On 12th October, 2010, on board BA Flight 77 from the UK to Luanda, Angola, Jimmy Mubenga, a 46-year-old who had been in Britain for 16 years and had lost a long series of appeals, and who was being forcibly detained by Group 4 Security, working on behalf of the UK Borders Agency, died.
Several witness statements speak of him complaining and undergoing breathing difficulties while under restraint.
What surprises me about this is not so much that Mr Mubenga died. The UK Borders Agency is a singularly uncaring and monolithic entity without a shred of decency, compassion, or mercy; capable, for instance, of ordering the deportation of a terminal cancer patient to certain and painful death. Nor am I surprised at the actions of Group 4 Security. In fact, given the "fine carelessness" and disregard they seem customarily to display in such circumstances, I am surprised that apparently this is the first death which has occurred actually during deportation in 17 years.
But what surprises me most of all, is the total lack of public outcry.
Why isn't this front page news? If it was some vulnerable kid, living in a hovel and neglected by social services, the papers would be full of it. You wouldn't be able to move for waving shrouds, bandwagons, and public enquiries. Politicians would be queueing up at the despatch box to wring their hands and spout sanctimonious claptrap. But someone dies, in suspicious circumstances, during deportation, in front of witnesses, and nothing happens! No-one says a dickey-boo!
In fairness to the UK Borders Agency, they did go so far as issuing a statement, saying that Mr Mubenga was taken ill on board the plane and died later in hospital. But what process of enquiry produced this? Have any of the guards in question been suspended or investigated? Have any lessons been learned in the use of restraints? Will anyone ever be prosecuted?
No doubt, the Borders Agency and Group 4 would like to draw a veil over the proceedings as quickly as possible, to put the stone back in place over the slimy practice of forcible deportation before anything else crawls out.
We, however, those of us who care, can do our part to make sure that the case of Jimmy Mubenga does not get brushed aside without due judicial process. As well as using the normal channels such as letters to the press and to your elected representatives, I would also suggest a total boycott of British Airways and Group 4 and all their subsidiary companies and supply chain, at least until some announcement is made about an enquiry to establish what really happened, since all we can definitely say at the moment is there are suspicious circumstances and a major difference of opinion on the subject. I repeat, that alone is normally enough to excite the attention of the police and the DPP.
It won't bring him back, but perhaps 12 October every year could be remembered as Jimmy Mubenga day, until the UK Borders Agency is no more, disbanded for good, and Group 4 once more recognises that its true level of competence is in losing, or occasionally delivering, overnight parcels (or knocking on the door and leaving a card, even though you were in the house at the time). They were crap at that, but at least they didn't kill anyone.
Tuesday, 23 November 2010
Monday, 22 November 2010
Get Down, Shapp!
The Tories didn't really wait so long before showing their true colours.
Since the flawed election, which saw them seize power without a mandate, with the aid of their lackeys and lickspittles in the Liberal Democrats, a slew of hateful policies, proposals and suggestions, mainly aimed at targeting the poor, and demonising the disabled and those on benefits, has poured forth like a sewer from Central Office, or wherever their septic think tank is located these days.
As I have said elsewhere, I suspect that some of these proposals may be not entirely serious, kite-flying by some chosen mouthpiece (other orifices are available, some of them Lord Young) to test public reaction.
Their latest idea is about Social Housing, floated by Grant Shapps, and must surely fall into that category. It achieves the unique distinction of being not only gaga and unworkable, but also running counter to Tory policy as established by their patron saint, the blessed Margaret Thatcher, and her ideology.
In Mrs Thatcher's era, if you lived in a council house and you did well for yourself, and prospered materially, you might get to buy your house, thus denuding the UK's social housing stock, which many thousands did in the 1980s. Nowadays, if you live in a council house, and your material circumstances improve, under this pispotical proposal, you are likely to find yourself being evicted!
The stated aim is to end the concept of council house tenancies for life. Why? What possible good can it do, and where are the people supposed to move to? Grant Shapps is part of the Department of Communities. What has this proposal got to do with communities?
What it is about is, because the government doesn't want to build more social housing, it is making the existing stock "go further" by moving on the people who live there into the private sector, and bringing in people who are on the waiting list!
Compared, of course, to the obvious policy, of just building more social housing to start with.
Since the flawed election, which saw them seize power without a mandate, with the aid of their lackeys and lickspittles in the Liberal Democrats, a slew of hateful policies, proposals and suggestions, mainly aimed at targeting the poor, and demonising the disabled and those on benefits, has poured forth like a sewer from Central Office, or wherever their septic think tank is located these days.
As I have said elsewhere, I suspect that some of these proposals may be not entirely serious, kite-flying by some chosen mouthpiece (other orifices are available, some of them Lord Young) to test public reaction.
Their latest idea is about Social Housing, floated by Grant Shapps, and must surely fall into that category. It achieves the unique distinction of being not only gaga and unworkable, but also running counter to Tory policy as established by their patron saint, the blessed Margaret Thatcher, and her ideology.
In Mrs Thatcher's era, if you lived in a council house and you did well for yourself, and prospered materially, you might get to buy your house, thus denuding the UK's social housing stock, which many thousands did in the 1980s. Nowadays, if you live in a council house, and your material circumstances improve, under this pispotical proposal, you are likely to find yourself being evicted!
The stated aim is to end the concept of council house tenancies for life. Why? What possible good can it do, and where are the people supposed to move to? Grant Shapps is part of the Department of Communities. What has this proposal got to do with communities?
What it is about is, because the government doesn't want to build more social housing, it is making the existing stock "go further" by moving on the people who live there into the private sector, and bringing in people who are on the waiting list!
Compared, of course, to the obvious policy, of just building more social housing to start with.
Accentuate the Positive (Part 2)
A VISION FOR BRITAIN
Something fundamental is needed to change our society. We are not in Kansas anymore. Capitalism has broken, in fact, in October 2008, we came within a fag paper’s width of the collapse of global monetary systems, and all which that would have entailed. Socialism, true socialism, has never been allowed to fill the gap. I happen to believe, and would argue We need a completely NEW landscape. Something different.
At the poll in May, I argued for a massive boycott of the election, a low turnout of seismic proportions, combined with a comparative “Everest” of spoilt ballots from those who did turn out, I said, would surely send them the signal, all of them, all of the parties, that their ideas, their policies, their proposals, were limp, shrunken, dead and moribund. They needed to go away, and think again.
Sadly, that did not happen, and the three major parties were allowed to get away with sterile and negative policies, although I did, and still do, question the legitimacy of the result. However, that would take us in the direction of party politics, which we have been asked to eschew in this thread, and therefore I will, instead, try and be positive in suggesting some key points of policy where I think things could be different. My vision for the future, if you like.
In general, I think that there needs to be an alternative to the free market and socialism. Especially as socialism in this country has, in reality, meant The Labour Party. As Orwell put it in “The Lion and the Unicorn”
It has never been able to achieve any major change, because except in purely domestic matters it has never possessed a genuinely independent policy. It was and is primarily a party of trade unions, devoted to raising wages and improving working conditions
Since this is likely to be a very long post I think, rather than risk crashing the software, I will post it in chunks and summarise my main points under each heading.
ECONOMY
I believe that the way out of the debt/deficit jungle is to grow the UK economy and repay what we owe through a fairer taxation system and a growing tax take as the economy grows. Key to this in my manifesto would be the creation of a new sector in the economy: social enterprise. Social enterprise is government capitalism that makes a profit and then uses it for the public good. This is the economic idea which underlies Rooftree, for instance (see under housing). Let us be clear about what social enterprise is not. It is not outsourcing. It is not privatisation, it is the government setting up companies to do things that need doing and to turn a profit out of them, a profit which is then re-invested in the public’s interest.
We should also be conscious, in taking economic decisions, that we govern our own country, it is not government by the markets. Nor is it government by the EU, which takes too much money out of this country for very little return.
DEFENCE
I am in favour of a phased withdrawal from Afghanistan, I think our troops are behaving there with the customary bravery and aplomb which you would expect but in effect all they are doing is being professional targets. My “default” position for the withdrawal would be the White Cliffs of Dover, ideally, but given that we would already be abandoning Afghanistan to the Taleban, we can’t afford for Pakistan to go the same way so we would probably have to retain some sort of presence along the border. Although to be honest, the US should really now shoulder the burden if they want to carry on, along with some of our EU colleagues who have been backwards at coming forwards with men and materiel.
I would keep the aircraft carriers, I think it is an act of criminal folly for a nation such as ours which relies on maritime trade routes to leave itself exposed for a decade with no seaborne air cover capacity. Likewise I would go ahead with the replacement for Trident, reluctantly, with my arm forced up my back, and not really wishing to start from here, but recognising the realpolitik of the situation Blair and Bush landed us in.
Ultimately, I would like to see our army, as indeed I would like to see all the world’s armies, evolve into an international rescue and humanitarian force to deal with natural disasters, coupled with the necessary forces retaimed on British soil for the defence of the realm. These could also double as a civil defence force in time of floods and other disasters.
JUSTICE/PRISONS
I would repeal many of the harsh anti-libertarian measures which have been smuggled through by the government under the pretext of “anti-terrorism” legislation since 2001.
While recognising that things such as CCTV and speed cameras have their virtue in providing evidence, we should not go down the road of over reliance on them, there is no substitute for professionally trained and resourced police officers.
The prisons are full of people who should not be there. I would establish a canon of offences where, if you were found guilty of one of these relatively minor offences you would be eligible for training and eventual release into a civilian civil defence force (see above) but of course if you did anything wrong or illegal while on such a programme you would go straight back to prison and serve the remainder of your full original sentence without the option.
I would consider legalising cannabis (and taxing its sale and supply) below a certain strength, or of certain types. This would free up an enormous amount of police manpower.
EDUCATION
I would like to see a return to the respect for education as a profession. I think that the current situation, the whole system, is posited on the assumption that teachers jerk around when they pull on the purse-strings, whoever they are at the time. Nobody in education seems interested in learning for its own sake any more, only as a passport to money, or a commodity. And if it comes to a choice between pedagogy and pounds sterling, we know which one will win out. I want to see a return to inspirational teaching, a curriculum that allows the teachers some flexibility to tailor the content to bring out the best in each individual pupil and yet still meets recognised national standards, that are not lowered every year.
I would also like to see an end to any special status for schools which is provided by the state. I think faith schools are potentially divisive within society and if people want to found a faith school, then it should be a private educational establishment and not funded by the state. However, I do believe that religion and morality should still be taught in schools, along with other things which kids will actually find useful (how to touch type, and running a bank account, to name but two)
I do not believe that turning schools into academies “levels up” the educational playing field, I believe it actually increases the division between the schools that get all of the resources lavished on them and the bog-standard comprehensive.
I also believe that people do not want “choice”. Choice is the false product of the current inequalities in the education system and what they really want is a good, competent school somewhere near at hand where they can send their children and know they can be educated.
HEALTH
Clearly the NHS cannot be a bottomless pit for ever for everyone. I would like to see the establishment of a series of principles of treatment based on clinical need and decided by the medical professionals in charge of the treatment, not artificially massaged to meet targets or sold between different medical establishments
Other than that it sometimes ties itself in knots doing things that are peripheral to the main causes of illness and death in the UK, and needs to re-focus on its core ideals, I think the NHS is best left alone to do what it does well, curing people. However, one area which does need reform is the provision of affordable dentistry for people who are currently priced out of the market, however that may be achieved.
TRANSPORT
I would re-nationalise the railways over a period of time as the franchises expired and turn them back over to one national network, run by a social enterprise called British Rail.
I would also investigate the economic benefits, as opposed to the ecological demerits, of re opening closed branch lines and/or narrowboat carrying on the canal system.
Ideally, one would want to look at a more local means of production and distribution for materials, to reduce the strain on long-distance motorway freight.
CLIMATE CHANGE
We should be treating this with the same urgency and despatch as Churchill treated the buildng of Spitires and the development of radar in world war two. Action this day! This is a perfect area for the creation of social enterprises to stimulate growth in the economy and potential British exports, too.
IMMIGRATION AND THE EU
I have lumped these together because they are inextricably linked. We need to disengage from the political process of the EU and regain control of our own borders, then – and only then – we can begin to formulate an immigration policy based on who WE want here and what skills they can contribute.
I also believe that instead of locking asylum seekers up and paying them vouchers, we should give them an NI number and let them work and contribute taxes while their cases are heard, but if they put a foot wrong or try to disappear during this process, then they go straight back without the option. In other words, we give them a chance to show their worth to the UK, and hopefully they will be sensible enough to grab it with both hands.
HOUSING AND HOMELESSNESS
For the sake of brevity I am just going to link to Rooftree, even though I am taking the site down soon.
http://www.rooftree.org.uk
FARMING AND THE ENVIRONMENT
I would like to see the subsidies paid for set aside paid instead to people who produce organic produce and I would like to see a more humane regime for animals in farming.
I would retain (and indeed, enforce) the ban on fox hunting and I would suspend the badger culling trials and put the effort into finding a vaccine solution for Bovine TB instead.
DEVOLUTION & CONSTITUTION
Abolish the Welsh and Scottish assemblies and bring them back under the control of Westminster, on the grounds that the political identity of the island should be congruent with its geographical identity. Likewise get rid of "mayors" who are another unecessary and costly layer of local buraeucracy.
Put the hereditary Lords back in the Lords, but increase the number of life peers to reflect the makeup of society as a whole
Retain the Royal Family as a bulwark against arriviste politicians with ideas above their station.
Limit MPs' expenses, outside work, second homes etc. and introduce a residence qualification. If you want to represent a constituency, you should have lived there for at least two years first as your primary place of residence.
CONCLUSION
Think of how social enterprises could change the landscape for the people of Britain.
Feed the hungry. House the homeless. Treat the sick. Teach the Children. Cherish the animals. End the Wars. Punish the Guilty. Fulfil the spirit. We need a gentler more tolerant and respectful society like we had in the 1950s, one where people realise there is more to life than a new sofa from DFS
It is not rocket science. All that is lacking is the political will.
And every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill made low. The crooked straight and the rough places plain: the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.
Something fundamental is needed to change our society. We are not in Kansas anymore. Capitalism has broken, in fact, in October 2008, we came within a fag paper’s width of the collapse of global monetary systems, and all which that would have entailed. Socialism, true socialism, has never been allowed to fill the gap. I happen to believe, and would argue We need a completely NEW landscape. Something different.
At the poll in May, I argued for a massive boycott of the election, a low turnout of seismic proportions, combined with a comparative “Everest” of spoilt ballots from those who did turn out, I said, would surely send them the signal, all of them, all of the parties, that their ideas, their policies, their proposals, were limp, shrunken, dead and moribund. They needed to go away, and think again.
Sadly, that did not happen, and the three major parties were allowed to get away with sterile and negative policies, although I did, and still do, question the legitimacy of the result. However, that would take us in the direction of party politics, which we have been asked to eschew in this thread, and therefore I will, instead, try and be positive in suggesting some key points of policy where I think things could be different. My vision for the future, if you like.
In general, I think that there needs to be an alternative to the free market and socialism. Especially as socialism in this country has, in reality, meant The Labour Party. As Orwell put it in “The Lion and the Unicorn”
It has never been able to achieve any major change, because except in purely domestic matters it has never possessed a genuinely independent policy. It was and is primarily a party of trade unions, devoted to raising wages and improving working conditions
Since this is likely to be a very long post I think, rather than risk crashing the software, I will post it in chunks and summarise my main points under each heading.
ECONOMY
I believe that the way out of the debt/deficit jungle is to grow the UK economy and repay what we owe through a fairer taxation system and a growing tax take as the economy grows. Key to this in my manifesto would be the creation of a new sector in the economy: social enterprise. Social enterprise is government capitalism that makes a profit and then uses it for the public good. This is the economic idea which underlies Rooftree, for instance (see under housing). Let us be clear about what social enterprise is not. It is not outsourcing. It is not privatisation, it is the government setting up companies to do things that need doing and to turn a profit out of them, a profit which is then re-invested in the public’s interest.
We should also be conscious, in taking economic decisions, that we govern our own country, it is not government by the markets. Nor is it government by the EU, which takes too much money out of this country for very little return.
DEFENCE
I am in favour of a phased withdrawal from Afghanistan, I think our troops are behaving there with the customary bravery and aplomb which you would expect but in effect all they are doing is being professional targets. My “default” position for the withdrawal would be the White Cliffs of Dover, ideally, but given that we would already be abandoning Afghanistan to the Taleban, we can’t afford for Pakistan to go the same way so we would probably have to retain some sort of presence along the border. Although to be honest, the US should really now shoulder the burden if they want to carry on, along with some of our EU colleagues who have been backwards at coming forwards with men and materiel.
I would keep the aircraft carriers, I think it is an act of criminal folly for a nation such as ours which relies on maritime trade routes to leave itself exposed for a decade with no seaborne air cover capacity. Likewise I would go ahead with the replacement for Trident, reluctantly, with my arm forced up my back, and not really wishing to start from here, but recognising the realpolitik of the situation Blair and Bush landed us in.
Ultimately, I would like to see our army, as indeed I would like to see all the world’s armies, evolve into an international rescue and humanitarian force to deal with natural disasters, coupled with the necessary forces retaimed on British soil for the defence of the realm. These could also double as a civil defence force in time of floods and other disasters.
JUSTICE/PRISONS
I would repeal many of the harsh anti-libertarian measures which have been smuggled through by the government under the pretext of “anti-terrorism” legislation since 2001.
While recognising that things such as CCTV and speed cameras have their virtue in providing evidence, we should not go down the road of over reliance on them, there is no substitute for professionally trained and resourced police officers.
The prisons are full of people who should not be there. I would establish a canon of offences where, if you were found guilty of one of these relatively minor offences you would be eligible for training and eventual release into a civilian civil defence force (see above) but of course if you did anything wrong or illegal while on such a programme you would go straight back to prison and serve the remainder of your full original sentence without the option.
I would consider legalising cannabis (and taxing its sale and supply) below a certain strength, or of certain types. This would free up an enormous amount of police manpower.
EDUCATION
I would like to see a return to the respect for education as a profession. I think that the current situation, the whole system, is posited on the assumption that teachers jerk around when they pull on the purse-strings, whoever they are at the time. Nobody in education seems interested in learning for its own sake any more, only as a passport to money, or a commodity. And if it comes to a choice between pedagogy and pounds sterling, we know which one will win out. I want to see a return to inspirational teaching, a curriculum that allows the teachers some flexibility to tailor the content to bring out the best in each individual pupil and yet still meets recognised national standards, that are not lowered every year.
I would also like to see an end to any special status for schools which is provided by the state. I think faith schools are potentially divisive within society and if people want to found a faith school, then it should be a private educational establishment and not funded by the state. However, I do believe that religion and morality should still be taught in schools, along with other things which kids will actually find useful (how to touch type, and running a bank account, to name but two)
I do not believe that turning schools into academies “levels up” the educational playing field, I believe it actually increases the division between the schools that get all of the resources lavished on them and the bog-standard comprehensive.
I also believe that people do not want “choice”. Choice is the false product of the current inequalities in the education system and what they really want is a good, competent school somewhere near at hand where they can send their children and know they can be educated.
HEALTH
Clearly the NHS cannot be a bottomless pit for ever for everyone. I would like to see the establishment of a series of principles of treatment based on clinical need and decided by the medical professionals in charge of the treatment, not artificially massaged to meet targets or sold between different medical establishments
Other than that it sometimes ties itself in knots doing things that are peripheral to the main causes of illness and death in the UK, and needs to re-focus on its core ideals, I think the NHS is best left alone to do what it does well, curing people. However, one area which does need reform is the provision of affordable dentistry for people who are currently priced out of the market, however that may be achieved.
TRANSPORT
I would re-nationalise the railways over a period of time as the franchises expired and turn them back over to one national network, run by a social enterprise called British Rail.
I would also investigate the economic benefits, as opposed to the ecological demerits, of re opening closed branch lines and/or narrowboat carrying on the canal system.
Ideally, one would want to look at a more local means of production and distribution for materials, to reduce the strain on long-distance motorway freight.
CLIMATE CHANGE
We should be treating this with the same urgency and despatch as Churchill treated the buildng of Spitires and the development of radar in world war two. Action this day! This is a perfect area for the creation of social enterprises to stimulate growth in the economy and potential British exports, too.
IMMIGRATION AND THE EU
I have lumped these together because they are inextricably linked. We need to disengage from the political process of the EU and regain control of our own borders, then – and only then – we can begin to formulate an immigration policy based on who WE want here and what skills they can contribute.
I also believe that instead of locking asylum seekers up and paying them vouchers, we should give them an NI number and let them work and contribute taxes while their cases are heard, but if they put a foot wrong or try to disappear during this process, then they go straight back without the option. In other words, we give them a chance to show their worth to the UK, and hopefully they will be sensible enough to grab it with both hands.
HOUSING AND HOMELESSNESS
For the sake of brevity I am just going to link to Rooftree, even though I am taking the site down soon.
http://www.rooftree.org.uk
FARMING AND THE ENVIRONMENT
I would like to see the subsidies paid for set aside paid instead to people who produce organic produce and I would like to see a more humane regime for animals in farming.
I would retain (and indeed, enforce) the ban on fox hunting and I would suspend the badger culling trials and put the effort into finding a vaccine solution for Bovine TB instead.
DEVOLUTION & CONSTITUTION
Abolish the Welsh and Scottish assemblies and bring them back under the control of Westminster, on the grounds that the political identity of the island should be congruent with its geographical identity. Likewise get rid of "mayors" who are another unecessary and costly layer of local buraeucracy.
Put the hereditary Lords back in the Lords, but increase the number of life peers to reflect the makeup of society as a whole
Retain the Royal Family as a bulwark against arriviste politicians with ideas above their station.
Limit MPs' expenses, outside work, second homes etc. and introduce a residence qualification. If you want to represent a constituency, you should have lived there for at least two years first as your primary place of residence.
CONCLUSION
Think of how social enterprises could change the landscape for the people of Britain.
Feed the hungry. House the homeless. Treat the sick. Teach the Children. Cherish the animals. End the Wars. Punish the Guilty. Fulfil the spirit. We need a gentler more tolerant and respectful society like we had in the 1950s, one where people realise there is more to life than a new sofa from DFS
It is not rocket science. All that is lacking is the political will.
And every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill made low. The crooked straight and the rough places plain: the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.
Accentuate the Positive (part 1)
This is the first of two positive posts I will attempt. People have said that my blog is invariably negative and that I don’t have a good word for the Tories or the Literal Dimwits. This is untrue, I have several good words for them, most of which begin with f or c.
It has also been suggested to me that if there was another general election, it would simply result in the re-election of a further Tory government. I wonder, though, are we absolutely sure about this? Because I think if Cameron and Clegg did the honest thing, merged their two parties formally, acknowledging that the LibDims have been swallowed whole by the Orca of the conservative party, instead of riding it like Dolphin Boy or whatever he was called, as they naively hoped, and went to the country on their actual policy, as now revealed, which was not part of their platform last May, they would get decimated. And deservedly so.
I agree with their critics about the Labour party, though. When they were in power they did not do enough to keep the bankers, speculators and rentier capitalists in check, though to Brown’s credit, and this is something you won’t hear me say very often, to Brown’s credit, he was exactly the right person to have in place during the banking crisis of 2008, and he may also have displayed prescience and foresight in keeping us out of the damned Euro.
But yes, I agree, the present Labour party doesn’t have a clue what to do, as it showed recently by electing the wrong leader, a man with the killer instinct of Tim Henman. I did have high hopes that the Labour party would bounce back off the ropes, with Biffo at the helm, and start tearing into the Tory tissues of lies, contradictions and doublespeak.
God alone knows, there is plenty to go at, but it seems that Mr Ed the talking horse was too busy doing to his wife what he is now about to do to the party of the amalgamated wheeltappers and shunters. Very sad. It means that the poor and underprivileged, the ill, and those on benefits will be thrown to the Tory wolves unless someone else comes forward to stop it, and since democracy has failed in this respect, because none of the parties at the last election were willing to engage in the democratic process, then the next step may have to be one of those outbursts of extraparliamentary action which have marked the major advances in British social history from Corn Law Reform to the Peterloo Massacre to the Jarrow Crusade and the march against the Iraq war.
If Labour did win, so the theory goes, then the markets are going to take fright and cause even more unemployment and misery. Ah, well, here I do differ. “There is no alternative” is a mantra which we will hear from the Tories and their stooges again and again, but actually there are quite a lot of alternatives, starting from the doctrinaire Marxist approach of nationalising ALL the banks and financial institutions, down from there to more sensible proposals based on a mixed economy.
It comes down to who you think should run the country, ultimately, the markets or a democratically elected government. Paul Krugman, writing in his NY Times Blog (“The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves”) points out that Argentina told the IMF where to get off, and then was able to negotiate a much better package, with fewer drastic implications for cuts, which they subsequently paid off. So it seems that even WITH Government from the IMF, which is often represented as the consequence of Labour’s “shallower cuts, less quickly” approach, you don’t have to take the first deal you’re given.
It is true that people are still using the banks as a convenient “whipping boy” in non-credible alternatives. It is first worth establishing some things on which we could probably agree.
The massive sovereign debts of the advanced capitalist countries are the result of governments converting private debt into public debt, having bailed out the banks and rescued the system. Worldwide, the cost of this unprecedented bail-out is estimated to be US$10.8 trillion (£7 trillion). Some estimates have been as high as US$14 trillion. So it is not merely a case of Gordon Brown alone being on a one-man mission to wreck the economy, in fact it may turn out in time that it was him who saved us from having to queue in the streets for loaves of bread thrown off the back of an army lorry, however useless he may have been as a politician in many ways (too stubborn, badly advised, and not media savvy) and ill-fitted to be Prime Minister.
In Britain, an eye-watering £1.5 trillion was thrown at the banks, equating to 94.4% of the Gross Domestic Product. Much of this money was for guarantees against banking losses, which have since been recovered. Into the bargain, the government was forced to nationalise Northern Rock and the Royal Bank of Scotland. However, the total cost to the taxpayer is estimated to be £815bn, or £31,000 per household.
Although these banks were formally nationalised, in reality, the bail-out meant the nationalisation of the debts and the privatisation of the profits; in Britain, ordinary people are being attacked in order to reduce a budget deficit of £149bn, while nobody can deny that bankers continue to receive millions in public subsidies and bonuses.
As I said before, if I were a Marxist (biddy biddy biddy biddy biddy biddy biddy boom) I would be calling for the nationalisation of the entire sector. I am not, but I don’t see why they shouldn’t share more of the burden than is presently the case, since they caused the problem in the first place, and it is unfair and unjust to expect poor people to pay for the mistakes of the rich – see below.
Classic Marxist theory holds that sooner or later, the market becomes too narrow for the continuous outpouring of commodities; everybody already has two mobile phones and a new sofa from DFS. The capitalist system faces a crisis of over-production. If you look at what happened in 2008, it is quite a compelling analysis.
The capitalists attempted to delay this crisis, the Marxists say, by creating the greatest credit bubble in history. At bottom, the restricted consumption of the masses prepares the way for crisis under capitalism. The market is therefore restricted by the amount of money that people have in their pockets to spend on goods and services, as well as the excess capacity that has built up throughout the economy. Today, the world is awash with excess capacity. The market is saturated and the capitalists have had to cut back on production. Their attempt to overcome the crisis by credit has reached its limits. The productive forces have outgrown the limits of the capitalist system.
There are figures to illustrate how far credit was used to put off the crisis. A recent report on debt in The Economist stated that, “average total debt (private and public sector combined) in ten mature economies rose from 200% of GDP in 1995 to 300% in 2008. There were even more startling rises in Iceland and Ireland, where debt-to-GDP ratios reached 1,200% and 700% respectively” (26th July 2010).
In relation to consumer credit, The Economist reports that:
“At the end of the Second World War in 1945, consumer credit in America totalled just under $5.7 billion; ten years later it had already grown to nearly $43 billion and the party was just getting started. It reached $100 billion in 1966, $500 billion in 1984 and $1 trillion in 1994, or around $4,000 for every man, woman and child. The peak, so far, was almost $2.6 trillion in July 2008. Household debt approached 100% of GDP in 2007, a level seen only once before, rather ominously in 1929. America was not alone in embarking on a debt spree. In Britain, household debt rose from 105% of disposable income in 2000 to 160% in 2008” (ibid).
This huge expansion of credit was made possible by banks and governments (which is where Brown could be held to be culpable, with lax regulation, though the problem goes back much further, over several administrations) encouraging people to take out cheap loans, mortgages, and credit cards; hence the growth of “sub-prime mortgages”. However, this debt-fuelled party could not last forever. In the United States in 2006, people started to default on their loans. Consumer demand dropped. Producers could no longer find any consumers to sell their commodities to, and capitalism was faced with a classic crisis of over-production.
I have resisted the temptation to precis this analysis because again it shows that, in terms of the credit crunch itself, what Broon claimed was largely true, that it was a global problem and not simply something home-grown coming home to roost in our own back yard. Broon may have done some dumb things (eg selling off the gold reserves) but 2008 wasn’t one of them.
People speak about the current situation as if the ideas behind it were somehow new. The idea of governments running a deficit and accumulating sovereign debt is not unique to the current period. Even at its lowest point in the last 30 years, the UK debt was 26% of GDP, and before the current crisis, in September 2007, the UK debt stood at 36% of GDP. The government regularly borrows money to make up the deficit between public spending and money received from various sources of tax. In fact, the British government has only recorded a budget surplus in six of the last 36 years, generally overspending by between 2% and 5% of GDP.
Governments raise money for their deficit by auctioning government bonds, or “gilts.” The government pays interest on these bonds every six months, up to the “maturity date,” at which time the full value must be paid back. The majority of British debt bonds have a maturity of 15 years, and currently the government pays £42bn per year in interest payments, making interest payments the fourth biggest source of public spending after benefits and pensions, health, and education.
Greece was charged 40% interest on its gilts as the lenders (i.e. speculators) began to get worried about the possibility of sovereign default, as happened in Iceland in late 2008. Demands were made for public spending to be dramatically cut, and the EU and IMF came in, to outline the austerity measures that were to be imposed. Similar demands are being made of Britain. The Con-Dem coalition is now embarking on a merciless austerity package to slash public spending, pre-empting what it thinks the IMF wants to hear - a very different solution to public debt: draconian cuts. The programme of austerity in Britain (following on from Greece and Ireland) is seen by some as a test-bed, internationally. If the coalition can carry out such brutal attacks on the British working class, then governments elsewhere will have no qualms about carrying out equally severe cuts on theirs.
However: the UK Debt Management Office breaks the ownership of UK debt down as follows:
39.8% - Insurance companies and pension funds
35.1% - Overseas investors
17.8% - Other financial institutions
2.9% - Households
2.9% - Banks
1.5% - Others
From this, it is obvious that the overwhelming majority of the public debt in Britain is owned by financial speculators (insurance companies, overseas investors, and “other financial institutions”, e.g. hedge funds, etc.) who are looking to make a profit out of Britain’s debt crisis – a crisis that was created by bailing out the very same bankers and speculators in the first place – another reason why they should shoulder more of the burden.
Keynesian economists, such as Paul Krugman, rightly warn that the effect of such deep cuts will be to reduce demand and usher in a “double-dip” recession. They are correct; the cuts will exacerbate excess capacity and over-production. However, simply increasing government expenditure is also not viable. Continuing government stimulus to maintain the economy would just inflate public debt, driving up interest rates on the debt and would end up pushing national economies further towards default. That is why I am calling for a completely new sector of the economy, the social enterprise section, to sit in between the private and the public sector, to employ people so that they earn money on which they pay tax, increasing the tax take, and some of which they spend, stimulating the economy, and producing a public good for all of us – in my example, increasing the social housing stock, as opposed to paying the brickies, sparkies and joiners to stay at home on the dole.
The Keynesians also point out (again correctly) that governments have had much larger debts in the past. This is true; the UK’s public debt was above 100% of GDP for most of the inter-war period, and peaked at over 250% after WWII. However, the reduction of the national debt after the Second World War was achieved on the basis of economic growth, which in turn was possible owing to the destruction of capital during the war and growing world trade, and investment in the profitable new technologies that had developed as a result of wartime research and development. In some ways we have similar conditions today with the fight against climate change. I think we should be treating that as a “war” and developing new British technologies which we can lead the world in, and export to every corner of the globe (not that a globe has corners, before anyone who has got this far without the mogadon kicking in points this out).
Many within the trade unions and the Labour Party, support Keynesian “alternatives” to the programme of Coalition austerity. They argue that the working class did not cause the crisis, therefore they should not pay for it. This is what I have said all along. They argue however that the £149bn deficit can be plugged by taxing the rich and cutting spending elsewhere.
• £25bn is lost through tax avoidance, in which the rich find legal loopholes in order to avoid taxes.
• £70bn is lost through tax evasion, where the rich just don’t declare certain income.
• Replacing Trident (nuclear missile submarines) will cost between £15bn-20bn.
• The UK budget for defence spending is currently £37bn per year.
Their proposals, therefore, are to eliminate tax evasion and avoidance, scrap Trident, and reduce “defence” spending. Adding up the money from these measures results in a potential £152bn that could be raised. Personally, I do not agree with the latter two premises, but -along with a higher rate of income tax for those on high incomes, a tax on financial transactions (also known as the “Tobin tax” or “Robin Hood tax”) and greater corporation tax, it seems that we should have no problem in finding ways to plug at least £95bn of the deficit.
The government has a choice – it can either cut spending, and/or raise taxes, and, for ideological reasons, Cameron has decided that it shall be by cutting, and by targeting those cuts largely on those least able to bear them, that the deficit shall be reduced. I would be more convinced that it wasn’t purely evil ideological spite if they had announced some plans for restoring levels of public spending once the deficit has been tackled, but they haven’t!
So: as I said elsewhere, SOMEBODY has got to challenge the spurious “mandate” of this shower, and I am not happy with the concept of them going unchallenged and people dying as a result. Normally, one would look to the Labour Party for this, but they are feeble, useless, supine, and leaderless. I leave the last word, therefore, to my hon. friends, the Marxists.
A mass movement must not only challenge the Con-Dem government but must challenge the system itself. Open the books! Let ordinary people see how much of their money is wasted on outsourcing services to private companies and on fees for management consultants! Let workers see how much profit the giant monopolies make! Let us see how many millions are spent on bankers’ bonuses! If the books are opened, then we can really see the rottenness of capitalism. Drastic times call for drastic solutions.
Under the current conditions, the demand should be for the trade unions to call for a public sector strike, followed by a 24-hour general strike. After the long period of low activity in the class struggle in Britain, a day-long general strike would act as a demonstration of strength and could help to give the working class a sense of their power, thus raising consciousness.
It has also been suggested to me that if there was another general election, it would simply result in the re-election of a further Tory government. I wonder, though, are we absolutely sure about this? Because I think if Cameron and Clegg did the honest thing, merged their two parties formally, acknowledging that the LibDims have been swallowed whole by the Orca of the conservative party, instead of riding it like Dolphin Boy or whatever he was called, as they naively hoped, and went to the country on their actual policy, as now revealed, which was not part of their platform last May, they would get decimated. And deservedly so.
I agree with their critics about the Labour party, though. When they were in power they did not do enough to keep the bankers, speculators and rentier capitalists in check, though to Brown’s credit, and this is something you won’t hear me say very often, to Brown’s credit, he was exactly the right person to have in place during the banking crisis of 2008, and he may also have displayed prescience and foresight in keeping us out of the damned Euro.
But yes, I agree, the present Labour party doesn’t have a clue what to do, as it showed recently by electing the wrong leader, a man with the killer instinct of Tim Henman. I did have high hopes that the Labour party would bounce back off the ropes, with Biffo at the helm, and start tearing into the Tory tissues of lies, contradictions and doublespeak.
God alone knows, there is plenty to go at, but it seems that Mr Ed the talking horse was too busy doing to his wife what he is now about to do to the party of the amalgamated wheeltappers and shunters. Very sad. It means that the poor and underprivileged, the ill, and those on benefits will be thrown to the Tory wolves unless someone else comes forward to stop it, and since democracy has failed in this respect, because none of the parties at the last election were willing to engage in the democratic process, then the next step may have to be one of those outbursts of extraparliamentary action which have marked the major advances in British social history from Corn Law Reform to the Peterloo Massacre to the Jarrow Crusade and the march against the Iraq war.
If Labour did win, so the theory goes, then the markets are going to take fright and cause even more unemployment and misery. Ah, well, here I do differ. “There is no alternative” is a mantra which we will hear from the Tories and their stooges again and again, but actually there are quite a lot of alternatives, starting from the doctrinaire Marxist approach of nationalising ALL the banks and financial institutions, down from there to more sensible proposals based on a mixed economy.
It comes down to who you think should run the country, ultimately, the markets or a democratically elected government. Paul Krugman, writing in his NY Times Blog (“The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves”) points out that Argentina told the IMF where to get off, and then was able to negotiate a much better package, with fewer drastic implications for cuts, which they subsequently paid off. So it seems that even WITH Government from the IMF, which is often represented as the consequence of Labour’s “shallower cuts, less quickly” approach, you don’t have to take the first deal you’re given.
It is true that people are still using the banks as a convenient “whipping boy” in non-credible alternatives. It is first worth establishing some things on which we could probably agree.
The massive sovereign debts of the advanced capitalist countries are the result of governments converting private debt into public debt, having bailed out the banks and rescued the system. Worldwide, the cost of this unprecedented bail-out is estimated to be US$10.8 trillion (£7 trillion). Some estimates have been as high as US$14 trillion. So it is not merely a case of Gordon Brown alone being on a one-man mission to wreck the economy, in fact it may turn out in time that it was him who saved us from having to queue in the streets for loaves of bread thrown off the back of an army lorry, however useless he may have been as a politician in many ways (too stubborn, badly advised, and not media savvy) and ill-fitted to be Prime Minister.
In Britain, an eye-watering £1.5 trillion was thrown at the banks, equating to 94.4% of the Gross Domestic Product. Much of this money was for guarantees against banking losses, which have since been recovered. Into the bargain, the government was forced to nationalise Northern Rock and the Royal Bank of Scotland. However, the total cost to the taxpayer is estimated to be £815bn, or £31,000 per household.
Although these banks were formally nationalised, in reality, the bail-out meant the nationalisation of the debts and the privatisation of the profits; in Britain, ordinary people are being attacked in order to reduce a budget deficit of £149bn, while nobody can deny that bankers continue to receive millions in public subsidies and bonuses.
As I said before, if I were a Marxist (biddy biddy biddy biddy biddy biddy biddy boom) I would be calling for the nationalisation of the entire sector. I am not, but I don’t see why they shouldn’t share more of the burden than is presently the case, since they caused the problem in the first place, and it is unfair and unjust to expect poor people to pay for the mistakes of the rich – see below.
Classic Marxist theory holds that sooner or later, the market becomes too narrow for the continuous outpouring of commodities; everybody already has two mobile phones and a new sofa from DFS. The capitalist system faces a crisis of over-production. If you look at what happened in 2008, it is quite a compelling analysis.
The capitalists attempted to delay this crisis, the Marxists say, by creating the greatest credit bubble in history. At bottom, the restricted consumption of the masses prepares the way for crisis under capitalism. The market is therefore restricted by the amount of money that people have in their pockets to spend on goods and services, as well as the excess capacity that has built up throughout the economy. Today, the world is awash with excess capacity. The market is saturated and the capitalists have had to cut back on production. Their attempt to overcome the crisis by credit has reached its limits. The productive forces have outgrown the limits of the capitalist system.
There are figures to illustrate how far credit was used to put off the crisis. A recent report on debt in The Economist stated that, “average total debt (private and public sector combined) in ten mature economies rose from 200% of GDP in 1995 to 300% in 2008. There were even more startling rises in Iceland and Ireland, where debt-to-GDP ratios reached 1,200% and 700% respectively” (26th July 2010).
In relation to consumer credit, The Economist reports that:
“At the end of the Second World War in 1945, consumer credit in America totalled just under $5.7 billion; ten years later it had already grown to nearly $43 billion and the party was just getting started. It reached $100 billion in 1966, $500 billion in 1984 and $1 trillion in 1994, or around $4,000 for every man, woman and child. The peak, so far, was almost $2.6 trillion in July 2008. Household debt approached 100% of GDP in 2007, a level seen only once before, rather ominously in 1929. America was not alone in embarking on a debt spree. In Britain, household debt rose from 105% of disposable income in 2000 to 160% in 2008” (ibid).
This huge expansion of credit was made possible by banks and governments (which is where Brown could be held to be culpable, with lax regulation, though the problem goes back much further, over several administrations) encouraging people to take out cheap loans, mortgages, and credit cards; hence the growth of “sub-prime mortgages”. However, this debt-fuelled party could not last forever. In the United States in 2006, people started to default on their loans. Consumer demand dropped. Producers could no longer find any consumers to sell their commodities to, and capitalism was faced with a classic crisis of over-production.
I have resisted the temptation to precis this analysis because again it shows that, in terms of the credit crunch itself, what Broon claimed was largely true, that it was a global problem and not simply something home-grown coming home to roost in our own back yard. Broon may have done some dumb things (eg selling off the gold reserves) but 2008 wasn’t one of them.
People speak about the current situation as if the ideas behind it were somehow new. The idea of governments running a deficit and accumulating sovereign debt is not unique to the current period. Even at its lowest point in the last 30 years, the UK debt was 26% of GDP, and before the current crisis, in September 2007, the UK debt stood at 36% of GDP. The government regularly borrows money to make up the deficit between public spending and money received from various sources of tax. In fact, the British government has only recorded a budget surplus in six of the last 36 years, generally overspending by between 2% and 5% of GDP.
Governments raise money for their deficit by auctioning government bonds, or “gilts.” The government pays interest on these bonds every six months, up to the “maturity date,” at which time the full value must be paid back. The majority of British debt bonds have a maturity of 15 years, and currently the government pays £42bn per year in interest payments, making interest payments the fourth biggest source of public spending after benefits and pensions, health, and education.
Greece was charged 40% interest on its gilts as the lenders (i.e. speculators) began to get worried about the possibility of sovereign default, as happened in Iceland in late 2008. Demands were made for public spending to be dramatically cut, and the EU and IMF came in, to outline the austerity measures that were to be imposed. Similar demands are being made of Britain. The Con-Dem coalition is now embarking on a merciless austerity package to slash public spending, pre-empting what it thinks the IMF wants to hear - a very different solution to public debt: draconian cuts. The programme of austerity in Britain (following on from Greece and Ireland) is seen by some as a test-bed, internationally. If the coalition can carry out such brutal attacks on the British working class, then governments elsewhere will have no qualms about carrying out equally severe cuts on theirs.
However: the UK Debt Management Office breaks the ownership of UK debt down as follows:
39.8% - Insurance companies and pension funds
35.1% - Overseas investors
17.8% - Other financial institutions
2.9% - Households
2.9% - Banks
1.5% - Others
From this, it is obvious that the overwhelming majority of the public debt in Britain is owned by financial speculators (insurance companies, overseas investors, and “other financial institutions”, e.g. hedge funds, etc.) who are looking to make a profit out of Britain’s debt crisis – a crisis that was created by bailing out the very same bankers and speculators in the first place – another reason why they should shoulder more of the burden.
Keynesian economists, such as Paul Krugman, rightly warn that the effect of such deep cuts will be to reduce demand and usher in a “double-dip” recession. They are correct; the cuts will exacerbate excess capacity and over-production. However, simply increasing government expenditure is also not viable. Continuing government stimulus to maintain the economy would just inflate public debt, driving up interest rates on the debt and would end up pushing national economies further towards default. That is why I am calling for a completely new sector of the economy, the social enterprise section, to sit in between the private and the public sector, to employ people so that they earn money on which they pay tax, increasing the tax take, and some of which they spend, stimulating the economy, and producing a public good for all of us – in my example, increasing the social housing stock, as opposed to paying the brickies, sparkies and joiners to stay at home on the dole.
The Keynesians also point out (again correctly) that governments have had much larger debts in the past. This is true; the UK’s public debt was above 100% of GDP for most of the inter-war period, and peaked at over 250% after WWII. However, the reduction of the national debt after the Second World War was achieved on the basis of economic growth, which in turn was possible owing to the destruction of capital during the war and growing world trade, and investment in the profitable new technologies that had developed as a result of wartime research and development. In some ways we have similar conditions today with the fight against climate change. I think we should be treating that as a “war” and developing new British technologies which we can lead the world in, and export to every corner of the globe (not that a globe has corners, before anyone who has got this far without the mogadon kicking in points this out).
Many within the trade unions and the Labour Party, support Keynesian “alternatives” to the programme of Coalition austerity. They argue that the working class did not cause the crisis, therefore they should not pay for it. This is what I have said all along. They argue however that the £149bn deficit can be plugged by taxing the rich and cutting spending elsewhere.
• £25bn is lost through tax avoidance, in which the rich find legal loopholes in order to avoid taxes.
• £70bn is lost through tax evasion, where the rich just don’t declare certain income.
• Replacing Trident (nuclear missile submarines) will cost between £15bn-20bn.
• The UK budget for defence spending is currently £37bn per year.
Their proposals, therefore, are to eliminate tax evasion and avoidance, scrap Trident, and reduce “defence” spending. Adding up the money from these measures results in a potential £152bn that could be raised. Personally, I do not agree with the latter two premises, but -along with a higher rate of income tax for those on high incomes, a tax on financial transactions (also known as the “Tobin tax” or “Robin Hood tax”) and greater corporation tax, it seems that we should have no problem in finding ways to plug at least £95bn of the deficit.
The government has a choice – it can either cut spending, and/or raise taxes, and, for ideological reasons, Cameron has decided that it shall be by cutting, and by targeting those cuts largely on those least able to bear them, that the deficit shall be reduced. I would be more convinced that it wasn’t purely evil ideological spite if they had announced some plans for restoring levels of public spending once the deficit has been tackled, but they haven’t!
So: as I said elsewhere, SOMEBODY has got to challenge the spurious “mandate” of this shower, and I am not happy with the concept of them going unchallenged and people dying as a result. Normally, one would look to the Labour Party for this, but they are feeble, useless, supine, and leaderless. I leave the last word, therefore, to my hon. friends, the Marxists.
A mass movement must not only challenge the Con-Dem government but must challenge the system itself. Open the books! Let ordinary people see how much of their money is wasted on outsourcing services to private companies and on fees for management consultants! Let workers see how much profit the giant monopolies make! Let us see how many millions are spent on bankers’ bonuses! If the books are opened, then we can really see the rottenness of capitalism. Drastic times call for drastic solutions.
Under the current conditions, the demand should be for the trade unions to call for a public sector strike, followed by a 24-hour general strike. After the long period of low activity in the class struggle in Britain, a day-long general strike would act as a demonstration of strength and could help to give the working class a sense of their power, thus raising consciousness.
Wednesday, 17 November 2010
Foggy Compo, Clegg.
There has been a predictable outcry by the likes of the Daily Mail and the Conrad Blackshirts about the proposal to settle claims for compensation out of court with the victims of Guantanamo Bay.
What these people fail to grasp is that if someone is wrongly imprisoned, probably illegally, and tortured to boot, and our government is responsible, then it's only right that the injustice should be compensated. It's what makes us the good guys. Still. just.
If we were really interested in being the good guys of course, instead of sinking to the same level as Al Qaida in the first place, seizing people, sandbagging them, holding them against their will and applying mental and physical pain, we wouldn't have done it, but at that time we were wedged so far up George Bush's chuff we couldn't see daylight.
I wonder if there would be as much fuss if the people illegally detained and tortured were called "George", "Henry" and "Cyril" instead of Mohammed. I suspect not. Brown people getting compensation of any kind, even compensation to which they are legally entitled and which will presumably save the taxpayer money if it is an out-of-court settlement, always gets the bigots frothing.
People who argue against this proposal often link the issue of torturing detainees with the 7/7 bombings. Errr. Am I missing something here? What does 9/11 and 7/7 have to do with Guantanamo Bay, except that we colluded with the US in a like for like response that dragged us down to the same level as the bombers?
Are they claiming that in some way 7/7 was caused by Guantanamo detainees? I thought it was three guys from Leeds and one from Reading. I am not following the process by which they are linking the two. Or are they claiming that, if only someone had turned up the current a bit on someone's ghoulies out in Guantanamo, this would somehow have magically prevented 7/7 taking place?
Sadly, it is excrescences like Guantanamo that CAUSE radical idiots to get more and more radicalised, until they start strapping bombs to themselves, and by following George Bush down the primrose path to dalliance, we played right into their hands. We're lucky that we didn't have more than one 7/7. We may well yet have further cause to regret it.
Orwell, of course, in between wishing he could fly, way up in the sky, once famously said that all that keeps us free is that rough men stand ready in the night to do harm, and this is the crux of the question. There ARE people out to destroy our way of life. I would contend, however, that helping George Bush in his ill-starred "War on Terror", with things such as Guantanamo, has ADDED to their numbers, considerably, rather than deterred them.
Also, I question the worth of any of the intelligence gathered by means of torture. If you turn the current up far enough, your victim will tell you whatever you want to hear. It would be instructive to know really how many threats have been neutralised since 2001 by this method of intelligence alone.
I suspect the answer would be very few, because the agencies concerned probably rely on a patchwork of intelligence from different sources, of which torture is only one, which again leads me to question its worth, compared to the problems it causes us by giving radical idiots something to latch onto and radicalise other idiots.
The intelligence agencies are unlikely to tell us the truth, however, because their interest is in making it seem as if there are hundreds of plots every day, which are only averted by shipping people off to CIA deniable "black" prisons. That's how they keep us cowed, and get us to accept the loss of more and more of our own civil liberties to anti-terror legislation.
By the way, just because I am opposed to us lowering ourselves to the depths of torture, doesn't mean I am automatically against the use of lethal force against (for instance) an invading force in a declared, legal war. If Al Qaida were massing at Dunkerque in their invasion barges, I would be reporting for duty on the White Cliffs of Dover, but the War on Terror is a different matter: an undeclared dirty war on a concept.
People also argue that we are now at war against the whole Third World, and this requires desperate measures.
I think that "the third world" as a whole is much more occupied with scrabbling for food in the dust and trying to prevent their children dying of malaria every 40 seconds than mounting a sustained attack on the west. What you are talking about is one convoluted strain of Islam, espoused by a radical bunch of beardyweirdies originally in Saudi Arabia, latterly living in caves in Tora Bora, that objected to the US bases in their Holy Land, and to US policy in Israel. I agree, though, that since 2001, the west in general and the US in particular, seem hell-bent on increasing the number of people who hate us as quickly as possible
And anyone who thinks torture (or collusion with torture) isn't still going on under a ConLibdimwit government is living in cloud cuckoo land.
What these people fail to grasp is that if someone is wrongly imprisoned, probably illegally, and tortured to boot, and our government is responsible, then it's only right that the injustice should be compensated. It's what makes us the good guys. Still. just.
If we were really interested in being the good guys of course, instead of sinking to the same level as Al Qaida in the first place, seizing people, sandbagging them, holding them against their will and applying mental and physical pain, we wouldn't have done it, but at that time we were wedged so far up George Bush's chuff we couldn't see daylight.
I wonder if there would be as much fuss if the people illegally detained and tortured were called "George", "Henry" and "Cyril" instead of Mohammed. I suspect not. Brown people getting compensation of any kind, even compensation to which they are legally entitled and which will presumably save the taxpayer money if it is an out-of-court settlement, always gets the bigots frothing.
People who argue against this proposal often link the issue of torturing detainees with the 7/7 bombings. Errr. Am I missing something here? What does 9/11 and 7/7 have to do with Guantanamo Bay, except that we colluded with the US in a like for like response that dragged us down to the same level as the bombers?
Are they claiming that in some way 7/7 was caused by Guantanamo detainees? I thought it was three guys from Leeds and one from Reading. I am not following the process by which they are linking the two. Or are they claiming that, if only someone had turned up the current a bit on someone's ghoulies out in Guantanamo, this would somehow have magically prevented 7/7 taking place?
Sadly, it is excrescences like Guantanamo that CAUSE radical idiots to get more and more radicalised, until they start strapping bombs to themselves, and by following George Bush down the primrose path to dalliance, we played right into their hands. We're lucky that we didn't have more than one 7/7. We may well yet have further cause to regret it.
Orwell, of course, in between wishing he could fly, way up in the sky, once famously said that all that keeps us free is that rough men stand ready in the night to do harm, and this is the crux of the question. There ARE people out to destroy our way of life. I would contend, however, that helping George Bush in his ill-starred "War on Terror", with things such as Guantanamo, has ADDED to their numbers, considerably, rather than deterred them.
Also, I question the worth of any of the intelligence gathered by means of torture. If you turn the current up far enough, your victim will tell you whatever you want to hear. It would be instructive to know really how many threats have been neutralised since 2001 by this method of intelligence alone.
I suspect the answer would be very few, because the agencies concerned probably rely on a patchwork of intelligence from different sources, of which torture is only one, which again leads me to question its worth, compared to the problems it causes us by giving radical idiots something to latch onto and radicalise other idiots.
The intelligence agencies are unlikely to tell us the truth, however, because their interest is in making it seem as if there are hundreds of plots every day, which are only averted by shipping people off to CIA deniable "black" prisons. That's how they keep us cowed, and get us to accept the loss of more and more of our own civil liberties to anti-terror legislation.
By the way, just because I am opposed to us lowering ourselves to the depths of torture, doesn't mean I am automatically against the use of lethal force against (for instance) an invading force in a declared, legal war. If Al Qaida were massing at Dunkerque in their invasion barges, I would be reporting for duty on the White Cliffs of Dover, but the War on Terror is a different matter: an undeclared dirty war on a concept.
People also argue that we are now at war against the whole Third World, and this requires desperate measures.
I think that "the third world" as a whole is much more occupied with scrabbling for food in the dust and trying to prevent their children dying of malaria every 40 seconds than mounting a sustained attack on the west. What you are talking about is one convoluted strain of Islam, espoused by a radical bunch of beardyweirdies originally in Saudi Arabia, latterly living in caves in Tora Bora, that objected to the US bases in their Holy Land, and to US policy in Israel. I agree, though, that since 2001, the west in general and the US in particular, seem hell-bent on increasing the number of people who hate us as quickly as possible
And anyone who thinks torture (or collusion with torture) isn't still going on under a ConLibdimwit government is living in cloud cuckoo land.
Tuesday, 16 November 2010
The Road To Weakened Fear
While I have been stuck in hospital over the summer, I have been struck by a new phenomenon, deliberately engineered by the government, to keep us all cowed and apprehensive. Austerity anxiety.
I feel many people are cowed and anxious over what the future will bring, because the government has been deliberately pumping up the volume over the cuts, precisely in order to keep people in a subdued mood and stop them asking awkward questions like "why should poor people pay for the mistakes of rich people?”
Their other trick is to practice "doublespeak" by insisting that "we are all in this together" while simultaneously spreading scare stories about so--called "benefit scroungers" to divide and rule the opposition and promote disharmony in society.
It is a fundamentally dishonest and evil policy, and it is quite deliberate, as you would expect from a fundamentally dishonest and evil government. I would echo Bevan's comment about "lower than vermin", pace Harriet Harman, but I don't want to insult the vermin.
I see that the Daily Mail is reporting Rowan Williams' attack on this idea as "Archbishop attacks proposals to make the workshy pick litter" or some such headline.
The workshy? Excuse me?? The WORKSHY?????
Who the HELL are Daily Mail journalists, with their louche lifestyle, their excesses of alcohol and drugs, their credit card bills, which they happily write about in their columns, who the HELL gave these LEECHES the right to call the long term unemployed the "workshy".
I'd like to see them do a ten hour shift in a call centre for nothing, as an "interview" for a job, only to be told the week after that "you haven't been selected for the next round", as scandalously happened recently to my friend Phil, unemployed now for getting on two years and desperate for anything in a South Yorkshire economy that is collapsing round everyones' ears because of CleggTory cuts. It’s a great way to get workers for free without any tiresome H&S, tax, PAYE or wages. I wouldn't be surprised if the bastards aren't holding "interviews" every day!
How DARE the Daily Mail? Whilever Phil is reduced to digging up his garden and growing his own winter veg to survive on the dole, there should be public burnings of the Daily Mail outside every labour exchange.
Here's my question to anyone who thinks the long term unemployed are "workshy" :-
*W H E R E * A R E * T H E * J O B S ?
Where are the jobs in
Rochdale (84% unemployment)
Middlesbrough (67% unemployment)
Sparkbrook, Birmingham (63% unemployment)
Birkenhead (62% unemployment)
Where are the jobs in Grimethorpe? Where are the jobs in Rusty Lane, West Bromwich?
I have recently been re-reading The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell, and SOS: Talks on Unemployment by S. P. B. Mais, two books which in their own way bookend the unemployment crisis of the 1930s, appearing in 1937 and 1933 respectively. One of the most telling passages is where Orwell discusses the unemployment figures. It is worth quoting at length:
When you see the unemployment figures quoted at two millions, it is fatally easy to take this as meaning that two million people are out of work and the rest of the population is comparatively comfortable. I admit that till recently I was in the habit of doing so myself. I used to calculate that if you put the registered unemployed at round about two millions and threw in the destitute and those who for one reason and another were not registered, you might take the number of underfed people in England (for everyone on the dole or thereabouts is underfed) as being, at the very most, five millions.
This is an enormous under-estimate, because, in the first place, the only people shown on unemployment figures are those actually drawing the dole — that is, in general, heads of families. An unemployed man's dependants do not figure on the list unless they too are drawing a separate allowance. A Labour Exchange officer told me that to get at the real number of people living on (not drawing) the dole, you have got to multiply the official figures by something over three. This alone brings the number of unemployed to round about six millions. But in addition there are great numbers of people who are in work but who, from a financial point of view, might equally well be unemployed, because they are not drawing anything that can be described as a living wage. Allow for these and their dependants, throw in as before the old-age pensioners, the destitute, and other nondescripts, and you get an underfed population of well over ten millions.
Some things have changed since 1937, such as the ratio of family heads to dependents, but a similar calculation could still be done to show that the “real” consequences of unemployment are far higher than shown by the official figures.
"Underfed" might nowadays be substituted with “badly fed” though Orwell also drew attention to how easy it was, even in 1937, to buy cheap, bad food to cheer yourself up while unemployed. In that respect, Phil is doing himself a favour by growing his own veg rather than buying Micro-Chips from Iceland.
And though things have may changed in some respects since it was written, what is really chilling about going back to The Road to Wigan Pier after a period of time, as I have done, is how much of it is startlingly prescient of 2010. To look for the philosophical antecedents of David Cameron, George Osborne, and Nicholas Clegg, you have to go back not only to Thatcher, the obvious model for driving a chariot with knives on the wheels through the ranks of public service, but also to the 1930s.
I shouldn’t be at all surprised, when you add the 600,000 redundancies which may result from the cuts to whatever the current announced “public” unemployment figure is, to see hunger marches again. In fact, before they become necessary, I think we ought to re-enact them, to remind this government, which has no legitimacy, and which was cobbled together over a weekend on the back of some spurious rumour about Greece and the Euro and the markets which everyone has now conveniently forgotten, of the consequences of its actions.
Since unemployment is likely to assume huge proportions in the lives of many of us over the next year or so, as the cuts begin to bite, it is worth devoting some time to an attempt at analysing some of the common causes and solutions, if any, and also what resonances there are between today’s causes and remedies and those of the 1930s.
Unemployment and the Impact of Mechanisation
This is chiefly only felt on manufacturing industry. There are plenty of “jobs” needing doing that are not affected by increased mechanisation, and never will be. What we are really arguing about here is the nature of work itself, and the value of different types of work. Of course, it is futile trying to rank different types of work by value. One might as well try and rank potatoes and apricots. But it doesn’t stop the boors, bores and bigots who bang on about “non-jobs” and “real jobs”, as if digging a hole in the road is somehow to be ranked higher than, say, cleaning a ward in a hospital, when in fact they are just different.
Globalisation, localism, and niche marketing
The question of how far it is reasonable to expect someone to travel a) in pursuit of a job and b) to commute to work once they have got a job, is critical to the argument of “on your bike” as a means of solving unemployment. Much as the Tories and their Liberal stooges would like to see the sort of “flexible” jobs market I described earlier, where people do a little bit here, a little bit there, and travel for hours in between, there are limits of practicality. There are some jobs where catching a bus for two hours, doing and eight hour day, and then catching a bus home for two more hours, is going to be a borderline decision. True, it is (for some strange reason) always easier to get a job when you have already got a job, than to get one when you are unemployed, but that in itself is not a reason for taking a borderline job.
There is also the issue of quality of life. Otherwise, if quality of life did not matter, it would be easy for an unemployed man to go and get a job at the other end of the country, live in a hostel, and just send money home. But what sort of a life is that, when he is reduced purely to a unit of economic production and never sees his family from one month end to the next.
Globalisation merely extends this principle. If the work is in China, then get on your rickshaw, and go and get a job in China, and Fedex the money home to Bolton every week, taking the “on your bike” scenario to its nth degree. Where is the quality of life in that? I would love to see some of these fat, sleek, Tory and Liberal MPs whose life is organised for them to the last minute, put up with such disruption and inconvenience! What – no way of getting back to the constituency second home at the weekends? Why, that would never do!
The other side of the globalisation coin, of course, is that there are more than enough Chinese people in China wanting jobs already, all of whom are happy to work (probably) for far less than the incomer would require.
And that is reflected in the end cost of their products, as well. So our poor old unemployed British worker is hammered from two directions. Maybe the only job he can get involves massive sacrifices of quality of life in return for not-massive amounts of money, and moving far away from home and all that it entails, all his ties, friends, neighbours, and familiar haunts. And in the end, if he does go down the sacrificial route, he may find that he is only earning slightly more than he would have got on benefits anyway. (The Tory answer to that dichotomy is of course to seek to cut the benefit, rather than raise the wages!) He is unlikely to get a job in “mainstream” manufacturing now, because so many of our household items, goods and chattels are manufactured much more cheaply in China, or somewhere similar.
So what can we do to overcome these particularly thorny issues of globalisation and unemployment? Under the old Domestic System of Industry, of course, in England before the Industrial Revolution, most people found work in the immediate locality. The weavers, in my own West Riding of Yorkshire, found their work waiting for them downstairs! It would be good in many ways to get back to a situation where goods were made in the locality where they were needed. It would also be more sustainable. It would save us having to ship goods half way round the world in container ships and airliners. So, one solution would be if we all made what we needed, but this is hardly practicable in that it doesn’t allow for the unemployed worker to make a second bowl and sell it. Nor does it compete with the fact that it is cheaper, quicker, and more efficient, assuming you have the money, to just go and buy a plastic bowl made in China, in the local hardware shop, than to carve yourself one out of a large lump of teak, rosewood or mahogany, however satisfying the latter might be as a craft exercise.
Clearly, what is needed is for people to be able to manufacture something which is desired, useful, economic to produce in these Islands with our western overheads, and unobtainable elsewhere. This is where niche marketing, and the role of the internet, can come in. And maybe the products could be something to combat climate change?
This solution could perhaps be used to solve, or partially solve, another situation which S. P. B. Mais was criticised for, another by-product of unemployment, which is that if the unemployed take up manufacturing something at a lower rate than the existing manufacturer, or providing a service, for that matter, at a lower rate, they are undercutting commercial enterprises and potentially spreading unemployment there as well. The trick again is to manufacture something novel – more so now than in the 1930s, because now, the unemployed are unlikely to be able to undercut the wholesale prices of Chinese manufacturers anyway, and the competition is no longer between the unemployed miners’ workshop making cut price toys for the kiddies and the local high street toy shop, but rather between the miners and a factory in Shanghai. A unique product, however, sets its own price.
At he end of the day, however, perhaps we shouldn’t be over-concerned about protecting the interests of industry from the efforts of the unemployed to become entrepreneurs. We should remember what Michael Foot said, on the campaign trail in 1983.
We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress. No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer 'To hell with them.' The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do
Women in the Workplace
This was a big issue in the 1930’s. S. P. B. Mais devotes a whole programme to it in the scripts of his talks. Even though the effect of WWI had been to emancipate women in the workplace, there were still some antedeluvian voices in 1933 arguing that women should stay home and raise children (not that there is anything wrong per se with mothers who choose to do this). In fact, there are still some antedeluvian voices who say this today, but I don’t think that the genie of Mrs Pankhurst is ever going to go back in the bottle.
Today, though, what may be called the “women” argument about unemployment has been largely replaced by the “immigrant” argument. This is often simplistically represented as “there are three million unemployed and there are three million “guest” workers here (or whatever the figure currently is) – immigrants from the EU and elsewhere – send them all home, and we could have full employment!” This ignores two things: - one, that whilever we are signed up to the EU and its political projects, we have absolutely no control over our own borders. Secondly, that the jobs thus vacated would need to be in the same areas where there are native British citizens unemployed, and that the native workforce would have the equivalent portable skills to be able to step in and fill their shoes.
Neither of these is evident, or automatically true, but again, this doesn’t stop those who, from either ignorance or design, seek to conflate migrant workers, asylum seekers, and non-white British citizens, and who propagate the view that unemployment is somehow exclusively a racial issue. There is currently common ground between race and unemployment, in that certain ethnic groups are disproportionately more highly represented in the unenplyment figures: young black males for instance. But this is due to social and economic factors. They live in areas of high social and educational deprivation, lacking opportunity, many of which are the result of Margaret Thatcher’s policies in the 1980’s, and they suffer also the peer pressure of the American “gangsta rap” culture, which makes it “uncool” to have a “job” that doesn’t involve drugs, fast cars, or pimping. They are not unemployed inherently because they are black.
I have long argued that the only immigration policy which makes sense is to look at the range of skills and talents we need here in the UK, particularly those we are short of, and to adjust our own UK immigration policy accordingly. So much so that, as far as I am concerned, if asylum seekers have the skills we need, it would be far more sensible to let them work and pay tax and make a contribution to the UK while they wait for their cases to be decided, rather than spend public money locking them up, policing them, and deporting them. If they renege on the deal, of course, that’s it – they go back, without the option. Anyway, I digress. One important point to stress, though, is that when I say “British Jobs for British Workers”, I mean “British Workers, whatever the colour of their skin”, whereas of course the likes of the BNP mean “British Jobs for White British Workers”.
Waged versus Unwaged
The recent Tory proposal to compel the long-term unemployed to pick litter in return for their benefits, or lose the benefits, once again provides another correspondence between the modern situation and S. P. B. Mais’s 1933 SOS Talks on Unemployment. This is basically the issue of whether or not the unemployed should have to work for their benefits, and off the back of that, whether the unemployed should do things voluntarily in return for training and experience, either on a compulsory or a voluntary basis. Back in 1933, the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement opposed the many philantrhopic and well-meaning schemes which SPB documents (toy making, furniture making, allotments) on the grounds that these voluntary clubs were merely a sop to the idea of keeping the unemployed occupied, at any cost. They also opposed the larger schemes, where unemployed men did heavy work such as marsh draining or tree felling, in return for a free meal or a new pair of boots.
Even though, in many cases, the 1930s schemes were not compulsory, and were mainly paternalistically aimed at improving the skills and employability of the attenders. George Orwell, in The Road to Wigan Pier, also documents the opposition of the NUWM to these schemes, on similar grounds.
Although the NUWM ceased to exist in 1946, if it objected to the 1930s clubs run by well-meaning colonels and local busybodies, it would be apopleptic about the modern-day proposal by the Tories. Indeed, it is difficult to defend it in any rational way, but then it isn’t a rational policy. A rational policy would be that if you have to do the work, in order to receive the corresponding remuneration, it should be paid at the legal, minimum wage. Plus, of course, those officious prodnoses at the Labour Exchange whose job it is to harrass the unemployed by ensuring that they have been seeking work, shouuld be forced to acknowledge that, lacking gift of bilocation, the unemployed can’t be picking litter and actively seeking employment at one and the same time.
One area of S. P. B. Mais’s work, however, which perhaps does bear reconsideration for the 2010 unemployment crisis, is that of allotments. There is a great deal of wasted land in the UK, which could be turned over to the cultivation of healthy, organic vegetables and fruit. All that is lacking is the organisation and the political will. If someone on unemployment benefits wants an allotment, they could be given one in some sort of bargain over their arrangements which would allow them the leeway to devote some time to growing their own and their family’s food while still seeking work. It would, today, as in the 1930s, get people out into the open air, teach them new skills, and save them money on food.
Of course, this Tory proposal isn’t serious – at least I hope it isn’t. The answer to long term unemployment in areas of chronic economic crisis and disadvantage (again, much of which was caused by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s) is not picking up litter. Or at least, not on those terms. If the government wants to create proper social enterprise companies to pay people a living wage to do socially useful work that benefits the whole community, that is, of course, a different matter. That is one of the fundamental tenets behind Rooftree. Indeed, social enterprise is one major way in which the government could start to get us out of this mess, by creating a whole new sector in the economy. But, in reality, I view this proposalas nothing more than another strand in the government’s “divide and rule” policy of simultaneously insisting that “we are all in this together” while sowing discord and disharmony and rumour, with deliberate but baseless stories of “benefit scroungers”, straight out of the “man in the pub” manual of journalism, and lapped up and reprinted almost verbatim, of course, by the likes of the Daily Mail.
On Your Bike – or way off the Bus Route?
The litter picking proposal is not the only wacky Tory solution to unemployment being bruited abroad at the moment. Tory bastard Iain Duncan Irritable-Bowel Smith seems to think that full employment is only a bus-ride away. When he was in charge of the whole shambles, a few years ago, he styled himself “The Quiet Man” and, to be fair to him, he has a lot to be quiet about. I sometimes think the Tories won’t be happy until the entire jobseeking workforce is lined up by the side of the road, with their possessions on their back, their children and their livestock, ready to ride off into the sunset on the first bus that comes along, in the hope of a few hours; fruit picking on the Gower Peninsula, then maybe over to Kent for some hopping, up to Skelmersdale for some PCB assembly, and so on. The fact that this would all be piece work, un-unionised, with minimal health and safety, and gangmaster wages, is not lost on me, either. It would be the Tory bosses’ vision of hog-heaven, freed from the schackles (as they see them) of the only progressive achivements of Blair and Brown’s era.
Again, like the litter-picking idea, I hope this is just specious nonsense and kite-flying to appeal to Middle-England bigots, but I suspect, in this case, that they may actually be serious. I think old “Irritable Bowel” really means it. So, let’s take him at his word, just assuming for the moment that this “Son of Tebbit” policy has some practical merit. Let us assume that (if you live in a rural area) there even is a bus to take you where you want to go. Where are the jobs? We come back again and again to this central mantra. Where are the jobs? Where are they?
Osborne is going to add something like 600,000 people to the dole queue as his planned cuts bite and take hold: how is the removal of so many previously economically active people from the daily round of commerce, the weekly supermarket shop, the knock on effect of their spending power – how is that going to stimulate the economy? How is it going to create any more jobs? In the same way as Orwell quite rightly noted the “hidden” numbers of unemployed behind the official figures, so there are hidden figures of “employed” whose jobs depend on other people coming into their shops and spending money.
It is all too easy, as I sit here writing these words, safe in my warm bed (yes, I am sitting writing this in bed!) listening to the wild winds of winter howling and wailing outside, and hearing the rain flung like handfuls of gravel at the window – it is all too easy for me to deride and poke fun at these stupid Tory proposals. In fact, it is all too easy to deride and poke fun at them whether you are in bed or not!
In the 1930s, S. P. B. Mais reported on rough sleepers in the iron working areas sleeping out on the slapgheaps at night, for warmth, after the furnaces had been emptied. But, out there, in the night, even now, are people who are the victims of these Tory policies. They are bedded down in doorways or under bridges, desperately trying to keep warm so that they will see another dawn. Let us be perfectly clear about this, make no mistake, as a result of these laughable yet evil policies, targeting the poor and vulnerable while safeguarding the rich, powerful and influential, people will be driven to despair, to anxiety, to homelessness, and people will die. This winter, out in the cold, in once-Great Britain, in the year of our Lord two thousand and ten, people will die, as a result of Tory cuts, propped up by the Liberal Dimwits. And I, for one, would like to hear the government justify to us how they manage to sleep at night, when they know this is the case, or indeed, why they should be allowed to, until something is done about it.
In case we are in any doubt about unemployment, these chilling words are from a letter sent to S. P. B. Mais after his book was published in 1933. Seventy-seven years later, it goes a long way to explain those “houses where the curtains stay closed all day” which George Osborne was keen to tell us about in his first broadcast as Chancellor [the one where he claimed we were all in it together.]
Glad of a rest, the unemployed man does not yet begin the frantic hunt for a job – a week’s rest will do me good, he thinks, and after that, I will have a look around. I shall soon get fixed up somewhere. But even while he thinks this, the chill of doubt strokes at his heart. A week or so later, he is saying to himself that he never dreamed times were so bad. The fruitless, despairing search for work which simply cannot be found has begun … See him now that some months have passed, with hope gone. He lies in bed longer each morning, keeps to the house more, is less tidy in his appearance, though unaware of the change, the chin is sunk lower, the face is half ashamed, the glance has become wavering and irresolute. He is losing his morale … like some wounded animal, creeping to a hole to die.
This is a very accurate assessment of the life of what Osborne calls “benefit scroungers”. I know which rings truer for me. I doubt that even the most ardent long-term adherents of benefits celebrate the lifestyle. All you can possibly hope for is to reach an accommodation with each grim grey day of disappointment and low horizons that comes around.
We cannot allow the government to go on sabotaging the economy. The only remedy for this parlous state of affairs, to stop these fools in their tracks before they inflict such damage on the economy that it takes a generation to recover, is a General Strike against the cuts, starting now. Yes, in fact, let us have a GENERAL STRIKE to protest against the cuts. And if a few stray cobbles end up being thrown through the windows of 10 Downing Street, so much the better! You have nothing to lose but your P45s!
I feel many people are cowed and anxious over what the future will bring, because the government has been deliberately pumping up the volume over the cuts, precisely in order to keep people in a subdued mood and stop them asking awkward questions like "why should poor people pay for the mistakes of rich people?”
Their other trick is to practice "doublespeak" by insisting that "we are all in this together" while simultaneously spreading scare stories about so--called "benefit scroungers" to divide and rule the opposition and promote disharmony in society.
It is a fundamentally dishonest and evil policy, and it is quite deliberate, as you would expect from a fundamentally dishonest and evil government. I would echo Bevan's comment about "lower than vermin", pace Harriet Harman, but I don't want to insult the vermin.
I see that the Daily Mail is reporting Rowan Williams' attack on this idea as "Archbishop attacks proposals to make the workshy pick litter" or some such headline.
The workshy? Excuse me?? The WORKSHY?????
Who the HELL are Daily Mail journalists, with their louche lifestyle, their excesses of alcohol and drugs, their credit card bills, which they happily write about in their columns, who the HELL gave these LEECHES the right to call the long term unemployed the "workshy".
I'd like to see them do a ten hour shift in a call centre for nothing, as an "interview" for a job, only to be told the week after that "you haven't been selected for the next round", as scandalously happened recently to my friend Phil, unemployed now for getting on two years and desperate for anything in a South Yorkshire economy that is collapsing round everyones' ears because of CleggTory cuts. It’s a great way to get workers for free without any tiresome H&S, tax, PAYE or wages. I wouldn't be surprised if the bastards aren't holding "interviews" every day!
How DARE the Daily Mail? Whilever Phil is reduced to digging up his garden and growing his own winter veg to survive on the dole, there should be public burnings of the Daily Mail outside every labour exchange.
Here's my question to anyone who thinks the long term unemployed are "workshy" :-
*W H E R E * A R E * T H E * J O B S ?
Where are the jobs in
Rochdale (84% unemployment)
Middlesbrough (67% unemployment)
Sparkbrook, Birmingham (63% unemployment)
Birkenhead (62% unemployment)
Where are the jobs in Grimethorpe? Where are the jobs in Rusty Lane, West Bromwich?
I have recently been re-reading The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell, and SOS: Talks on Unemployment by S. P. B. Mais, two books which in their own way bookend the unemployment crisis of the 1930s, appearing in 1937 and 1933 respectively. One of the most telling passages is where Orwell discusses the unemployment figures. It is worth quoting at length:
When you see the unemployment figures quoted at two millions, it is fatally easy to take this as meaning that two million people are out of work and the rest of the population is comparatively comfortable. I admit that till recently I was in the habit of doing so myself. I used to calculate that if you put the registered unemployed at round about two millions and threw in the destitute and those who for one reason and another were not registered, you might take the number of underfed people in England (for everyone on the dole or thereabouts is underfed) as being, at the very most, five millions.
This is an enormous under-estimate, because, in the first place, the only people shown on unemployment figures are those actually drawing the dole — that is, in general, heads of families. An unemployed man's dependants do not figure on the list unless they too are drawing a separate allowance. A Labour Exchange officer told me that to get at the real number of people living on (not drawing) the dole, you have got to multiply the official figures by something over three. This alone brings the number of unemployed to round about six millions. But in addition there are great numbers of people who are in work but who, from a financial point of view, might equally well be unemployed, because they are not drawing anything that can be described as a living wage. Allow for these and their dependants, throw in as before the old-age pensioners, the destitute, and other nondescripts, and you get an underfed population of well over ten millions.
Some things have changed since 1937, such as the ratio of family heads to dependents, but a similar calculation could still be done to show that the “real” consequences of unemployment are far higher than shown by the official figures.
"Underfed" might nowadays be substituted with “badly fed” though Orwell also drew attention to how easy it was, even in 1937, to buy cheap, bad food to cheer yourself up while unemployed. In that respect, Phil is doing himself a favour by growing his own veg rather than buying Micro-Chips from Iceland.
And though things have may changed in some respects since it was written, what is really chilling about going back to The Road to Wigan Pier after a period of time, as I have done, is how much of it is startlingly prescient of 2010. To look for the philosophical antecedents of David Cameron, George Osborne, and Nicholas Clegg, you have to go back not only to Thatcher, the obvious model for driving a chariot with knives on the wheels through the ranks of public service, but also to the 1930s.
I shouldn’t be at all surprised, when you add the 600,000 redundancies which may result from the cuts to whatever the current announced “public” unemployment figure is, to see hunger marches again. In fact, before they become necessary, I think we ought to re-enact them, to remind this government, which has no legitimacy, and which was cobbled together over a weekend on the back of some spurious rumour about Greece and the Euro and the markets which everyone has now conveniently forgotten, of the consequences of its actions.
Since unemployment is likely to assume huge proportions in the lives of many of us over the next year or so, as the cuts begin to bite, it is worth devoting some time to an attempt at analysing some of the common causes and solutions, if any, and also what resonances there are between today’s causes and remedies and those of the 1930s.
Unemployment and the Impact of Mechanisation
This is chiefly only felt on manufacturing industry. There are plenty of “jobs” needing doing that are not affected by increased mechanisation, and never will be. What we are really arguing about here is the nature of work itself, and the value of different types of work. Of course, it is futile trying to rank different types of work by value. One might as well try and rank potatoes and apricots. But it doesn’t stop the boors, bores and bigots who bang on about “non-jobs” and “real jobs”, as if digging a hole in the road is somehow to be ranked higher than, say, cleaning a ward in a hospital, when in fact they are just different.
Globalisation, localism, and niche marketing
The question of how far it is reasonable to expect someone to travel a) in pursuit of a job and b) to commute to work once they have got a job, is critical to the argument of “on your bike” as a means of solving unemployment. Much as the Tories and their Liberal stooges would like to see the sort of “flexible” jobs market I described earlier, where people do a little bit here, a little bit there, and travel for hours in between, there are limits of practicality. There are some jobs where catching a bus for two hours, doing and eight hour day, and then catching a bus home for two more hours, is going to be a borderline decision. True, it is (for some strange reason) always easier to get a job when you have already got a job, than to get one when you are unemployed, but that in itself is not a reason for taking a borderline job.
There is also the issue of quality of life. Otherwise, if quality of life did not matter, it would be easy for an unemployed man to go and get a job at the other end of the country, live in a hostel, and just send money home. But what sort of a life is that, when he is reduced purely to a unit of economic production and never sees his family from one month end to the next.
Globalisation merely extends this principle. If the work is in China, then get on your rickshaw, and go and get a job in China, and Fedex the money home to Bolton every week, taking the “on your bike” scenario to its nth degree. Where is the quality of life in that? I would love to see some of these fat, sleek, Tory and Liberal MPs whose life is organised for them to the last minute, put up with such disruption and inconvenience! What – no way of getting back to the constituency second home at the weekends? Why, that would never do!
The other side of the globalisation coin, of course, is that there are more than enough Chinese people in China wanting jobs already, all of whom are happy to work (probably) for far less than the incomer would require.
And that is reflected in the end cost of their products, as well. So our poor old unemployed British worker is hammered from two directions. Maybe the only job he can get involves massive sacrifices of quality of life in return for not-massive amounts of money, and moving far away from home and all that it entails, all his ties, friends, neighbours, and familiar haunts. And in the end, if he does go down the sacrificial route, he may find that he is only earning slightly more than he would have got on benefits anyway. (The Tory answer to that dichotomy is of course to seek to cut the benefit, rather than raise the wages!) He is unlikely to get a job in “mainstream” manufacturing now, because so many of our household items, goods and chattels are manufactured much more cheaply in China, or somewhere similar.
So what can we do to overcome these particularly thorny issues of globalisation and unemployment? Under the old Domestic System of Industry, of course, in England before the Industrial Revolution, most people found work in the immediate locality. The weavers, in my own West Riding of Yorkshire, found their work waiting for them downstairs! It would be good in many ways to get back to a situation where goods were made in the locality where they were needed. It would also be more sustainable. It would save us having to ship goods half way round the world in container ships and airliners. So, one solution would be if we all made what we needed, but this is hardly practicable in that it doesn’t allow for the unemployed worker to make a second bowl and sell it. Nor does it compete with the fact that it is cheaper, quicker, and more efficient, assuming you have the money, to just go and buy a plastic bowl made in China, in the local hardware shop, than to carve yourself one out of a large lump of teak, rosewood or mahogany, however satisfying the latter might be as a craft exercise.
Clearly, what is needed is for people to be able to manufacture something which is desired, useful, economic to produce in these Islands with our western overheads, and unobtainable elsewhere. This is where niche marketing, and the role of the internet, can come in. And maybe the products could be something to combat climate change?
This solution could perhaps be used to solve, or partially solve, another situation which S. P. B. Mais was criticised for, another by-product of unemployment, which is that if the unemployed take up manufacturing something at a lower rate than the existing manufacturer, or providing a service, for that matter, at a lower rate, they are undercutting commercial enterprises and potentially spreading unemployment there as well. The trick again is to manufacture something novel – more so now than in the 1930s, because now, the unemployed are unlikely to be able to undercut the wholesale prices of Chinese manufacturers anyway, and the competition is no longer between the unemployed miners’ workshop making cut price toys for the kiddies and the local high street toy shop, but rather between the miners and a factory in Shanghai. A unique product, however, sets its own price.
At he end of the day, however, perhaps we shouldn’t be over-concerned about protecting the interests of industry from the efforts of the unemployed to become entrepreneurs. We should remember what Michael Foot said, on the campaign trail in 1983.
We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress. No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer 'To hell with them.' The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do
Women in the Workplace
This was a big issue in the 1930’s. S. P. B. Mais devotes a whole programme to it in the scripts of his talks. Even though the effect of WWI had been to emancipate women in the workplace, there were still some antedeluvian voices in 1933 arguing that women should stay home and raise children (not that there is anything wrong per se with mothers who choose to do this). In fact, there are still some antedeluvian voices who say this today, but I don’t think that the genie of Mrs Pankhurst is ever going to go back in the bottle.
Today, though, what may be called the “women” argument about unemployment has been largely replaced by the “immigrant” argument. This is often simplistically represented as “there are three million unemployed and there are three million “guest” workers here (or whatever the figure currently is) – immigrants from the EU and elsewhere – send them all home, and we could have full employment!” This ignores two things: - one, that whilever we are signed up to the EU and its political projects, we have absolutely no control over our own borders. Secondly, that the jobs thus vacated would need to be in the same areas where there are native British citizens unemployed, and that the native workforce would have the equivalent portable skills to be able to step in and fill their shoes.
Neither of these is evident, or automatically true, but again, this doesn’t stop those who, from either ignorance or design, seek to conflate migrant workers, asylum seekers, and non-white British citizens, and who propagate the view that unemployment is somehow exclusively a racial issue. There is currently common ground between race and unemployment, in that certain ethnic groups are disproportionately more highly represented in the unenplyment figures: young black males for instance. But this is due to social and economic factors. They live in areas of high social and educational deprivation, lacking opportunity, many of which are the result of Margaret Thatcher’s policies in the 1980’s, and they suffer also the peer pressure of the American “gangsta rap” culture, which makes it “uncool” to have a “job” that doesn’t involve drugs, fast cars, or pimping. They are not unemployed inherently because they are black.
I have long argued that the only immigration policy which makes sense is to look at the range of skills and talents we need here in the UK, particularly those we are short of, and to adjust our own UK immigration policy accordingly. So much so that, as far as I am concerned, if asylum seekers have the skills we need, it would be far more sensible to let them work and pay tax and make a contribution to the UK while they wait for their cases to be decided, rather than spend public money locking them up, policing them, and deporting them. If they renege on the deal, of course, that’s it – they go back, without the option. Anyway, I digress. One important point to stress, though, is that when I say “British Jobs for British Workers”, I mean “British Workers, whatever the colour of their skin”, whereas of course the likes of the BNP mean “British Jobs for White British Workers”.
Waged versus Unwaged
The recent Tory proposal to compel the long-term unemployed to pick litter in return for their benefits, or lose the benefits, once again provides another correspondence between the modern situation and S. P. B. Mais’s 1933 SOS Talks on Unemployment. This is basically the issue of whether or not the unemployed should have to work for their benefits, and off the back of that, whether the unemployed should do things voluntarily in return for training and experience, either on a compulsory or a voluntary basis. Back in 1933, the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement opposed the many philantrhopic and well-meaning schemes which SPB documents (toy making, furniture making, allotments) on the grounds that these voluntary clubs were merely a sop to the idea of keeping the unemployed occupied, at any cost. They also opposed the larger schemes, where unemployed men did heavy work such as marsh draining or tree felling, in return for a free meal or a new pair of boots.
Even though, in many cases, the 1930s schemes were not compulsory, and were mainly paternalistically aimed at improving the skills and employability of the attenders. George Orwell, in The Road to Wigan Pier, also documents the opposition of the NUWM to these schemes, on similar grounds.
Although the NUWM ceased to exist in 1946, if it objected to the 1930s clubs run by well-meaning colonels and local busybodies, it would be apopleptic about the modern-day proposal by the Tories. Indeed, it is difficult to defend it in any rational way, but then it isn’t a rational policy. A rational policy would be that if you have to do the work, in order to receive the corresponding remuneration, it should be paid at the legal, minimum wage. Plus, of course, those officious prodnoses at the Labour Exchange whose job it is to harrass the unemployed by ensuring that they have been seeking work, shouuld be forced to acknowledge that, lacking gift of bilocation, the unemployed can’t be picking litter and actively seeking employment at one and the same time.
One area of S. P. B. Mais’s work, however, which perhaps does bear reconsideration for the 2010 unemployment crisis, is that of allotments. There is a great deal of wasted land in the UK, which could be turned over to the cultivation of healthy, organic vegetables and fruit. All that is lacking is the organisation and the political will. If someone on unemployment benefits wants an allotment, they could be given one in some sort of bargain over their arrangements which would allow them the leeway to devote some time to growing their own and their family’s food while still seeking work. It would, today, as in the 1930s, get people out into the open air, teach them new skills, and save them money on food.
Of course, this Tory proposal isn’t serious – at least I hope it isn’t. The answer to long term unemployment in areas of chronic economic crisis and disadvantage (again, much of which was caused by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s) is not picking up litter. Or at least, not on those terms. If the government wants to create proper social enterprise companies to pay people a living wage to do socially useful work that benefits the whole community, that is, of course, a different matter. That is one of the fundamental tenets behind Rooftree. Indeed, social enterprise is one major way in which the government could start to get us out of this mess, by creating a whole new sector in the economy. But, in reality, I view this proposalas nothing more than another strand in the government’s “divide and rule” policy of simultaneously insisting that “we are all in this together” while sowing discord and disharmony and rumour, with deliberate but baseless stories of “benefit scroungers”, straight out of the “man in the pub” manual of journalism, and lapped up and reprinted almost verbatim, of course, by the likes of the Daily Mail.
On Your Bike – or way off the Bus Route?
The litter picking proposal is not the only wacky Tory solution to unemployment being bruited abroad at the moment. Tory bastard Iain Duncan Irritable-Bowel Smith seems to think that full employment is only a bus-ride away. When he was in charge of the whole shambles, a few years ago, he styled himself “The Quiet Man” and, to be fair to him, he has a lot to be quiet about. I sometimes think the Tories won’t be happy until the entire jobseeking workforce is lined up by the side of the road, with their possessions on their back, their children and their livestock, ready to ride off into the sunset on the first bus that comes along, in the hope of a few hours; fruit picking on the Gower Peninsula, then maybe over to Kent for some hopping, up to Skelmersdale for some PCB assembly, and so on. The fact that this would all be piece work, un-unionised, with minimal health and safety, and gangmaster wages, is not lost on me, either. It would be the Tory bosses’ vision of hog-heaven, freed from the schackles (as they see them) of the only progressive achivements of Blair and Brown’s era.
Again, like the litter-picking idea, I hope this is just specious nonsense and kite-flying to appeal to Middle-England bigots, but I suspect, in this case, that they may actually be serious. I think old “Irritable Bowel” really means it. So, let’s take him at his word, just assuming for the moment that this “Son of Tebbit” policy has some practical merit. Let us assume that (if you live in a rural area) there even is a bus to take you where you want to go. Where are the jobs? We come back again and again to this central mantra. Where are the jobs? Where are they?
Osborne is going to add something like 600,000 people to the dole queue as his planned cuts bite and take hold: how is the removal of so many previously economically active people from the daily round of commerce, the weekly supermarket shop, the knock on effect of their spending power – how is that going to stimulate the economy? How is it going to create any more jobs? In the same way as Orwell quite rightly noted the “hidden” numbers of unemployed behind the official figures, so there are hidden figures of “employed” whose jobs depend on other people coming into their shops and spending money.
It is all too easy, as I sit here writing these words, safe in my warm bed (yes, I am sitting writing this in bed!) listening to the wild winds of winter howling and wailing outside, and hearing the rain flung like handfuls of gravel at the window – it is all too easy for me to deride and poke fun at these stupid Tory proposals. In fact, it is all too easy to deride and poke fun at them whether you are in bed or not!
In the 1930s, S. P. B. Mais reported on rough sleepers in the iron working areas sleeping out on the slapgheaps at night, for warmth, after the furnaces had been emptied. But, out there, in the night, even now, are people who are the victims of these Tory policies. They are bedded down in doorways or under bridges, desperately trying to keep warm so that they will see another dawn. Let us be perfectly clear about this, make no mistake, as a result of these laughable yet evil policies, targeting the poor and vulnerable while safeguarding the rich, powerful and influential, people will be driven to despair, to anxiety, to homelessness, and people will die. This winter, out in the cold, in once-Great Britain, in the year of our Lord two thousand and ten, people will die, as a result of Tory cuts, propped up by the Liberal Dimwits. And I, for one, would like to hear the government justify to us how they manage to sleep at night, when they know this is the case, or indeed, why they should be allowed to, until something is done about it.
In case we are in any doubt about unemployment, these chilling words are from a letter sent to S. P. B. Mais after his book was published in 1933. Seventy-seven years later, it goes a long way to explain those “houses where the curtains stay closed all day” which George Osborne was keen to tell us about in his first broadcast as Chancellor [the one where he claimed we were all in it together.]
Glad of a rest, the unemployed man does not yet begin the frantic hunt for a job – a week’s rest will do me good, he thinks, and after that, I will have a look around. I shall soon get fixed up somewhere. But even while he thinks this, the chill of doubt strokes at his heart. A week or so later, he is saying to himself that he never dreamed times were so bad. The fruitless, despairing search for work which simply cannot be found has begun … See him now that some months have passed, with hope gone. He lies in bed longer each morning, keeps to the house more, is less tidy in his appearance, though unaware of the change, the chin is sunk lower, the face is half ashamed, the glance has become wavering and irresolute. He is losing his morale … like some wounded animal, creeping to a hole to die.
This is a very accurate assessment of the life of what Osborne calls “benefit scroungers”. I know which rings truer for me. I doubt that even the most ardent long-term adherents of benefits celebrate the lifestyle. All you can possibly hope for is to reach an accommodation with each grim grey day of disappointment and low horizons that comes around.
We cannot allow the government to go on sabotaging the economy. The only remedy for this parlous state of affairs, to stop these fools in their tracks before they inflict such damage on the economy that it takes a generation to recover, is a General Strike against the cuts, starting now. Yes, in fact, let us have a GENERAL STRIKE to protest against the cuts. And if a few stray cobbles end up being thrown through the windows of 10 Downing Street, so much the better! You have nothing to lose but your P45s!
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