Forget Cameron & Co – was One Nation Labour ALWAYS designed with UKIP in mind?

 David Cameron, in a hole, Labour, One Nation Labour, triangulation, UKIP  No Responses »
May 082013
 

This piece from Ian Birrell in the Guardian this morning says mostly what can be sensibly said about our body politic’s shared attitudes to the immigration “issue”:

The overall tone is clear: foreigners are flooding over here and taking our jobs, our benefits, our houses. This is, of course, a panicky response to the rise of Ukip – but it is one utterly wrong on commercial, economic and even the narrowest of party political grounds, pandering to ill-informed prejudice rather than putting the interests of the country first. Already the immigration cap is undermining higher education, one of our few world-beating sectors. Yet Labour, going through its own masochistic contortions on this issue, is unlikely to offer resistance; shamefully, it seems determined to outflank from the right.

Meanwhile, this is what Nigel Farage is responding right now to the Coalition’s programme on immigration for the next parliamentary session:

“The immigration measures in the Queen’s speech don’t tackle important issues on exploitation and illegal immigration.

“We support many of the measures promised though of course we will scrutinise the detail, but it appears their impact will be limited.

“The Government is still not tackling the exploitation of foreign workers leading to the undercutting of local workers. There is nothing to improve enforcement of the national minimum wage, no action on agencies recruiting only from abroad, nothing to improve training for local workers for sectors recruiting heavily from abroad, no action to extend the Gangmasters licensing legislation, and nothing to deal with slum landlords using overcrowded housing to recoup labour costs.

“The Government is also missing the opportunity to tackle illegal immigration which has got worse on their watch. There’s nothing to deal with the failure at the Home Office to deport bogus student cases, nothing to deal with loopholes in student visitor visas, and nothing to give UKBA officers who inspect colleges and workplaces the power of arrest.

“Immigration is important for Britain and needs to be controlled and managed so it is fair for all. That is why the impact on the labour market and the problem of illegal immigration need to be addressed.”

Did I say Nigel Farage?  I did, of course, mean Yvette Cooper.

The problem of course is this “One Nation” terminology.  For starters, it’s manifestly untrue: there are probably hundreds of nations of people who live their lives in latterday Britain.  So what I want to know is why they chose the phrase “One Nation“.  Why not “One State” or “One Country” – or “One Place” even?  Why focus, as they have, on an emotive word such as “nation” with all its historical, colonising and excluding baggage?

Unless, of course, that’s what you mean to do.  Unless, of course, you’d already analysed quite a way back that in a disintegrating social environment, and come 2015, the dynamics of the immigration “issue” would be far more important than the traditional old battle between left and right.

Is there any chance, any chance at all, that the Labour Party’s strategists have just been waiting for UKIP to rear its ugly head?  That the “One Nation Labour” language was never intended to allow Labour to wrest power from the Tories come election time but, rather, more predictably, deal with what would almost certainly be the real opposition five years down the line: those ideas and dynamics, those fascist instincts for personal survival over societal support, which UKIP – and other groupings like it – best exemplifies.

Is there any chance that Labour – with its “One Nation” mantra – has all along been triangulating not for a David Cameron (II) at all but, instead, for a UKIP – in one potentially unhappy shape or another?

The resulting plan being to convince all us progressive souls to continue voting as we were – on the understanding that Labour will keep slyly hidden from the rest of the electorate until after the next election its true instincts and values.

Ingenious approach, right?  Even – in the light of disagreeable 20th century history – intelligently, usefully and wisely prescient.

So just forget Cameron & Co, and hope this is the case: that One Nation Labour was always designed with a UKIP in mind.

Because if this isn’t the plan, if this isn’t the explanation for the outflanking wearily quoted in full above, I really do wonder how anyone in my dearly beloved movement expects us to believe that One Nation Labour won’t itself become that UKIP we all fear – but all on its triangulatory and ingenious lonesome.

In the banana republic that is Cameron’s England, the shittiest government website in the world

 a con, David Cameron, Department for Work and Pensions, digital economy, digital literacy, digital world, England, Iain Duncan Smith, in a hole, web, websites  10 Responses »
May 052013
 

This has to be the shittiest government website in the world – the worst, biggest and bitterest digital abyss you’ll ever experience, in fact.  And it’s all here in Cameron’s England for the delectation and delight of those with the right to claim Attendance Allowance, Disability Living Allowance and Overseas State Pension.

No.  Not those websites.  Those are pretty decent; informative and easy to read.  No.  I’m talking about the website behind this Inquirer story.  The website you are supposed to use to claim the benefits the former websites so informatively inform you about.  Read it and be prepared to be absolutely flabbergasted by IT-shite of the very highest (ie the very lowest) order.  This is how it starts out, at least at the time of writing this post:

About this service

You can only use this service for:

  • Attendance Allowance (AA)
  • Disability Living Allowance (DLA adult and child)
  • Overseas State Pension – if you are a non-UK resident (including Channel Islands).

Rather ominously, it then goes on to say:

This service doesn’t work with some modern browsers and operating systems. Tell me more

We are considering how best to provide this service in future.

You may want to claim in another way.

Here then are “some modern browsers and operating systems” which this online piece of bollocks doesn’t work with:

Operating systems and browsers

The service does not work properly with Macs or other Unix-based systems even though you may be able to input information.

You are likely to have problems if you use Internet Explorer 7, 8, 9 and 10, Windows Vista or a smartphone. Clearing temporary internet files may help but you may wish to claim in another way.

There is also a high risk that if you use browsers not listed below, including Chrome, Safari or Firefox, the service will not display all the questions you need to answer. This is likely to prevent you from successfully completing or submitting the form. You may wish to claim in another way.

OK.  So let’s see what systems it does manage to negotiate:

What the service was designed to work with

The service was designed to work with the following operating systems and browsers. Many of these are no longer available.

Microsoft Windows 98:

  • Internet Explorer versions 5.0.1, 5.5 and 6.0
  • Netscape 7.2

Microsoft Windows ME

  • Internet Explorer version 5.5 and 6.0
  • Netscape 7.2

Microsoft Windows 2000

  • Internet Explorer version 5.0.1, 5.5 and 6.0
  • Netscape 7.2
  • Firefox 1.0.3
  • Mozilla 1.7.7

Microsoft Windows XP

  • Internet Explorer 6.0
  • Netscape 7.2
  • Firefox1.0.3
  • Mozilla 1.7.7

What?  You do have to be joking, right?

“Many of these are no longer available.”

What the fuck (pardon my French) is the Department for Work and Pensions playing at?

What the hell makes it think it has the right to implement/perpetuate such a frightful piece of web estate in order that the disabled, those in need of care and pensioners various can access online services and exert their solemn rights, via insecure (not to say unobtainable) software such as Windows 98 and Netscape?

For Christ’s sake, this has to be the most unpleasant piece of casual government cruelty to those least advantaged, to those least able to defend themselves, in many a cold-comfort moon.

This is a shocking disgrace.

Words are literally failing me.

Words … are … literally … failing … me.

How #Cameron REALLY blew it (and what next)

 Big Society, David Cameron, in a hole, revolution  No Responses »
Mar 282013
 

I wrote quite a bit, whilst it was still a buzzword worth buzzing about, on the subject of the blessed Big Society.  I even suggested at one point that it had been deliberately conceptualised to favour one self-interested section of society – those semi-retired white males and females of independent means who always seem to appear on parish and local councils – over the rest of us.

The strategy would go as follows: devolve all sorts of powers down to the localities themselves, and then make it impossible for anyone who had a life to live to be able to participate in the sudden flowering of democracy.  How easy would it then be for a certain profile of local people (a profile which, quite coincidentally, would just happen to coincide with that of Tory voters) to take charge of all things local.  How easy would it then be for them to introduce a certain ideological colour of blue to our erstwhile pleasant and very green land.

But that, now, is all behind us.  No one speaks any more of the Big Society.  It is dead.  And probably just as well.  Except that, today, I’m looking to resurrect it.

Rick writes consistently on the subject of the peak state.  This from the other day, and this from about a year ago, bear witness to the fact that the state is not the expanding universe we assumed to be the case: in this, human experience does not mimic science.  (Perhaps shortly we will discover that, in fact, our physical theories of life and everything will also need to be revisited.  Fred Hoyle may yet have the opportunity to dance joyfully on his own grave.)

Now I have no professional criteria to be able to decide if Rick is right or not – but his arguments and his evidence are hardly counter-intuitive; especially in a world where they force us to see countries as credit cards.  So for the purposes of this post, let’s assume the state has, indeed, peaked.  What, then, can we do about it?  Can we do anything at all?

Cameron is a bit of a wally, to be honest – a pretty sad man who’s managed to single-handedly misspend the tremendous trust his party placed in him just about as much as his own Chancellor has single-handedly misspent our national goodwill.

A PM, in fact, who has rapidly ended up at the fag end of his days far sooner than any of us expected.  Not so much a PM of afternoon glow as an AM of early morning hangover.

And yet for all of that, there is still something of his project which remains in my mind and makes me sad.  The Big Society’s conceptualisation was diffuse and uncertain, that is true.  But his task was almost certainly impossible, for what it would have really required to properly work would have been a revolution of a quite unconservative cut.  This is how I suggest it could have gone, in seven (possibly fascinating; definitely revealing) steps:

  1. Give everyone a basic income, as per these kinds of ideas (a kind of universal credit, in fact).
  2. Encourage people to voluntarily form local community groups around existing organs (NHS trusts; local councils; CABs etc), especially in areas of practice where they had existing knowhow or interest.
  3. In a first instance, identify roles which could be “outsourced” to citizens easily.
  4. Put into place a massive person-by-person training scheme to train people up in training others, especially in the activities to be initially “outsourced” and especially in their areas of existing knowledge.
  5. Get those with knowledge to train those with less.
  6. Suggest, with all of the above, that everyone could learn something from everyone – and everyone could teach something to everyone.
  7. Finally, call it the Big Society, as – simultaneously – you make appeals to Britain’s wartime spirit; the fact that we’re all in this together; and a mountain of other inspiring markers in the sand/soundbites/platitudes.

Any of the above ring any bells of any sort?  Well, they do to me – even though, right now, the bells toll for thee and me.

Imagine, if you will, that Cameron in particular had embarked on a far more radical plan to change the nature of the state.  If instead of just aiming to fill the pockets of his corporate sponsors by contracting its public size – with all the bitter legacy of citizen suicide, poverty, homelessness, human misery and accusations of corporate graft he’ll now be leaving behind him – he had chosen for his legacy to circulate around contracting out its services to the very people themselves.

In such a scenario, even IDS himself would be a people’s hero of very 21st century instincts, as the state was wound down, wound up and – finally – handed over to the people whom it would both begin to serve and be directly served by.

What empowering instincts these would have been.  What devolving environments these Tories would have left behind them.

And yes.  Cameron’s initial instincts (in some small way, at least; in some very private and honest place) were almost certainly these, as he fumbled, flipped and flopped with a flagship policy which utterly failed to convince absolutely anyone, precisely because his ambitions – whilst astonishing – were nowhere matched by a corresponding competence.  The Big Society could have been a far more revolutionary, lasting, One-Nation-like and truly prime ministerial narrative – capable, that is, of assuring Cameron’s place in history – than any cruel, toff-engendered, class war off Eton’s playing-fields, conducted against the lazy, shirking, chav-like inhabitants of this hoodie- and immigrant-infested land of criminal prejudice.

Almost three years after the event, we could all be in such a better place, couldn’t we?  A place of a wonderful new politics.

As it is, Cameron’s blown it – for him, of course, without a doubt; but more importantly, for the rest of us too.

A self-inflicted sucker punch of the most collateral kind.

And what’s more, not only unneeded but also gratuitously unnecessary.

So what next?  Time to get really radical?  Time to turn this world they’ve turned upside down, upside down all over again?

In a pretty unavoidable way, I think any government which follows Cameron’s (as, indeed, Rick clearly shows us) will have no alternative but to consider such alternatives.  Social-democratic and neoliberal evolution have, seriously, lost their way.  And the only choice left us, a historical Hobson’s choice if there ever was one, will be that revolution (of some kind) I allude to.

Time not to ameliorate where we can, but disrupt where we need to.

Only using very 21st century tools and mindsets to do so.

Time Ed Miliband gave David Cameron a helping hand

 Coalition, Coalition capitalism, Coalition cuts, Coalition economics, Coalition U-turns, David Cameron, Ed Miliband, Labour, latterday capitalism, latterday socialism, New Labour, New Toryism, on a high, One Nation Labour, one-nation conservatism, Tony Blair, Tories  No Responses »
Mar 112013
 

Paul Burgin asked an intriguing question this afternoon.  I retweeted it and answered it thus (for those of you not familiar with Twitter’s syntax, you have to read the second part first and the first part second):

What Ed M is doing right now? Rock boat, but not too much. RT @Paul_Burgin: What does it take to ensure that Cameron remains PM until 2015?

Is it, in fact, time that the leader of the Labour opposition, Ed Miliband, gave David Cameron, the Tory Prime Minister, the helping hand it would appear he so desperately needs?  After all, this judgement of Cameron’s efficacy and historical potential is biting – and eye-opening:

My friend writes:

“I’m struggling to get the incredulity of the commentariat regarding leadership threats to Cameron. Why should anyone expect that a Party leader who failed to win an unlosable General Election, did nothing with being PM, and apparently has no chance of winning the next General Election would survive unchallenged?”

Ouch. And, as he points out, it is often forgotten that later this year Cameron will have been leader for eight years.

“Eight years after becoming Conservative Party Leader … Thatcher had got inflation from 22 per cent to 4 per cent and beaten the Argies. Heath had joined the EU. Churchill had won World War Two. Baldwin had seen off the General Strike and the Great Depression and broken both the Liberal and Labour parties, utterly. (No other Conservative leader lasted eight years post World War One). Cameron, on the other hand has … well, there’s … umm …”

Now I’m not entirely sure that in that poverty-stricken “umm” everything is necessarily lost.  Blair’s abiding achievement, after all, was a bloody conflict in Iraq.  It may have been the case that history was cruel to him – but the energy, resource, financial weight and body count which the conflict in question required of us leads me to wonder if a cipher of Blair wasn’t exactly what we were looking for in Cameron.  So did Cameron really fail to win an “unlosable General Election” – or was it, rather, that he instinctively comprehended the British people’s need to tether just a bit more definitively their next leader to their evermore parochial kennel?

Sometimes, the closed system that is politics has its own karma.  You give up a country’s sense of itself to a foreign power such as the US, however apparently justified at the time the deal may have appeared to be – and the next leader but one who comes along has no alternative but to reverse the ship of state.  No more foreign adventures for the moment – no more Falklands, no more Kosovos, no more Iraqi conflagrations.  If you must lie to the people, then divide the country cruelly up into deserving and non-deserving; get your communications paid for by the viewers via the TV licence fee; and tell those huge lies as hugely as you can, whilst history – or at the least the next general election – remains firmly on your side.

But whether Cameron is the cipher we needed or not, I think it’s pretty clear we in the Labour Party now need him to remain.  We need his frantic straddling of supposedly detoxified Toryism on the one hand and the lurching to the right which UKIP’s current bounce presages on the other to continue for as long as it might.

And it is in Paul Burgin’s original question and in Iain Martin’s perspicacious friend that I think I finally discover the reasons behind the modest approach which, to date, Labour’s Ed Miliband has taken.  Miliband has had Cameron’s measure since the very beginning.  After all, Miliband was an MP under Blair – had the opportunity to observe at close quarters the very man Cameron has surely modelled himself on.

In both Cameron’s strengths as a professional obfuscator and his manifest weaknesses as a professional salesman, Miliband will have seen it all before.

Miliband knows Cameron’s laying his own traps.  He just has to be there for him – with the kind of helping hand all enemies proffer.

Enough rope to keep him hanging on.

Not too much to hang him.

Not yet.

Was the Equal Marriage bill driven by conviction or triangulation?

 Coalition, Coalition capitalism, Coalition cuts, Coalition economics, coalition governments, coalition parties, David Cameron, Nick Clegg, triangulation, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Feb 052013
 

The BBC reports that:

MPs have approved legislation for same-sex marriage in England and Wales, despite the opposition of dozens of Conservative MPs.

The Commons voted in favour of the The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill, by 400 to 175, a majority of 225, at the end of a full day’s debate on the bill.

This is clearly a good thing – one we can all be happy about.  The article goes on to tell us that:

Prime Minister David Cameron has described the move as “an important step forward” that strengthens society.

And I think he’s right.  My questions today, however, circle around how he reached his conclusions.  Was his desire – a very personal one it seems – to ensure this legislation was passed driven entirely by honest conviction or, alternatively, was there more than a pinch of old-fashioned triangulation behind the horse and cart he’s smashed through his party?  After all, as the BBC also indicates:

Former children’s minister and Conservative MP Tim Loughton told the BBC that he believed “140 or so” of his party colleagues had voted against the plans, along with “a small rump of Labour MPs” and “four Lib Dem MPs”.

He added: “Apparently there are 132 Conservative MPs who voted in favour, so I think what we’re going to see is that more Conservative MPs voted against this legislation than for it.”

The Lib Dem leaders are, of course, clearly delighted with the measure – it allows them to go back to their faithful with a truly liberal concept on the table.  But, as is perhaps too often the case, I am suspicious of the motivations.  And it begins to make me wonder if the name-calling that situates Clegg on the conservative (where not Conservative) right of the spectrum is encouraging us to simplify what it is happening in British politics.  Perhaps, indeed, for our own traditionally located interests.

As Clegg drags – in a complex but certain manner – his political party to the first taste of real government in generations, so Cameron may be aiming to hollow out in some constructive way the noisy and nasty party that is the Tories.  We on the left have looked to (maybe) simplistically paint the Lib Dems as just hanging onto the coattails of an unpleasantly irrelevant and Etonite England.  But (maybe) the process is a tad more engineered than that.

If we see the Coalition of Cameron’s Conservatives and Nick Clegg’s Lib Dems in terms of a corporate merger between a large and untidily ancient behemoth of contradictory decisions and a small and guerilla-like company of instant advantage-taking – the former perhaps an IBM before it reinvented itself, whilst the latter perhaps an Amstrad in its awfully excitable heyday – then the massive adventure which the two leaders have embarked on, both its downsides and upsides, both its potential risks and paybacks, becomes far far clearer.  Here we could argue that it’s the Alan Sugar/Nick Clegg-type pick-and-mix opportunists who visibly have the vision and agility of perceptions, even where they do not have the distribution network and other infrastructures various.  Meanwhile, the transnational corporate/David Cameron-led thinkers, dinosaur-like and history-riven as they are, have all of the infrastructures and contacts, even as they are unable any longer to provide the “market” with exactly what it needs.

Maybe the Equal Marriage bill was driven by conviction.  But I truly wonder if it wasn’t part of a much greater and broader understanding to revise and restructure the populist centre ground in, at the very least, England and Wales.  And that could mean just as much allowing the rancid Tory right to destroy themselves in their echo chambers as it could mean dragging a traditionally reflective and thoughtful strand of often principled political thought into the unhappy but (maybe) necessary glare of rather cruel 21st century government.

With these words, I’m not saying I agree at all with the vast majority of policies that have resulted from this process.

But I do wonder, honestly wonder, whether the nexus of Cameron and Clegg – and its implications – is as easy to accurately describe and define as we sometimes seem to assume.

Especially for those of us on the left of political activity.  But possibly – with the exception of the two men in question – for almost everyone else as well.

On spare rooms, bedroom taxes and the paradox of interfering government

 a con, Camerong, Chester, Chester and District Housing Trust, David Cameron  No Responses »
Jan 312013
 

This tweet by yours truly got a number of retweets just now, for which I am pleasantly surprised, grateful and sad in equal measure:

If people with spare rooms are liable for #bedroomtax, do people in overcrowded housing get #taxrebates? #QuestionForGideon

It shows, I think, how very unhappy many people are getting about this issue.  That social housing and housing benefit are at a premium right now is obviously a symptom of a wider absence of available and cost-effective accommodation.  Most of us wouldn’t need to resort to such systems if the private sector wasn’t so expensive, unreliable and plain unpredictable.

Not that social housing is any kind of panacea.  Let me tell you our story as an example.

I’m epileptic and suffered a considerably disabling mid-life crisis when I came back to Britain in 2003 looking for work.  (I am British born and bred, just in case you were wondering.  My family is entirely Spanish.) This meant that for a while my economic activity didn’t match my previous CV.

Which is why it wasn’t the best or most productive time of my life – though I have, in general, recovered a broader equilibrium since then.

My wife and children followed me over some months later, and for the first year and a half we stayed with my parents in their reasonably spacious three-bedroom house.  That was, even so, seven people in three bedrooms.

Some eighteen months later we managed to get a foothold in a small first-floor maisonette managed by our local housing trust.  They gave us a small amount of money to redecorate it – which I did; a member of my family gave us financial support to get it carpeted – though the carpet had to be laid over breaking Bakelite-type floor tiles.  I was so naive about such housing at the time that when I saw the gas and central-heating pipes running round the rooms on the outside of the walls I asked in my ignorance if this was a temporary measure, and when they would be finally buried inside the walls.

We didn’t intend, of course, to stay in such tiny accommodation for too long.  Firstly, it was – and is – plagued with recurring mould.  Secondly, our two (now grown-up) sons had to study for GCSEs and A-levels in a shared room with barely enough space for two beds, never mind accompanying wardrobes and desks.  Thirdly, whilst convenient for our children’s schools (for those of you who don’t have children, this is a massive factor in deciding where you need to continue living), the rent did seem to increase rather exponentially.

Now let it be understood: we are eternally grateful for the humble roof over our head.  We appreciate there are many others who are suffering a hell on earth.  And, in fact, I do know a (very) little about what it is like to be homeless – even though this was only for about five days in London.

Nevertheless, from 2007 onwards – two and a half years after entering the maisonette – we have been officially defined as overcrowded.  This was when our eldest reached the age of sixteen and was supposed to have the right to a room to pursue his school studies in private.

And this is where the real nightmare kicked in.  If there was ever a latterday Catch-22 situation, it was this.  Because we were overcrowded, and because our eldest was now sixteen, both the online and offline application systems automatically kicked us out of any application for a three-bedroom house.  A house, of course, would’ve been far better for our needs: a parlour could’ve been converted into another room; a sofa bed could’ve been installed in a back room.  But no.  The only houses we were allowed to apply for by then were four-bedroom houses – of which there are damn few in Chester.

Anywhere.

In any suburb.

So although we were officially classed as overcrowded, and although moving into a house – whatever the nominal number of bedrooms – would have made us far less overcrowded, the system as it stood – and as I believe it still stands – ensured and preferred we remained more overcrowded than a perspicacious and sensitive eye would have cared to allow.

Now you may say to me: why don’t you just move into private accommodation?  (In fact, in response to a query of mine in relation to this issue, the local housing trust recently suggested our solution lay precisely in vacating their property.)  And believe me, we’ve thought about it.  Especially because of the persistent mould.  But it’s just not financially possible.  Not in the area where our children still go to school.  Not on the income we earn at the moment.  (We don’t claim housing benefit, by the way – nor care to either.  But that is perhaps something we should throw in no one’s faces.  We are lucky we can make that choice.  Many people frankly cannot.)  (Incidentally, this was, in fact, something else the housing trust recently suggested we access.)

Now we certainly hope to improve our financial standing shortly – especially as new sources of Internet-related income appear to be coming on stream in my case.  And if this does take place, and life does look up again, we will be the first to want to move away from social housing.

For anyone who has always lived in their own home cannot appreciate what it is like to live in someone else’s.  Especially when the landlord refuses – or is simply physically unable – to resolve long-running deficiencies.

So get this, please – and consider it carefully: few people are going to choose to live in the kind of social housing we’ve been living in.

But the worst of this matter is the subject we started out with: Cameron and Osborne’s blessed bedroom tax.  If there ever was a paradox, it’s the repeating pattern of behaviours that Tory opposition politicians perpetuate when they finally come to power.  Whilst able only to flail wordily about as they complain of Big Brother attitudes amongst the socialists, when it actually comes to their turn to intervene in people’s daily lives … well, instead of following consequentially on from the positions they held whilst in the wilderness of politics, they end up sticking their noses into people’s affairs even more unpleasantly and disagreeably than their left-wing counterparts ever managed to do.

Can you imagine it?  A supposedly freedom-loving government taxing an autistic person out of his settled seven-year relationship with his surroundings.

Is there a problem which needs attending in how social housing and housing benefit are distributed?  Of course there is.  But using a surrogate taxation system to terrify and impoverish people into homelessness is not the best solution by any means.

In fact, it would be far better to apply the taxation system to the wealthy in society in order to build more social housing of the kind which would help – in quantity, quality and outright attractiveness – to provide the competitive edge our civilisation needs to ensure neither private- nor public-sector landlords get away with capitalising on a miserable second best.

Just as Cameron’s food chain is the kind of place where poor people eat horsemeat dressed up as beef, so Cameron’s housing policy is the kind of place where even the social landlords may aim to build those inadequately configured business empires – empires which begin to tumble precisely when the much-needed quality accommodation we all have a right to should really be their only, and abiding, objective.

The real problem isn’t spare bedrooms, for goodness sake.  The real problem is a supremely overpriced housing market which, once again, serves the interests of the rich over the permanently poor – and forces the latter to breathe in, day after day, lungful after lungful, the results of far too many examples of substandard living conditions which the Camerons of this world simply know nothing about.

Assuming David Cameron started out with the very best of intentions – what now?

 David Cameron, TUC, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Jan 042013
 

Difficult for many of us to assume, but let’s carry out the thought experiment all the same.  Let’s give Mr Cameron the benefit of any remaining doubt.  Let’s pretend – or imagine – that back in the halcyon days of 2010, when that Rose Garden-burnished laughter and good humour seemed to bring the pleasant prospect of cooperative and coalition governance to our country once more, that Mr David Cameron in particular started out with the very best of intentions.  Yes.  He wanted to undo a lot of what New Labour had engineered – but this was mainly because he had a quite different vision of how he wanted people to behave.  He wanted to engender a world where spin and lobbyists didn’t rule; he wanted honesty and sincerely hard work to come to the fore.  He wanted to recover a sense of what Britain can do best.  He wanted to release the good intentions of a generation of people accustomed to a well-meaning government intrusiveness – but an intrusiveness all the same.

Fast-forward to early 2013 – and what do you get?  Not what you see, that’s for sure.

Today, via Twitter, comes this data from the TUC.  The key findings as per the image below.

Never did a government permit misconceptions to rule so fiercely, nor bulldoze away from all policymaking process any sense or sensibility that otherwise might have remained.

*

Did I mention getting away from intrusiveness and government control?  Well, it’s not been all bad news.  Some, yes.  But not all.  Here’s Paul to remind us of both the successes and failures of the past year.  Meanwhile, my own far darker thoughts on double standards in obesity, as per my post from yesterday, only serves to remind us that politicians when in power acquire utterly different ways of acting from their opposition moments of glory.

“So what about austerity?” you say.  Well, this is a biggie.  Really seems like it’s failing all round.  And even though there are plenty out there who are coming to the same conclusion, Labour - out of fear, it would seem, of the widely-held misconceptions the TUC dutifully highlights above - continues to sign up to its miserable discourse.

Instead of aiming far more reasonably to correct such misconceptions.

But let’s just say David Cameron’s not to blame for even the latter.  Let’s just say he really did start out with the very best will in the world.  Let’s say he probably thought he was telling porkies – but let’s also say that he did it because he truly felt it was for our own good as a nation of the clever and willing: a nation of spiky and creative souls in drastic need of a change of governmental scenery.

A liar, yes.  But a liar with the very best of intentions.

Only intentions really aren’t enough, are they?

Where do we go from here or here, for example?  If benefits are to be cut in order to re-establish a certain order of entrepreneurial activity whilst basic food costs for ordinary families are going through the roof, what benefit of the doubt should we continue to offer our Prime Minister?  (Especially as Mr Cameron’s friends bet on the futures markets of breakfast cereals galore – and reveal themselves as the real reason behind increasing pressures on people’s budgets.)

As Rick points out here:

The OECD reckons that public services play a significant role in reducing inequality – more so in Britain than in many other countries.

Social spending in the UK relies more on public services (such as education, health etc.) than on cash transfers: spending on services amounts to over 15.4% of GDP while spending on cash transfers is some 10%. These services reduce inequality more than almost anywhere else, and this impact has increased over the 2000s.

In other words, a lot of services that people pay for in many parts of the world are subsidised or free in the UK. And, of course, spending on all these services is being cut. Even those which are supposedly ring-fenced are facing de facto cuts. Over the next few years, a lot of things that used to be free or subsidised won’t be. As the state reduces or abandons the provision of some services, the redistributive effect of Britain’s public sector will almost certainly be reduced over the next few years.

So what am I trying to argue in all of this?  There is hardly any way that Mr Cameron can have any good intentions left.  His road to hell – and therefore our road too – is well paved already.  Any original and privately expressed aim to change Britain for the better is turning into a nightmare on UK street for us ordinary souls.

To summarise, here are three ways our life is about to collapse as a direct result of those perhaps well-meaning lies the Rose Garden exemplified:

  1. Our standard of living is being cut via a reduction in benefits.
  2. Our standard of living will shortly be slashed by cuts in redistributing public services of a very British nature.
  3. Our standard of living will eventually collapse through existing hikes in energy prices and encroaching hikes in fundamental foodstuffs.

The first two are clearly as a result of massive misconceptions this government has shamelessly spun.  But the last item is still within the scope of interventionist government.

And if Cameron’s government is anything at all, it is about as interventionist as any government in British political history.  In a matter of two and a half years it has managed to dismantle huge elements of Legal Aid, swathes of assumptions around the NHS, basic principles underlying the disabled and their right to independent lives, the beliefs and practice of the teaching profession and even how the police can and should be privatised.

So if I am to commit the foolhardiness of extending – even now, even after all the above – to Cameron and his ilk a complicatedly understanding hand, we need to ask of him and his government the following question: “Assuming you still have the British people’s interests at heart, are you prepared to use your interventionist style not only to cut benefits in the public sector but also profiteering in the private sector?”

If the answer is “Yes, I am”, we can assume that where Cameron fails us, it is because he is incompetent but not malevolent.  There is hope still up there in them thar hills.

If the answer is “No, I’m not”, however, there is nothing left for us to do but bemoan a lost opportunity on all sides (and perhaps also slide into the hate of a kind of substitute civil war).  This lost opportunity?  To defend the British people and democracy from a financial injustice – a pecuniary cancer, in fact – that does not/did not need to take place.  So what if Cameron & Co want to re-engineer British society?  That is their democratic right.  If by reducing our dependence on benefits they achieve this, there may be little we on the left can do to stop it.  But this democratic right should surely lead them to want to protect the nation not only from the excesses of New Labour’s micro-managing instincts but also from the growth of evermore transnational moneymaking rackets which have accompanied all Western economic growth and societies over the past three decades.

Yes.  I’m still prepared to give Mr Cameron the benefit of the doubt if in the next few months he not only continues the re-engineering of a society via benefit withdrawal but also proceeds to substantially reduce the cost of living by stamping down on his profiteering friends in corporate-land.

If he succeeded in being even-handed in this way, if he made Britain a much cheaper place for us all to live in, if he managed to reduce the cost of living so that the state found active intervention in people’s daily lives simply and totally unnecessary, we could I am sure, whatever our politics, all find it in ourselves to admire him in some way or other.

Maybe we might approve of a benefits society or not – but to excise the cancerous profiteers from the heart of a modern democracy like Britain’s would truly be a historic achievement for this extraordinarily complex Tory moderniser to take away as his indisputable 21st century legacy.

On the other hand …

On the other hand …

If his good intentions are now limited to unleashing a savage impoverishment onto millions, this extraordinarily complex Tory moderniser will have shown himself to be nothing but an extraordinarily simple sham.

Why is Cameron’s government so evil? #Think #Tremble

 a con, Chris Dillow, Coalition, Coalition capitalism, Coalition cuts, Coalition economics, David Cameron, hierarchy of power, Stumbling and Mumbling  No Responses »
Dec 302012
 

Steve continues to pursue, with admirable doggedness, the #plebgate affair – situating it thus.  He argues that public confidence in the police may be shaken for many historical reasons – but that the Andrew Mitchell case should not, at least as yet, be one of them.

Myself, I’m beginning to wonder if there aren’t other issues we should factor into our current body politic and society – and which might help explain how dreadful things are getting.  For instance, everyone who has ever been a half-decent teacher or parent knows that the confidence and trust you exhibit in someone is often a self-fulfilling tool to sustain that person’s own confidence and trust in themselves.  What’s more, the job of good government – where it chooses intelligently not to micro-manage society – should surely be to engender such environments of wider confidence and trust at a societal level.

Not to do so is to endanger the ability of these societies to create the relationships which lead to better, more efficient and less corrupt economies and communities.

Yet this Coalition government of ours appears to care not one jot about the evermore scarce resources that are confidence and trust.  In fact, it seems to be quite happy to express the most savage absence of belief in its people – allowing and even encouraging the broader perception that the blame for all our ills lies with the most helpless in society.  “If only the sick, poor, disabled, elderly and jobless would fuck off,” so the mantra seems to go, “we could get on with our hierarchical-capitalist ways till the [cash] cows came home.”

For hierarchical capitalism, as described by Chris today, and as employed, encouraged and sanctioned by British governments since time immemorial (but, in particular, by Cameron and Blair), is not only unfair – it’s also bloody inefficiently unfair.  As per Chris’s post:

[...] Fehr and colleagues say:

We find a strong behavioral bias among principals to retain authority against their pecuniary interests and often to the disadvantage of both the principal and the agent.

Some two-fifths of principals did not delegate even when income-maximization required it. This suggests that people get a non-pecuniary buzz from being in control, and seek this benefit at the cost of economic payoffs to themselves and others. This is consistent with the findings of other experiments by Fehr and colleagues, which suggests that hierarchy facilitates exploitation rather than pure economic efficiency.

*

My conclusion?  People at the top are not only working in an unjust way but also in a wasteful way.  If injustice were the only problem, we might still escape the implications of such a system.  But it’s manifestly not.  And it’s getting far worse.  If you think Cameron is evil, you really ain’t seen nothing yet.

Let’s take the case of workfare.  As the Department of Work and Pensions, in what would appear to be one of its more rational moments, has been reported to have concluded:

Academic analysis by the Department of Work and Pensions has cast doubt on the effectiveness of workfare policies. After surveying the international evidence the from America, Canada and Australia the report states:

“There is little evidence that workfare increases the likelihood of finding work. It can even reduce employment chances by limiting the time available for job search and by failing to provide the skills and experience valued by employers. Subsidised (‘transitional’) job schemes that pay a wage can be more effective in raising employment levels than ‘work for benefit’ programmes. Workfare is least effective in getting people into jobs in weak labour markets where unemployment is high.”[10]

Not that government pronouncements or practice on the ground would care to give any credence to the above.  You only have to take a quick look around the worldwide web to realise this.

But if you thought Cameron was evil, how about this for a taster of what such untrusting and confidence-lacking hierarchies are capable of?

Imagine going to work every day and not getting paid. Then, one day, you’re told there’s no work to do — so you must pay the company for the privilege of not working.

This is the daily reality facing Mrs. Kim, a petite 52-year-old North Korean. Her husband’s job in a state-run steel factory requires him to build roads. She can’t remember the last time he received a monthly salary. When there are no roads to build, he has to pay his company around 20 times his paltry monthly salary, she says.

The truth of the matter is that economies the world over – whatever the ideological colours that run their governments, states and politics – can only ever flourish in environments where minimum levels of the trust and confidence I’ve already mentioned above exist in sufficient and realistic amounts.  Whether such economies be located in the extremes of North Korean or, indeed, British injustice, people will simply not be willing to take the (additional) risks that imaginative capitalism demands of its participants – especially if the (unavoidable) risks of simply bringing bread and butter home to the kitchen table are as rankly unjust as both North Korea, and now in its own tepid way the UK, appear to display more and more.

Hierarchy as thus exhibited and taken advantage of by those at the top will never function effectively; will never make people work as well as they could.

In order to take the kinds of risks proponents of imaginative capitalism argue must be taken, we need to ensure that life is supportive of those risks.  Because any society which makes the reward for sticking your neck out the guillotine is not a society with too much of a future.  And men and women as intelligent as those who lead our Western governments today should really have sussed out this truth by now.

*

A final string of thoughts.

How can any government possibly believe it can engineer changes in a society without getting people onside first?

How can any government possibly believe it can modify behaviours without achieving a certain degree of collaboration and consensus first?

How can any government possibly believe it can implement a series of difficult and challenging policies without managing people as people first?

Unless, of course, like the North Koreans, it believes that hierarchy is all you need to make stuff work.

As I pointed out in a tweet yesterday:

Q: What would these Tories do if they realised they’d lose the next election? A: Exactly what they’re doing right now. #Think #Tremble

Well quite.

Once you realise you don’t need democracy to action the levers of power, everything else just runs as smooth as silk.

Only you do know that silk is made by worms.

A Lesson in Neo-Prehistory: “Why McDonald’s Brings Us Closer to the Cave”

 Camerong, conditionality, corporations, David Cameron, McDonald's, McMenu, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Dec 292012
 

My middle son doesn’t share breakfast with us during the week.  He gets up at six and feeds himself.  He has, however, agreed that at weekends we are to be regaled with a little of his time.  Today, being Saturday, was one such occasion.  It was a nice family moment which the older your children, the less frequently you enjoy.

At one point in the meal, carefully laid by myself and my wife with appropriately Christmassy-themed plates, cutlery and assorted items, he brought a 4-pint plastic bottle of milk to the table.  We raised our hands in horror.  He couldn’t see what he was doing wrong.  As he wants to be a film director later in life, I asked him whether in the making of a film how he presented the content wouldn’t matter and be important.  He said of course – but that would be a job with the reward of money behind it.  There would therefore be a reason to take care of the hows and wherefores.  Here, meanwhile, there was none of the above: what did it matter whether a plastic bottle or a beautiful jug was brought to the table or not?

I wonder if such attitudes don’t have an explanation.  This, after all, is the generation of McDonald’s: a place where you are taught (if teaching were necessary) to eat with your fingers and without knives, forks or plates – and yet, simultaneously, clear up after yourself!  What a contradictory set of lessons and messages our powerful corporates are able to transmit.

No wonder my son is confused about etiquette.

In a sense, so much of modern corporate education – for that is how I would describe what they spend so much time, money and effort on communicating – is designed to bring us closer to our forebears: from eating with our hands, on the hoof and as quickly as possible to only doing stuff for ourselves and others because there exists a reward of some kind behind the acts in question … well, it’s clear that something retrograde is happening here.

If anything defines what’s happening to the nations that currently compose the United Kingdom, it’s this generational conflict – this misunderstanding even – between these “before” and “after” moments: on the one hand, sensible British socialists as manifested by the NHS, Legal Aid, free education and the rule of an egalitarian law; on the other, unconscious children of the corporates.

The latter savvy, it is true, in their ability to read and absorb the meaning of the content faster than any of the rest of us – but perhaps without enough distance from the ideologies that underpin its transmission.

We feel we see it all clearly – and so we find it difficult to enjoy; meanwhile, they simply do and act – and so find it so difficult to question.  Their futures are so very bound up in the structures we as failing adults criticise.  In a sense, therefore, it’s understandable that they should wish to participate in what’s on offer.  Our working lives are coming to an end whilst theirs are only just starting.  If we cannot deliver the Jerusalem of educated altruism that we so fiercely attempted to build our postwar society on, how can they possibly continue to believe in anything but a return to the caves of yore?

Cameron is not a bad man, in himself.  He is simply an enabler of a change of generations.  He is continuing the work that Blair did before him.  And whoever comes afterwards will not be able to stem the tide of conditional behaviours that dominate our societies.

We came from the caves, we created a society which strove to retreat from them – and now, in a matter of fifty years, it would seem that our children will return.

And what shall we call it – when the dust has gone and settled?

Neo-liberalism?

Neo-conservativism?

Neo-prehistory perhaps?

Whatever the label, we will shortly be in a position to understand exactly why McDonald’s – and those who like to follow their star – are bringing us all much closer to the caves we once escaped from.

Why do makers and shakers really want to eliminate the state?

 a con, David Cameron, Margaret Thatcher, state, state bureaucracy, state regulation, Tony Blair  No Responses »
Nov 112012
 

I’ve been wondering on this one for a while now.  It’s clear that the Tories are engaged in a blitzkrieg of terrifying proportions as they fight alongside their American cousins to destroy the infrastructure of public-service delivery here in Britain.  It’s even been argued that they don’t care about cost: that the substitute National Health Service, as operated by private institutions, will spend far more as it does the job worse, both in terms of patient care as well as staff working conditions and pay, than the previous structures ever did.

So.

They’re not interested in cost.

They’re not interested in delivery.

What an earth, then, are they interested in?

I think to be honest the only conclusion we can now reasonably come to is blame, culpability and responsibility in general.

The state has always been criticised quite savagely by the right here in Britain for being generally cumbersome and overly procedural – as well as lacking in responsiveness and customer focus.  Every time a disease has broken out at an NHS hospital or a child has been abused at a state school or  a police force has been accused of ignoring rape victims, we get another case added to an apparent litany of crimes which the overbearing nanny state continues to commit.

How much better would it be, then, for the state to be divided up into small and focussed gobbets of good practice which worked alongside their communities in beautiful and cogent consonance and agreement!

A kind of sociopolitical heaven on earth, don’t you think?

And that’s the way they’re telling us it’ll go.  Except that I’ve realised, today, how that’s not the real intention.

Why do makers and shakers really want to eliminate the state?  Because they’re fed up to their unprofessional back-teeth of having to respond to a public oversight of everything they undemocratically cook up on their cosy sofas behind their carefully closed doors.  Having a relatively concentrated state with relatively clear lines of responsibility makes it evermore difficult, especially in a social-media age of rolling 24-hour Internet judgement, to maintain a proper narrative which serves to win elections.

You can just hear them discussing it in one or other of their top-level strategy meetings:  “How much better then would it be if we could find a way of diluting that responsibility?  Of making it impossible to pin down – not only to the politicians but also the service deliverers themselves?”

And so this is what they’ve been doing, since Tony Blair’s time at least.  In this sense, Thatcher was anything but a diluter of responsibilities.  She shouldered them vigorously, frontally, aggressively.  Not for her this lily-livered hiding-behind-contracting-corporations.

She may have used the state to destroy whole communities – but, for her, the state was a tool that should continue.

These lot, however, are post-Thatcherites in one very important sense: deviating lines of responsibility to make one’s job easier is the least attractive behaviour any person at the top of a hierarchy can demonstrate.  And this is precisely what Cameron & Co are now doing.  Not only do they not care to make the public sector more efficient, they prefer to substitute it with a more expensive private sector which will act as a shield for their continued political survival and protection.

They are getting us to expensively pay for that which will assure their long-term permanence in their chosen fields of endeavour.

The great advantage of the democratic state was that everyone who worked in it used to think that bad deeds would one day come – sooner or later – to very public light.  The great advantage of the private-sector state, however, at least for this most recent crop of post-Thatcherite politicos, is that everyone who works in it just knows that responsibilities will be inevitably hidden.

That’s why it’s called the private sector.  It keeps most of the very bad things it does very much to itself.

Makers and shakers of this nature really only want one thing: not to be blamed for anything at all.

By claiming to reduce the state to its minimum expression, and – at the same time as destroying the legal aid system – proceeding to shift the burden of proof to the patient, parent and crime victim, they’ve discovered a wonderful way of absolving themselves of all direct responsibility.

For they’ve now found the perfect mechanism to achieve this hugely damaging goal.

Once named the taxpayer, we now have the newly 21st century patient, parent and crime victim: as hapless and confused consumer without enforceable rights, they become political cannon fodder to the personal and careerist enrichment of the most evil political class in Western democracy.

The cowardly right.

So what if Cameron is prejudiced? Aren’t you?

 David Cameron, gays and lesbians, in a hole, politicians, politicking, politics, prejudice  4 Responses »
Nov 092012
 

This, from Jon Stewart, post-US elections, is very funny – and makes me sad.  Its total enjoyment of the chagrin of evil others really does not bode well for the future of consensus politics.  This is, in fact, politics made war – and, perhaps, as a species, it is all we are capable of.

Contrast it with reactions such as these – “No time for collaboration” – and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

Meanwhile, back in Britain, Mr David Cameron has mentioned the words “paedophilia”, “witch-hunts” and “gays” in the same conversation.

This has, of course, provoked reactions of all sorts.

I am, myself, actually inclined to believe Mr Cameron did act out of the very best of intentions.  I do feel, however, that – like so many of the rest of us human beings out here – he unconsciously revealed his deepest prejudices.  Just as as the American left as represented by Jon Stewart so visibly despises the hardline American right for all their lies, obfuscation and manipulatory politics, so Mr Cameron probably despises the British left for all their nit-picking and prejudice-catching instincts.  Yes.  He was probably accurate when he said that gays would come worst off in any such witch-hunt.  How could it be any other way?  We’ve already seen how the disabled, sick and poor are equally at risk of suffering the full weight and heavy-handed politics of the worst government we’ve had in the last forty years.

Gays are no different.  A visible and organised group of people who rightly defend their rights to make a life at what used to be the margin of traditional establishment assumptions about what was right and wrong in human discourse.

Mr Cameron prejudiced?  Absolutely.  After all, aren’t we all?  Did he mean to connect paedophilia, witch-hunts and gays in the same sentence?  Yes and no.  He didn’t mean it to come out as he said it – but under that PR mane of suave communication, and perhaps very very deep down, it’s what he surely believes.

Perhaps despite himself.

For example, I’m sure he and his wife wouldn’t choose for their children a nursery school run and staffed entirely by gays.

Now would you?  And if you wouldn’t, why not?

*

In all this, we’re losing something very precious.  The glorious English right to eccentricity is disappearing over our cultural horizons.  Jimmy Savile and his ilk have done far more to destroy the essence of English freedoms than any New Labour-driven obsession with using the state to prevent child and teenage abuse and deprivation.

The impact that all the above will have on our society will shake its reality to its profoundest foundations.

All because those in power had far too much power.

All because our newspapers decided that money and influence were more important than truth.

All because every one of us is prejudiced beyond belief.

All because – in the end – no one ever knows how to properly avoid compromising their principles.

And in this, this terrible sequence of matters, we’re definitely all in it together.

Gordon’s Secret Army? This is Cameron’s Fifth Column!

 a con, Big Society, David Cameron, Fraser Nelson, Gordon Brown, Iain Duncan Smith  1 Response »
Oct 262012
 

I have a theory.  But before we proceed, let me lay the facts before you.

First we had Lord Bichard suggesting that pensioners might not get their full pension if they refused to sign up to voluntary work in the community:

Retired people should be encouraged to do community work such as caring for the “very old” or face losing some of their pension, a peer has suggested.

Lord Bichard, a former benefits chief, said “imaginative” ideas were needed to meet the cost of an ageing society.

And although such a move might be controversial, it would stop older people being a “burden on the state”.

Imaginative ideas, eh?  Not imaginative ideas which aim to stigmatise the elderly I hope.

Then we get Iain Duncan Smith arguing that families with more than two children should basically tell the successive ones that society doesn’t care to help them become employable workers and profitable consumers.  Talk about rubbing the runt of the litter’s nose in it:

Iain Duncan Smith told the poorest families to “cut your cloth” according to their “capabilities” and the money available.

The Work and Pensions Secretary suggested limiting benefits to the children of the unemployed as he pledged to end the “madness” of taxpayers housing large families in expensive homes.

Madness, right?  Not the kind of madness which aims to stigmatise the poor I hope.

(Oh, and if you’re interested, here’s a fact check on Duncan Smith’s declarations.  Just if, by any chance, the truth still interests you.)

Finally, tonight, and – sadly, to my mind anyhow – from the pen of Fraser Nelson, we get this absurd piece of tosh on how the charitable opposition to this Coalition’s welfare reforms is completely down to Gordon Brown’s Secret Army of Labour subversives.  Yes!!!  It’s Fifth Column time once again in our country: on this occasion, mind, this Cameron-careering juggernaut of a propaganda-driven excuse for a government aims to blame the failure of its own policies on the Machiavellian powers of a supposedly once-vanquished – as well as impotently ineffective – enemy.

Thus it is that it’s not the government which is failing to convince the country its medicine is the right and only one: instead, it’s (still) all Labour’s fault that sensible people refuse to behave insensibly.  As Nelson awfully sustains:

We saw this yesterday, when Iain Duncan Smith trailed a speech about welfare and poverty. A now familiar welcoming committee rose up early to greet him. The Child Poverty Action Group declared that there are no jobs to be had, so why punish those on welfare? A revered charity, Save the Children, has identified government cuts as a major threat to British children. Even the National Society for the Protection of Children warns that the “most vulnerable” children are “bearing the brunt” of Cameron’s cuts. And hearing them all, who would your average listener believe: a politician, or charity worker?

But these charities are not the kindly tin-rattlers they were. In 2008, Brown changed the rules so charities could join political campaigns. In theory, they could support any party – but as Brown knew, not many would use these powers to demand smaller taxes. It was a masterstroke. The charities sharpened their claws by hiring former Labour apparatchiks. Save the Children is now run by Justin Forsyth, Brown’s ex-strategy chief. The NSPCC has hired Peter Watt, a former Labour general secretary. Damian McBride is working for Cafod. Britain’s charities are nurturing a colourful, talented and efficient anti-Tory alliance.

Look.  You can’t have it both ways.  You can’t argue that Brown is a yesterday-politician one day and a tomorrow-politician the next.

Unless, of course, he wasn’t the yesterday-politician they so cruelly painted him out to be.

Now I hadn’t thought of that.

Had you?

A matter, perhaps, for another post.

But back to this evening’s thesis: Lord Bichard announces there’s no money for pensioners who don’t work; Iain Duncan Smith announces two kids is all you’re going to get; and Fraser Nelson announces any opposition to Cameron’s Tory-led government is an evil throwback of secretive individuals burrowing under the very transparency of parliamentary democracy itself.

And so to our theory.

Does this really not sound what a Fifth Column of insurgents – who’d taken over control of Parliament by barely legal means (say a group of politicos practised in the Goebbel-like arts of advertising) – might say of anyone else who was looking to defend democracy’s integrity?

Well, quite.  It does take a thief to catch a thief, after all.

If truth be told, I really don’t know what Nelson & Co are up to here.  From no benefits for a third child, it’s a small step to legislating against families having more than two children.  Once governments start fiddling around with such numbers and choices, the slippery slope of hubris leads them to all kinds of dreadful things.  And just remember, big families help create future workforces and consumers who consume.  Without biggish families down the line, they’ll be no one to pay the pensions.

Oh, but – bless him! – that’s where old Bichard comes in, isn’t it?  In this brave new web of Coalition policies, pensioners will end up paying for themselves.

We don’t need big families any more.  We don’t even need the poor to have families at all.  All we need is a land army of old people prepared to die on their feet and a pool of little rich kids who, with the right kind of schooling, will acquire exactly the right sort of voting habits.

This is, in fact, the Big Society by force.  People haven’t stepped forward in their droves to volunteer to make the state run for free, so now those in power have decided you will volunteer.

Or you won’t procreate.

Even when the English language and culture always taught us that both were blessed and honourable choices which humanised us.

*

So perhaps Gordon does have his Secret Army.

But in the Second World War, Western democracy couldn’t have beaten back the evil hoards if we hadn’t had our Resistance to hand.

Now could it?

The two big questions, of course, run as follows: does Nelson speak for Cameron tonight?  And does Cameron really want to frame the next three years as a war amongst the people?

What a crappy country is Mr David Cameron’s Britain

 a con, Coalition, David Cameron  No Responses »
Oct 112012
 

Less than a month ago, the week this happened in fact, we had Mr Andrew Mitchell, a government minister, mouthing off at the police at the gates of Downing Street itself.  The phrases he apparently chose included swear words and the term “plebs”.  The implications of such usages being as follows:

“Plebs” means the great mass of people not like them – casting all low-earners in the same pool, how cleverly Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling and the prime minister elide the dysfunctional few with the great majority of the poor who work, but can’t earn enough. The media helps, even the BBC, in programmes such as Neighbourhood Watched, seeking out the telegenic worst, maddest and most helpless on housing estates: job done, that’s the plebs in social housing, that’s everyone on benefits or on credits. Little wonder the public turns against paying for them. Of course, it’s far too dull to film toiling but grossly underpaid cleaners, guards and carers.

Today, from the Bolton News, we have this kind of headline.

Whilst Mr Andrew Mitchell has apparently been allowed to get off scot-free in his alleged abuse of on-duty police officers – there were, after all, no microphones to record what he said (although there were – presumably lip-readable – CCTV cameras absolutely plaguing the area, and two police officers did take notes which contradicted his version of the events) – in the case described above by the Bolton News, the man the wider media will now surely describe as a “yob” will go to prison for four months for the offence in question.  In part, because he was not only unpleasant but also stupid: he walked around in a T-shirt with the offensive comments for all and sundry to see, be offended by and take photos of.

Surely a case of a WYGSIWYRGP society if there ever was one.

A local police inspector is reported to have said: “”To mock or joke about the tragic events of that morning is morally reprehensible and Thew has rightly been convicted and sentenced for his actions.”  Morally reprehensible?  I quite agree.  A question of moral turpitude?  A lack of moral fibre?  Undoubtedly.

So wouldn’t community service be a more appropriate punishment for such weaknesses?  Get the man in question (I resist the easy name-calling of “yob” though comprehend the instinct) to see the impact his cruelty actually had on real people in the community – both police officers and citizens.

For is sending him to prison really a question of rightly sentencing him for his actions?  I’m not sure that it is.  In such a disagreeable environment, you might even find he gets a hero’s welcome from its unhappy inhabitants for wearing the T-shirt he wore.

Alternatively, of course, we could apply the punishment Mr Andrew Mitchell received for allegedly swearing at his own government’s security detail.

Which would be …?

Well, quite.

I’m really beginning to get the impression that there’s something deeper operating here.  A social schism whereby police officers are “plebs”, criminals on housing-estates are “yobs” – and wrongdoers in central London streets are … well … allowed to get away with it.

No clearer examples than the ones I outline today: all yobs beware – except in central London.

What a crappy country is Mr David Cameron’s Britain.

On Ed Miliband’s uphill battle to go downhill

 Conservative Party Conference 2011, Conservative Party Conference 2012, David Cameron, Ed Miliband, Labour Party Conference 2010, Labour Party Conference 2011, Labour Party Conference 2012, on a high, pyramid politics, pyramidal organisations  No Responses »
Oct 112012
 

This tweet got me thinking:

Cameron is not a prophet, a genius or even an inspiration. But he is the best all-round politician of a limited generation.

For the sake of a mind experiment, let’s assume that latter assertion is true: he is the best all-round politician of a limited generation.  The question that then comes to mind is: why is the generation limited?

It’s a well-known fact that more than fifty percent of Conservative Party funding comes from the financial services sector – what you and I would inexactly call the banks.  Banks are for a number of reasons the most hierarchical organisations on the planet.  Regulatory bodies and the need for an iron-cast governance make them that way.  Except that, of course, events have shown that what should’ve  been a virtue has become a weakness.  Top-level CEOs have brought such businesses – and by extension, our personal economies – to rack and ruin, precisely through the top-down power which such pyramidal structures offered them.

Meanwhile, in British society it seems that political parties have had a bad press of late.  Yes.  They do tend to promise rather more than they deliver.  They do tend to throw up charismatic leaders who eventually forget where they came from.  But if properly constructed, if constructed along the lines of those virtuous virtual communities the web is always throwing up, political parties could have a quite different purpose: that is to say, help engender a creative environment in which party leaders would no longer have to sit uncertainly atop an unstable structure, but could – instead – find themselves amongst collaborative colleagues, members and supporters all looking to work together.

If – as the tweet argues – the generation is limited, and I’m happy to accept for the moment that is so, is it actually because we stand at a massive structural crossroads in our societies?  On the one hand, we have socioeconomic conservatives in politics and business – in the UK, the Tory Party and their banking sponsors – looking to work together to sustain centuries-old ways of thinking and doing.  On the other hand, we have socioeconomic progressives – I used the word “progressive” uncertainly, I must admit – trying with difficulty to see their way through to different ways of organising people, societies and civilisations.

And in this latter band of social miscreants, I see Ed Miliband himself.  That he might not be the best of a limited generation, as – for the moment – Cameron could be, isn’t because he’s not up to the job of leading a country.  Rather, it’s because he belongs to a quite different generation from that which Cameron has cared to represent.

Miliband’s is a generation which looks to learn from the iconically 21st century.  Words like collaboration, cooperation, communication and dialogue.

He’s most definitely not looking to reassert that the 19th century at its zenith should be our objective.

If Cameron does appear to be the best of a bad bunch, perhaps that’s because he really is.

And if Ed Miliband appears to have been having an uphill battle, perhaps that’s because he’s far more ambitious than Cameron: perhaps he refuses to settle for being the best of a bad bunch.  Miliband, quite paradoxically, may be aiming to use party politics for a quite different purpose.

Not to command from up on high in the rarefied atmosphere of a political Everest but to enable in the luxuriant and fertile downhill slopes where the vast majority of people use their daily intelligences to eke out their livings.

A case of an uphill battle to go downhill?  Downhill to that part of society where the greatest abundance of thought and wisdom lies?

Why not?  On many occasions in history, perception is everything.  You can be right, but if people’s misinterpretation of you kicks in first … well, there’s very little you can do to right the vessel after that.

When Labour under Miliband first talked of that New Generation, I truly do think they were on to something.  The only question which remains in my mind right now is whether they remember exactly how much that something was.

Because I do.

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Further reading: this on Miliband’s One Nation strategy is well worth your time.  Disillusionment waiting in the wings for some?  Perhaps.  If this is the case, how much more important is it to ensure we reach the abundance of creative party political structures – before, that is, an inevitable closing-down of options takes place.

Dear Mr Cameron: In order for some to swim, some must sink

 Conservative Party Conference 2011, Conservative Party Conference 2012, David Cameron, in a hole  No Responses »
Oct 112012
 

I just saw an advert for people in need – people who might run out of money during retirement, in fact.

As you can see, these people really are needy.

And capitalism is working – for them.  I don’t deny it.  But when David Cameron says we must “sink or swim”, his fervent belief in the values and behaviours of hierarchical capitalism means he doesn’t really mean “sink or swim” – he means “sink and swim”.  There is no way we can all realistically aspire to being on the top; to spreading the privilege around a bit; to sitting at the top table with our leaders.

In a deeply hierarchical society such as ours, in order for some to swim, some must sink.

And that is what David Cameron refuses to publicly acknowledge when he tries so desperately to sell us his version of hierarchical capitalism and democracy.

Must it be this way, then?  In order for some to swim, must some sink?  Well, of course not.  We could fashion a different sort of politics, a deeper politics (more here).  But this would require Mr Cameron & Co to reverse the privilege they possess.

Privilege literally means:

privilege (plural privileges)

  1. A peculiar benefit, advantage, or favor; a right or immunity not enjoyed by others or by all; special enjoyment of a good, or exemption from an evil or burden; a prerogative; advantage; franchise; preferential treatment.

It’s hardly possible, then, for everyone to swim.

I don’t know which is the worse thought, to be honest: that Mr Cameron really doesn’t realise this or that Mr Cameron really doesn’t care.  Either way, at a statistical number-crunching level, and whether reluctant or happy, he accepts that latterday hierarchical capitalism should only service those with the means to purchase their privilege.

And the rest of those in need who clearly don’t have the wherewithal - because, precisely, the system requires that they can’t?

I don’t have the mind to use the words I should right now – but I’m sure you can fill in the blanks on my behalf.

The Porkie-Telling Tendency of Cameron & Co

 class war, class warfare, David Cameron, PLEBS, police, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Sep 212012
 

This morning, the big story was about a Tory toff swearing at the police for acting like plebs (translation: for doing their jobs) (I reserve the right to allegedly use the word toff, by the way, precisely because the toff in question allegedly used the word pleb).  As the BBC‘s Nick Robinson points out, the sequence of events was thus:

That the new Conservative Chief Whip, Andrew Mitchell, lost his temper with a member of Scotland Yard’s Diplomatic Protection Group, is not in dispute. What is disputed is what he said.

The officer’s Police Federation representative has confirmed his account of the row – first reported in The Sun: “Best you learn your f—ing place. You don’t run this f— government”

He is also said to have added another politically toxic four letter word – calling the officer a “pleb.”

Mr Mitchell insists he did not use any of the offending words although he has now apologised to the officer for failing to” treat the police with the respect they deserve”.

Now before we proceed, let’s examine that word “pleb”.  Wikipedia says this:

The plebs were the general body of free land-owning Roman citizens (as distinguished from slaves and the capite censi) in Ancient Rome. They were the non-aristocratic class of Rome, and consisted of freed people, shopkeepers, crafts people, skilled or unskilled workers and farmers[1]. Members of the plebs were also distinct from the higher order of the patricians. A member of the plebs was known as a plebeian (play/plɨˈbiːən/; Latin: plebeius). This term is used today to refer to one who is or appears to be of the middle or lower order; however, in Rome plebeians could become quite wealthy and influential.

Curious how being a free person, shopkeeper, crafts person, skilled or unskilled worker or farmer could morph itself – in what we thought was a meritocracy, at least of sorts – into an insult of such awfully class-ridden proportions.

Anyhow, from what I saw on Channel 4′s main news programme this evening, the police would appear to be sticking by their version of events.  Which leads one to wonder if Mr Mitchell, an influential Tory figure, has actually lied at some point in the proceedings – despite his apology for failing to “treat the police with the respect they deserve”.

If Mr Mitchell did indeed say what it is alleged he said, I am moved to ask the following question: assuming Mr Mitchell told even a small porkie when he initially claimed he didn’t use the vocabulary he was accused of using, was he acting out of a desire to attack or defend?  Was it hubris that motivated him – or more simply shame? Was it a mechanism of fight or flight?

More widely, too, when Cameron & Co pull the wool over our eyes, as I firmly believe they are doing every day of the week, should we feel angry at them for the aggression they are committing or sorry for them for the bind that the real world of shabby government is now placing them in?

That is to say, are they running cruel circles around us – or are events beginning to encircle them?

*

One final thought.  If people like Mitchell, Cameron and Osborne are finding the weight of government so heavy as to make them fall into the casual habit of snapping aggressively at every symbol of an order which continues to stubbornly resist their charms (think of the lawyers, the doctors and now the police), only then to tell tall tales about what really happened, just imagine what they might be saying – or not saying – about the stuff they manage, even now, to keep hidden behind closed doors.

As I tweeted earlier in the day:

Govt reminds me of bit of Hitler: at trickiest time in its war against English, it sure knows how to alienate on all fronts. #historylesson

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