How capitalism is a most curious thing (or Amazon, 38 Degrees and that tax avoidance poster)

 38 Degrees, Amazon, distribution, publishing, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Dec 052012
 

More and more I’m coming to the conclusion that we need to engage with modern corporations – not aim to destroy them by boycotting their wares.  How difficult the latter is to achieve has just become amazingly clear to me today.

An example, if you wish.  At least, when I visited the 38 Degrees page in question.  A noble attempt, via a festive and timely poster, to highlight corporations which whilst acting entirely legally may also – in the eyes of many – be behaving quite immorally (.pdf).

Only just look at the address bar of the page the poster is served up from:

Yup.  It would appear, quite unconsciously (or maybe otherwise), that 38 Degrees uses Amazon’s web services to publish material critical of the very same company.

Now I’m not posting this to criticise 38 Degrees.  I’m not trying to make anyone look hypocritical.  What I am trying to suggest, for the good of the planet, is that there must come a time when we recognise the brilliant “whats” that these corporations have created on their parallel paths to world domination – at the very same time as we begin to engage constructively with their “hows”.

No.  It’s not right for companies as significant as Amazon or Caffè Nero or Boots to legally tax-avoid their relationships with the communities they make money out of.  It’s not right to do stuff which directly impacts the quality of life of our citizens – especially as governments cut back on social spending the world over.  It’s not right to believe that only the shareholders rule business.  It’s not right to build feathered nests for the few – the few who are lucky enough to find themselves at the top.

Capitalism is a most curious thing.  Amoral to an extreme.  That Amazon should find itself making money out of distribution and delivery services which allow others to criticise its own tax arrangements is just one example of how amoral it is.  And that 38 Degrees, an admirable organisation of our very virtual times, should find it so difficult not to use such a service is, surely, just one more indication of how true my assertions over these past few months have been: there will come a time when the planet needs us all.  Corporations and people both.  The real question is: will we understand this in time?

Society has already splintered – why shouldn’t the Lib Dems split?

 38 Degrees, Avaaz.org, choice, Legal Aid, Lib Dems, McMenu, NHS, on a high, politics, single-issue campaigning, Splinternet, Tories, welfare  No Responses »
Mar 012012
 

Labour List had an interesting post yesterday from the always attuned Mark Ferguson.  In it, he suggested there was serious evidence the Lib Dems would be splitting after the 2015 general election.  I hardly think this is surprising.  Society, after all, began to splinter quite a while ago.

And I don’t mean this is a negative way: this is not broken-backed Britain we’re dealing with but a simple recognition that the united society of yore was actually, probably, in reality, a bit of a lie anyway.  The media have always loved to create perceptions which hardly correspond to ordinary people’s lives.  Journalists have deadlines to meet – and a startling angle, however inaccurate it may be, makes their jobs, editors’ jobs and newsagents’ jobs so much easier to do.

On the occasion of the recent Netroots North West event, I came to the following conclusion:

[...] Coordinating the actions of thinking people never predisposed to singular mindspeaks was never going to be an easy objective to achieve.  We are on the left precisely because we often disagree with each other.  So are we prepared, after two years of Coalition ideology, to take our principles in our hands once more and entirely trust a political party?  Or is the way forward some other different (and splintered) approach far more suited to the instincts of the 21st century?

I don’t know.

But I am inclined – if you ask me to bet on the future – that the answer for the progressive left will lie one day far more in the latter than it ever could any longer lie in the former.

So what should we do in the face of Lib Dem initiatives such as these?  Is it our responsibility to circle like vultures, looking to take advantage of easy pickings?  I think quite roundly not.  The rumblings in the Lib Dems could quite easily be interpreted as being entirely due to the strains of Coalition government.  But it would be simplistic to come to such conclusions.  Society, far more widely, for far longer, has become far more discrete and disintegrated than ever before in recent British sociocultural history.

From the strains on the Union and those calls for Scottish independence to the very fact that the Tories were quite unable to win the last general election, the vultures – if we must see them that way – which are gathering round the British body politic should not be traditional political parties looking to carve up the pie that is the British electorate.  The success of single-issue campaigning – from organisations like Avaaz.org and 38 Degrees to the recent social media-engendered movements against the Welfare, NHS and Legal Aid bills currently going through Parliament – just goes to show that getting people involved isn’t, in the future, going to be simply the old trick of putting them all in the same leaflet-delivering sack.  The old political parties will still be needed – but just like the content industries struggling to understand the Internet, they will have to change their business models, downsize their reach and learn how to work with hundreds of different interests.

Interests, incidentally, they will not be able to control in the managerialist ways they have been used to.

If the Lib Dems do split, then, it will be a sign all the other parties should take note of.  To interpret it as a weakness of Lib Dem structure would be to sadly – as well as dangerously – mistake the effect for a cause.  All parties, however well led, will soon have to face the (for them) sickening reality that there are far more ways of getting involved in politics and democracy these days than either joining or even simply supporting one of the existing political groupings.

McMenu comes to politics?  Don’t knock it.  At least, not before you properly understand its implications.

Choice is a powerful harbinger of change.  And change, from now on, is what it’s all going to be about.

Get used to it, get real or get off?

 38 Degrees, Anthony Painter, Avaaz.org, CND, Greenpeace, in a hole, Labour, LabourList, political parties  No Responses »
Sep 052011
 

If I had to choose, I think right now I’d rather be the Salvation Army.  Anthony Painter would argue otherwise:

Labour rose from community social action and now that is to be recognised in its constitution. But there’s a problem in all this. Everything that Labour has secured has been through becoming an electoral force. It is not community action and election. It is social justice secured through election.

That is the means through which political parties secure their aims. That is why you have a Labour Party as opposed to just trade unions, christian social action, or community activism. So the proposed new Clause I, while containing worthy elements, just doesn’t get it right. Labour people are part of their local community in a myriad of ways and they bring that into the party. The party reaches out to the local community and serves its needs. It does so through representative democracy. Actually, the current Clause I is better because at least it makes it clear that Labour is a political party:

“Its purpose is to organise and maintain in Parliament and in the country a political Labour Party.”

(Incidentally, more opinion on the proposed new Clause 1 can be found in yesterday’s post over at Though Cowards Flinch.)

Meanwhile, Painter goes on to underline the following:

[...] A political party is a means not an end. To secure social justice? Sure. To serve local communities? Absolutely. Is power an end in itself? Absolutely not. That’s why we have a statement of our values in the constitution. It’s why we present ideas and policies in the form of a manifesto. You just muddy things if you make ‘collective action’ a foundational function of the party. It’s not the Salvation Army. It exists to advance a set of values through electoral success.

And yet I still find the idea of the Salvation Army more attractive.  Well.  Not the Salvation Army itself – but something more resiliently wholesome and acceptable in that grander moral scheme of things than the political parties we must choose from.

Painter’s argument seems to be that in the real world of Western politicking we must accept the dirtiness and dishonesty which all that – of late – would seem to lead to and inevitably invoke.  It’s as if political parties and sincerity cannot go together.  And it is therefore our responsibility as realistic participants to accept that dirty money, marketing-ridden lies and spin after spin after spin are simply going to be givens in our daily existences.

Our sad environments.

Our envelope-stuffing cannon-fodder foot-soldier lives.

Get used to it.  Get real.  Or get off.

That seems to be the message.

But surely that’s entirely missing the point. 

If people find the connect between organisations such as 38 Degrees and Avaaz.org so much more convincing and are prepared to sign up in their millions to defend a rolling sequence of causes, where exhortations to support political party campaigns rarely reach their tens of thousands, surely we need to ask the following question: what can we do to make political parties more 21st century and as effective organisational tools as these other campaigning institutions?

For 38 Degrees and Avaaz.org are not the single-issue groupings of yore – the CNDs and Greenpeaces that welded certain profiles in tight-knit enthusiasms.  They are, rather, hybrids – halfway between a Greenpeace and a political party.  A hybrid which is very 21st century – and properly designed to work as most of us need.

How, then, do we gauge exactly what 21st century could mean – and how might we design a new kind of political party on the back of it? 

This is a question which may lead us to conclude that the openness and sincerity, the absence or presence of dirty money and the general impression that everything’s above board are all elements we should continue to keep firmly in mind – as we decide how to properly recover the initiative which, arguably, Painter’s understandable realism has nevertheless led us to so comprehensively lose.

Is David Cameron, Radicaliser Extraordinaire, the very best thing to happen to society in years?

 38 Degrees, a con, Big Society, David Cameron, Ed Miliband, False Economy, in a hole, Labour, latterday capitalism, on a high, pyramid politics  No Responses »
Jun 142011
 

Sometimes, quite despite our efforts to the contrary, things turn out very much for the better.  This is the email I received today from that excellent organisation 38 Degrees:

“I’ve seen the difference the work of 38 Degrees members has made to the debate on NHS changes. Today’s announcements seem like significant progress, but there are still big causes for concern and we all need to look carefully at the details as they emerge. Celebrate the success so far, 38 Degrees, but don’t stop speaking up for the future of our NHS!”
Dr Clare Gerada, Chair, Royal College of GPs

Dear Miljenko,

Today, Nick Clegg and David Cameron admitted that the original NHS plans were wrong, and accepted the need for changes. We’ve not won yet – but we definitely have made progress. According to Andrew Lansley’s original timetable, the NHS changes would be law by now. We’ve helped stop that happen.

Clegg and Cameron’s speeches included some steps in the right direction. But we can’t afford to drop our guard. For a start, these are just speeches – we haven’t seen the full text of the proposed laws. We will need to scrutinise the plans line by line as they pass through parliament.

We have got this far by working together. 38 Degrees members voted to start the campaign because we know just how important the NHS is – we can’t trust it’s future to politicians.

If we keep working together, we can keep the pressure on. But what should be our priorities? How can we push David Cameron to keep the promises he has made this week? How can push our MPs to vote down bits of the plans that still look dangerous? What could we do to challenge cuts to services we rely on?

Help decide what we do next together by completing this two minute poll:
http://www.38degrees.org.uk/nhs-what-shall-we-do-next

Back in April, thousands of us took part in a vote to decide together which parts of the NHS plans we were most worried about.

Today, hundreds of 38 Degrees members have been discussing the announcements and the media coverage on the 38 Degrees website and Facebook page. Here’s an attempt at a summary of what we decided to prioritise and where we seem to have got to:
What we decided together to focus on What David Cameron’s new proposals might mean
Don’t force the NHS to promote competition between private health companies: rule out price competition and promote co-operation and quality of care instead Some Progress. It sounds like the role of the NHS regulator, “Monitor”, will now have an overall focus on promoting the interests of patients not price competition as originally proposed.  The devil will be in the detail of how this works, and there is probably still more talk of competition than lots of us would like. Lib Dem MP Andrew George has warned “Monitor” could act as a “trojan horse” allowing more of the original plans to be slipped “through the back door”.
Don’t allow private companies to ”cherry pick” healthcare contracts in a way which could undermine local hospitals: put NHS services and hospitals first Progress. There will be “new safeguards” to stop private companies taking over the job of commissioning health services where hard-pressed GPs are unwilling. But the government wants to keep the policy of “Any Willing Provider” being allowed to run NHS services, including private companies.  Many experts say this policy means that in practice it will be extremely difficult to prevent “cherry-picking”. We will definitely need to look hard at this area of the legislation when it is published.
Don’t take big decisions about health spending without experts and patients being involved as well as GPs A lot of progress. It sounds like patients, nurses, and hospital doctors will now be involved in taking decisions as well as GPs. Mental Health Charity Rethink is describing the revised plans as “a real step forward for patient power”.
Don’t allow big decisions about health spending be taken behind closed doors and without democratic scrutiny Some Progress. It seems that local “health and well-being boards”, which include elected local people, will have a beefed up role in scrutinising what GP commissioning boards are up to.
Don’t force any big changes without testing them properly first – trial any changes in one area for several years first, then give parliament a fresh vote A little bit of progress. The timetable for imposing the changes has definitely been slowed down, with many of the original deadlines dropped or softened. But the government still isn’t proposing a local trial, or a fresh vote once we’ve seen how all of the new systems work.
Don’t remove the government’s “duty” to provide a comprehensive health service: keep that duty in law Success? It’s being reported that the Bill will be rewritten to reinstate this comprehensive duty. That would be a massive success – but we need to see it happen in practice before we can relax!

What areas of David Cameron’s new plan are you most concerned about? What should 38 Degrees members do together next to stand up for the future of our health service?

Have your say here:
http://www.38degrees.org.uk/nhs-what-shall-we-do-next

We won’t know exactly what the government is planning until they release detailed legislation. But we do know that some hardliners are angry that Andrew Lansley’s original plans have been changed and will be campaigning to revive them. If we keep working together, we can make sure that doesn’t happen.

Two weeks ago, before this flurry of announcements, thousands of 38 Degrees members voted to decide what we should do next. So much has changed since then, but here are some of the most popular ideas we came up with:

  • Aim to deliver copies of the Save our NHS petition to every single member of the cabinet in the next month
  • Send lots of letters to local papers to make sure they hear how many people are worried about the NHS plans
  • Hold birthday parties in July to celebrate the NHS’s 63rd birthday

Do you think theses are still the best ideas? Should we do something else? Please take 2 minutes to help decide:
http://www.38degrees.org.uk/nhs-what-shall-we-do-next

Thanks for getting involved:

David, Marie, Johnny, Hannah, Becky, Cian and the 38 Degrees team

PS: if you completed the poll last week, then thank you, but please do this one too – so much has changed in the past two weeks! http://www.38degrees.org.uk/nhs-what-shall-we-do-next

Notes:

Here are a couple of summaries of the changes to NHS plans:
Department of Health official response: http://healthandcare.dh.gov.uk/government-response-to-nhs-future-forum/
The BBC: Step-by-step guide to NHS changes: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-13749880

It’s clear that both this organisation and initiatives such as False Economy, as well as a plethora of other evidence-based social media movements, are taking their toll on this government.

Or are they?

Whilst recent polls suggest that few people want to get involved in David Cameron’s Big Society in its most formal and prescriptive manifestations, it’s absolutely the case that through both online and related offline initiatives the voting public is beginning to radicalise itself in a way that, for example, the Labour movement’s leaders in other very different times would have found difficult to even imagine.  David Cameron as the Radicaliser Extraordinaire then?  The very best thing to happen to society in years perhaps?

Maybe so.  Maybe, indeed, this is the case.  Even despite himself.  Not quite the Big Society he was looking to engender – but a Big Society of sorts he may yet be able to take advantage of.

And whilst the Labour Party in crisis shows us the real weaknesses of pyramid politics as it begins to frustrate some of those who might in other circumstances have truly placed their confidence in it, the real force for change and for a dynamically continuous improvement in our economy, state and relationships – even where this is effected in a reactive and contradictory sense; that is to say, in opposition to our desires – is precisely constituted in those individuals who Carl, in the first story I linked to at the top of today’s post, slates thus:

Sir/Madame, look at these two. Clegg and Cameron. Are you surprised? Do you wince? Do you think their compassion consists in wanting to share, nay impose, the worst of the lifestyle of the ruling class upon us grounded, not landed, folk?

Sir/Madame, are these conservative men ripping down our institutions from inside? Did they not realise we must desist from change if its success rests upon luck?

Sir/Madame, did they not realise that it was private interest and interference that slowed down and frustrated the national health service during the terms of the last cabinet. Are they aware this service, free at the point of entry, is an inscription of welfare as a right of citizenry, there to stop anyone from falling through the net, commissioned only through donations of that grandest of traditions the state?

Sir/Madame, look at this one. Duncan-Smith. Does he not acknowledge welfare as a right of citizenry?

Sir/Madame, I am under little doubt these thugs understand nothing of what they are doing. But quite why we should tolerate them while they do it is beyond me. Are we yet fit for revolt?

Cameron & Co are so good for society because suddenly, after years of having it all handed out to us on a plate, we are having to define and fight for everything we believe in.  We are having to rediscover and assert what really matters to us.  We are becoming welfare guerrillas battling for the safety and security of our friends and families.  This has, all of a sudden, become a war not to the death – but, rather, on behalf of everyone’s lives.

Cameron & Co are destroying society as we know it – and, in so doing, are forcing us to recover the past: that is to say, the very society they aim to bury.  Therein lies the political tautology: they would see themselves as radicals but their impact on us will lead to an overall and net societal conservatism.  And even as we see ourselves essentially as radicals, we struggle to conserve the results of our ancient battles.

So does no one know how – or care any longer – to have a truly radical impact on our world these days?

Is the system we live under so absolutely pervading and powerful that there is nothing we can now do to disentangle us from its control?

Is it capitalism, then, which has led us all down the road of absolute conservatism?

I do, actually, wonder if this is the case.

Don’t you?

Is the NHS so important to the British because we don’t really do God?

 38 Degrees, Britain, in a hole, Insalud, NHS, NHS cuts, Spain  No Responses »
May 292011
 

I received this email from the excellent 38 Degrees the other day:

Dear Miljenko,

Andrew Lansley’s NHS listening exercise closes in just 4 days. We need to move fast to flood it with objections to his dangerous plans.

Thousands of personal submissions to the listening exercise will make it much harder for Lansley to spin the results. He’ll have to publish the figures, whether he likes it or not. They will tell a clear story: the overwhelming response is against these dangerous changes to the NHS.

It’s easy and fast to send your message to the listening exercise using the 38 Degrees website. It only takes a couple of minutes. There are suggestions for what issues to raise, and you can see what other 38 Degrees members are already saying.

Get started here:
http://www.38degrees.org.uk/nhs-listening-exercise

There are signs our pressure is starting to work. Yesterday, Nick Clegg said he thought Lansley’s plans need to be watered down and delayed. [1] But today’s Daily Telegraph reports that Conservative hardliners have started planning their fightback. They are determined to rush Lansley’s plan through. [2] We need to keep the pressure growing!

We’ve already created a huge stir this week with our hard-hitting newspaper adverts. Next week we will submit a copy of our 400,000-strong petition. So now, let’s back all of that up with thousands of personal submissions telling the listening exercise we don’t want our NHS ruined.

We have got until 5 PM on Tuesday, May 31 to send messages. Send yours now:
http://www.38degrees.org.uk/nhs-listening-exercise

Lansley wants to use the listening exercise to claim he’s building support for his plans, so he can plough ahead. But by working together we can make that impossible.

The British Medical Association’s own submission to the listening exercise says Lansley’s plans should be scrapped. [3] Nurses’ groups, health care charities and patient groups all seem to agree. [4] If we all keep working together, we can protect our NHS for future generations.

The listening exercise closes in four days. Please take a couple of minutes to write in now:
http://www.38degrees.org.uk/nhs-listening-exercise

Thanks for being involved,

Johnny, David, Becky, Hannah, Cian, Marie and the 38 Degrees team

PS: Here’s what the BMA said after submitting their listening exercise response: “the message from doctors is clear and simple – the Bill must be changed significantly, if not withdrawn altogether, if the NHS is to continue to improve.” [3] Send your message in now at: http://www.38degrees.org.uk/nhs-listening-exercise

NOTES
[1] Channel 4 News http://www.channel4.com/news/clegg-signals-nhs-reform-slowdown, The Financial Times: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/db0e43cc-878d-11e0-af98-00144feabdc0.html
[2] Telegraph: Tory MPs in campaign to stop Nick Clegg diluting NHS reforms http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/8540088/Tory-MPs-in-campaign-to-stop-Nick-Clegg-diluting-NHS-reforms.html
[3] Telegraph: Doctors repeat call for NHS reforms to be scrapped http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/8536450/Doctors-repeat-call-for-NHS-reforms-to-be-scrapped.html The BMA’s response to the listening exercise is here: http://www.bma.org.uk/healthcare_policy/nhs_white_paper/listeningresponse.jsp
[4] http://38degrees.org.uk/pages/save-our-nhs-who-is-worried

Meanwhile, most of my (very Labour) Twitter and Facebook feeds are currently deluged with items about this selfsame subject.  And it got me wondering as to why here in Britain we are so particularly enamoured of our health service.

My only other experience of living in a country for any length of time is Spain.  I remember my contact with the Spanish Insalud – their equivalent of the NHS – as almost uniformly positive.  The first summer I was over there they dealt very efficiently with a curious high temperature I was struck down with; they saved my wife’s life from the horrors of multiple meningitis with an incredibly complex operation; they brought our three children into the world with consummate skill (though, for a while, led us to believe our second child would be born spina bifida – a mistake of calibration I hope no health service cares to commit again); they made my mother-in-law’s last six months as comfortable as anyone could possibly have done …

And so it goes on.

But I could say the same of our homegrown NHS.  And yet what I might suggest are significant cultural differences do exist – and do impact on how we believe such services should function.

In the Spanish system, families are not only not kept at a distance from the patients, they’ve always been an essential part of the procedures.  From monitoring the state of the drip to keeping loved ones company, family members are fundamental to the Spanish way of hospital care.  In fact, most Spanish hospital rooms (and they generally tend to be rooms for two or three patients rather than wards for ten or more) seem to be equipped with reclining chairs so that family members can spend all day and night looking after their relatives.

This is perhaps a true Good Society, writ absolutely large.

And under such circumstances, death, in general, is no stranger – medicine serves not to detach us from life but brings us closer to the process that leads us all to our very solitary end.

Not all Mediterranean circumstances are as I describe them above, of course – I have personal knowledge of people facing up to the inevitable as well as deliberately ignoring it.  But I would hazard a guess that Mediterranean countries are far more publicly aware of death, far more accepting of its reality (you only have to see how the theatre of bullfighting has flourished for so long in Spain to understand this), than Anglo-Saxon countries.

This is why I suspect we in Britain and the US, even where in our very different ways (the former via supportive socialism, the latter via rapacious marketplace), spend so much of our time and political energies deflecting our attention and our resources from the need to face up to death’s inevitability onto procedures, systems, cultures and approaches which attempt to distance us from its march.

I wonder if, at least here in Britain, the way we pay for and do so much medicine is precisely because we don’t do God.

I’m not suggesting that we should do God.

Really, what I’m suggesting is that by not looking to face up to the afterlife or its absence we end up, essentially, creating health systems which – like gigantic corporations and their work processes – tend to break down every single part of our existence as participants into discrete entities which only experts can manage and ever have overall oversight of.

In this way, we become strangers in our own bodies.

In this way, we become strangers in our own worlds.

In this way, we focus on the medical games people play and ignore the realities of life which underpin them.

I don’t agree with the terribly self-serving proposals the Tory-led Coalition is looking to put in place.  But I do wonder, in the light of my experience of at least one other culture I love and treasure, whether there isn’t any other more profound kind of change the NHS needs to undergo.  The NHS, that is to say – and by extension, a wider British society.

The NHS, for the British way of life, is a sacred cow – and rightfully so.  We are, after all, talking about our very own way of dealing with death.  But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t wonder if there aren’t better ways of managing our own feelings and reactions to such an emotive subject.

In the meantime, fight all you can to save this wonderful institution.  But remember, when we talk about the importance of health, we may actually be describing our very uncertain relationship with death.