. For access to Pasco Risk featured articles now and in the future, go to their website]

Election 2010 - Foreign Policy And Coalitions

The markets seem to be surprisingly untroubled by current negotiations over who will lead the next Government of the United Kingdom. They know that whoever is in charge will have to follow a programme of cuts and tax rises.

The Timetable

Whatever the different constituencies for the two sides may hope, the two main competitive options are only going to differ on nuance rather than fundamentals when it comes to economics. The same applies to foreign policy. The differences lie on political reform and the type of cuts and tax rises.

There are many potential permutations in the medium term - including another election or a minority Tory government pottering along until its first major vote of confidence - but the most likely outcomes are either a Lib-Con pact or the so-called 'progressive alliance'.

The system has around another three or four days to get itself sorted out. If there are not signs of significant progress by (say) Thursday, the markets will get jittery. No deal at all by the time the markets open next Monday could cause a more serious crisis.

What has not been commented upon a great deal is the effect on foreign policy of the final outcome. There is only a hair's breadth difference between Conservatives and New Labour so any 'nuance' must come from the emergence of the pro-European Liberal Democrats and the Scots and Welsh Nationalists.

Perceptions of Sovereignty

It is common knowledge that David Cameron has relatively little interest in foreign policy. His concern with domestic issues means that he has virtually handed over this area to the Churchillian 'post-imperial' elements like Hague who revel in statecraft as once did Tony Blair.

Both New Labour and the Tories are Atlanticist to the core. Both are persuaded towards UN reform in favour of rising powers. Both have a 'thing' about Iran and Africa. Both support the two-state solution in the Middle East. Both are committed to overseas aid as a moral principle.

The difference lies over Europe and a particular perception of sovereignty. Mandelson's vision of power is subtle and relies on influence through a trans-national elite leadership as if the country was an important subsidiary of a major conglomerate. The Tories believe in UK plc as a separate entity.

Tory euroscepticism is not now driven by the fear of English votes moving to the Right but is embedded in the rising generation of libertarians. Surely this in itself might push the Liberal Democrats into the arms of New Labour?

The Tories & Europe

The failure of UKIP, various English nationalists and the BNP to make a mark is only partly a matter of taste - the intelligent English and British nationalists have become sophisticated and retaken the Tory Party from its base. The image of Europe has also changed on the centre-right with Lisbon.

Once there was a vision, closer to Mandelson's, where national economic interests were intimately bound up with the creation of a massive single market. This enabled mainstream Toryism to embrace Maastricht but Lisbon has been an integration too far.

Appreciation of the single market model has been replaced by a greater fear that economic federalism will end up killing the goose that lays the United Kingdom's 'golden egg' (the City of London) and that integration demands will severely damage British, or rather English, culture.

This is why it remains possible for the Liberal Democrats, despite the risk of alienating much of the rest of the English population, to shift from the Tories to New Labour if they do not get a major concession that gives them a prospect of electoral reform before the next election. But will they?

Europe, The Liberal Democrats & Labour

Europe is central to the world view of the older generation of Liberal Democrats. Cameron's euroscepticism will cause them to bridle as Europe integrates under the guise of saving the Euro in a way that makes it increasingly difficult for a Tory Government to accommodate change.

New Labour is infinitely more pro-European than the Tories, seeing it not as competitor for influence within the West but integral to a West that is lead in part from London and wholly in partnership with Washington. It is just a variation on a shared Atlanticist theme but an important one.

New Labour's Manifesto was supportive of European social protection legislation (a core trades union demand), supportive of enlargement and supportive of the integration of EU anti-crime, anti-terror and defence operations with NATO. The concession of a referendum on the Euro was merely tactical.

But, other than Europe, foreign policy is less important to Liberal Democrats than to either of the other two parties who, paradoxically, given all their debates over sovereignty, are heavily beholden to the joint security arrangements with the US that make Trident such an expensive white elephant.

What the Liberal Democrats offer is a softer approach to issues of war and peace, assertive in defence of human rights and opposed to WMD but not necessarily adopting the 'hard' Western view that the exercise of forward military power is the means to guarantee rights and democracy.

Since many of the Labour Left and certainly the Scots and Welsh nationalists share these views, are more suspicious than nearly all Conservatives of Atlanticism and are more instinctively pro-European, the idea that the Liberal Democrats can 'tame' New Labour in an alliance has its attractions.

The State Carries On Regardless

The State (the Crown), after fifty years of Atlanticism, is relaxed. It is confident that 'plus ca change'. The nuances may be different but the core of the next Government will still be embedded in a vision of the West, the UK at its heart, a post-imperial vision of global influence under the wing of America.

The Liberal Democrats are scarcely revolutionaries, merely replacing America with Europe as the focus of attention within a values-driven conception of a 'progressive alliance' and softening the means to attain the same values-driven ends in either model.

The questions this week are whether these differing nuances in foreign policy are going to be at all central to the decision whether to take one path rather than another in the formation of the next Government and what each 'model' may mean in practice.

Our view is that they will play a role in the negotiations but they are far from central. The big economic decisions (including Trident and the Eurofighter) are going to be driven by market factors and it is probable that Tories and New Labour would combine to save the central core of Atlanticist policies.

The Liberal Democrats know that they cannot do anything about the Tory position on Europe and the best that can be done is to fight the big battles through referenda rather than on the floor of the House.

Similarly, the Liberal Democrats can make a lot of noise about right-wing posturing on sovereignty on matters of detail and principle and might combine with the 'progressives' to block a particularly obnoxious bit of nationalism (as they would see it) but this need not cause a Government to fall.

Outcomes

At the end of the day, the prize for the Liberal Democrats has little to do with Britain's place in the world and a great deal to do with political reform.

If you add in the chance to influence the Tories towards their own avowed 'compassionate' conservatism and a shared agenda on the restoration of civil liberties, there is a lot to be said for a Liberal-Conservative alliance until the next election.

On the surface, the Liberal Democrats may have much more in common with the 'progressive coalition' in foreign affairs than they do with the Tories but we need to dig under the surface of what is going on here.

The two nationalist parties have opportunistically sought to out-flank New Labour to the Left. Their package of measures has included the attack on Trident and on post-imperial interventions overseas but this radicalism is really only skin-deep.

The nationalist parties are simply against the 'Empire' and they want to continue its break-up whereas the Liberal Democrats have only ever wanted to liberalise and humanise it. Indeed, liberal enthusiasm would often extend Empire where pragmatic Tories might justifiably only see the costs.

So what influence would the Liberal Democrats actually have on New Labour's policies in office (in foreign policy)? We would suspect - despite the best wishes of what remains of the Labour Left and the progressive grassroots - very little indeed.

Foreign policy is central to New Labour's positioning and many Liberal Democrats are happier with its general thrust in terms of forward promotion of Western values than they like to admit. The 'real' Left had a more revolutionary take, wanting to liberate the world by liberating the British working classes.

New Labour Right assumptions are not so very different from Liberal Democrat instincts. Both New Labour and Liberal Democrats like big things the country can belong to! They both want them to have some basis in universal values rather than mere statecraft.

The Labour Left, on the other hand, is on its knees. Its progressive elements are very little different from Liberal Democrats and its radical elements are crushed with no hold on either Party or State. The collapse of RESPECT in East London matched the crushing failures of the Radical Right.

The addition of Liberal Democrats and Nationalists to New Labour would be an occasional irritant rather than the cause of major change. If the Liberal Democrats joined the 'progressives, it would be for political reform, electoral advantage and civil liberties - not for a sea-change in the British State.

In other words, here, as with the Tories, foreign policy is a second order consideration in any negotiations. The Liberal Democrats in office with New Labour are unlikely to be at the heart of external State policy unless given greater prominence in Europe.

The current negotiations, like the election itself, are primarily about domestic reform and domestic crisis - how to rebuild confidence in the system to weather major cuts and tax rises. They are not about foreign policy. In that area, expect business as usual constrained by lack of cash.

New Labour and the 'Lazy Libertarians' of Britain

There have been two stories in the British media this week that help to demonstrate why the New Labour Government is having a problem connecting with the population at large. They are not stories about foreign wars or economic crisis but about the management of private life.

The first saw a 19-year old Canadian woman effectively kicked out of the country because of new visa rules despite having married a Welsh man and being happily settled with him in an apparently stable relationship on British territory.

The second is the announcement that anyone, including parents, who regularly drives children around for social reasons will have to undergo criminal record checks or (in theory though less so in practice) face major fines.

What these stories have in common is an attitude of mind. In a large and complex society, Government has resorted to sledgehammers to crack recalcitrant nuts. Lobbyists against specific abuses have driven Government into solutions that look good on paper but bad in the street.

In these cases, and in many others, the instinct of New Labour progressives when faced with an abuse by a small minority is to create new rules (often begging the question of effective enforcement) that add petty bureaucracy and inconvenience (and costs) to millions.

There are many other examples, low and high. The identity card scheme (in abeyance but far from forgotten) imposes European style social control mechanisms in a forlorn attempt to manage and control massive social security fiddling. Most middle class people just can't see the point.

Sometimes, these approaches are designed to support special interests. New technologies are creating problems for the creative industries so the Government plans to introduce draconian measures on filesharing that could ultimately have coppers bursting in on private homes to arrest teenagers.

If you think this is extreme, observe the Metropolitan Police Art & Antiques Squad's arrest of a teenage artist who dared to challenge the might of Damien Hirst, actually the might of the protectors of the right to print money of fashionable artists needing to preserve value for their patrons.

At other times, the Government follows a different ideological tack. Its Deputy Leader, Harriet Harman, is a hardline old-school feminist who does not like prostitution. Her solution would be to bring in more draconian Swedish-type laws that would outlaw paying for sex.

In her case, just as the change in visa laws is related to forced marriages and the criminal records registration requirements to the risk from paedophiles, the real driver behind Harman's rather potty idea (under British conditions) is the very real problem of sex-trafficking.

If it is not sexual conduct, then it is right behaviour in environmental matters or in late night drinking. Sensible reforms are often made ridiculous with a bridge too far in attempts to control language (implying control of thought) instead of just behaviour.

In Scotland, it would seem a barman cannot volunteer the phrase 'same again' lest that 'nudge' you into that extra drink. The public are treated as mindless zombies. Much of this legislation appears to be guided by a new breed of manipulative cognitive scientists.

Then there is the security agenda which results in increasingly oppressive and patently daft applications of counter-terror legislation in local government. There is not an amateur photographer in the land who is not angered by the increasingly odd behaviour of the police.

Many of the British are beginning to get increasingly irritated by all this interference because it indicates a Government that is weak rather than strong, unable to deal with particular problems through decisive executive action. It can only create blanket rules which it often fails to enforce.

The net effect is a climate of anxiety, fear and inconvenience in which the majority of the population is cowed into avoiding behaviour that they would probably never have considered in the first place, while the really bad people go ever deeper underground where it can be pretended that they do not exist.

There are other irritations. Most of the specific problems that are emerging are the result of globalisation (the easy flow of peoples from other cultures into Britain to meet cheap labour needs) or of community breakdown under free market pressure. But migration and economic interventionism are taboo subjects.

New Labour is trapped by its ideology in two directions - its egalitarian liberal human rights agenda means that rules should apply to everyone equally and its free market agenda fails to permit any  effective and targeted interventionist strategies that can deal with economic root causes.

Not only are there real and vicious abuses in society to deal with but New Labour is also determined to support certain 'creative industrial' interests as part of its competitiveness agenda and to keep its own ideological minorities as happy as possible given its crumbling electoral base.

We are in the position where ordinary British families, generally a-political and best characterised as 'lazy libertarians', are finding that, increasingly, they have to start owning documents and registering to prove they are to be trusted or fear the heavy boot of Plod at every bit of grey area bodging.

They are not only pushed around by uniformed jobsworths (not necessarily the police) when they try to take a snap but they are being forced to snoop on their own kids.

History is repeating itself. In the early 1950s, the Labour Government that created the welfare state and undertook a massive postwar housing programme lost an election to the Conservatives. 

There were many reasons for that defeat but one was that the 'lazy libertarians' decided that they had had enough of 'socialist' regulation and rules and wanted more basic freedoms.

Admittedly a narrow defeat but Labour was slow to understand that many in the electorate saw regulation as a temporary necessity rather than a way of life.

Even though there is now scarcely a socialist bone in New Labour's body (despite the claims of Tory libertarians to whom Roosevelt was a Communist), it has not shaken off its Fabian-derived instinct to manage the population from above through direction and regulation.

There is an element in the New Labour elite that fears HG Wells' projection of his time into a world of Eloi and Morlocks. To Tories like David Davis, council estates are still filled with Disraeli's 'angels in marble' whereas some sour progressives see a seething mob marked by a 'poverty of aspiration'.

Tories have held on to working class votes since Disraeli's time not only through crass nationalism (as Labour people like to claim) but by ensuring a 'laissez-faire' approach to private life. Beer drinkers would naturally gravitate to the centre-right to the degree that the 'temperance' loons took over the left.

In the current Government's case, the ideological predisposition towards social intervention (perhaps accentuated by its refusal to consider economic intervention) is compounded not only by the chaos caused by economic globalisation but by the attempt to Europeanise British culture.

The regulatory frame of mind is normal in parts of Europe. In Germany, it seems accepted that language (as in the criminalisation of holocaust denial) can be a subject for legislation - and this mentality has drifted over into anti-racism legislation and the debate about blasphemy in the UK.

Wherever you look in British public life, in the dying days of what may be the last centre-left administration for a long time, you see a propensity to use the blunt instrument of petty regulation of private life to solve problems that its policy approaches created in the first place.

The gap between the Tories and New Labour will narrow over the coming months as the special interests underpinning the centre-left start to realise what is in store for them - but the general public have accumulated so many petty irritations that a tipping point may have been reached.