On shifting the frame of the surveillance-state debate

 surveillance, technocracy, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Jun 162013
 
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I’d like to change how we talk about these issues.  Let’s accept, for one minute, we need a surveillance state.  Let’s accept – to use Doctorow’s terminology – that high-ranking secretive officials of our democratic administrations should have the right to watch what we’re doing, even whilst we are doing something as private as going to the toilet.

On shifting the frame of the surveillance-state debate, my issue would no longer be with these matters as described above.  No longer would I worry about the rights and wrongs of invading our privacy; of needing to properly understand the difference between democratic privacy and criminal secrecy; of disentangling the process whereby this way of defending liberal democracy – and its corresponding business practice – undermines precisely that which we claim to defend.  No.  The matter would become quite different; my focus quite another.

If a surveillance state is an inevitability – neither because evil is threatening to overcome our civilisation nor because the gradualists have painted us into a corner from which there is no escape but, rather, simply because maybe we all have too many freedoms to know properly what to do with them – let’s, at least for the sake of argument, assume there is nothing we can now do to stop it.

The issue is no longer prevention.

It therefore becomes a different one of implementation.

Yes.  Admittedly, we are late to the game because the gradualists have done their job all too well.  But that doesn’t mean we are too late to the game, nor – indeed – that we can’t amend its rules in some constructive and democratically hopeful manner.

I suggest, therefore, as a starting-point of sorts that we might want to proceed in the following way.  As I tweeted this afternoon, the real serious problem of minimal democratic oversight on the kind of massive expenditure a surveillance state will always involve is the inevitable inefficiency, graft and downright corruption that comes out of any such cosy relationships framed thus.

This is why we need to shift the frame of the debate.  And this is how I suggest we should do it.

It’s time we introduced the ideas of data protection, total quality management, democratic oversight, and – above all – an intrinsic value for money, back into the debate around what our spies can and can’t do.  We need to get involved somehow in their processes and procedures: after all, to eliminate an evil terrorist we need surely to know how much it might cost in resource terms and whether this can be justified as a proper and correct return on our taxpayer contributions.  You want the right to get rid of people extra-judicially; to keep people in prison for years; to bring down or support dictatorships; to destroy dangerous democracies?  OK.  That’s fine.  But show me – year in, year out – you’re doing it in the most cost-effective way.  No blank cheques any more.  No unexamined processes and procedures.  Instead, a righteous – and rightful – process whereby democracy observes and guarantees its overall value for money.

That’s where I’d like to push the surveillance state now.  Proportionate; correctly administered; a technocratic revolution in everything spyworthy.  Let overarching objectives and targets become the bread and butter of its practice; let productivity spreadsheets and return-on-investment become public knowledge; let spies and spooks and practitioners of our societies’ underbellies be required to emerge blinking and emboldened into the cold light of a leaner way of seeing.  Ultimately, let the ways of thinking and doing the rest of us have long ago got used to be the guiding light of a new surveillance state.

You even want to watch me do my business in my figurative bathroom?  Then demonstrate, prove and evidence to what degree you really are defending my personal and public integrities.

In practice; in reality; in fact and in deed.

And only when I really know, not just believe or trust to be the case, that – in exchange for losing the freedom to shit in private – I will have gained the freedom to always walk the streets safely in public … well, only then will I begin a slow, possibly painful, process of being prepared to decently accept, democratically consolidate and transparently implement this implicit compact and settlement you lay out in front of us: a compact and settlement which, over the past two decades, the gradualists have been incorrectly imposing on us – without honestly or in good faith ever drawing our political attention adequately to.

You want to control a long-ago consumer-driven world?  Be prepared for such a world to verily demand its VfM!


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On learning from the “noble gnomes of Zurich”

 democracy, referendums, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Jun 122013
 
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Ever wondered why we call bankers “gnomes”?  The BBC has a lovely explanation from 2010 here:

Forget kitschy garden ornaments. These gnomes emerged from medieval fascination with the secrets of wealth, especially gold, buried underground and mined by mysterious beings. Goethe writes about them in his epic Faust – ambiguous characters creating wealth which others, depending on their morals, use for good or evil.

So as the secretive world of Swiss banking took shape, centred on Zurich, and based on underground vaults with anonymous numbered accounts in a fiercely independent, mountainous country, you can see why the idea of gnomes sprang to mind.

They even get Donald Rumsfeld in on the act with a reference to “so many ‘gnome unknowns’”, as bankers line up alongside the Illuminati and the Bilderberg types who “really run our world”.

But one of the saddest things about a modern hyper-communicated world is how silos of prejudice are more often than not perpetuated rather than broken down.  There’s evidence of this today in a few stories about Switzerland.  Firstly, how a Swiss referendum of ordinary people unexpectedly leads to caps on bankers’ bonuses:

Swiss voters have overwhelmingly backed proposals to impose some of the world’s strictest controls on executive pay, final referendum results show.

Nearly 68% of the voters supported plans to give shareholders a veto on compensation and ban big payouts for new and departing managers.

Secondly, how the Swiss parliament looks to pass a bill which aims to break up “cherished” Swiss banking secrecy laws once and for all:

A blow to banking secrecy: a Swiss government bill has just been put to parliament which would allow Swiss banks to hand over internal information to the US authorities – effectively sidestepping Switzerland’s own secrecy laws, but hopefully also placating Washington.

Thirdly, there are moves in this apparently ever-so-gnomic country to award all citizens a €2100 a month salary for life (the Spanish original here; robot English here):

Un chollo. Así se puede calificar, de primeras, la propuesta de un movimiento ciudadano suizo que pretende que todos tengan de por vida una renta de casi 2.100 euros al mes (2.500 francos suizos), trabajen o no trabajen; sean ricos o pobres.

A bargain.  At first sight, this is how we can define a proposal by a Swiss citizen movement which looks to give everyone a salary of almost €2100 a month (2500 Swiss francs), whether they work or not; whether they are rich or poor.

And of course I suppose you can happily contemplate such a move where a majority rejects in a similar kind of referendum the opportunity to increase its holiday entitlement by fifty percent:

Voters in Switzerland have rejected a proposal to give themselves more annual leave in a national referendum.

The plan would have given workers six weeks off a year, but business groups warned about the cost to the economy.

Who, after all, would really want – or, indeed, need – to increase their time off, if citizen wages as described above were to be implemented for all and sundry?

Prejudice is a bad thing, though.  Of that, I am clear.  As the BBC goes on to say in the last report linked to above:

Referendums are a key part of Switzerland’s direct democracy system.

The Swiss frequently have their say on changes to laws, budgets, or any issue that 100,000 citizens say they feel strongly about.

Meanwhile, the kind of things the Swiss democratically say yay or nay to can, quite obviously, vary immensely:

In other referendums, voters in Zurich agreed to the creation of “sex boxes” where prostitutes can work. In Geneva, residents voted to tighten restrictions on street protests.

Democracy is just that, isn’t it?  You have to run with the rough and the smooth.  What you can’t do is leave it all in the hands of the privileged corrupters of latterday politics, simply because you assume the voters will do worse.  As Kath Raymond Hilton points out in her coruscating piece:

Politicians are extraordinary people. There’s almost nothing they can’t do. They can break, with impunity, laws that govern the rest of us. They can take our money, commit fraud, tell lies, make libelous statements and break judicial injunctions, all without fear of prosecution. They can earn thousands of pounds on top of the salaries we pay them by telling businesses how to influence ministers and select committees. Or by helping them get new laws in place, or get around the old ones. That’s a bit like a serving police officer advising a burglar – for cash – of the best way to bypass window locks.

That’s exactly how it is.  That’s exactly how it’s ended up.  Out of a historical fear of the base instincts of uneducated and unmediated souls, the educated elites have been able to justify taking over our society and turning it into a tool for their final self-enrichment.

I’ve never been entirely in favour of referendums myself; maybe I’ve also feared the clear dangers of a dominating people-power.  Today, however, in the light of the Swiss examples I’ve described in this post, as well as the rank reality Hinton’s article lays out so plainly, I’m truly beginning to wonder if it isn’t time we needed to learn from the “noble gnomes of Zurich”.  As the BBC feature also suggested:

[...] “In the world it is not the image, but the substance behind the image which counts,” sniffed top banker Paul Rossy at the time.

We could do well to remember this idea.

Especially in a time where all – including our democracy – has become a quite unfulfilling, sales-driven hype.


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Changeling

 blogging, blogosphere, change, music industry, music video, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Jun 042013
 
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Wikipedia defines “changeling” thus:

A changeling is a creature found in European folklore and folk religion. It is typically described as being the offspring of a fairy, troll, elf or other legendary creature that has been secretly left in the place of a human child.  [...]

And thus this blog’s surface has changed today.  Might be the restlessness an approaching summer provokes; might be me simply finding myself at a bit of a loose end.  Whatever the reason, I hope you like at least most of the result.

In the meantime, a jolly good reason to play a fantastic piece of music.


http://youtu.be/W1xfkUdl13M


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Lobbyists clogging up Parliament? Then high time your MP became a Magnum!

 democracy, in a hole, lobbyists, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Jun 042013
 
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Lobbying is getting a terrible – perhaps I should say an even worse – name for itself.  The latest here from the Guardian; meanwhile, background here from the BBC.

I suppose, as the latter article underlines, lobbying in theory is a conduit for democratic debate:

Lobbying in order to influence political decisions is widely regarded as a legitimate part of the democratic process. Lobbyists are firms or individuals that are paid to influence such decisions.

They are often former politicians or ex-civil servants who have developed personal contacts with those in power.

Alternatively, individuals. firms, charities and other groups can lobby on their own, without paying professional lobbyists.

The problem, of course, is the rank professionalisation of the activity.  That people and firms can earn livings on the back of all this is clearly a vector for the infection of our body politic.

So why does it need to happen in the first place?  I suppose, in the first instance, it has something to do with the trafficking of information.  From the hundreds of thousands of press releases which attempt to churnalise good journalists into moral submission to the ready-made pre-digested outputs of the higher-powered lobbyists, we basically have an information industry giving up self-interested executive overviews to MPs and others who often have very little time on their hands.

Do we really believe all MPs and Lords religiously read every word of every parliamentary proposal?  Or, indeed, are able in relatively short timeframes to accurately judge the implications of every clause?  In such a circumstance, it surely ought to be both beneficial and inevitable that outside specialists interact with and inform our representatives in both Houses.

Surely it should.  Surely it must:

  • 206 parliamentarians have recent or present financial private healthcare connections
  • 145 Lords have recent or present financial connections to companies involved in healthcare
  • 124 Peers benefit from the financial services sector
  • 1 in 4 Conservative Peers have recent or present financial connections to companies involved in healthcare
  • 1 in 6 Labour Peers have recent or present financial connections to companies involved in healthcare
  • 1 in 6 Crossbench Peers have recent or present financial connections to companies involved in healthcare
  • 1 in 10 Liberal Democrat Peers have recent or present financial connections to companies involved in healthcare
  • 71 MPs have recent or present financial links to companies involved in private healthcare
  • 81% of these are Conservative

And so it goes on.

So how can we resolve the corrupting nature of money in our democratic process?  I think it would be relatively simple.  As follows: how about we throw even more money at our MPs and Lords?  “More money?” I hear you screech.  “Well, yes,” I reply hurriedly.  Let me explain.

Just as churnalism is the bane of modern mainstream media, as overworked communicators rely more and more on the PR industry for the sources of their stories and points of view on reality, so the spin and angles professionalised lobbyists place on our perceptions of the world don’t half taint these perceptions to a considerable degree.  Yet if each and every MP and Lord had their own properly resourced research machine, resourced to the extent any half-decent lobbying firm is currently resourced for example, and which allowed them to investigate from scratch the whole world and its mother, wouldn’t the impact on and need for our representatives to engage with such democratically debilitating creatures fall dramatically?

If every one of our representatives was in essence the centre of a mini think-tank all on its lonesome, wouldn’t the information flow and the unhappy dependence on external mediation become far less necessary?  In such a way, then, we could recover some of the alleged former glories of our constituency system where individuals used to vote with their own properly informed – and relatively independent – minds on matters their own understandings served to broaden.

Once this was so; the world, quite naturally, has since become far more complicated.  Hardly surprising many cannot keep up, and therefore feel the need for the supporting hand of intellectual bribery.  (Sometimes literal bribery too.)

But if MPs and Lords could revert to being those disinterested specialists of other times whose careers were designed to consistently enable representative democracy, instead of the helicopter-viewing extensions of PR merchants they’ve latterly and frequently turned into, we could perhaps begin to reconstruct a recognition that not all in our democracy has to stink so unlimitedly.

What I am finally suggesting?  I suppose nothing more nor less than this: that our MPs and other representatives became not just private but, more significantly, very public investigators.

Not easily swayed recipients of pre-digested wisdoms but – actually – generators of original and very evidence-based thought.

A Magnum anyone?

No.  Not those summer thoughts of lazy indulgence.  This one I mean, of course!  (In a way …)


http://youtu.be/3CquMO3vJvo


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How to spot an idiot living in your neighbourhood

 common sense, democracy, gilipollas, people, Telegraph, unclassifiable  2 Responses »
May 302013
 
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There is an idiotic article out there at the moment with one – just one – (apparently borrowed) phrase of massively perceptive wisdom:

[...] As has been said, you have to be just clever enough to do it and just stupid enough to believe in it.

As follows, in fact:

It is surely reasonable for Dame Widow Twankey, the former director general of HI5, to call for people to inform on neighbours they suspect of idiocy. To a very limited extent, it happens already. But for the sake of all of us – political and celebrity communities in particular – it needs to happen more.

Also reasonable, on the face of it, is the Government’s desire to do more to discourage the process by which disaffected individuals turn themselves into intellectual lunatics – the job of the proposed task force on Prevent, the counter-radicalisation strategy.

In fact, we already know all we need to know about radicalisation. What the task force needs to focus on is what to do and – equally important – what not to do.

Studies show that it can happen to anyone, that there is no single identifiable profile. That said, the great majority of idiots, unsurprisingly, have been Anglo-Saxon males aged 35-70, a third to a half of whom had always been unemployed in the service of the state, in particular as MPs, and a significant portion of the rest under-employed as company directors or tabloid columnists. Most were unhappily married. Where women were involved, it tended to be in a supportive role, although in the Houses of Parliament and the Lords female representatives were radicalised by the decline of democracy, showing a curious empathy with the dispossessed.

Worldwide, about 62 per cent were graduate idiots, with those of non-British origin generally from the educated but politically frustrated aspirational middle class. British home-grown idiots tend to be less well educated though of a higher socio-economic status. One estimate is that about 31 per cent participated in some form of lower education, studying such subjects as hunting, shooting or fishing. They are not mad: levels of mental illness were roughly in line with world averages. Between a third and a quarter of those judged to be idiots in Britain and Europe had signs of congenital idiocy. A fifth or more of British idiots were also international celebrities, in particular business gurus, lifestyle leaders and think-tank groupies, integrating perfectly with the foolishness of their host culture and often obtaining leave to remain. Throughout Europe, many idiots were and are disaffected second-generation business wannabes on the political make.

Etc etc etc …

And so to our conclusion?  Again, as follows:

Rather than ban idiots, the Government should dialogue with, educate and embrace them (as the French often do) along with their hangers-on. It should stress that the proposed Common Idiots Bill (aka the “Promote Graft Charter”) does little more than extend to new idiots existing practices with the old. Above all, officials should pay more attention to “anti-democratic idiots”, the swamp from which the current Parliament and the international celebrity community has emerged. The Prime Minister publicly called for this in his 2011 speech in Munich, but Whitehall largely ignored him, focusing on what one of Dame Twankey’s successors called “the idiots nearest the boat”. It needn’t cost much – a few good dipstick officers here and there – but it would make a difference.

One final observation, this time on a totally serious note: we can always tell where a so-called “white” society is rampantly prejudiced when a crime committed by a “white” man or woman doesn’t merit the epithet of “white”, even as any crime committed by someone of another race, religion or ethnic grouping immediately leads to the latter information being foregrounded in those oh-so-even-handed newspaperly descriptions.

When I was a kid, and when I was occasionally driven to use swear words about people in front of my father, he would tell me – quite carefully and gently – that I should be using the term “indescribable idiot”.

No.  It doesn’t sound the same as, for example, “black savage” – but it does allow us to communicate our necessary positions without the tragic interference of otherwise inevitable prejudice.

We ought to listen to my father on this one, I think.

Let’s start calling all those who would destroy the equilibrium of democracy “idiots” – and in the process aim to leave our prejudices properly behind us.

Don’t you think?


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Politics as poison

 politics, unclassifiable  No Responses »
May 282013
 
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We’ve been informed that politics and Machiavelli go together like bread and butter.  Well, I recently had to give up the butter side of the agreement and exchange it for cholesterol-reducing spreads.  So maybe it’s time we gave up Machiavelli.

To accept resignedly that cruelty is our lot is not something I am prepared to go along with.  The real problem is as I tweeted this afternoon, whilst describing politics as poison:

@itiddly Poison ‘cos politicians & businesspeople live in each other’s pockets. Politicians should enable society, not their bank accounts.

I added later on in a separate conversation:

@robmanuel Politics has seeped into absolutely everything, which means that business now controls everything thru’ the hand of politics.

The operative word really is “seep” too.  It’s become a contaminating water source.  Something that irrigates our every act and move.  But instead of with a refreshing and healthy recovering of an equilibrium we can all share, it’s reverted to something very medieval; almost primal in fact.

I read today that Moody had upgraded the US banking system from poor to standard (I do, of course, mean from negative to stable).  This provoked the following sorry train of thought:

Imagine the banking system gets sorted. Not hard to contemplate given all the taxpayer money thrown at it. & how will that help me exactly?

The same people at the top, the same people who caused us such grief. The same mindsets; the same attitudes; the same expectations.

But with the disastrous result that they will believe themselves confirmed in their arrogant behaviours.

Politics is pwned by the private sector through and through.  This is not only bad for politics; it is bad – long-term – for the private sector too.  Corrupting behaviours always lead to inefficiencies in processes and procedures.  Where those in charge believe a price can be paid for silence, the silence that is bought will neglect to illuminate the thinking of those who would make life more effective for such organisations.  Society is built on the individual actions of people, departments, divisions, national organisations and transnational headquarters.  Where you contemplate corrupting the people on such a large scale, you contemplate corrupting the headquarters.

That is how politics has become a poison.  A poison which is corroding our society from within.  Capitalism is destroying its efficiencies – and taking us speedily along with its swirling tornado-like destructions.

I was just listening to an interview with the Spanish politician and writer Alfonso Guerra.  In a few short phrases, he explained so very clearly what is going wrong.  Better, far better, than I ever could.

“Guerra” in Spanish means “war”, by the way.

And this politics as poison is about as unconscionably insidious a war that has ever been coursed against the people.

What next?

What’s left?

What else can we do?

I’ve signed a multitude of petitions.

I’ve written a multitude of blogposts.

I’ve tried to engage with a multitude which seems evermore lost.

I’ve tried to engage with my more rational side in a multitude of ways.

Yet our governments, and our business leaders through our governments, through the tools that are politics and political parties, insist on continuing to monetise our every instinct; insist on reducing us to ever lower denominators; insist on turning beasts who are not animals into the most degraded of creatures on the earth.

Where did this poison originate?  How can we resist what is happening?  Where will it end if not in the death of every blessed human aspiration we once believed worth possessing?

Politics as poison – and we the laboratory rats.  Is that what we’ve finally come down to?


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A tale of two prices and one (very sorry) internal market

 Asda, competition, market, NHS, online world, unclassifiable  1 Response »
May 252013
 
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My wife decided to buy a Daewoo microwave last week.  She liked the red colour.  She’s special that way – and I mean it in a good way.

She bought it at Asda (I couldn’t remember any more whether we were still supposed to be boycotting them – or, even, if we were ever supposed to be doing so) – and so that I thought was going to be the end of that.

Yesterday, whilst checking out prices for some other appliance online, I stumbled across the Asda Direct website.  As per the screenshot below, it showed the same microwave – only this time with a ten percent discount on the previous lowest price charged (that is to say, the one that my wife had paid the previous weekend).

Asda microwave offer

At the time of my web browsing, my wife was near the local Asda.  I rang her up and suggested she went to the store and asked them if anything could be done about the matter.  As chance would have it, and although she obviously wasn’t going to have the microwave itself on her, she did have the receipt.  She agreed to pop in on the off-chance that maybe a price adjustment might be possible.

Worth a try.  After all, “every little helps”.  Or is that “every penny matters”?

Or should I have said “saving you money every day”?

Or even “Asda price”!

Hmm.  Asda price.  Now that’s an idea and a half.  As you’ll shortly see.

A few minutes later, my wife phoned me back – a little distraught in a first-world-pains sort of way.  In short, the lady at the helpdesk had explained to my wife that she could take advantage of the price change, but in order to do so, she’d have to return the microwave she’d bought, reorder online with the relevant checkout code, wait two days or so for another appliance to be delivered to the store, and only then pick up the latter at the revised price.

Now my wife is Spanish and she sometimes feels awfully frustrated in ridiculous situations like these, especially when she sees herself obliged to overcome her fury at stupidity whilst having to do so by communicating in a foreign language.  So she asked me to speak by phone to the helpdesk manager to try and explain the essentially rubbish nature of the whole process as already explained to my wife by the first woman she had spoken to.

So it was that the manager described the reality as follows:

  1. Asda Direct is effectively a separate company within a company.
  2. A store and Asda Direct compete for business.
  3. The prices of one and the other can vary, even as the latter offers a Collect In-Store service where customers can pick up the products delivered for free at the (allegedly competing) stores themselves.
  4. Customers frequently complain about these kinds of issues.  I refrained from asking why they weren’t being listened to.
  5. When I suggested Asda might like to price-match itself, I was informed that Asda hasn’t offered a price-match facility for years (could have fooled me from the ads).  “Price guarantees”, on the other hand, were currently offered on groceries.
  6. Prices depended on customer demand (understandable) which could vary from online shop to bricks and mortar store to bricks and mortar store – whilst often, for example, CDs were cheaper because they were delivered from the Channel Islands.  I observed that microwaves probably weren’t.  She did kind of agree.
  7. She did confirm that in theory we would have to return the microwave to the shop, reorder online with the checkout code and request Collect In-Store in order to purchase again at the new price.  She also agreed however – all credit to her by now creeping sense of customer focus here – that she would be prepared to give us a £5 gift card as a goodwill gesture to avoid the consummation of the above totally foolish palaver.

At which point we were, of course, ultimately grateful – again, in that very first-world-pains sort of way.  But it did lead me to a couple of inconsequential thoughts on the back of it.  Inconsequential – or perhaps not so very.

Firstly, it might indeed have been an example of good customer service – but the customer might not have been my wife.  Imagine how much it would have cost Asda to process a return of product to the store, an online order, and a delivery of the very same product from their Asda Direct arm to the store in question.  I don’t have the data but I’m pretty sure it would have been more than the value of the gift card my wife was given.  Yes.  The helpdesk manager might have been helping my wife out on my insistence – but she might just as easily have been calculating the odds pretty damn quickly and doing what her business’s procedures clearly didn’t want to contemplate: that is to say, the sensible thing.

Secondly, let’s imagine what such internal-market dynamics might do when applied, say, to public-sector corporate organisations like the NHS.

No.  I don’t have the knowhow to lay it out before you in black and white.  I don’t have the skill or wherewithal to define with precision and accuracy the implications of such structures.

But I do have the prescience to fear the possibility not only for simple corporate abuse but more significantly – as in this case – utter procedural stupidity.

Internal markets aren’t the only way.  They don’t have to even be the best way.  As in the above-mentioned situation, they can even be the worst way.

Bad enough when applied to the sale of consumer durables.

With the potential for a negligence by almost criminal default when applied to sensitive matters such as patient care.


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“Cheese!” I suppose we should say

 Catholic Church, civilisation, conditionality, religion, unclassifiable  No Responses »
May 242013
 
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Watch the following video.  Millions already have – yet it was only published three days ago.  A lovely game of point-of-view, too.  Top-notch stuff, whether true or not.


http://youtu.be/zdtD19tXX30

Frame is everything, especially in a visual world.  This from Pope Francis, for example:

He told the story of a Catholic who asked a priest if even atheists had been redeemed by Jesus.

“Even them, everyone,” the pope answered, according to Vatican Radio. “We all have the duty to do good,” he said.

“Just do good, and we’ll find a meeting point,” the pope said in a hypothetical reply to the hypothetical comment: “But I don’t believe. I’m an atheist.”

“You couldn’t get more hopeful,” I imagine many of you are thinking.  Me?  It just makes me wonder if even the Pope has fallen in with those who would create a conditional world – a world where what we do is far more important than what we are.

As I say, frame is everything in a visual world – and there’s nothing more visual than a pope who knows how to speak to the masses via the tools and media they are most comfortable with.  Even when unconditionality is the last thing on his mind.

Maybe I’m being picky here – let it be clear, for the moment I find Pope Francis a real breath of fresh air.  But I still feel unsure of where I should stand in other contexts: if we’re talking about my children, for example, my love is absolutely unconditional.  Why, then, can’t society be built on similar foundations?  Why must we choose, instead, to monetise life so?

Why must our civilisations measure us so religiously – even as religions are the last thing on their mind?

More importantly, how is that one of our biggest religions also finds it this easy to do?

Does no one care to love any more outside the framing impact of these artificial boundaries?

And this impossibility that our societies might just allow us to be – doesn’t it also serve to explain a jot why our lives are becoming so mentally ill-advised?

For it’s truly paradoxical that in a supposedly hyper-individualist world, one should feel this fearful obligation to conform to certain norms rather than discover oneself in all one’s uniqueness.

Frame, as I say, is everything in a world where what we see has become more important than what we think.

And this is, quite sadly, where too many of us now find ourselves.

“Cheese!” I suppose we should say.

No?


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How to rescue One Nation Labour from oblivion

 Ed Miliband, Labour Party Conference 2011, Labour Uncut, neo-New Labour, New Labour, One Nation Labour, Reaganomics, unclassifiable  No Responses »
May 232013
 
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Kath has an interesting piece over at Speaker’s Chair.  In it she says:

Just two years before a general election, and already Ed Miliband’s ‘One Nation’ mantra whiffs of failure. It’s not hard to see why. As a slogan, it doesn’t have the oomph of a car insurance advert, let alone the ‘va va voom’ Labour needs to win.

She adds that:

Tony Blair’s New Labour re-branding in 1994 was a success because it meant something. With one short word, he told Britain that the old Labour Party – the party of wildcat strikes, crippling taxation and high unemployment – was gone forever. One Nation Labour tells us nothing. It certainly isn’t going to contribute to a landslide victory in 2015.

Now I can understand where she’s coming from, but I’m not sure I agree.  The renaming process of “New Labour” spoke most powerfully about the thus-banished behaviours of the Party itself.  One Nation Labour, meanwhile, may be trying to do something far more revolutionary.  Even as she argues …

How are voters meant to grasp something so essentially elitist? And why would they bother trying?

… I respond with this comment:

Hmm. I agree that One Nation doesn’t mean much now, but I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. Imagine, if you will, two years down the line, a country finally riven by the cuts which have still barely begun to bite. Imagine how people will feel, what they’ll be really desperate for. Togetherness perhaps? A oneness of nationhood? A society which helps all its members? Is that really beyond belief? Can’t the kind of political rhetoric One Nation rhetoric represents be filled out and made clear for a change by the people, instead of by the politicians?

This is why I think Ed Miliband may have thought this through much more from a strategic point of view than from a marketing point of view. Yes. Like a good Ibsen play, the real action is taking place offstage, in the community in question, amongst the people themselves. In my mind, at least, One Nation may be a political bath just waiting to be filled by the people themselves. And using the multitude of babies (Legal Aid, the NHS, education, social care, disabled support etc) which the Tories have clearly been looking to dispose of.

We’ve been here before, of course – specifically, Party Conference 2011 and Miliband’s famous curiosity of a speech.  It wouldn’t, after all, be the first time he has had people misunderstanding/underestimating what he is up to:

[...] But I do think, in an analogous way, that – in his recent speech at Party Conference – Ed Miliband was at least attempting to break certain moulds in quite a courageous manner.  The very fact that many people felt obliged to criticise his delivery – and not see his register as conversational rather than traditionally declamatory – does make me wonder if this poor man doesn’t have the hardest job in politics: to sell grassroots collaboration to a political party wary of, and thus resistant to, all such similar promises.

A political party which claims to be the very essence of grassroots politics – and then consistently finds itself in search of yet another charismatic group of fixers.

[...]

Is Ed Miliband’s speech going to be a Hitchcockian achievement [as per Hitchcock's "Psycho"]?  Misunderstood on its first outing by those who claim to know – yet generally, in the future, to be well received by those who can only vote?  Battling against those “vested interests” which make economies in their own image and for their own purposes is an issue he is courageous to raise.  In a sense, then, perhaps we could say – with his conversation – that Miliband proposes nothing more nor less than that neo-New Labour I was unhappy with the other day: but in a better and far more constructive register; that is to say, all the unfinished business which New Labour was never brave enough to get round to effecting.

This, then, in a very Reaganite way, could be how revolutionary One Nation Labour might become.  Miliband looking only to place a conceptual framework around the people; not, in any significant way, to play the commentariat game of telling the people what to think and do.  It’s not without its own risks, of course.  As Ben suggests over at Labour Uncut:

One Nation: the slogan that just will not budge. Still being drummed home to death. We may have tired of it but we’re not going to forget it. The mark of a successful slogan? Not really. I still don’t understand what it means. Or more accurately, what we’re meant to do with it. Alone, it’s meaningless: Labour has broad appeal? It will unite the whole of Britain?

But, all parties profess to do this. Besides, One Nation fails the “elevator pitch:” able to be summarised in one elevator ride. Which isn’t 100% accurate as I’ve just summed it up in a sentence. Unfortunately, the summary alone is so vague it requires several more elevator rides. Heck, it might be easier just to get in one, hit the emergency alarm, and hope the rescue takes several hours.

Yet I see other things which Labour, in the ordinary communities it must win, is doing to create a different feeling.  Maybe Miliband isn’t doing as well as he could to flesh out One Nation Labour to the mass media.  On the other hand, maybe he’s still holding back as he looks to allow the people to start taking part and doing that job of definition themselves: through the acts he encourages them to take ownership for and in the time and space he is giving the Party in order that it might grow.

This, for example, which I – in sudden partisan-like mood – blogged about thus.  In itself, then, a small event – but multiply it up by hundreds of others, multiply it up by the time Miliband is taking, multiply it up so that the members and supporters do really begin to get the feeling that something might be slowly changing inside Labour’s perception of both its activists and voters … multiply up all of that as I suggest and maybe, just maybe, a revolution of sorts could be enabled in the end.

It’s an alternative interpretation, anyhow – worth a shot, surely.

A disaster about to befall us or a revolution in British politics in the making?  As I conclude in my comment to Kath’s piece:

[...] This working-at-the-heart of people’s lives, being there to engineer good times and not just complain about the bad, is surely something we should proceed with – and maybe something that can rescue One Nation from the oblivion you all seem to think it may already be destined for.

Perhaps, also, for a traditionally national political party like Labour, Miliband has succeeded in realising – even learning from the Lib Dems in this sense – the importance of all things local to get one’s message across.

Especially in a social media and peer-to-peer networked age.

And even as some observers may find themselves at a loss to understand the true nature of the dynamics in play.


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Why we need more penny-whistle guys in politics

 Chris Dillow, music industry, music video, penny-whistle guys, politics, unclassifiable  No Responses »
May 192013
 
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So the Danes won the Eurovision song contest.  And their doing so made me realise the following: we need more musicians in politics.  Watch the video first – in particular the penny-whistle guy – and then I’ll explain.


http://youtu.be/k59E7T0H-Us

See what I mean?  No?  The penny-whistle guy provides a haunting theme – a haunting motif – that punctuates the song wonderfully.  He plays it to the maximum of his abilities – and yet, even as he does so, he must spend most of the time counting bars.  I remember this lesson very well from when I used to sing in a choir.  We once did “Carmina Burana” – the gong section is, of course, going to be the most impressive and memorable for any young lad participating in any kind of music.


http://youtu.be/AdIpoE2LEps

Counting the bars to shine when you are needed; subsuming your ego to the roundness of a beautiful whole; creating life out of love for your art … yes, the penny-whistle and gong guys of music’s greatest moments certainly have something to teach the rest of us.

I mentioned yesterday how music was being used by the Labour Party to enable, engender and develop a sense of community.  As I said in that piece:

Live encounters; real events; natural extensions of hopes, fears, ambitions and futures.  All of this and more can be found in a Labour Live performance.

Meanwhile, today Chris posts on a broader perception of what political activism does (or more importantly doesn’t do) for its participants (the bold is mine):

Now, I don’t say all this to claim that all party activists are loons. That phrase “from an economists’ perspective” is doing some work; I’m speaking here of cost-benefit considerations and abstracting from the crooked timber of humanity which causes some sane people to become activists.However, these thoughts are consistent with a recent empirical finding - that political activism, unusually amongst voluntary activities, does not make people happier.

And as I point out at the bottom of Chris’s post:

I did go to a Labour Live event this weekend though, and, in relation to the “being happy or not” theme of your conclusion, wonder if Labour isn’t onto something far more important here. The evening involved excellent live music, young and old people, people from Chester and people from further out. This was about as close to happy as political parties might get. The reward before the pain of envelope-stuffing, even.

And it does make me think that if political parties start to give before they ask something of one, the conditions for party-political volunteering might reach a tipping point in favour of happy collaboration over manic belief.

What I see in music – the selfless nature of good music-makers whilst they are making their good music – is what I think we need to promote in civil society.  The best kind of music-making is, after all, like the best kind of socialism: creative; adding to the world; supporting people in their aspirations to do better; working together to common goals; each person finding a niche which allows them to participate to the best of their abilities.

If only we could sell socialism as Labour Live sold music this weekend in Chester.

If only there were more penny-whistle guys in politics.

*

An example here.  Listen to this interview first.

Now watch this.


http://youtu.be/xf6d0Ko-tW0

Now buy it.


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Memo to Ed: “On UKIP and giving the Tories a really really bad name”

 Ed Miliband, Labour, Tories, UKIP, unclassifiable  No Responses »
May 182013
 
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UKIP’s been getting itself a pretty unpleasant name of late.  Holocaust deniers, equal marriage haters, out-and-out racists – the accusations have come thick and fast.  Now much of the political debate, for Labour at least, has centred around how far it needs to triangulate to the right of the British political spectrum.  Especially in the light of political shocks such as this.

There comes a time when principle must come first, however.

However hard the decisions might be, however unfavourable the polls might seem, however tempting that triangulation becomes, however risky sticking with the values of a wider movement may be perceived, UKIP’s success is precisely the reason why Labour should firmly ignore the pressure-cooker venting of political prejudice clearly going on at the moment.

UKIP is, in fact, a perfect opportunity to paint the Tory right with the broad brush of rancid ideology.  The more the rather private British right becomes unavoidably associated with the public witterings of such figures, the more the difference between what we need Labour to be and what the right is becoming revealed as will become clear in the public mind.

It’s time we saw UKIP not primarily as a threat to Labour’s heartlands but as a perfect weapon to sully the Tories’ own attempts at detoxification.  It’s not the Labour Party which should be worried about losing its voters but the Tory Party its room for manoeuvre.  We need to make that happen.  We need to ensure it does.

The good people will come back to a Labour Party which remains firm on this one.

The sad people will bury the Tories one way or another in overbearing prejudices of UKIP’s making.  It’s not Labour’s job to make the sad people happy but make the good people realise they were right all along.

Remember that, Ed.  Remember that, please.


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The true conservative nature of the English

 conservative bias, England, English, political parties, UKIP, unclassifiable  No Responses »
May 142013
 
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I read recently, though can’t now pinpoint where, that no single political party representing the English has ever properly understood their true conservative nature.  This tweet which has just come my way reminds of this observation:

Farage: a pint, a fag, no control of his party, bigotry galore, and people vote for him? We need a change in electorate as well as govt.

And returning to the original observation, I realise now how mistaken it is.  It’s not that no single political party has ever properly understood their true conservative nature but rather, quite differently, that such parties have understood it all too well.  And as a result, they have – to a greater or lesser degree – chosen to ignore it.

As I argued some time ago in relation to the destructive swings of excluding politics:

The desire for vengeance, the impulse to recover so much lost time, the blind hatred of the other’s ideas … all this leads to an awful environment akin to a pressure-cooker of prejudice, where time postpones the ability to impose what inevitably become one’s tragic instincts.

Nevertheless, as the pendulum swings back, eventually power does return to the vengeful right – or, indeed, the vengeful left.  And so all those suppressed and supposedly politically incorrect opinions find their voice, their bullying courage and their aggressive channels of communication all over again.

Yet pressure-cookers are only good for cooking food.  Opinion is surely best let out on a regular basis.  As the Spanish would say, only by speaking can we understand people.  And if we choose, on either side, to suppress the right for political movements to participate in democratic process, each time the pendulum swings evermore violently back we can only expect further violence in return.

Perhaps what uniquely distinguishes UKIP’s verbal discourse, then (as opposed to the managerialist and toff-nosed leaders who peddle its wares), is that it looks not to avoid such possibilities of violence.  It looks, in fact, not to approach the electorate from the point of view of those educated political souls who understand the dangers of giving the public what it actually believes in but, instead, to engage the same by giving public voice to all its prejudices.  Whilst traditional right- and left-wing parties have both managed to contain such English conservatism, this doesn’t mean the latter has gone away.  And although in the presence of an economy which at least offered hope it has been happy to simply bubble under the surface, generally out of sight of all those social networks and media as its prejudices are shared across multiple garden-fenced and pint-inscribed conversations, when crisis hits home the fracturing nature of English conservatism has finally found in Farage’s foraging in the undergrowth of our beliefs that pressure-cooker valve I refer to above.

The danger is, of course, that what starts out as a release valve of pent-up pressure converts itself into a political party with its hands on the levers of power.

Perhaps, after all, we do need a new electorate.  But that will only really happen when the real powers in this world stop wilfully destroying environments of support, empowerment and societal liberation.

A big ask indeed.

On the other hand, if your aim is actually to engineer brutish societies of lowest-common-denominator capitalism, those are surely the kind of voters you’ll end up getting.

So conservatively focussed on Ye Olde Merrie England, even our dearly beloved Mr Gove wouldn’t feel out of place.

Talk about one forward gear and five reverse.  In their love of ancient comfort zones, political cowards without exception surely.


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Psychiatry, disorder and reacting to neoliberalism

 mental health, mental ill health, neoliberalism, nervous breakdown, proto-psychosis, psychiatry, psychosis, unclassifiable  No Responses »
May 122013
 
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The Observer does proud this weekend those of us interested in all matters psychiatric, in three articles published here, here and here.

My interest comes from a personal involvement at a very early age and then during a mid-life crisis.  I was epileptic from 10 onwards and diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic from 41 onwards (just around the time of the Iraq War, in fact) – though interestingly the classification used by British psychiatry suggests that:

Similar disorders developing in the presence of epilepsy or other brain disease should be classified under F06.2

Which in turn says the subject may suffer from a:

Schizophrenia-like psychosis in epilepsy

No matter.  In my case the diagnosis has always been firmly full-blown paranoid schizophrenia, my GP politely refusing to contemplate any change.  I mention this because of one of the arguments used in the third Observer article linked to above, where a professional in favour of the current system of classification says:

[...] A classification system is like a map. And just as any map is provisional, ready to be changed as the landscape changes, so is classification. [...]

This is clearly not my experience, neither at the time of initial assessment nor in the years that followed that first assault on my sense and sensibility.  Meanwhile, in the second half of the article I’ve just quoted from, I find in Oliver James a much more sympathetic voice:

Yet 13 studies find that more than half of schizophrenics suffered childhood abuse. Another review of 23 studies shows that schizophrenics are at least three times more likely to have been abused than non-schizophrenics. It is becoming apparent that abuse is the major cause of psychoses. It is also all too clear that the medical model is bust.

And this:

[...] there is a huge body of evidence that our early childhood experiences combined with subsequent exposure to adversity explain a very great deal. This is dose dependent: the more maltreatment, the earlier you suffer it and the worse it is, the greater your risk of adult emotional distress. These experiences set our electro-chemical thermostats.

So does subsequent adult adversity. For instance, a person with six or more personal debts is six times more likely to be mentally ill than someone with none, regardless of their social class: the more debts, the greater the risk.

My own adult adversity was chronicled a couple of years ago in a short story I wrote.  You can find this story, if you are of a mind to read it, here.  I lay it down as the evidence I still need to provide in order that I might demonstrate I have no disorder except my epilepsy – and no illness except my savage reaction to madness around me.

As a young adolescent I remember something else too.  A book called “Sanity, Madness and the Family” entered my life and influenced me in boundless ways.  It seemed to hit a raw nerve, and much as semiotics and comparative studies at university later on, opened my eyes to a whole host of new ways of seeing.

Its thesis, if I remember rightly, was that much of what schizophrenics were accused of suffering from involved a series of collusive and horrendously denied acts committed by those who lived with and around them.  Films taken of family interviews showed the alleged schizophrenic at the centre of the discourse, with siblings and parents winking at each other around them.  In the face of a reality which was never shared it’s hardly surprising that someone might be described as delusional.

At the time of my own diagnosis, only my father had an opportunity to speak to the psychiatrist.  My wife, who spent most time with me in the year leading up to my collapse, never had the chance to put across her point of view. Hardly a holistic approach able to contain both biology and society.

The problem with maps, of course, being you can sometimes hold them upside down.

*

And so we come to my final question: what is the proper task of this complex discipline we call psychiatry?  To map and decide disorder, simply and dissectingly?  To assume that what we have amongst us are people who suffer from incomplete bodies, broken mechanisms and disabling biochemistry?

Or, alternatively, enter into a completely different landscape where psychiatrists comprehend that much of what is seen as disorder is in fact reaction and adjustment by perfectly sane beings painfully hurting from painful lives?  As James observes:

Britons and Americans have exactly twice the amount of mental illness of mainland western Europeans (23% versus 11.5%). Thirty years of Thatcher and “Blatcher” turned us into a nation of “affluenza”-stricken, shop-till-you-drop, “it could be you”, credit-fuelled consumer junkies. Personal debt – a major stressor for adults – rose from £200bn in 1980 to £1,400bn in 2006. After 1979, the amount of mental illness mushroomed.

Maybe sanity, madness and the family – in its environmental and reactive emphasis – wasn’t such a wild mantra, after all. It’s an old dichotomy, of course – but no less worth revisiting for all that.

Not after the shock to the system which neoliberalism has – more than manifestly – engineered.


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How the Coalition’s war against the professions continues

 Coalition, education, Law Society, Legal Aid, NHS, NHS cuts, social care, social engineering, social services, unclassifiable  No Responses »
May 112013
 
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I’ve been tracking the Coalition’s war against the professions for quite a while now.  I guess you must have been too.  In these pieces, written almost a year apart, we can remind ourselves how medieval politicians are; why dequalifying the professions is a bad move; and why Cameron & Co are really no better than 21st century witch doctors.  I’ve also watched, miserable, as the Welfare State has been dismantled pillar by pillar (more here, here and here) out of rank and disagreeable prejudice.

The latest example is complex in its detail (.pdf file) but simple in its impact:

The Criminal Law Solicitors Association (CLSA) has read the consultation on competitive price tendering (CPT) produced by the Government ‘Transforming legal aid: delivering a more credible and efficient system’ and this briefing is our initial response. A formal fuller response will be made shortly.

Here is point 1 of its response, to give you a flavour of what’s going on:

A. Why the proposals are socially divisive, dangerous and against the public interest.

1. It transforms people into mere economic units by denying them the simple human dignity of choice. These Stalinist proposals to require people to abandon their freedom of choice and to force them to be represented by a lawyer allocated by an impersonal call centre are deplorable. Winston Churchill said: “The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country’. Clients are people and if they are legally aided when accused of crime they do not cease to be such. The process of arrest and prosecution are demeaning enough without this added humiliation of denial of choice. In contrast, unlike the majority of the community, the political and wealthy elite who will of course retain the economic ability to purchase their choice of legal representation. It is a socially divisive and shameful proposal. We cannot believe that were a politician, MOJ civil servant or wealthy person accused of a crime they did not commit would be content with being represented by a solicitor randomly allocated by a call centre. But the ‘little people’ (Including low paid, the youths, the students and most people who will qualify for means tested legal aid in the Crown court) are to be denied the same choice even when as tax payers citizens will have paid through taxation for the right to be legally aided.

What’s clearly happening here is yet another example of prejudice-based governors ignoring the opinions and sidelining the intelligences of evidence-based professionals.  From teachers to GPs to nurses to lawyers, before and again now, it’s apparent that evidence-based professions pose a serious risk to the incompetent unprofessionalised politicians.  As I tweeted some minutes ago, here, here and here:

@geektrev It’s OK. I managed to get there. :-) I wrote a lot a year or so back on destruction of Legal Aid as pillar of Welfare State.

@geektrev Think it’s part of deliberate wider deprofessionalisation of society (teachers, doctors, nurses etc).

@geektrev Evidence-based professionals present a threat to prejudice-driven politicians and need to be neutralised. That’s what’s happening.

So none of this surprises me, and none of this confuses me.

A century ago, there was nothing more difficult to deal with for the professionals of learning than the self-taught man or woman with a chip on their shoulders.

Today, there is nothing more difficult to deal with for the citizens and subjects of an educated state than a self-made politico or politica with a driven belief in their own prejudices.

And that’s essentially what’s happening as we witness so many generations of structures being destroyed before our very eyes; as we witness aghast the collapse.

Anything we can properly do to halt this careering towards a 21st century Dark Ages?  Perhaps not.  Perhaps we are hardwired quite otherwise.  But, even so, even assuming there is nothing more to be realistically done, I do suggest at the very least you bear witness to what is happening – I do suggest you sign this petition:

Save UK Justice

Responsible department: Ministry of Justice

The MOJ should not proceed with their plans to reduce access to justice by depriving citizens of legal aid or the right to representation by the Solicitor of their choice.

If a government which claims to act out of a desire to create more societal freedoms finds it necessary to intervene from a prejudiced standpoint in the workings of society’s fundamentals – from the NHS to Legal Aid to social care to education – then surely we need to draw in the most vigorous terms the rest of our nation’s attention to the contradictions involved.

You cannot create a civilisation of the free based on top-down reorganisations mandated by throwbacks to foolish and primitive times – times which never existed, even as the self-interested rose-tinted spectacles claim to demonstrate they did.

You cannot create a civilisation of the free based on such prejudice – or, indeed, on such back-scratching self-enrichment.

Perhaps it’s time we realised a civilisation of the free isn’t, actually, the goal of these leaders – leaders who, in any meritorious field of endeavour, would be considered to be on the worst side of incompetent.

Puts quite a different slant on everything, once you accept that to be the case.

Don’t you think so?


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Life in the UK – actually corrupt or “simply” amoral?

 corruption, life, power, sexual abuse, unclassifiable, United Kingdom  No Responses »
May 102013
 
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This report from the Independent today shows us just how far we have come.  Whilst Tory Euro-sceptics continue to plot final disavowal of that evil anti-British entity that we all know and love as the European Union, we get these choice phrases on the corruption Britain is finally now exhibiting all on its lonesome:

Yet recent British scandals can compete with the best Europe can offer. Besides MPs fiddling their expenses and Jimmy Savile’s history of paedophilia, racing has been hit by Frankie Dettori’s six-month drugs ban, we’ve seen London-based banks Barclays and UBS embarrassed by the Libor rate-fixing scandal, and BAE Systems has been investigated over its arms deals.

And yet it gets worse, as goalposts are continuously moved:

[...] “There is no real accountability of these guys coming in—the cops don’t really investigate them,” says Mark Hollingsworth, co-author of Londongrad, a 2009 book about the Russian invasion. “They see the capital as the most secure, fairest, most honest place to park their cash, and the judges here would never extradite them.”

Meanwhile, with respect to the paedophilia scandals, the desire of power to overwhelm through the abuse of sex just gets worse (more here):

A prominent barrister specialising in reproductive rights has called for the age of consent to be lowered to 13.

Barbara Hewson told online magazine Spiked that the move was necessary in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal to end the “persecution of old men”.

Now in a short Twitter exchange this morning it was brought to my attention that the problem isn’t immorality.  In fact, the problem may not even be corruption as such.  Rather, so much of what we do in both large and small corporate organisations is done with a transcendental amorality.  We are circumscribed by process and procedure – and we assume the bigger view is not ours to own.  We assume that those who set up process and procedure knew what they were doing when they trained us.

Yet this very amorality, this unquestioning behaviour, this inability to think from scratch and try and perceive – on a rolling basis – a broader set of consequences from our acts, leads to outcomes which are anything but amoral.  We ourselves are not immoral – most of us are truly not corrupt – but the accumulation of all our individual tasks does seem to lead more and more to utterly unjust outcomes.

Is it then a systemic question as the Independent reports it might be?  Or is it a question of people-culture?  After all, you can have any number of protective processes and procedures in place but if the people who are supposed to operate them are of a mind to, any and all may quite easily – and eventually – be circumvented.

The battlecry for the anti-Europeans is that Europe is a dirty patchwork of vile and corrupt marshes we need to retreat from.  And yet recent attempts to drag us out of such fields only makes me wonder if the true powers-that-be are looking more to defend their own rights to perpetuate a very British corruption from international law and wider socially-inspired movements than to revert what was apparently once an honest public life to a semblance of modest functionality.

Corrupt or “just” amoral?  Does it really matter in the final analysis?  The evidence of the impact of widespread corruption – that is to say, inefficient and ineffective socioeconomic systems – is all around us.  You don’t need to drill down into that individual or the other to know that the inefficiency and ineffectiveness I mention must be inspired by something seriously wrong.

Solutions?  Lord, I really don’t know.  I really don’t know where to start.  But perhaps we should take a lesson from the best corporate organisations: when you struggle to know the true extent of the bigger picture, start with bitesized pieces.  And maybe, just maybe, attempt to comprehend that just as those poor workers were trapped and died in the rubble of a Bangladeshi building, so too many people here in the West – whilst not losing their lives – are wasting their existences in systems which also, in a way, serve to entrap them.

Just because you act in an amoral fashion doesn’t make you immoral.  Even as, perhaps, the results of your actions are.

There’s a lesson to be drawn there, then, about how we see, consult and work with others.

Maybe it’s time we thought the best of our fellow workers.  And acted in consequence.


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Happy St Google’s Day!

 Amazon, Google, private spaces of public use, public space, Spain, Spanish, Starbucks, tax dodgers, unclassifiable, Vodafone  No Responses »
Apr 232013
 
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Amazon Cloud services used by 38 Degrees

I saw a BBC Panorama documentary recently on the subject of North Korea.  Towards the end, after showing those of us who know nothing the veritable horrors of the place, it compared the advertising-free misery of the North Korean underground with the magnificent and joyful hoarding-invaded South Korea.  If I remember rightly, on more than one occasion our attention was drawn to this defining advantage of living in the free world – as if the quantity of advertising which serves to puncture our eyes is somehow a litmus test of how free we really are.

Well, I’m sorry but I don’t agree.  And today I read a story from the Spanish El País newspaper which simply confirms me in my resistance.  In it, we discover (robot English translation here) that the Madrid Metro Línea 2 - along with its iconic stop Sol – will become the sponsorship property of the Vodafone phone company, to such an extent that the aforementioned station will be renamed vodafone Sol.  In exchange for a three-year deal, it appears that a paltry €3 million will exchange hands.  But, of course, the story won’t end with the “awarding” of these “naming rights”.  As the article goes on to report:

[...] El acuerdo previsto con la empresa tiene una duración de tres años, lo que supone unos tres millones de euros. Para González es una “posibilidad enorme de ingresos” para Metro. “Tenemos 11 líneas más y muchas estaciones” que ofertar, ha recordado el presidente.

Loosely translating as:

[...] The agreement in question with the company will last three years, which means some three million euros.  For González, this presupposes an “enormous opportunity of income” for Metro.  “We have 11 lines and many stations” to offer, the president has reminded everyone.

So let’s just analyse exactly what’s going on here.  A public entity which has been offering state-funded services to a taxpaying city (I assume the Metro service is still all of these things, though – after so much economic despair – I may of course be wrong by now) has decided, in its wisdom, that it has the right to sell off to a foreign corporation the rights to name public spaces as if they were private spaces of public use.  Given the experience we’ve supposedly had with the Vodafones of the world here in Britain, as perfectly legal tax avoidance has begun to drill holes in the future financial planning of the state and our public services, this really does seem to be adding considerable insult to hurtful injury.  Especially when the people responsible for the deal appear to be saying that the cost of using the service will continue to rise for end-users, despite the corporate dosh changing hands.

That is to say, in an ongoing and awful political and socioeconomic crisis, where Spanish youth unemployment has hit over fifty percent and politicians of parties various have both enriched themselves and their business mates in a long-drawn-out process of terrible fecklessness (clearly at the expense of all the nations that make up the country), the Madrid Metro finds itself obliged to go with its begging bowl to precisely those guarantors of the free world which have brought us all to our knees in the first place.

To such an extent we finally discover that these people don’t only destroy our economies and welfare states so as to own us materially but also, now, look to own our public spaces – so as to own us emotionally too.

Can you imagine it?

The Starbucks Northern Line.

The Google Circle Line.

The Amazon Jubilee Line.

Hurts, doesn’t it?  Hurts so much it burns.  Burns like brands originally did.  And I bet it’ll come sooner than you think to England’s green and evermore unpleasant land.

Happy St Google’s Day!

Wonder what Shakespeare would’ve had to say about it all.

To brand or not to brand, perhaps?  Would that be the question?

St Google's Day


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