The possibility of being found guilty of thought crimes came another step nearer with David Cameron’s recent pronouncement that he was going to “crack down” on anyone not espousing traditional British values. Bizarrely, this apparently includes getting Ofsted to spy on universities and educational establishments to see if they are being “radicalized”. As the only difference between Ofsted and a plastic surgeon is that the latter tucks up the features, I can’t see this being a riproaring success.
Still, one question haunts me… would that include the “traditional British value” of free speech within the bounds of the law, Mr Cameron?
Showing posts with label double standards. Show all posts
Showing posts with label double standards. Show all posts
Saturday, 18 June 2011
Gadaffi your horse, and drink your milk
Can anyone tell me what we are still doing meddling in Libya?
Friday, 6 May 2011
Bin Laden Bin In?
Well said, Rowan Williams, for speaking out on Osama Bin Laden. No doubt you will receive reams of hate mail from the mad colonels in Gloucestershire who read the Daily Telegraph religiously over their cornflakes, but you were quite right.
Everybody seems to be missing the point that the issue here is about the principle of justice. What makes us the “good guys” or is supposed to, is that we believe in this ideal. In any case, I doubt personally that Bin Laden was any more “responsible” for the 9/11 attacks than the Lockerbie bomber was responsible for downing flight 103, but his convenient demise will prevent a lot of awkward questions for the US administration that might otherwise have emerged at any form of trial.
When you get to the stage (which I fear we have now reached) when international justice is whatever the current US President says it is, and is enforced at the point of a missile or bullet, by special forces who act as judge, jury and executioner, then any pretence we had to be more “civilised” than Bin Laden and his cronies vanishes in the wind. We are, as George Bush said (out of the mouths of babes and sucklings…) back in the days of the Wild West.
And if, as some have claimed, it was an act of war, legally I am afraid they are mistaken. Legally, you cannot have a war on a concept and anyway, if it was a state of war, then presumably the Geneva convention applies, and always applied, to Guantanamo Bay?
Everybody seems to be missing the point that the issue here is about the principle of justice. What makes us the “good guys” or is supposed to, is that we believe in this ideal. In any case, I doubt personally that Bin Laden was any more “responsible” for the 9/11 attacks than the Lockerbie bomber was responsible for downing flight 103, but his convenient demise will prevent a lot of awkward questions for the US administration that might otherwise have emerged at any form of trial.
When you get to the stage (which I fear we have now reached) when international justice is whatever the current US President says it is, and is enforced at the point of a missile or bullet, by special forces who act as judge, jury and executioner, then any pretence we had to be more “civilised” than Bin Laden and his cronies vanishes in the wind. We are, as George Bush said (out of the mouths of babes and sucklings…) back in the days of the Wild West.
And if, as some have claimed, it was an act of war, legally I am afraid they are mistaken. Legally, you cannot have a war on a concept and anyway, if it was a state of war, then presumably the Geneva convention applies, and always applied, to Guantanamo Bay?
Saturday, 30 April 2011
57 Reasons not to be Cheerful, one, two, three...
Any large public event is always a balance between freedom of expression and movement, safety, and civil liberty. The “Rile Widding” was no exception. Except it was – it marked a new watershed in the shifting of the balance away from freedom and towards outright repression. I have already remarked that there seems to be a disparity between Brian Haw camping in Parliament Square (not allowed) and thousands of people camping out in The Mall (allowed) and this double standard is indicative of the sneaky, insidious way in which major public events are used to undermine civil liberties. Presumably if Boris Johnson wants to prosecute the people who broke the law on Thursday night in the Mall, he has plenty of CCTV and TV footage to allow him to identify the offenders. I await his next action with interest.
These are the “facts” behind what was “hailed” as a “successful” security operation. I am going to quote this at length from the BBC because it bears some deconstruction. It is a curiously jumbled and un-focused piece that reads as if it is the police official statement merely rehashed and regurgitated.
Scotland Yard has hailed the security operation surrounding the royal wedding as an "amazing success" despite 57 arrests around its security zone. About half the arrests were for breach of the peace and a man was held for an alleged sex assault on a girl, aged 14.
OK, no-one would argue with that. Breach of the peace and a sex assault, it all sounds fairly straightforward.
Ten people carrying climbing gear and anti-monarchy placards were arrested near Charing Cross. Other arrests were for drunk and disorderly, criminal damage, theft and over a suspected environmental protest. Three people were held in the Covent Garden area over the alleged demonstration, police said.
To be frank, I am surprised that the BBC didn’t look into the anti-monarchy and environmental protests more closely. They seem to be accepting of the police lumping these in with drunk and disorderly, criminal damage and theft. In this manner, legitimate protest is subtly criminalised. Were these people charged, and if so, with what?
Anti-terror powers were used to arrest one man who was seen taking suspicious photographs of transport hubs and security personnel in the Charing Cross area.
This is the sort of thing that is an example of the insidious erosion of our civil liberties – and, of course, it will now continue right up to the Olympic Games and beyond, if they can get away with it.
Three others were held over drug offences and four for allegedly carrying an offensive weapon.
OK, we’re back to the straightforward stuff again. But why not make some effort to group the arrests by type? Why mix up protests with criminal activity?
Met Police Assistant Commissioner Lynne Owens said the success of the overall policing operation showed that the force could handle security for next year's Olympic Games. She said her 5,000 officers should be "immensely proud" of their role in the "happy and safe" event. She admitted to pre-event "nerves" and defended the decision to carry out a string of pre-event raids as "entirely justified".
“Entirely justified”? Justified to whom, justified by what? Is she saying she has some inside information that she is not telling us? Were the people who were arrested pre-emptively some sort of terrorist threat? Because I have a feeling that this is just the police justifying themselves to themselves, with no scrutiny.
Officers questioned masked anti-monarchy protesters in Soho Square as a huge security operation took place around Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey and The Mall.
So who were these masked anti-monarchy protestors? How many of them were there, were they charged with anything? Are they part of the 57 arrests?
Thousands of police officers created a "ring of steel" around the venues. Snipers took to rooftops and undercover officers mingled among the crowds
Sort of gives the lie to the “carefree, joyous celebration”, doesn’t it?
More than 90 people were banned from the area and up to 80 VIPs were granted personal protection.
Again – “banned from the area” – under what pretext, what law, what judicial process has been gone through to be able to ban people from walking through the streets of their own capital city. If we are getting to the state where we are having people “banned” then we need to be sure this is not just something being done on a whim or on a spurious assumption, there needs to be a proper legal process.
Over the past few days police have arrested three people believed to be planning to behead effigies at the wedding. They were detained by police in Brockley, south-east London, on Thursday night.
These people have presumably been detained under the law which says that planning a terrorist act is an offence? Again, the BBC doesn’t seem to have asked any further questions. Were they charged? What with? Or were they merely quietly released again after the wedding? Am I committing an offence if I am planning to burn an effigy on November 5th?
There were also several raids on squats across London, which drew criticism from one Labour backbencher. John McDonnell accused police of "disproportionate" action, saying the raids appeared to be "some form of pre-emptive strike".
These are presumably the pre-emptive arrests of which Teresa May spoke in her advance trail of the measures she was “considering” after the Black Bloc’s window-breaking protests on 26 March. The people arrested in the squats were arrested for electricity abstraction – bypassing the meter. They have probably been doing it for months, if not years. They could have been arrested at any time for it, but coincidentally, police swooped the day before the Rile Widding. Coincidence? You decide.
As I said at the start, any large public event carries with it inevitable issues of public safety and security, even on the basic level of making sure no one gets trampled in the rush. And yes, I accept that – given that we’ve annoyed every hothead east of the Euphrates and a good many nearer home – there might be some people who want to use such an event to cover terrorist outrages. It’s all very lamentable. And in any large gathering of people, statistically there are going to be a few lags, perverts and ne’erdowells. So yes, policing is necessary. Up to a point. But when it gets to the stage where we’re stifling legitimate protest, we have to say, I think, that it’s time to take a good long hard look at where this is going.
Personally, I would let the protestors protest. In the case of the more zany fringe groups, it would show some of them up for the unsupported talentless loonies that they really are. If the whole world can see that there are only twelve members of “Muslims against Crusades”, that shows the world exactly what you are dealing with here. I would have stuck them in some obscure corner of Horse Guards Parade, suitably policed, and let them get on with it. Because the freedom not to be part of this, the freedom to hold contrarian views, however far they are off the bus route, is still one of the things that makes us the good guys.
And personally, I can’t see how you can describe any event where it has to be stage managed to stifle those who disagree with it, and pushed through at gunpoint by the presence of snipers on rooftops, as in any way “happy”.
Good luck, if you want to pretend that the whole country rose up as one great spontaneous street party and boogied long into the night. It didn’t, but feel free to delude yourself. For my part, the Royal Family is only useful for one thing. As a constitutional wedge to stop the bastard politicians taking over forever and issuing a written list of everything you are allowed to do, and everything else is verboten.
So if we have to have the occasional Rile Widding to keep the unwritten constitution intact, so be it. But don’t use it as an excuse to stifle legitimate protest, and don’t expect me to enjoy it. Just pull my vest down when you’ve finished.
These are the “facts” behind what was “hailed” as a “successful” security operation. I am going to quote this at length from the BBC because it bears some deconstruction. It is a curiously jumbled and un-focused piece that reads as if it is the police official statement merely rehashed and regurgitated.
Scotland Yard has hailed the security operation surrounding the royal wedding as an "amazing success" despite 57 arrests around its security zone. About half the arrests were for breach of the peace and a man was held for an alleged sex assault on a girl, aged 14.
OK, no-one would argue with that. Breach of the peace and a sex assault, it all sounds fairly straightforward.
Ten people carrying climbing gear and anti-monarchy placards were arrested near Charing Cross. Other arrests were for drunk and disorderly, criminal damage, theft and over a suspected environmental protest. Three people were held in the Covent Garden area over the alleged demonstration, police said.
To be frank, I am surprised that the BBC didn’t look into the anti-monarchy and environmental protests more closely. They seem to be accepting of the police lumping these in with drunk and disorderly, criminal damage and theft. In this manner, legitimate protest is subtly criminalised. Were these people charged, and if so, with what?
Anti-terror powers were used to arrest one man who was seen taking suspicious photographs of transport hubs and security personnel in the Charing Cross area.
This is the sort of thing that is an example of the insidious erosion of our civil liberties – and, of course, it will now continue right up to the Olympic Games and beyond, if they can get away with it.
Three others were held over drug offences and four for allegedly carrying an offensive weapon.
OK, we’re back to the straightforward stuff again. But why not make some effort to group the arrests by type? Why mix up protests with criminal activity?
Met Police Assistant Commissioner Lynne Owens said the success of the overall policing operation showed that the force could handle security for next year's Olympic Games. She said her 5,000 officers should be "immensely proud" of their role in the "happy and safe" event. She admitted to pre-event "nerves" and defended the decision to carry out a string of pre-event raids as "entirely justified".
“Entirely justified”? Justified to whom, justified by what? Is she saying she has some inside information that she is not telling us? Were the people who were arrested pre-emptively some sort of terrorist threat? Because I have a feeling that this is just the police justifying themselves to themselves, with no scrutiny.
Officers questioned masked anti-monarchy protesters in Soho Square as a huge security operation took place around Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey and The Mall.
So who were these masked anti-monarchy protestors? How many of them were there, were they charged with anything? Are they part of the 57 arrests?
Thousands of police officers created a "ring of steel" around the venues. Snipers took to rooftops and undercover officers mingled among the crowds
Sort of gives the lie to the “carefree, joyous celebration”, doesn’t it?
More than 90 people were banned from the area and up to 80 VIPs were granted personal protection.
Again – “banned from the area” – under what pretext, what law, what judicial process has been gone through to be able to ban people from walking through the streets of their own capital city. If we are getting to the state where we are having people “banned” then we need to be sure this is not just something being done on a whim or on a spurious assumption, there needs to be a proper legal process.
Over the past few days police have arrested three people believed to be planning to behead effigies at the wedding. They were detained by police in Brockley, south-east London, on Thursday night.
These people have presumably been detained under the law which says that planning a terrorist act is an offence? Again, the BBC doesn’t seem to have asked any further questions. Were they charged? What with? Or were they merely quietly released again after the wedding? Am I committing an offence if I am planning to burn an effigy on November 5th?
There were also several raids on squats across London, which drew criticism from one Labour backbencher. John McDonnell accused police of "disproportionate" action, saying the raids appeared to be "some form of pre-emptive strike".
These are presumably the pre-emptive arrests of which Teresa May spoke in her advance trail of the measures she was “considering” after the Black Bloc’s window-breaking protests on 26 March. The people arrested in the squats were arrested for electricity abstraction – bypassing the meter. They have probably been doing it for months, if not years. They could have been arrested at any time for it, but coincidentally, police swooped the day before the Rile Widding. Coincidence? You decide.
As I said at the start, any large public event carries with it inevitable issues of public safety and security, even on the basic level of making sure no one gets trampled in the rush. And yes, I accept that – given that we’ve annoyed every hothead east of the Euphrates and a good many nearer home – there might be some people who want to use such an event to cover terrorist outrages. It’s all very lamentable. And in any large gathering of people, statistically there are going to be a few lags, perverts and ne’erdowells. So yes, policing is necessary. Up to a point. But when it gets to the stage where we’re stifling legitimate protest, we have to say, I think, that it’s time to take a good long hard look at where this is going.
Personally, I would let the protestors protest. In the case of the more zany fringe groups, it would show some of them up for the unsupported talentless loonies that they really are. If the whole world can see that there are only twelve members of “Muslims against Crusades”, that shows the world exactly what you are dealing with here. I would have stuck them in some obscure corner of Horse Guards Parade, suitably policed, and let them get on with it. Because the freedom not to be part of this, the freedom to hold contrarian views, however far they are off the bus route, is still one of the things that makes us the good guys.
And personally, I can’t see how you can describe any event where it has to be stage managed to stifle those who disagree with it, and pushed through at gunpoint by the presence of snipers on rooftops, as in any way “happy”.
Good luck, if you want to pretend that the whole country rose up as one great spontaneous street party and boogied long into the night. It didn’t, but feel free to delude yourself. For my part, the Royal Family is only useful for one thing. As a constitutional wedge to stop the bastard politicians taking over forever and issuing a written list of everything you are allowed to do, and everything else is verboten.
So if we have to have the occasional Rile Widding to keep the unwritten constitution intact, so be it. But don’t use it as an excuse to stifle legitimate protest, and don’t expect me to enjoy it. Just pull my vest down when you’ve finished.
Wednesday, 6 April 2011
Second Opinion
David Cameron is going to "pause for reflection" in his ill-judged reform of the NHS. What a pity he didn't pause for reflection before he even started, as he could have saved the money wasted on this project so far. In fact, the more I see of Mr Cameron, the more I wish his parents had paused for reflection.
In fact, I strongly suspect that the reflection, if any, during this period will be more concerned about how the Tories and mini-tories can sell this deeply flawed crock of shite to a) the Liberal Dimwits at large, who have already showed a marked inclination to defenestrate Clegg over this at their Spring conference b) the House of Lords, who are queueing up to amend it with a chain saw and c)a skeptical public, who are being told that we have no money, and yet see us firing rockets costing £800,000 at Libya and giving £650 million to Pakistan, and are starting to ask "what is this reorganisation of the NHS costing?
In his glossy, smarmy, airbrushed election posters this time last year, Cameron said "We can't go on like this - I'll cut the deficit, not the NHS". If the cost of this reorganisation is coming from existing NHS budgets, then that is a de facto cut. And if the cost is coming from elsewhere, then I can think of a thousand better uses for extra money for the NHS than a reorganisation that nobody wants. Apart from David Cameron of course, to whom it is a shibboleth almost as sacred as "The Big Society".
In fact, I strongly suspect that the reflection, if any, during this period will be more concerned about how the Tories and mini-tories can sell this deeply flawed crock of shite to a) the Liberal Dimwits at large, who have already showed a marked inclination to defenestrate Clegg over this at their Spring conference b) the House of Lords, who are queueing up to amend it with a chain saw and c)a skeptical public, who are being told that we have no money, and yet see us firing rockets costing £800,000 at Libya and giving £650 million to Pakistan, and are starting to ask "what is this reorganisation of the NHS costing?
In his glossy, smarmy, airbrushed election posters this time last year, Cameron said "We can't go on like this - I'll cut the deficit, not the NHS". If the cost of this reorganisation is coming from existing NHS budgets, then that is a de facto cut. And if the cost is coming from elsewhere, then I can think of a thousand better uses for extra money for the NHS than a reorganisation that nobody wants. Apart from David Cameron of course, to whom it is a shibboleth almost as sacred as "The Big Society".
Easy Git
Oliver Let-Wind has apparently been letting wind again. This time it was out of his mouth rather than his arse, but since he frequently talks out of both of them, any confusion is understandable.
Apparently, and up to the time of writing, he has not denied this, in an argument with Boris Johnson over airport development, he said that he didn't want to see any more families from Sheffield taking cheap holidays.
Notwithstanding that this was a private comment, my first thought, when I heard that this was in the context of an argument, was that it was a pity it didn't escalate and come to blows.
As it is, it shows up the Tory mindset brilliantly. We don't want these oiks having holidays, not people from Sheffield, no, they should work for free as interns, send their children up chimneys, and be bloody well grateful that we're only cutting some of their libraries, schools, police, and refuse collections, and not all of them. We've already got Sir Digby Jones, of CBI fame, suggesting that unemployed people should volunteer and work for nothing, the Tories love this sort of thing. Cut the benefits, starve them into non-existent jobs, or leave them in the gutter to starve. Pardon me, but is this 1811, or 1911 all of a sudden? Only, I thought it was 2011, that's all.
Welcome to the mind of the Tories. Work for nothing, get on your bike, and don't expect a holiday! If it wasn't for the fact that there are no jobs anyway, and many people now won't be able to afford holidays, cheap or otherwise, it would be laughable. As it is, it's a pathetic insult to the low paid and the unemployed.
It's also an insult, of course, to the people of Sheffield, and Clegg has apparently told Let-Wind to watch his mouth - ha ha ha hardy ha. If Clegg couldn't stop the Tories cancelling a loan (a loan, not a grant) to Sheffield Forgemasters in his own constituency, I hardly think Let-Wind is going to be quaking in his boots at anything Clegg says, especially as he probably thinks that everyone in Sheffield says "eee bah goom", keeps whippets in the bath, and wears a string vest, and a knotted handkerchief on their head.
Personally, I think all the people of Sheffield should take a holiday in Let-Wind's garden. And shit in his fishpond, except I don't believe in cruelty to fish, and he'd only put the cost of cleaning it out on his expenses and charge it back to us.
Apparently, and up to the time of writing, he has not denied this, in an argument with Boris Johnson over airport development, he said that he didn't want to see any more families from Sheffield taking cheap holidays.
Notwithstanding that this was a private comment, my first thought, when I heard that this was in the context of an argument, was that it was a pity it didn't escalate and come to blows.
As it is, it shows up the Tory mindset brilliantly. We don't want these oiks having holidays, not people from Sheffield, no, they should work for free as interns, send their children up chimneys, and be bloody well grateful that we're only cutting some of their libraries, schools, police, and refuse collections, and not all of them. We've already got Sir Digby Jones, of CBI fame, suggesting that unemployed people should volunteer and work for nothing, the Tories love this sort of thing. Cut the benefits, starve them into non-existent jobs, or leave them in the gutter to starve. Pardon me, but is this 1811, or 1911 all of a sudden? Only, I thought it was 2011, that's all.
Welcome to the mind of the Tories. Work for nothing, get on your bike, and don't expect a holiday! If it wasn't for the fact that there are no jobs anyway, and many people now won't be able to afford holidays, cheap or otherwise, it would be laughable. As it is, it's a pathetic insult to the low paid and the unemployed.
It's also an insult, of course, to the people of Sheffield, and Clegg has apparently told Let-Wind to watch his mouth - ha ha ha hardy ha. If Clegg couldn't stop the Tories cancelling a loan (a loan, not a grant) to Sheffield Forgemasters in his own constituency, I hardly think Let-Wind is going to be quaking in his boots at anything Clegg says, especially as he probably thinks that everyone in Sheffield says "eee bah goom", keeps whippets in the bath, and wears a string vest, and a knotted handkerchief on their head.
Personally, I think all the people of Sheffield should take a holiday in Let-Wind's garden. And shit in his fishpond, except I don't believe in cruelty to fish, and he'd only put the cost of cleaning it out on his expenses and charge it back to us.
Tuesday, 29 March 2011
Hick-ery, Dick-ery, Bloc.
On Saturday, 26 March, half a million people marched through London to show their opposition to the savage, ideological cuts being imposed by the Tories, held up by Clegg and his band of merry men, (whose idea of a Robin Hood tax seems also to be to rob from the poor and give to the rich, while in the background, Caroline Spelman puts Sherwood Forest on e-bay).
People from all walks of life were there, people I know, either personally, or online,of all ages, across the whole community, people whose sole aim was that they wanted to demonstrate, peacefully and in a dignified manner, that these cuts in services and funding, affecting the poorest and those least able to manage, were "not in their name".
Unfortunately, none of that got on the news. The news media are often lazy, sometimes stupid, they have a "slot" to fill, and the VT gets edited to fit the time available. All of this is common knowledge.
And so, predictably, on the news on Saturday and all over the print media at the weekend, the story was dominated not by the vast, peaceful, dignified majority, but by two linked, but essentially separate activities - the occupation of Fortnum and Mason's by UK Uncut, and the actions of the so-called "anarchists", all 400 or so of them out of a crowd of half a million, who make up the organisation "Black Bloc".
It was very naive of UK Uncut, to have scheduled an action to take place in the context of this march. In the past, I have admired and applauded their cheeky, non-violent inventiveness in highlighting the part which big companies avoiding tax and shirking their responsibilities plays in the large black hole in Britain's balance sheet. But by doing what they did on a day when anyone with half an amoeba inside their skull must have known that it would be kicking off, they have scored a spectacular own goal, compounded by the feeble performance of their spokesperson on Newsnight on 28 March in failing to condemn the violence. Idiots. It plays right into the hands of the establishment, who now have the brush of anarchy and violence with which to tar UK Uncut. They have set their campaign back years. If they had only had the sense to occupy Fortnums the day after the demo, they would still have hung on the coat tails of the publicity, but the story would then have been the contrast between their peaceful demo and the violence of the previous day.
The "anarchists" of course, are, like the poor, always with us. They tag along at every demo, sticking it to the man by breaking the windows of a bus shelter. Freedom for Tooting, what did the Romans ever do for us? They are beyond satire, and, being bone from the neck up, impervious to it. But they are not that dumb, they have spotted how successful UK Uncut has been at organising and recruiting, and they have now "written" an open letter to them, offering their "support". Well, if you wanted a perfect example of an attempted reverse takeover by a wolf in sheep's clothing, there you have it. I hope UK Uncut have the sense to tell them to sod off.
I could rant for hours about what idiots these people are, but I will leave that for another day. Instead, here's an extract from a post on one of their forums from a trade unionist who was actually on the march, and took the time to register in order to tell them exactly what he thought.
It was a demo. It was supposed to set an agenda and make the public aware that we're not going to accept the cuts. It wasn't a revolutionary moment.
Those red'n'black lot (why do they all dress the same, its weird, like some cult) 'joined' the march at various points (Piccadilly mainly) and made gigantic pricks of themselves by such predictable and irrelevant acts of violence that were utterly meaningless in the bigger picture. Throwing paint and smoke bombs at the Ritz does absolutely zero to further any revolutionary aim.
What it did do however was enable the media to focus on the violence and avoid the issues in question. And, yes, they would have covered it well without the violence. The media have been all over the unions and TUC who organised the march for weeks in advance of this. But now they're ignoring us in the trade union movement and giving all the attention to the perpetrators of violence.
What the actions of the various show offs, self-obssessed and selfish bellends that decided to play revolution for the day managed to achieve was to directly support the objectives of the media. And to detract from the social movement against this government.
Oh and they also managed to scare the shit out of some familes and kids that got caught in the crush outside Fortnums in the process.
Well done. I hope they are very proud of themselves
Says it all, really.
People from all walks of life were there, people I know, either personally, or online,of all ages, across the whole community, people whose sole aim was that they wanted to demonstrate, peacefully and in a dignified manner, that these cuts in services and funding, affecting the poorest and those least able to manage, were "not in their name".
Unfortunately, none of that got on the news. The news media are often lazy, sometimes stupid, they have a "slot" to fill, and the VT gets edited to fit the time available. All of this is common knowledge.
And so, predictably, on the news on Saturday and all over the print media at the weekend, the story was dominated not by the vast, peaceful, dignified majority, but by two linked, but essentially separate activities - the occupation of Fortnum and Mason's by UK Uncut, and the actions of the so-called "anarchists", all 400 or so of them out of a crowd of half a million, who make up the organisation "Black Bloc".
It was very naive of UK Uncut, to have scheduled an action to take place in the context of this march. In the past, I have admired and applauded their cheeky, non-violent inventiveness in highlighting the part which big companies avoiding tax and shirking their responsibilities plays in the large black hole in Britain's balance sheet. But by doing what they did on a day when anyone with half an amoeba inside their skull must have known that it would be kicking off, they have scored a spectacular own goal, compounded by the feeble performance of their spokesperson on Newsnight on 28 March in failing to condemn the violence. Idiots. It plays right into the hands of the establishment, who now have the brush of anarchy and violence with which to tar UK Uncut. They have set their campaign back years. If they had only had the sense to occupy Fortnums the day after the demo, they would still have hung on the coat tails of the publicity, but the story would then have been the contrast between their peaceful demo and the violence of the previous day.
The "anarchists" of course, are, like the poor, always with us. They tag along at every demo, sticking it to the man by breaking the windows of a bus shelter. Freedom for Tooting, what did the Romans ever do for us? They are beyond satire, and, being bone from the neck up, impervious to it. But they are not that dumb, they have spotted how successful UK Uncut has been at organising and recruiting, and they have now "written" an open letter to them, offering their "support". Well, if you wanted a perfect example of an attempted reverse takeover by a wolf in sheep's clothing, there you have it. I hope UK Uncut have the sense to tell them to sod off.
I could rant for hours about what idiots these people are, but I will leave that for another day. Instead, here's an extract from a post on one of their forums from a trade unionist who was actually on the march, and took the time to register in order to tell them exactly what he thought.
It was a demo. It was supposed to set an agenda and make the public aware that we're not going to accept the cuts. It wasn't a revolutionary moment.
Those red'n'black lot (why do they all dress the same, its weird, like some cult) 'joined' the march at various points (Piccadilly mainly) and made gigantic pricks of themselves by such predictable and irrelevant acts of violence that were utterly meaningless in the bigger picture. Throwing paint and smoke bombs at the Ritz does absolutely zero to further any revolutionary aim.
What it did do however was enable the media to focus on the violence and avoid the issues in question. And, yes, they would have covered it well without the violence. The media have been all over the unions and TUC who organised the march for weeks in advance of this. But now they're ignoring us in the trade union movement and giving all the attention to the perpetrators of violence.
What the actions of the various show offs, self-obssessed and selfish bellends that decided to play revolution for the day managed to achieve was to directly support the objectives of the media. And to detract from the social movement against this government.
Oh and they also managed to scare the shit out of some familes and kids that got caught in the crush outside Fortnums in the process.
Well done. I hope they are very proud of themselves
Says it all, really.
Emergency, War 10!
The Tories and their stooges in the Mini-Tories have been quick to point out that the cost of the war against Libya will not come out of any existing budgets from Government departments already squeezed by the cuts, cut - in some cases - to the bone, and then beyond.
No, it will, instead, apparently, come out of a "contingency fund" in the Treasury, which is kept for emergencies and dire situations, according to Danny Alexander, on BBC's Question Time.
Now just hang on a cotton-pickin minute, thar, boy! Run that by me one more time, as Captain said to Tenniel or vice versa. The country is allegedly stony broke, on its uppers, so much so that the church mice are having a whip-round for us and yet, all the time, we're all in this together (though clearly some of us are "in it" up to our necks and sinking fast, while others haven't even had their expensive shoes splashed, yet) and all this time, the Treasury has a secret slush fund, a giant piggy bank in the underground car park, a hidden panel that, when pressed reveals a cupboard stuffed with £50 notes or something? What?!?!
Not only a secret slush fund, but one which must be fairly substantial, since it can stand funding the UK bombing the crap out of Benghazi with missiles that cost £800,000 each!
This, for me, raises a very important question. If this money is supposed to be used for emergencies, when is an "emergency" not an "emergency"? If we have got to the stage where we're shutting hospital wards, Sure Start centres and libraries, that is a bloody emergency! If we have got to the stage where we're cutting police because we can no longer afford to keep our streets safe, that is an emegency! If we've got to the stage where thousands of people are being laid off - in the construction industry for example - that is an emergency. If we've got people having their houses repossessed and being turned out onto the streets, that is an emergency.
Forget foreign adventurism and posturing on the world stage. We have little or no idea who these Libyan rebels are, or, in the long run, whether the situation there would be better or worse for our intervention. The examples of Iraq and Afghanistan don't hold out much hope.
Meanwhile, you don't need a flashing blue light and a howling siren to see that there are many more urgent "emergencies" at home, caused by the Con-Dims "bombing" their own economy, to appease the markets and bankers, that deserve much more to benefit from the judicious application of Danny Alexander's secret slush fund.
No, it will, instead, apparently, come out of a "contingency fund" in the Treasury, which is kept for emergencies and dire situations, according to Danny Alexander, on BBC's Question Time.
Now just hang on a cotton-pickin minute, thar, boy! Run that by me one more time, as Captain said to Tenniel or vice versa. The country is allegedly stony broke, on its uppers, so much so that the church mice are having a whip-round for us and yet, all the time, we're all in this together (though clearly some of us are "in it" up to our necks and sinking fast, while others haven't even had their expensive shoes splashed, yet) and all this time, the Treasury has a secret slush fund, a giant piggy bank in the underground car park, a hidden panel that, when pressed reveals a cupboard stuffed with £50 notes or something? What?!?!
Not only a secret slush fund, but one which must be fairly substantial, since it can stand funding the UK bombing the crap out of Benghazi with missiles that cost £800,000 each!
This, for me, raises a very important question. If this money is supposed to be used for emergencies, when is an "emergency" not an "emergency"? If we have got to the stage where we're shutting hospital wards, Sure Start centres and libraries, that is a bloody emergency! If we have got to the stage where we're cutting police because we can no longer afford to keep our streets safe, that is an emegency! If we've got to the stage where thousands of people are being laid off - in the construction industry for example - that is an emergency. If we've got people having their houses repossessed and being turned out onto the streets, that is an emergency.
Forget foreign adventurism and posturing on the world stage. We have little or no idea who these Libyan rebels are, or, in the long run, whether the situation there would be better or worse for our intervention. The examples of Iraq and Afghanistan don't hold out much hope.
Meanwhile, you don't need a flashing blue light and a howling siren to see that there are many more urgent "emergencies" at home, caused by the Con-Dims "bombing" their own economy, to appease the markets and bankers, that deserve much more to benefit from the judicious application of Danny Alexander's secret slush fund.
Sunday, 20 March 2011
Doing a Dubya on Libya
So, we are bombing Libya. As I wake up on this cool, grey, Sunday morning in March, listening to the birds tweeting and some distant church bells pealing over rural England, British service personnel, some of whom probably have a P45 from the government waiting in the post for them at home, are putting their lives at risk once again in the cause of naked political horse-trading and the sort of selective American foreign policy we thought we’d seen the back of when Dubya finally donned his spurs and stetson and rode off into the sunset.
My first thought, on hearing we would be sending our warplanes was “what warplanes?” We’ve got rid of the Harriers and we’ve mothballed so many Tornados, we’ve watched the Nimrods being cut up on the ground, on prime-time TV, I wouldn’t be surprised if all we had left to send was a couple of Tiger Moths, dropping hand grenades on elastic so we could get the bits back to use again! Still, at least with the RAF involved, you know that the bombs, such as they are, will hit their targets, whereas the USAF counts it a success if they can just manage to hit Libya.
Actually, before proceeding to the rights and wrongs of this situation, it shows up once again the criminal folly of the scale of the defence cuts imposed by the Tories. No aircraft carrier, no Harrier jets, no Nimrods, and now that the Tornados from Leuchars are presumably based temporarily in Malta or Cyprus or Southern France somewhere, nobody guarding the back door here, unless they’ve managed to rustle up an old Shackleton or an Avro Anson to stooge up and down along the coast off Skegness and count in the “bogeys”.
Why are we bombing Libya? If you believe the likes of David Cameron, it’s to protect the lives of innocent civilians. These would, of course, be the same innocent civilians who were being killed last week when we couldn’t give a stuff and were busy sending black helicopters in the middle of the night carrying “diplomats” to help resolve the situation.
It’s not exactly bothered us before; when Saddam Hussein was also killing his own civilians (much more terribly and efficiently that Gadaffi) using weapons which we in the west and other opportunist nations had sold him, (like we did to Gadaffi) we turned a blind eye then, because he was our ally, as Gadaffi was, briefly, in between two periods of being our enemy. And Cameron’s justification that we had to wait until it was legal rings very hollow with me, considering it didn’t bother Blair and we had no compunction in the past in acting illegally, on a lot flimsier pretext when it came to saving innocent civilians, in Iraq. If the UN hadn’t voted to allow this action, would that have stopped us, with oil at stake? And if we are that bothered about saving the lives of innocent arabs, what about Bahrain, inviting in the forces of a neighbouring dictatorship to suppress its own revolt on the streets?
No, I am afraid what is happening in Libya is that old favourite dish, Realpolitik, on the menu again, served up this time with a stinking garnish of hypocrisy. We ignored (by we, I mean Europe and Obama) the uprising in Egypt, because it became obvious that the only “freedom” the protestors in Tahrir Square were gaining was the freedom to get rid of one dictator and be ruled by the army instead. So they were unlikely to do anything to destabilise the region, because they were not exactly Jihadists to start with. Plus, Egypt has lots of sand, camels, pyramids, tourists and potatoes, but not that much oil, in comparative terms. Plus, once the army was in charge, it opened up another sales opportunity for selling them weapons! Kerching! We ignored the rising in Bahrain, because the US Fleet is quartered there, and therefore, naturally, Obama would prefer the status quo. We ignored Saudi Arabia’s rumblings for the same sorts of reasons.
What it boils down to is that if you are an innocent citizen in a country ruled by a megalomaniac with no oil and no strategic importance to the USA, bad luck, old chap.
We actually ignored the Libyan situation for long enough, because we thought, wrongly as it turned out, that the rebels would do “our” job for us and get rid of our former enemy then ally now enemy again, Colonel Gadaffi. But the rebels couldn’t cut it, and they started to lose. Realising that Gadaffi wouldn’t then be that kindly disposed in future to those who supported the uprising against him, Europe and Obama, given the crucial importance of Libyan oil, have painted themselves into a corner, and have now no option but to step in and ensure the rebellion succeeds, having realised belatedly that they had backed the wrong horse and it was on a one-way trip to the glue factory. Still, at least they can dress it up with high flown rhetoric, bollocks and bluster, and try and disguise what it is that British service men and women will potentially die for, when the body bags start trundling through “Royal” Wootton Bassett.
I have no brief for Gadaffi, and I never expected David Cameron to be honest about anything, not even for a nano-second. I had slightly higher expectations of Obama, but it turns out he’s just like all the others, only slightly more inept. More fool me, for harbouring a vestige of political idealism and investing it in a cracked vessel.
But I do want to record that this morning, as our planes are in the air, I am sad, disappointed, and just a tad furious at the way in which once again we are not being told the real reasons behind our colonial adventurism, and exactly what it is our people are, potentially, being asked to die for.
Not in my name.
My first thought, on hearing we would be sending our warplanes was “what warplanes?” We’ve got rid of the Harriers and we’ve mothballed so many Tornados, we’ve watched the Nimrods being cut up on the ground, on prime-time TV, I wouldn’t be surprised if all we had left to send was a couple of Tiger Moths, dropping hand grenades on elastic so we could get the bits back to use again! Still, at least with the RAF involved, you know that the bombs, such as they are, will hit their targets, whereas the USAF counts it a success if they can just manage to hit Libya.
Actually, before proceeding to the rights and wrongs of this situation, it shows up once again the criminal folly of the scale of the defence cuts imposed by the Tories. No aircraft carrier, no Harrier jets, no Nimrods, and now that the Tornados from Leuchars are presumably based temporarily in Malta or Cyprus or Southern France somewhere, nobody guarding the back door here, unless they’ve managed to rustle up an old Shackleton or an Avro Anson to stooge up and down along the coast off Skegness and count in the “bogeys”.
Why are we bombing Libya? If you believe the likes of David Cameron, it’s to protect the lives of innocent civilians. These would, of course, be the same innocent civilians who were being killed last week when we couldn’t give a stuff and were busy sending black helicopters in the middle of the night carrying “diplomats” to help resolve the situation.
It’s not exactly bothered us before; when Saddam Hussein was also killing his own civilians (much more terribly and efficiently that Gadaffi) using weapons which we in the west and other opportunist nations had sold him, (like we did to Gadaffi) we turned a blind eye then, because he was our ally, as Gadaffi was, briefly, in between two periods of being our enemy. And Cameron’s justification that we had to wait until it was legal rings very hollow with me, considering it didn’t bother Blair and we had no compunction in the past in acting illegally, on a lot flimsier pretext when it came to saving innocent civilians, in Iraq. If the UN hadn’t voted to allow this action, would that have stopped us, with oil at stake? And if we are that bothered about saving the lives of innocent arabs, what about Bahrain, inviting in the forces of a neighbouring dictatorship to suppress its own revolt on the streets?
No, I am afraid what is happening in Libya is that old favourite dish, Realpolitik, on the menu again, served up this time with a stinking garnish of hypocrisy. We ignored (by we, I mean Europe and Obama) the uprising in Egypt, because it became obvious that the only “freedom” the protestors in Tahrir Square were gaining was the freedom to get rid of one dictator and be ruled by the army instead. So they were unlikely to do anything to destabilise the region, because they were not exactly Jihadists to start with. Plus, Egypt has lots of sand, camels, pyramids, tourists and potatoes, but not that much oil, in comparative terms. Plus, once the army was in charge, it opened up another sales opportunity for selling them weapons! Kerching! We ignored the rising in Bahrain, because the US Fleet is quartered there, and therefore, naturally, Obama would prefer the status quo. We ignored Saudi Arabia’s rumblings for the same sorts of reasons.
What it boils down to is that if you are an innocent citizen in a country ruled by a megalomaniac with no oil and no strategic importance to the USA, bad luck, old chap.
We actually ignored the Libyan situation for long enough, because we thought, wrongly as it turned out, that the rebels would do “our” job for us and get rid of our former enemy then ally now enemy again, Colonel Gadaffi. But the rebels couldn’t cut it, and they started to lose. Realising that Gadaffi wouldn’t then be that kindly disposed in future to those who supported the uprising against him, Europe and Obama, given the crucial importance of Libyan oil, have painted themselves into a corner, and have now no option but to step in and ensure the rebellion succeeds, having realised belatedly that they had backed the wrong horse and it was on a one-way trip to the glue factory. Still, at least they can dress it up with high flown rhetoric, bollocks and bluster, and try and disguise what it is that British service men and women will potentially die for, when the body bags start trundling through “Royal” Wootton Bassett.
I have no brief for Gadaffi, and I never expected David Cameron to be honest about anything, not even for a nano-second. I had slightly higher expectations of Obama, but it turns out he’s just like all the others, only slightly more inept. More fool me, for harbouring a vestige of political idealism and investing it in a cracked vessel.
But I do want to record that this morning, as our planes are in the air, I am sad, disappointed, and just a tad furious at the way in which once again we are not being told the real reasons behind our colonial adventurism, and exactly what it is our people are, potentially, being asked to die for.
Not in my name.
Saturday, 19 February 2011
Daily Fail
The Daily Mail has been at it again. If I was a fully paid up member of the tin foil hat brigade, instead of merely an occasional camp-follower, I might actually believe there was some conspiracy, some link, some hidden, arcane purpose behind the way these articles appear, with the regularity of the first cuckoo in Spring – and in many cases, “cuckoo” is such an appropriate word – just as the government, in the person of Irritable Bowel Smith, is limbering up to have another go at imposing swingeing cuts on people who receive benefits.
But, to give them credit, the Daily Heil has form in this area. They have “previous”. They have been at it for years. In the Daily Mail’s world view, our precious British way of life is under constant attack from unscrupulous foreigners, many of them maybe a bit “brownish”, who creep unnoticed through the Channel Tunnel at night, just for the fun of filling in an ESA form at Folkestone JobCentre Plus. “One-legged Muslim Latvian roofer asylum seeker took my cat swimming in the nude, says Vicar’s wife.” Making up headlines from the Daily Mail. We’ve all done it, for fun. The Daily Mail, however, has people who do it and get paid for it!
Take this headline from 11th February: “Nearly 2 MILLION on sickness benefits for years are fit to work!” Goodness me, you think. How can this be? Yet when you actually read the article, you discover that it is, in fact, the Daily Mail’s own projection of what they THINK the figure might be, if the results of two individual trials of benefit reviews which have been going on in Burnley and Aberdeen are rolled out nation-wide. If.
To be fair, this time around, the Mail does actually say, buried half way down the article: “If the total proportion of invalid claims matches the results from the two trial reassessments, it would mean almost 1.8 million people were receiving benefits despite being able to work.” Yes, it would, very true. And if my Auntie had balls, she would be my Uncle. So what?
The Mail then goes on to reference a previous article in similar vein where it did exactly the same trick, and I posted about it at the time (though not on here) “Last year it emerged that three-quarters of new applicants for sickness benefit were also declared invalid.”. What this carefully-recycled piece of DWP press release doesn’t say in this article, though, is that that “three-quarters” was ALSO three quarters of an initial assessment, not three-quarters of all claimants. Though in both cases the Mail obviously regards it as a slam-dunk that the ratio will be maintained, whereas in fact as I understand it, the early assessment of these cases does initially throw up a high proportion of abandoned claims, some of which were actually made by people suffering with short-term conditions that then cleared up. So they stopped claiming!
But, of course, to the Daily Wail, that’s not a story. It’s almost as much a non-story as “Moderate Muslim condemns hate crime extremist Imam”.
Meanwhile, the readers of the Daily Mail, like the readers of the Boston Evening Transcript in TS Eliot’s poem, continue to sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn, drowsily dreaming of a sepia-tinted England, with spinsters cycling to Matins and cricket on the green, and nary a black-faced benefits claimant or a one-legged Latvian roofer to be seen. Gawd bless yer, Miss Marple, that’s another mystery solved. Order is returned to the peaceful village of Tiglets Frisby. Richard Littlejohn is in his heaven, and all’s right with the right-wing loonies. Oh to be in Mail-land, where the church clock stands at ten to three, and there is always honey for tea. For those that can afford it.
But, to give them credit, the Daily Heil has form in this area. They have “previous”. They have been at it for years. In the Daily Mail’s world view, our precious British way of life is under constant attack from unscrupulous foreigners, many of them maybe a bit “brownish”, who creep unnoticed through the Channel Tunnel at night, just for the fun of filling in an ESA form at Folkestone JobCentre Plus. “One-legged Muslim Latvian roofer asylum seeker took my cat swimming in the nude, says Vicar’s wife.” Making up headlines from the Daily Mail. We’ve all done it, for fun. The Daily Mail, however, has people who do it and get paid for it!
Take this headline from 11th February: “Nearly 2 MILLION on sickness benefits for years are fit to work!” Goodness me, you think. How can this be? Yet when you actually read the article, you discover that it is, in fact, the Daily Mail’s own projection of what they THINK the figure might be, if the results of two individual trials of benefit reviews which have been going on in Burnley and Aberdeen are rolled out nation-wide. If.
To be fair, this time around, the Mail does actually say, buried half way down the article: “If the total proportion of invalid claims matches the results from the two trial reassessments, it would mean almost 1.8 million people were receiving benefits despite being able to work.” Yes, it would, very true. And if my Auntie had balls, she would be my Uncle. So what?
The Mail then goes on to reference a previous article in similar vein where it did exactly the same trick, and I posted about it at the time (though not on here) “Last year it emerged that three-quarters of new applicants for sickness benefit were also declared invalid.”. What this carefully-recycled piece of DWP press release doesn’t say in this article, though, is that that “three-quarters” was ALSO three quarters of an initial assessment, not three-quarters of all claimants. Though in both cases the Mail obviously regards it as a slam-dunk that the ratio will be maintained, whereas in fact as I understand it, the early assessment of these cases does initially throw up a high proportion of abandoned claims, some of which were actually made by people suffering with short-term conditions that then cleared up. So they stopped claiming!
But, of course, to the Daily Wail, that’s not a story. It’s almost as much a non-story as “Moderate Muslim condemns hate crime extremist Imam”.
Meanwhile, the readers of the Daily Mail, like the readers of the Boston Evening Transcript in TS Eliot’s poem, continue to sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn, drowsily dreaming of a sepia-tinted England, with spinsters cycling to Matins and cricket on the green, and nary a black-faced benefits claimant or a one-legged Latvian roofer to be seen. Gawd bless yer, Miss Marple, that’s another mystery solved. Order is returned to the peaceful village of Tiglets Frisby. Richard Littlejohn is in his heaven, and all’s right with the right-wing loonies. Oh to be in Mail-land, where the church clock stands at ten to three, and there is always honey for tea. For those that can afford it.
Monbiot Man
George Monbiot seems to have stirred up something of a hornets’ nest amongst tax lawyers and apologists for the Tories and Mini-Tories with his recent Guardian article about the proposals to change the way in which the UK taxes overseas profits of companies registered here. When it gets to the stage where people are blogging back atcha and calling you “Moonbat”, while simultaneously trying to suggest it’s no big deal, really, this tends to suggest to me that you’ve hit a nerve.
I don’t read The Guardian, and have absolutely no brief for Monbiot - the only letter I ever wrote him remains resolutely unanswered to this day - and I was only alerted to the piece by a tweet on Twitter that was re-tweeted by someone I don’t even follow, so I could well have missed it. As it was, I had to read Monbiot’s article a few times for the implications of it to sink in, but I freely admit that, as someone who failed O Level Maths, numeracy is not my strong point (or perhaps I should say, as Jack Straw did when having his collar felt over his expenses, “accountancy is not my strong suit”.)
Opinion seems divided over whether Monbiot has a point, or whether he is simply over-egging the pudding for effect. All kudos to him, I guess, at least for even bothering to read the adjustments the government is planning to the tax acts of 1988 and 2009! Personally, I glaze over faster than a lump of pork in cranberry jelly just thinking about it. Others have argued that it is just the UK bringing its method of taxing the profits of overseas subsidiaries in line with the rest of the EU. [I have remarked before that it never ceases to amaze me how we always have to harmonize with the rest of the EU, rather than them harmonizing with us, but let that pass for now.]
The net effect of the proposed changes will be to hand big businesses, multi nationals who can more than afford to shoulder the burden of their fair share of getting us out of this mess, a £100M tax break, just at the time when the Government is telling us we are all in it together. Clearly, some of us are “in it” more than others. Some of us are in it up to our necks and sinking fast, while others are allowed to skip gaily over the piles of ordure that lie in wait for the poor, the disadvantaged, the disabled and the unemployed, and continue merrily on their way.
And that is really the point behind all of this. What these companies are doing, aided and abetted by HMRC, may well be legal. But that doesn’t make it moral, it doesn’t make it right. It doesn’t make it right that libraries and swimming pools and community centres are closing left right and centre while for the bastards in stripey suits, it’s still “trebles all round”.
Any moral government, any government that even purported to care about the people of this country, would not be looking to add yet more loopholes to a taxation system that already resembles a moth-fancier’s string vest. They would be saying “these people can afford it, so proportionately, they should give more than a bloke on ESA in a tenement in Newcastle”.
This is what UK Uncut, with its excellent campaigns to blackguard and shame the tax avoiders into paying something more like a fair share, are all about, and more power to their collective elbow. I wish they were in Parliament, in opposition, right now, instead of the feeble and supine Labour Party.
But, whether Monbiot is wholly right or wholly wrong, or – as I suspect – somewhere in between, but definitely onto something, I suppose it comes as no surprise to find that the Tories are doing something divisive, unfair, and beneficial to big business. Something that was in no-one's manifesto, either, come to that. I do, however, remain amazed at how long the Liberal Dimwits will continue to allow themselves to be bitch-slapped by Cameron and Osborne. Talk about an abusive relationship!
Unfortunately for them, at the next election, whenever it comes, the electorate won’t believe they simply “walked into a door again.” They won’t believe anything the LibDims say. Vote Lib Dim, get Tory. Once bitten, twice shy, Lib Dims, bye bye.
I don’t read The Guardian, and have absolutely no brief for Monbiot - the only letter I ever wrote him remains resolutely unanswered to this day - and I was only alerted to the piece by a tweet on Twitter that was re-tweeted by someone I don’t even follow, so I could well have missed it. As it was, I had to read Monbiot’s article a few times for the implications of it to sink in, but I freely admit that, as someone who failed O Level Maths, numeracy is not my strong point (or perhaps I should say, as Jack Straw did when having his collar felt over his expenses, “accountancy is not my strong suit”.)
Opinion seems divided over whether Monbiot has a point, or whether he is simply over-egging the pudding for effect. All kudos to him, I guess, at least for even bothering to read the adjustments the government is planning to the tax acts of 1988 and 2009! Personally, I glaze over faster than a lump of pork in cranberry jelly just thinking about it. Others have argued that it is just the UK bringing its method of taxing the profits of overseas subsidiaries in line with the rest of the EU. [I have remarked before that it never ceases to amaze me how we always have to harmonize with the rest of the EU, rather than them harmonizing with us, but let that pass for now.]
The net effect of the proposed changes will be to hand big businesses, multi nationals who can more than afford to shoulder the burden of their fair share of getting us out of this mess, a £100M tax break, just at the time when the Government is telling us we are all in it together. Clearly, some of us are “in it” more than others. Some of us are in it up to our necks and sinking fast, while others are allowed to skip gaily over the piles of ordure that lie in wait for the poor, the disadvantaged, the disabled and the unemployed, and continue merrily on their way.
And that is really the point behind all of this. What these companies are doing, aided and abetted by HMRC, may well be legal. But that doesn’t make it moral, it doesn’t make it right. It doesn’t make it right that libraries and swimming pools and community centres are closing left right and centre while for the bastards in stripey suits, it’s still “trebles all round”.
Any moral government, any government that even purported to care about the people of this country, would not be looking to add yet more loopholes to a taxation system that already resembles a moth-fancier’s string vest. They would be saying “these people can afford it, so proportionately, they should give more than a bloke on ESA in a tenement in Newcastle”.
This is what UK Uncut, with its excellent campaigns to blackguard and shame the tax avoiders into paying something more like a fair share, are all about, and more power to their collective elbow. I wish they were in Parliament, in opposition, right now, instead of the feeble and supine Labour Party.
But, whether Monbiot is wholly right or wholly wrong, or – as I suspect – somewhere in between, but definitely onto something, I suppose it comes as no surprise to find that the Tories are doing something divisive, unfair, and beneficial to big business. Something that was in no-one's manifesto, either, come to that. I do, however, remain amazed at how long the Liberal Dimwits will continue to allow themselves to be bitch-slapped by Cameron and Osborne. Talk about an abusive relationship!
Unfortunately for them, at the next election, whenever it comes, the electorate won’t believe they simply “walked into a door again.” They won’t believe anything the LibDims say. Vote Lib Dim, get Tory. Once bitten, twice shy, Lib Dims, bye bye.
Tuesday, 8 February 2011
Small is Beautiful, Big is Better, but Both is best of all
The thing is, we did use to have the Big Society, well, sort of. I remember, growing up in the 1950s and 60s in East Hull, our community did look out for each other and - yes, cliche or not - you could always leave your door open and neighbours were always popping round for a cuppa.
In that scenario, you could never imagine, for instance, a vulnerable pensioner dying on her own of hypothermia and lying there for weeks before being discovered, because somebody would have noticed she was missing from her daily round, hadn't seen her in the corner shop recently, and would have stepped in with a hot meal, a blanket and/or a bag of coal.
Now, that kind of Big Society would be worth aspiring to. The kind of society where people band together and see each other through, behaving altruistically without any notion of payment or reward. The only problem with it is, though, that it's actually the Small Society. It works at a micro level, street by street. You can't scale it up to a national level, though it would be nice to get back to a society which was more caring, more respectful, less self-centred and - frankly - venal in its aspirations, since we seem to be descending more and more into "White Van Man Bigot Britain", encouraged by "dog whistle" pronouncements on things like benefits and immigration.
I say "get back to", because of course the communities that nourished and nurtured the "Small Society" are long gone - the fishing community of Hull being an example, the mining communities of the coalfields, the steelworks or the shipyards in those areas of the country where they were strong, and the docks in places like Liverpool and the East End. And not only have the communities, vanished, the ideas which held them together have vanished too - ever since Margaret Thatcher gave the green light to sheer naked greed for money as the motivating force in society, basically the country was set off down a route where it was apparently OK to climb over anyone's face on your way to the acquisition of wealth and goods, and everything has to make a profit, a philosophy that ultimately leads to your mum invoicing you for cooking your breakfast, or outsourcing the job to a chef in Mumbai.
There are some things that are necessary to be organised on a macro scale and which will never make a profit. Health care, education, prisons and the justice system, defence, transport, the postal system, things like that. The reason that the Big Society is falling apart at the seams is that the Tories, deep down, know this, but they are ideologically attached to the idea that everything must make a profit. This inherent contradiction at the heart of the policy is killing it stone dead.
If they could but bring themselves to abandon that shibboleth, and fund the idea like it needs to be funded, then the Big Society could work. But of course, with Eric Pickles in charge of the budgets, that is about as likely as me lapping Usain Bolt in the 100m at the next Olympics. Not going to happen.
So, as it is, we are left with an empty, vacuous fart of an idea, a trumped-up initiative which relies on wish fulfilment and fairy dust for its success. The idea that you can cut public services to the bone and beyond, remove funding left right and centre, throw thousands of people on to the dole and somehow, magically, the economy is going to pick up and create a lot of wealth that will somehow get given to charities by altruistic donors to pick up the slack. I don't think so. There goes Usain Bolt again.
It's not as if they really mean it, though. Cameron is using the Big Society as an attempt to speak over the heads of most people to those who would like Britain to return to a sepia-tinted era with cricket on the green and spinsters cycling to matins, but the reality is a savage attack on the public service ethos (because the Tories truly think everything can be reduced to a balance sheet) and passing the blame on to councils and charities for not picking up the pieces, when in fact, the Tories have stolen the dustpan and the brush!
I no longer differentiate between Tories and Lib Dims, these days they are all just Tories to me, but I do wonder sometimes how the Lib Dims, traditionally the party of local government, volunteering, and local activism, square their support for this dismal claptrap with their professed stance of caring about communities. And how they sleep at night.
In that scenario, you could never imagine, for instance, a vulnerable pensioner dying on her own of hypothermia and lying there for weeks before being discovered, because somebody would have noticed she was missing from her daily round, hadn't seen her in the corner shop recently, and would have stepped in with a hot meal, a blanket and/or a bag of coal.
Now, that kind of Big Society would be worth aspiring to. The kind of society where people band together and see each other through, behaving altruistically without any notion of payment or reward. The only problem with it is, though, that it's actually the Small Society. It works at a micro level, street by street. You can't scale it up to a national level, though it would be nice to get back to a society which was more caring, more respectful, less self-centred and - frankly - venal in its aspirations, since we seem to be descending more and more into "White Van Man Bigot Britain", encouraged by "dog whistle" pronouncements on things like benefits and immigration.
I say "get back to", because of course the communities that nourished and nurtured the "Small Society" are long gone - the fishing community of Hull being an example, the mining communities of the coalfields, the steelworks or the shipyards in those areas of the country where they were strong, and the docks in places like Liverpool and the East End. And not only have the communities, vanished, the ideas which held them together have vanished too - ever since Margaret Thatcher gave the green light to sheer naked greed for money as the motivating force in society, basically the country was set off down a route where it was apparently OK to climb over anyone's face on your way to the acquisition of wealth and goods, and everything has to make a profit, a philosophy that ultimately leads to your mum invoicing you for cooking your breakfast, or outsourcing the job to a chef in Mumbai.
There are some things that are necessary to be organised on a macro scale and which will never make a profit. Health care, education, prisons and the justice system, defence, transport, the postal system, things like that. The reason that the Big Society is falling apart at the seams is that the Tories, deep down, know this, but they are ideologically attached to the idea that everything must make a profit. This inherent contradiction at the heart of the policy is killing it stone dead.
If they could but bring themselves to abandon that shibboleth, and fund the idea like it needs to be funded, then the Big Society could work. But of course, with Eric Pickles in charge of the budgets, that is about as likely as me lapping Usain Bolt in the 100m at the next Olympics. Not going to happen.
So, as it is, we are left with an empty, vacuous fart of an idea, a trumped-up initiative which relies on wish fulfilment and fairy dust for its success. The idea that you can cut public services to the bone and beyond, remove funding left right and centre, throw thousands of people on to the dole and somehow, magically, the economy is going to pick up and create a lot of wealth that will somehow get given to charities by altruistic donors to pick up the slack. I don't think so. There goes Usain Bolt again.
It's not as if they really mean it, though. Cameron is using the Big Society as an attempt to speak over the heads of most people to those who would like Britain to return to a sepia-tinted era with cricket on the green and spinsters cycling to matins, but the reality is a savage attack on the public service ethos (because the Tories truly think everything can be reduced to a balance sheet) and passing the blame on to councils and charities for not picking up the pieces, when in fact, the Tories have stolen the dustpan and the brush!
I no longer differentiate between Tories and Lib Dims, these days they are all just Tories to me, but I do wonder sometimes how the Lib Dims, traditionally the party of local government, volunteering, and local activism, square their support for this dismal claptrap with their professed stance of caring about communities. And how they sleep at night.
Friday, 4 February 2011
Pass the Parcel
One thing which was obvious from the start, when the Tories and the Lib Dims agreed their pact made in hell with all the bonhomie of Von Ribbentrop and Stalin breaking out the celebratory vodka, was that the amount of money given to councils by central government was going to be decimated.
The Tories hate the public service ethos, they would much prefer everything to be privatised for the benefit of shareholders and their rich toffee-nosed friends in the City. They hoped of course that “The Big Society” would step in and make good some of the deficit, so that if, for instance, your council couldn’t afford to empty your bin any more, a possee of well-meaning citizens and charities could do it instead. The cuts, however, are damaging the income of charities as well – who has the wherewithal to donate to charity when their own job is under threat?
Now that The Big Society isn’t happening, a reasonable person might expect contrition and a re-think, but the Tories and their catamites are pressing on regardless into the valley of death. Their chief cheerleaders in this divide and rule programme of starving the councils of cash and then blaming them when they are unable to provide essential services are Eric Pickles and Grant Shapps at the Department of Communities. [A misnomer if ever there was one. Department for Dismantling Communities would be a more apposite title, these days]
Pickles operates on precisely the opposite principle to his more famous namesake, Wilfred, who was known for his catchphrase “Give ‘Em the Money, Mabel”. The Tories like to trot him out as their equivalent of John Prescott, but in fact he has fewer appealing attributes and even less charisma and life-experience, having risen in obscurity from the ranks of Bradford Council. Despite the fundamental dishonesty of a policy which denies councils the money to carry out essential services and then blames them for not emptying the bins, Pickles is at least straightforward about what he does.
Grant Shapps was in the news recently for holding up the “fact” that Manchester City Council had a “Twitter Tsar” on their payroll, at vast expense, naturally. When the story was investigated further, however, it was discovered that the “Twitter Tsar” was, in fact, the person who ran the Council’s web sites, and that “tweeting” was merely a small part of what his job entailed.
One of the most damaging aspects of this slash and burn approach to local authority funding by the Department of Communities has of course been its impact on the homeless and other vulnerable people who depend on Council social care.
We’ve seen this happen particularly in Nottingham, recently, where Framework, a local charity working to alleviate the problems of homelessness and deprivation, have been forced to the brink of legal action over budget cuts emanating from central government
Andrew Redfern, Chief Executive of Framework, said:
“We have served ‘letters prior to action’ (the first stage of a judicial review) on the department for Communities and Local Government and Nottingham City Council. There is a deadline for them to respond and we hope this may help them to resolve the issue.
“Framework serves homeless and vulnerable people, including those with mental health, substance and alcohol problems, older and younger people, people with learning disabilities and women fleeing domestic violence. We have a duty to defend the thousands of people who will lose their support and may become homeless because of the cuts. Whatever the outcome of this legal action I hope it will shine a light on the ludicrous nature of the situation.
“In the Comprehensive Spending Review the government announced a reduction in the national SP budget of only 12% in real terms over four years. The actual amount of cash available for the programme next year is barely 1% below the figure for the current year, yet it transpires that Nottingham City Council is proposing a cut of 45% (from £22.37m to £12.93m a reduction of £9.4m) based on its interpretation of the local government settlement. It will ameliorate this with an extra £2m for one year only.
“The department for Communities and Local Government disputes the city council’s figures stating that Nottingham’s SP allocation has been reduced by no more than 11.3%. The department has not yet given a precise figure.
“The argument between central and local government leaves us perplexed. The confusion about the settlement is causing chaos. The city council has issued de-commissioning notices for many of its SP-funded services from the end of March 2011 and reduced contract values on the others to £1 per annum. In view of this we have had no choice but to give notice to over 200 staff working directly with vulnerable people in the city.
“We are receiving more and more enquiries from service-users and concerned members of the public asking what will happen in April.
“The proposed cuts will have a devastating impact on the city. Levels of rough sleeping, crime, anti-social behaviour, ill-health, unemployment and poverty will all increase.
“We have to do whatever we can to stop the cuts. Our decision to seek a judicial review is one of the ways we are trying to do this,” added Mr Redfern.
Councillor John Collins, the leader of Nottingham City Council, has written an open letter to Grant Shapps pointing out the errors in his calculations of the amount by which the Support Grant has been cut. Not that this has made any difference. He may as well have saved his breath to cool his porridge.
The fact is that Grant Shapps doesn’t need the effects of his actions pointing out to him. He knows already what the effects are, and if he doesn’t, then he has (still) plenty of civil servants who can explain it to him. It's not a regrettable mistake, it's a deliberate strategy.
Once again, it is past midnight as I sit here, scribing out these words by the combined light of a low-energy light bulb in the standard lamp and the glow of the remaining coals through the window of the stove.
I can hear the wind buffeting the trees in the garden making them thrash about as if in pain, and I can hear the rain, sounding for all the world like handfuls of gravel being flung against the windows of the conservatory.
In olden days, of course, this sort of weather would be the backdrop for a secret lover arriving at your window in the middle of the night. In a poem by Keats for example, or a novel by Thomas Hardy. These days, we’re not so romantic, and every time I hear the rain driving against the conservatory, I think of those forced to be out there in the night, stuck out in the rain with no choice and nowhere to go.
And I think of those who voted for the Tories and the Liberal Dimwits at the last election, and I wonder if they are happy with this outcome? Happy that people are sleeping out in the perishing cold and the rain?
Is Grant Shapps happy with the results of his actions? Is David Cameron, as he goes back home for the weekend to his second home in his constituency, paid for by us, or to Chequers, with its hundreds of bedrooms, paid for by us?
And again I ask, if you are NOT happy with the outcome, why do you allow it to continue?
For the rest of us, the streets are full of cobbles and there are many, many windows in Whitehall. Given that the official opposition is about as much use as a chocolate teapot, what we need is an opposition to the opposition. What we need is an indefinite general strike against the cuts until the government gives in, and calls a general election!
The Tories hate the public service ethos, they would much prefer everything to be privatised for the benefit of shareholders and their rich toffee-nosed friends in the City. They hoped of course that “The Big Society” would step in and make good some of the deficit, so that if, for instance, your council couldn’t afford to empty your bin any more, a possee of well-meaning citizens and charities could do it instead. The cuts, however, are damaging the income of charities as well – who has the wherewithal to donate to charity when their own job is under threat?
Now that The Big Society isn’t happening, a reasonable person might expect contrition and a re-think, but the Tories and their catamites are pressing on regardless into the valley of death. Their chief cheerleaders in this divide and rule programme of starving the councils of cash and then blaming them when they are unable to provide essential services are Eric Pickles and Grant Shapps at the Department of Communities. [A misnomer if ever there was one. Department for Dismantling Communities would be a more apposite title, these days]
Pickles operates on precisely the opposite principle to his more famous namesake, Wilfred, who was known for his catchphrase “Give ‘Em the Money, Mabel”. The Tories like to trot him out as their equivalent of John Prescott, but in fact he has fewer appealing attributes and even less charisma and life-experience, having risen in obscurity from the ranks of Bradford Council. Despite the fundamental dishonesty of a policy which denies councils the money to carry out essential services and then blames them for not emptying the bins, Pickles is at least straightforward about what he does.
Grant Shapps was in the news recently for holding up the “fact” that Manchester City Council had a “Twitter Tsar” on their payroll, at vast expense, naturally. When the story was investigated further, however, it was discovered that the “Twitter Tsar” was, in fact, the person who ran the Council’s web sites, and that “tweeting” was merely a small part of what his job entailed.
One of the most damaging aspects of this slash and burn approach to local authority funding by the Department of Communities has of course been its impact on the homeless and other vulnerable people who depend on Council social care.
We’ve seen this happen particularly in Nottingham, recently, where Framework, a local charity working to alleviate the problems of homelessness and deprivation, have been forced to the brink of legal action over budget cuts emanating from central government
Andrew Redfern, Chief Executive of Framework, said:
“We have served ‘letters prior to action’ (the first stage of a judicial review) on the department for Communities and Local Government and Nottingham City Council. There is a deadline for them to respond and we hope this may help them to resolve the issue.
“Framework serves homeless and vulnerable people, including those with mental health, substance and alcohol problems, older and younger people, people with learning disabilities and women fleeing domestic violence. We have a duty to defend the thousands of people who will lose their support and may become homeless because of the cuts. Whatever the outcome of this legal action I hope it will shine a light on the ludicrous nature of the situation.
“In the Comprehensive Spending Review the government announced a reduction in the national SP budget of only 12% in real terms over four years. The actual amount of cash available for the programme next year is barely 1% below the figure for the current year, yet it transpires that Nottingham City Council is proposing a cut of 45% (from £22.37m to £12.93m a reduction of £9.4m) based on its interpretation of the local government settlement. It will ameliorate this with an extra £2m for one year only.
“The department for Communities and Local Government disputes the city council’s figures stating that Nottingham’s SP allocation has been reduced by no more than 11.3%. The department has not yet given a precise figure.
“The argument between central and local government leaves us perplexed. The confusion about the settlement is causing chaos. The city council has issued de-commissioning notices for many of its SP-funded services from the end of March 2011 and reduced contract values on the others to £1 per annum. In view of this we have had no choice but to give notice to over 200 staff working directly with vulnerable people in the city.
“We are receiving more and more enquiries from service-users and concerned members of the public asking what will happen in April.
“The proposed cuts will have a devastating impact on the city. Levels of rough sleeping, crime, anti-social behaviour, ill-health, unemployment and poverty will all increase.
“We have to do whatever we can to stop the cuts. Our decision to seek a judicial review is one of the ways we are trying to do this,” added Mr Redfern.
Councillor John Collins, the leader of Nottingham City Council, has written an open letter to Grant Shapps pointing out the errors in his calculations of the amount by which the Support Grant has been cut. Not that this has made any difference. He may as well have saved his breath to cool his porridge.
The fact is that Grant Shapps doesn’t need the effects of his actions pointing out to him. He knows already what the effects are, and if he doesn’t, then he has (still) plenty of civil servants who can explain it to him. It's not a regrettable mistake, it's a deliberate strategy.
Once again, it is past midnight as I sit here, scribing out these words by the combined light of a low-energy light bulb in the standard lamp and the glow of the remaining coals through the window of the stove.
I can hear the wind buffeting the trees in the garden making them thrash about as if in pain, and I can hear the rain, sounding for all the world like handfuls of gravel being flung against the windows of the conservatory.
In olden days, of course, this sort of weather would be the backdrop for a secret lover arriving at your window in the middle of the night. In a poem by Keats for example, or a novel by Thomas Hardy. These days, we’re not so romantic, and every time I hear the rain driving against the conservatory, I think of those forced to be out there in the night, stuck out in the rain with no choice and nowhere to go.
And I think of those who voted for the Tories and the Liberal Dimwits at the last election, and I wonder if they are happy with this outcome? Happy that people are sleeping out in the perishing cold and the rain?
Is Grant Shapps happy with the results of his actions? Is David Cameron, as he goes back home for the weekend to his second home in his constituency, paid for by us, or to Chequers, with its hundreds of bedrooms, paid for by us?
And again I ask, if you are NOT happy with the outcome, why do you allow it to continue?
For the rest of us, the streets are full of cobbles and there are many, many windows in Whitehall. Given that the official opposition is about as much use as a chocolate teapot, what we need is an opposition to the opposition. What we need is an indefinite general strike against the cuts until the government gives in, and calls a general election!
When is a secret not a secret?
There has been a spate recently of rich, famous, influential and politically powerful people being shown up as hypocrites and self-aggrandising idiots, by the likes of the undercover reporters of The Daily Telegraph, and Wikileaks.
The Telegraph upset Vince Cable, by pretending to be constituents and encouraging him to make grandstanding comments about being “at war” with Rupert Murdoch, which ultimately cost him a chunk of his job. And now he is bleating about complaining to the Press Complaints Commission. While I have absolutely no desire to see Rupert Murdoch's empire grow and prosper, the trick is, dear Vince, if you don’t want to be caught out saying one thing in private and something different in public, then don’t have a hypocritical two-faced stance where your beliefs and actions differ according to who it is you think you are talking to. Shimples, as any Meerkat would tell you.
Or to put it another way, if you are so embarrassed that your party is propping up the Tories as they continue in their revenge rape of the country, then don’t pretend apologetically to your constituents that you are at war with them – go to war with them, and vote with your feet. Pull out. As Si Kahn says, it’s not the fights you dreamed of, it’s those you really fought.
Wikileaks has done a similar thing to the Daily Telegraph, but on a much bigger scale of course. They have shown up almost every US diplomat as being a lying conniving two-faced shyster. Many of us already suspected this was the case, of course, but it’s good to have it confirmed at source.
This is why the CIA are so keen to lean on Norway – and indeed to lean on our own legal system – to make it difficult for Julian Assange. Whether or not he is guilty of the crimes for which he is currently going through the legal system, you can bet your sweet palookah that the US would dearly love to see him extradited, wearing a hood and orange overalls, and chained to a latrine in Guantanamo. To them, and to the UK politicians who bleat on about the necessity of being able to keep certain things secret from us, the great unwashed, I have really only one thing to say.
It is the same thing that you said to us, every time a piece of anti-libertarian legislation chipped away yet another fragment of our precious civil liberties.
“If you have got nothing to hide, you have got nothing to fear”.
Hello, boot, may I introduce you to the other foot?
The Telegraph upset Vince Cable, by pretending to be constituents and encouraging him to make grandstanding comments about being “at war” with Rupert Murdoch, which ultimately cost him a chunk of his job. And now he is bleating about complaining to the Press Complaints Commission. While I have absolutely no desire to see Rupert Murdoch's empire grow and prosper, the trick is, dear Vince, if you don’t want to be caught out saying one thing in private and something different in public, then don’t have a hypocritical two-faced stance where your beliefs and actions differ according to who it is you think you are talking to. Shimples, as any Meerkat would tell you.
Or to put it another way, if you are so embarrassed that your party is propping up the Tories as they continue in their revenge rape of the country, then don’t pretend apologetically to your constituents that you are at war with them – go to war with them, and vote with your feet. Pull out. As Si Kahn says, it’s not the fights you dreamed of, it’s those you really fought.
Wikileaks has done a similar thing to the Daily Telegraph, but on a much bigger scale of course. They have shown up almost every US diplomat as being a lying conniving two-faced shyster. Many of us already suspected this was the case, of course, but it’s good to have it confirmed at source.
This is why the CIA are so keen to lean on Norway – and indeed to lean on our own legal system – to make it difficult for Julian Assange. Whether or not he is guilty of the crimes for which he is currently going through the legal system, you can bet your sweet palookah that the US would dearly love to see him extradited, wearing a hood and orange overalls, and chained to a latrine in Guantanamo. To them, and to the UK politicians who bleat on about the necessity of being able to keep certain things secret from us, the great unwashed, I have really only one thing to say.
It is the same thing that you said to us, every time a piece of anti-libertarian legislation chipped away yet another fragment of our precious civil liberties.
“If you have got nothing to hide, you have got nothing to fear”.
Hello, boot, may I introduce you to the other foot?
Friday, 10 December 2010
Testing Times
Animal testing on cosmetics was banned completely by the EU last year. Big pharma companies such as Procter and Gamble can get round this law, however, by selling cosmetics in the EU which have been tested on animals elsewhere, eg America or China.
Back in 2003, the EU established a deadline of 2013 for the complete banning from sale of ANY animal tested cosmetics in the EU. This has given the industry more than a decade to prepare – and, of course, since a massive amount of cosmetics, out of the global market, are sold in Europe, this will put massive financial pressure on the animal testing companies to stop the cruel and un-necessary process of causing suffering to animals just to tick a box that says they have tested a new mascara!
But now, of course, under lobbying pressure from the big pharma companies, the EU is trying to move the goalposts and delay the implementation of the 2013 ban. Even though they have had 10 years to prepare.
So, we now have a choice. We can let them continue with the litany of pain, even though in my book we should be banning it NOW, let alone in three years from now. We can let them go on imprisoning animals in solitary confinement in wire cages, causing emotional distress and physical injuries; we can let them go on force-feeding animals chemicals via tubes shoved down their throats, at many times the doses acceptable to humans, toxins that cause cancer and other effects; we can let them go on poisoning and killing thousands of baby animals in toxicity tests; we can let them go on duplicating tests because of commercial confidentiality and disputes over results; we can let them go on giving animals a painful and terrifying death in a gas chamber once their usefulness to the company has expired.
Or we can stop them, by lobbying our democratic representatives and letting them no, in no uncertain terms, how unacceptable we find the process, and raise your voices in defence of the ban, insist on the 2013 deadline, in fact, insist on it being brought forward!
If cosmetics HAVE to be tested somewhere, maybe we should test them on Euro MPs. After all, if they can make that crowd look attractive, then we will KNOW they truly work.
Back in 2003, the EU established a deadline of 2013 for the complete banning from sale of ANY animal tested cosmetics in the EU. This has given the industry more than a decade to prepare – and, of course, since a massive amount of cosmetics, out of the global market, are sold in Europe, this will put massive financial pressure on the animal testing companies to stop the cruel and un-necessary process of causing suffering to animals just to tick a box that says they have tested a new mascara!
But now, of course, under lobbying pressure from the big pharma companies, the EU is trying to move the goalposts and delay the implementation of the 2013 ban. Even though they have had 10 years to prepare.
So, we now have a choice. We can let them continue with the litany of pain, even though in my book we should be banning it NOW, let alone in three years from now. We can let them go on imprisoning animals in solitary confinement in wire cages, causing emotional distress and physical injuries; we can let them go on force-feeding animals chemicals via tubes shoved down their throats, at many times the doses acceptable to humans, toxins that cause cancer and other effects; we can let them go on poisoning and killing thousands of baby animals in toxicity tests; we can let them go on duplicating tests because of commercial confidentiality and disputes over results; we can let them go on giving animals a painful and terrifying death in a gas chamber once their usefulness to the company has expired.
Or we can stop them, by lobbying our democratic representatives and letting them no, in no uncertain terms, how unacceptable we find the process, and raise your voices in defence of the ban, insist on the 2013 deadline, in fact, insist on it being brought forward!
If cosmetics HAVE to be tested somewhere, maybe we should test them on Euro MPs. After all, if they can make that crowd look attractive, then we will KNOW they truly work.
Monday, 22 November 2010
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.
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!
Thursday, 24 June 2010
Just Can't Budge It
Sometimes, for about a nano-second, a tiny bit of me feels sorry for the Literal Dimwits. I mean, they sort of go back to Gladstone, they are sort of a part of history. That's also their problem, though, now. Since Clegg bet the house on vingt et un bleu, and it came up, they don't stand for anything any more.
And at the next election, unless they are VERY stupid (always a possibility) Labour are going to be shouting from the rooftops, VOTE CLEGG, GET CAMERON! and even those not taken in my that must, perforce, wonder what exactly they would get if they ever voted Lib Dem again. I'll give you a clue, it's wearing a poke, it's covered in mud, and it likes haycorns. Voting Liberal Democrat is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.
Either Clegg hasn't realised that he's been so comprehensively shafted by Cameron (who is still wandering around with the slightly glazed air of someone who can't quite believe it ISN'T all a dream and he ISN'T going to wake up any moment in the shower with Sue-Ellen) or he has realised and, slut that he is, with his political knickers metaphorically round his ankles, he just doesn't care. Because 20 seconds of power is so worth sacrificing 150 years of principles for.
He's seriously underestimated this Forgemasters thing though. Not only is it a PR disaster akin to crapping on your own doorstep then treading in it, in Sheffield, but people in the Lib Dims at large are starting to ask, "hang on, if our glorious leader couldn't stop the Evil Tories cancelling a LOAN (not even a subsidy or a grant, a LOAN) to innovate manufacturing technology in a city for which he is one of the MPs, what exactly, apart from being the convenient whipping boys and patsies for announcing the Tory cuts, are we GETTING from this coalition?"
The rot, as far as the Tories/Mini-Tories are concerned, starts there. That is the only good news, as I confidently expect that by this time next year, dynamiting hospitals will be on the agenda and we will all be queueing in the street to catch loaves of bread thrown off army lorries. We just have to hope the rubber wheels fall off quickly, before they can do too much damage to the recovery, to British industry, and to jobs.
Seventy years ago, if you had a policy of blowing up Britain's infrastructure and deliberately wrecking its economy, you would have been tried as a traitor, stood up against a wall, and shot. How (sadly) times have changed.
The run-up to this budget has deployed the classic black propaganda technique of making people think it was going to be worse than it actually is. Although it is worse than it seems, when you look at it in more detail, the real damage to the economy will come as some of its key measures start to kick in, in the autumn, and in the new year, assuming the coalition lasts that long.
Before the election, the Liberal Dimwits opposed any increase in VAT, calling it a Tory tax bombshell. Osborne “failed to rule out” a rise in VAT, which told us all we needed to know really. And now the Liberals have helped the Tories achieve it, because of course there are some things which are so much more important than having principles.
So, in the autumn spending review, and in the departmental budget cuts of 25%, there is going to be a steep rise in the unemployment figures. The more so, when you factor in the effect of local government redundancies as well, as councils, unable to raise council tax, shed jobs instead, to cut costs. All of these people thrown out of work in the public sector will end up on the dole, drawing benefits, instead of earning money, paying taxes and putting spending power into the economy to drive the private sector revival. That revival is now in peril, as a result.
This budget is a victory for the small-minded, short-termist bigots who bang on about “non-jobs” in the public sector; arrogant, ignorant people who talk as if mixing cement was in some way more worthwhile than balancing the overtime budget of a busy social work department, or emptying bins, or educating children. People who think the amount of income tax you pay should dictate your say in society. These people still just don’t get it, they think that it’s possible to separate the public and the private sectors, that somehow they aren’t both part of the same economy. That you can somehow decimate one, without damaging the other.
But let’s just assume for a moment that this wacky idea has validity. Are ALL of these suddenly unemployed public sector workers going to get jobs in the private sector then? Where are these jobs? Where ARE they? And by putting VAT up to 20% in the new year, adding to inflation, transport costs, and depressing retail sales, how is any of THAT going to create or sustain a private sector revival?
Housing benefit is to be capped, so anyone who is unfortunate enough to find themselves out of work will now be squeezed in that area as well. The medical test qualifications for disability benefit are going to be extended and accelerated, again as a sop to those in the Tory camp who believe the concepts of “the sturdy beggar” and “the undeserving poor”, the sort of people David Cameron now refers to as benefit scroungers (now that he is showing his true colours). As if rotting on benefits, because of a complete lack of hope, prospects and opportunity, to the point where it becomes inured in your culture, is some kind of career decision! I also find myself wondering, has anyone done a cost-benefit analysis on whether the COST of all this additional medical testing will outweigh any savings to be made? Because this government has a habit of talking tough, but being equally profligate and stupid in its own way as Labour was. After announcing the bonfire of the Quangos, we’ve now got a new Quango for budgetary responsibility, and a couple of Quangos to monitor international aid, and now presumably there’s going to have to be a body of some description to organise this medical testing, unless it’s going to be outsourced, and who knows what expense? And of course we can always find taxpayer money to give to whirly-eyed fundamentalists or yummy mummies who want to set up their own school because they think they can do it better than the teachers.
The DWP’s figure for fraudulent DLA claims is about 0.05%, whereas the government are expecting something like a 20% reduction in claims as a result. That disparity can only mean that a lot of people currently eligible for, and deserving of, DLA, will no longer get it. And the net result might be to make it impossible for them to continue to work, and to pay taxes.
And of course, the Tories and their stooges think that all these people can be got off benefits and into jobs in the private sector. Again, where ARE these jobs going to be created? Where are these jobs? Quite how “bipping” people off benefits and not giving them any alternative employment counts as “protecting the vulnerable” is lost on me.
The Tories seem to think that cutting corporation tax will make rapacious international capitalists and entrepreneurs re-invest the savings, in employing more people in the UK, especially with the prospect of not having to pay NI. They won’t, they will just pocket it with a self-satisfied “kerching”, into a nice little offshore account in Belize. Just like, when the housing boom was in full swing, all those Tory politicians protested so loudly at the time that the housing bubble was unsustainable and all their chums in the city were getting usustainably rich and filling their unsustainable boots.
Fact is, if there was political will, there is the resource and the necessary plan to provide affordable housing for all in this country and to wipe out homelessness and reduce the pressure on the existing social housing stock.
Trouble is, we are NOW stuck with an unelected government which thinks it has a mandate to dynamite disused public buildings instead of converting them into social housing, because George Osborne got the idea from some redneck seal-clubber over a beer and a whaleburger in Tokyo.
It is, of course, the same old same old from the Tories, and no doubt those who have had their compassion bypassed at birth will be chortling about it and engaging in the usual triumphalism. I am surprised, though, that the Liberals haven’t had sleepless nights and considered suicide. Usually people who rat and re-rat that much suffer dreadfully from remorse and guilt. At least if they retain a spark of humanity. They have immense mental problems and guilt, because the gulf between their own innate compassion and the contradiction of their actions drives them over the edge. I can only observe that in the case of Clegg, Alexander and Cable, it couldn’t happen to a nicer, more deserving, bunch of people. The disused lift shaft awaits.
The standard Tory line is that there was no alternative, and that the finances inherited from Labour were a shambles. Labour had many faults, but nevertheless, there was another way. There still is another way. One which continues to attempt to grow the economy, while protecting the services which we all use and the benefits on which so many depend. And if the markets and the ratings agencies don’t like it, well, they can bloody well invade. They weren’t that good at picking winners when the bankers (who have got off far too lightly in this budget, but again that is only what you would expect from the Tories) were buying imaginary derivatives with non-existent money.
But the only way we will get this quickly, is if the coalition implodes. The only glimmer of light at the moment is that there are some Liberal Dimwits who are waking up to exactly how far Clegg has sold them down the river. Let’s hope they start rowing back upstream, and soon. Let’s hope they rediscover that they used to have a conscience, and that when they said they went into politics to make a difference, it wasn’t by dynamiting hospitals.
Back in the days of Thatcher, I used to have a foam rubber stress "brick" that I could throw at the television (in place of a real one, which would have been rather expensive in televisions)
Watching Osborne on telly just now, I think I may need to go and find it up in the attic.
"You shouldn't have to go off to work in the morning and see your neighbour's blinds drawn down as they spend their life on unemployment benefit"
Apart from the fact that you probably wouldn't have to do it for long, because this budget will soon result in BOTH houses with the blinds drawn down and the occupants on the dole, let's just unpick the thinking behind that statement.
How nasty, small-minded and divisive. Words calculated to appeal like a dog-whistle to those who harbour inbuilt prejudice towards the unemployed. What a gross over-simplification of the many and complex reasons for lack of opportunity, poverty and deprivation.
How *deliberately* calculated to appeal to the "there's too many of them over here with their benefits and their plasma TVs" brigade. People who have never known, or have forgotten, what economic deprivation is and who caused it (in South Yorkshire, it was the Tories)
And without offering any solution, either. So they are going to stop the benefit of the guy with his blinds down all day. What's he going to do? Get a job in the blind factory? I don't think they are hiring, right now.
Anyone who has the sheer gall and effrontery to utter such an evil, twisted, divisive message and then in the next breath to claim that we are all in this together really DOES deserve to be struck by lightning, and soon.
To those who say if we don’t do this, we will be punished by the markets,
I am sorry to say I disagree. Disregarding the fact that I think these people have no moral authority to dictate how we run our country anyway, and very little skill and judgement in financial rating anyway, at least from the evidence of their past performance, would the down-grading of the UK's rating, assuming it happened, lead to an immediate closure of any "money tap" - I don't believe it would. I believe it would make it more difficult, but not impossible, to get out of this mess.
Again, I think this is a matter of perspective. It's not surprising that having weathered the international banking crisis of 2008 when the whole of the financial sector was teetering on the brink of sliding off Canary Wharf and into the river, the nation's finances are in poor shape. But we've always had a National Debt, since the days of Walpole. And look what a mess we were in after the second World War, when basically we were in hock to the US up to our eyeballs. The difference then is that we had politicians of skill courage and vision, who in the teeth of that, established the Welfare State.
I am also becoming very skeptical about this analogy with Greece. It's trotted out regularly to explain the Damascene conversion of Clegg and Cable to the Tory hard line - the story being that, somehow, over the weekend of the coalition cabal, they also carved out the time to receive a detailed briefing on Greek economic matters and realised how bad it was. If you believe that, how do you feel about the tooth fairy? Greece doesn't have control over its own economy, because it made the misguided decision to join the Euro, and now it's in the same position we were in on Black Wednesday, of having to take medicine that is not appropriate for it, because when it comes to the Euro, one size fits all, for good or ill. We are not, thank God, stuck with the Euro and all its problems and we do have control over our own interest rates, should that be necessary.
I have said enough on here before now about how stupid Labour were, wasting money on things like illegal wars and ID cards, and I have seen at first hand on a smaller scale how profligate government was. I also contend that at the end of the day, this lot are probably wasting just as much money in their own way, they are just wasting it on different things (unecessary new Quangos, re branding the DCSF, etc)
I have no objection to the principle of adjustment in the abstract, but I do, strongly and bitterly, resent the idea that the poorest and weakest must adjust the most, that this needs to be done with unseemly haste just to placate "the markets" - which even if this were true, then begs the question "Who Governs Britain" and once again I question this assumption that the recovery will still happen despite mass unemployment approaching three million, job losses, bankruptcies, reposessions, people being forced off benefits on the premise of non existent private sector jobs, VAT increases and the risk of high inflation.
If there were five jobs for every applicant, instead of the other way round, then George Osborne might have a point. He would still be a smarmy little squit whose face I would never tire of punching, but he might have a point. But it IS five applicants to every job, and it's going to get worse.
WHERE ARE THE JOBS?????
I often hear the phrase, when benefits are being discussed
“Those who choose not to work”
It’s an interesting concept. We're back to sturdy beggars and the undeserving poor here again. I contend that, given the chance and the opportunity, anyone and everyone wants to work, but that generations of people have been beaten down by lack of motivation, lack of opportunity, and lack of any idea how to go about it. Usually in areas of former heavy industry, where there is very little "choice" involved because there ARE NO JOBS.
I take issue with the word "choosing". But I do agree that those unfortunate enough not to be able to find work should be financially supported by a state benefit system, yes: I believe it's what sets us apart as a civilised society. Or one of the things anyway. Housing Benefit has been fuelled by the housing boom which was created by unsustainable offers of credit from irresponsible banks to people who didn't know what they were getting into, encouraged by lax regulation all around and - let us not forget - not one Tory voice was ever raised to object to this because their pals in the City were all busy filling their boots, thank you very much.
I am a little bit unclear about what people are supposed to do though, if there's no point in them applying for jobs and they "choose" not to work, and they don't get any benefits, I guess it comes down to .... oooh, a couple of days on their grouse moor for those with private incomes, and the rest ... er ... begging, I guess.
People who advocate this sort of thing do, however, make a point about the Labour market which is generally overlooked, which is the need to re-think what we have got along the lines of socially useful companies run at a profit by and for the public good. It is called Social Enterprise. This is a viable "third way" that would solve many of the problems and get people away from this "public versus private sector" class war which Osborne seems hell-bent on encouraging. I doubt, however, that he has ever heard of it.
And finally, today, we have had the most breathtaking example of doublespeak of this whole government so far, when they talk of "Revitalising Retirement"* by making old people work even longer! I feel really revitalised!
*In the same way as you could revitalise child care by sending them up chimneys (Oh, hang on, that's in NEXT year's budget)
How long, I ask, can these charlatans, this unelected government with no mandate to wreck our economy, be allowed to continue causing this damage without being challenged?
The only sane response to this budget, I think, is that of Quellcrist Falconer in the Harlan’s World novels by Richard. K. Morgan. I couldn’t put it any better. George Orwell couldn’t put it any better.
J B Priestley and S P B Mais couldn’t put it any better. So here it is.
So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, TAKE IT PERSONALLY. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it PERSONAL. Do as much damage as you can. GET YOUR MESSAGE ACROSS. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous makes the difference, the ONLY difference in their eyes, between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it's just business, it's politics, it's the way of the world, it's a tough life and that IT'S NOTHING PERSONAL. Well, fuck them. Make it personal
And at the next election, unless they are VERY stupid (always a possibility) Labour are going to be shouting from the rooftops, VOTE CLEGG, GET CAMERON! and even those not taken in my that must, perforce, wonder what exactly they would get if they ever voted Lib Dem again. I'll give you a clue, it's wearing a poke, it's covered in mud, and it likes haycorns. Voting Liberal Democrat is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.
Either Clegg hasn't realised that he's been so comprehensively shafted by Cameron (who is still wandering around with the slightly glazed air of someone who can't quite believe it ISN'T all a dream and he ISN'T going to wake up any moment in the shower with Sue-Ellen) or he has realised and, slut that he is, with his political knickers metaphorically round his ankles, he just doesn't care. Because 20 seconds of power is so worth sacrificing 150 years of principles for.
He's seriously underestimated this Forgemasters thing though. Not only is it a PR disaster akin to crapping on your own doorstep then treading in it, in Sheffield, but people in the Lib Dims at large are starting to ask, "hang on, if our glorious leader couldn't stop the Evil Tories cancelling a LOAN (not even a subsidy or a grant, a LOAN) to innovate manufacturing technology in a city for which he is one of the MPs, what exactly, apart from being the convenient whipping boys and patsies for announcing the Tory cuts, are we GETTING from this coalition?"
The rot, as far as the Tories/Mini-Tories are concerned, starts there. That is the only good news, as I confidently expect that by this time next year, dynamiting hospitals will be on the agenda and we will all be queueing in the street to catch loaves of bread thrown off army lorries. We just have to hope the rubber wheels fall off quickly, before they can do too much damage to the recovery, to British industry, and to jobs.
Seventy years ago, if you had a policy of blowing up Britain's infrastructure and deliberately wrecking its economy, you would have been tried as a traitor, stood up against a wall, and shot. How (sadly) times have changed.
The run-up to this budget has deployed the classic black propaganda technique of making people think it was going to be worse than it actually is. Although it is worse than it seems, when you look at it in more detail, the real damage to the economy will come as some of its key measures start to kick in, in the autumn, and in the new year, assuming the coalition lasts that long.
Before the election, the Liberal Dimwits opposed any increase in VAT, calling it a Tory tax bombshell. Osborne “failed to rule out” a rise in VAT, which told us all we needed to know really. And now the Liberals have helped the Tories achieve it, because of course there are some things which are so much more important than having principles.
So, in the autumn spending review, and in the departmental budget cuts of 25%, there is going to be a steep rise in the unemployment figures. The more so, when you factor in the effect of local government redundancies as well, as councils, unable to raise council tax, shed jobs instead, to cut costs. All of these people thrown out of work in the public sector will end up on the dole, drawing benefits, instead of earning money, paying taxes and putting spending power into the economy to drive the private sector revival. That revival is now in peril, as a result.
This budget is a victory for the small-minded, short-termist bigots who bang on about “non-jobs” in the public sector; arrogant, ignorant people who talk as if mixing cement was in some way more worthwhile than balancing the overtime budget of a busy social work department, or emptying bins, or educating children. People who think the amount of income tax you pay should dictate your say in society. These people still just don’t get it, they think that it’s possible to separate the public and the private sectors, that somehow they aren’t both part of the same economy. That you can somehow decimate one, without damaging the other.
But let’s just assume for a moment that this wacky idea has validity. Are ALL of these suddenly unemployed public sector workers going to get jobs in the private sector then? Where are these jobs? Where ARE they? And by putting VAT up to 20% in the new year, adding to inflation, transport costs, and depressing retail sales, how is any of THAT going to create or sustain a private sector revival?
Housing benefit is to be capped, so anyone who is unfortunate enough to find themselves out of work will now be squeezed in that area as well. The medical test qualifications for disability benefit are going to be extended and accelerated, again as a sop to those in the Tory camp who believe the concepts of “the sturdy beggar” and “the undeserving poor”, the sort of people David Cameron now refers to as benefit scroungers (now that he is showing his true colours). As if rotting on benefits, because of a complete lack of hope, prospects and opportunity, to the point where it becomes inured in your culture, is some kind of career decision! I also find myself wondering, has anyone done a cost-benefit analysis on whether the COST of all this additional medical testing will outweigh any savings to be made? Because this government has a habit of talking tough, but being equally profligate and stupid in its own way as Labour was. After announcing the bonfire of the Quangos, we’ve now got a new Quango for budgetary responsibility, and a couple of Quangos to monitor international aid, and now presumably there’s going to have to be a body of some description to organise this medical testing, unless it’s going to be outsourced, and who knows what expense? And of course we can always find taxpayer money to give to whirly-eyed fundamentalists or yummy mummies who want to set up their own school because they think they can do it better than the teachers.
The DWP’s figure for fraudulent DLA claims is about 0.05%, whereas the government are expecting something like a 20% reduction in claims as a result. That disparity can only mean that a lot of people currently eligible for, and deserving of, DLA, will no longer get it. And the net result might be to make it impossible for them to continue to work, and to pay taxes.
And of course, the Tories and their stooges think that all these people can be got off benefits and into jobs in the private sector. Again, where ARE these jobs going to be created? Where are these jobs? Quite how “bipping” people off benefits and not giving them any alternative employment counts as “protecting the vulnerable” is lost on me.
The Tories seem to think that cutting corporation tax will make rapacious international capitalists and entrepreneurs re-invest the savings, in employing more people in the UK, especially with the prospect of not having to pay NI. They won’t, they will just pocket it with a self-satisfied “kerching”, into a nice little offshore account in Belize. Just like, when the housing boom was in full swing, all those Tory politicians protested so loudly at the time that the housing bubble was unsustainable and all their chums in the city were getting usustainably rich and filling their unsustainable boots.
Fact is, if there was political will, there is the resource and the necessary plan to provide affordable housing for all in this country and to wipe out homelessness and reduce the pressure on the existing social housing stock.
Trouble is, we are NOW stuck with an unelected government which thinks it has a mandate to dynamite disused public buildings instead of converting them into social housing, because George Osborne got the idea from some redneck seal-clubber over a beer and a whaleburger in Tokyo.
It is, of course, the same old same old from the Tories, and no doubt those who have had their compassion bypassed at birth will be chortling about it and engaging in the usual triumphalism. I am surprised, though, that the Liberals haven’t had sleepless nights and considered suicide. Usually people who rat and re-rat that much suffer dreadfully from remorse and guilt. At least if they retain a spark of humanity. They have immense mental problems and guilt, because the gulf between their own innate compassion and the contradiction of their actions drives them over the edge. I can only observe that in the case of Clegg, Alexander and Cable, it couldn’t happen to a nicer, more deserving, bunch of people. The disused lift shaft awaits.
The standard Tory line is that there was no alternative, and that the finances inherited from Labour were a shambles. Labour had many faults, but nevertheless, there was another way. There still is another way. One which continues to attempt to grow the economy, while protecting the services which we all use and the benefits on which so many depend. And if the markets and the ratings agencies don’t like it, well, they can bloody well invade. They weren’t that good at picking winners when the bankers (who have got off far too lightly in this budget, but again that is only what you would expect from the Tories) were buying imaginary derivatives with non-existent money.
But the only way we will get this quickly, is if the coalition implodes. The only glimmer of light at the moment is that there are some Liberal Dimwits who are waking up to exactly how far Clegg has sold them down the river. Let’s hope they start rowing back upstream, and soon. Let’s hope they rediscover that they used to have a conscience, and that when they said they went into politics to make a difference, it wasn’t by dynamiting hospitals.
Back in the days of Thatcher, I used to have a foam rubber stress "brick" that I could throw at the television (in place of a real one, which would have been rather expensive in televisions)
Watching Osborne on telly just now, I think I may need to go and find it up in the attic.
"You shouldn't have to go off to work in the morning and see your neighbour's blinds drawn down as they spend their life on unemployment benefit"
Apart from the fact that you probably wouldn't have to do it for long, because this budget will soon result in BOTH houses with the blinds drawn down and the occupants on the dole, let's just unpick the thinking behind that statement.
How nasty, small-minded and divisive. Words calculated to appeal like a dog-whistle to those who harbour inbuilt prejudice towards the unemployed. What a gross over-simplification of the many and complex reasons for lack of opportunity, poverty and deprivation.
How *deliberately* calculated to appeal to the "there's too many of them over here with their benefits and their plasma TVs" brigade. People who have never known, or have forgotten, what economic deprivation is and who caused it (in South Yorkshire, it was the Tories)
And without offering any solution, either. So they are going to stop the benefit of the guy with his blinds down all day. What's he going to do? Get a job in the blind factory? I don't think they are hiring, right now.
Anyone who has the sheer gall and effrontery to utter such an evil, twisted, divisive message and then in the next breath to claim that we are all in this together really DOES deserve to be struck by lightning, and soon.
To those who say if we don’t do this, we will be punished by the markets,
I am sorry to say I disagree. Disregarding the fact that I think these people have no moral authority to dictate how we run our country anyway, and very little skill and judgement in financial rating anyway, at least from the evidence of their past performance, would the down-grading of the UK's rating, assuming it happened, lead to an immediate closure of any "money tap" - I don't believe it would. I believe it would make it more difficult, but not impossible, to get out of this mess.
Again, I think this is a matter of perspective. It's not surprising that having weathered the international banking crisis of 2008 when the whole of the financial sector was teetering on the brink of sliding off Canary Wharf and into the river, the nation's finances are in poor shape. But we've always had a National Debt, since the days of Walpole. And look what a mess we were in after the second World War, when basically we were in hock to the US up to our eyeballs. The difference then is that we had politicians of skill courage and vision, who in the teeth of that, established the Welfare State.
I am also becoming very skeptical about this analogy with Greece. It's trotted out regularly to explain the Damascene conversion of Clegg and Cable to the Tory hard line - the story being that, somehow, over the weekend of the coalition cabal, they also carved out the time to receive a detailed briefing on Greek economic matters and realised how bad it was. If you believe that, how do you feel about the tooth fairy? Greece doesn't have control over its own economy, because it made the misguided decision to join the Euro, and now it's in the same position we were in on Black Wednesday, of having to take medicine that is not appropriate for it, because when it comes to the Euro, one size fits all, for good or ill. We are not, thank God, stuck with the Euro and all its problems and we do have control over our own interest rates, should that be necessary.
I have said enough on here before now about how stupid Labour were, wasting money on things like illegal wars and ID cards, and I have seen at first hand on a smaller scale how profligate government was. I also contend that at the end of the day, this lot are probably wasting just as much money in their own way, they are just wasting it on different things (unecessary new Quangos, re branding the DCSF, etc)
I have no objection to the principle of adjustment in the abstract, but I do, strongly and bitterly, resent the idea that the poorest and weakest must adjust the most, that this needs to be done with unseemly haste just to placate "the markets" - which even if this were true, then begs the question "Who Governs Britain" and once again I question this assumption that the recovery will still happen despite mass unemployment approaching three million, job losses, bankruptcies, reposessions, people being forced off benefits on the premise of non existent private sector jobs, VAT increases and the risk of high inflation.
If there were five jobs for every applicant, instead of the other way round, then George Osborne might have a point. He would still be a smarmy little squit whose face I would never tire of punching, but he might have a point. But it IS five applicants to every job, and it's going to get worse.
WHERE ARE THE JOBS?????
I often hear the phrase, when benefits are being discussed
“Those who choose not to work”
It’s an interesting concept. We're back to sturdy beggars and the undeserving poor here again. I contend that, given the chance and the opportunity, anyone and everyone wants to work, but that generations of people have been beaten down by lack of motivation, lack of opportunity, and lack of any idea how to go about it. Usually in areas of former heavy industry, where there is very little "choice" involved because there ARE NO JOBS.
I take issue with the word "choosing". But I do agree that those unfortunate enough not to be able to find work should be financially supported by a state benefit system, yes: I believe it's what sets us apart as a civilised society. Or one of the things anyway. Housing Benefit has been fuelled by the housing boom which was created by unsustainable offers of credit from irresponsible banks to people who didn't know what they were getting into, encouraged by lax regulation all around and - let us not forget - not one Tory voice was ever raised to object to this because their pals in the City were all busy filling their boots, thank you very much.
I am a little bit unclear about what people are supposed to do though, if there's no point in them applying for jobs and they "choose" not to work, and they don't get any benefits, I guess it comes down to .... oooh, a couple of days on their grouse moor for those with private incomes, and the rest ... er ... begging, I guess.
People who advocate this sort of thing do, however, make a point about the Labour market which is generally overlooked, which is the need to re-think what we have got along the lines of socially useful companies run at a profit by and for the public good. It is called Social Enterprise. This is a viable "third way" that would solve many of the problems and get people away from this "public versus private sector" class war which Osborne seems hell-bent on encouraging. I doubt, however, that he has ever heard of it.
And finally, today, we have had the most breathtaking example of doublespeak of this whole government so far, when they talk of "Revitalising Retirement"* by making old people work even longer! I feel really revitalised!
*In the same way as you could revitalise child care by sending them up chimneys (Oh, hang on, that's in NEXT year's budget)
How long, I ask, can these charlatans, this unelected government with no mandate to wreck our economy, be allowed to continue causing this damage without being challenged?
The only sane response to this budget, I think, is that of Quellcrist Falconer in the Harlan’s World novels by Richard. K. Morgan. I couldn’t put it any better. George Orwell couldn’t put it any better.
J B Priestley and S P B Mais couldn’t put it any better. So here it is.
So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, TAKE IT PERSONALLY. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it PERSONAL. Do as much damage as you can. GET YOUR MESSAGE ACROSS. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous makes the difference, the ONLY difference in their eyes, between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it's just business, it's politics, it's the way of the world, it's a tough life and that IT'S NOTHING PERSONAL. Well, fuck them. Make it personal
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