Dead Men Left

The horror, the horror

2006-09-30T14:50:00.000+01:00

Don't say I didn't warn you. The awesome prospect of John Reid actually becoming Prime Minister remains distant - though not quite distant enough, but the major effect of his likely candidature will be to pull Brown and thus the whole contest even further to the Right. That, it strikes me, is one reason amongst many why the Left - inside or outside of Labour - needs to back John McDonnell's campaign. British politics is debased enough without a thuggish neoconservative[*] in Communist drag marching us smartly towards a police state. I don't agree with McDonnell's perspective - I think the Labour Party as a vehicle for progressive change is all but dead - but it would be criminally foolish not to support him as best as possible.

Reid's current prospects of victory are, of course, not great. The electoral college system the Labour Party now has ensures that each MP's vote is weighted nearly a thousand times more heavily than each ordinary members' - to say nothing of the trade unionists' votes. And with Reid, I'm told, unable at present to get close to enough signatures to even stand, we might gain some idea of his present popularity amongst MPs. That's a significant hurdle.

What bothers me is that the media will do a Cameron for him: take the outsider, and plug him so heavily that he acquires an unstoppable momentum amongst ordinary members, often isolated from political structures and generally completely passive, who vote for him by the bucketload. We had a taster over the summer, with the absurd spectacle of John Reid defending the Britsh Way of Life from the awesome dangers of shampoo and Lucozade being talked to the heavens by the press - aided and abetted, of course, by Reid himself, who is both obsessive and canny in such matters. (Incidentally, such is Reid's eye for a media prize, and evident lack of scruple, that it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that the disruption of the Home Secretary's meet-the-natives speech by a bona fide loud-mouth fundamentalist nutter was not simply a result of typically incompetent police "intelligence". George hints as much here.) It's certainly a risk, and one of the few means to break up such a media push would be a concerted, grass-roots campaign amongst Labour Party members and union affiliates over the key issues the Labour Party has always claimed to stand for - not (at best) warmed-over communitarian shite. Brown can't deliver that, but perhaps McDonnell and the Left can.

[*] Not a curse-word; I can't think what else Reid's politics can be best summed up as. I suspect he'll harp on the theme of "security" actually being about helping the weakest some more, and perhaps adopt "social entreprenurship" as a theme over coming weeks.

Hubris

2006-09-27T10:22:00.000+01:00

From now until I leave office I will dedicate myself, with the same commitment I have given to Northern Ireland, to advancing peace between Israel and Palestine. I may not succeed. But I will try because peace in the Middle East is a defeat for terrorism.

GrrrrrrRRRRRRRRR.

Popery II

2006-09-20T16:57:00.000+01:00

Bang on cue (and neatly proving my earlier point), via Islamophobia Watch, we find the secular cavalry, in the person of Sean Matgamna, rallying to the Gates of Vienna:

The difference between modern Islam and modern Christianity is that Christianity, more under the pressure of the modern world for longer, is more schizoid, paying nonsensical, oxymoronic, lip service to both faith and reason. The Catholic Church is what it always was. The difference between that church now and in its quite recent past is not that it has, at root, changed, but that it is weaker.

Absent a few rhetorical flourishes, this is in its essentials identical to the claims Benedict XVI made in his speech: "lip service" the Pope may be paying, but at least the Catholic Church recognises reason - unlike the irrational hordes on our borders. Both claim Islam is uniquely irrational. But both the AWL's guru and the Holy Father have an astonishing lack of awareness if they think the history of rationalism can be written without reference to Islamic scholars. Matgamna continues:

The right to secular free speech, and the right to write and publish freely (under the laws against incitement to violence, and the laws of libel) is taken for granted in the western bourgeois countries. It is written into the constitution of the USA. It had to be won in centuries of struggle.... Today, militant, and even, comparatively speaking, some varieties of 'moderate' Islam, oppose all of that.... Now, we have reached the stage where the revelation, which should surprise nobody, that the Catholic Pope doesn't like Muhammad, or Islam, that he thinks his own religion better, the true religion, and says so, more or less, unleashes organised, obstreperous outrage across large parts of the globe! He is forced to deny that he said what he said, and what he clearly intended to say!

"... I repeat: if political Islam can do that to the Bishop of Rome, what can it not do to secularists, male and female sexual rebels, infidels, apostates from Islam, and socialists in the countries where it is dominant, and in the communities in Western Europe where it is immensely powerful? What does it do? Everywhere it is repressive, often murderously.

A truly unholy alliance.

Popery

2006-09-20T09:52:00.000+01:00

Funny thing with this Pope business: those usually keenest to prove their secular credentials by poring over the alleged utterances of Muslim clerics for the slightest whiff of Indecency and Badness, irrespective of context and the inadequacies of translation, suddenly become keen to defend that notorious secularist, His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, and desperate to exonerate the Holy Father: his remarks were out of context, they were only illustrative, it's an obscure theological point anyway.

Madeleine Bunting is spot on here:

Some say this was a case of naivety, of a scholarly theologian stumbling into the glare of a global media storm, blinking with surprise at the outrage he had inadvertently triggered. The learned man's thoughtful reasoning, say some, has been misconstrued and distorted by troublemakers, and the context ignored.

But such explanations are unconvincing. This is a man who has been at the heart of one of the world's multinational institutions for a very long time. He has been privy to how pontifical messages get distorted and magnified by a global media. Shy he may be, but no one has ever before accused this pope of being a remote theologian sitting in an ivory tower. On the contrary, he is a determined, shrewd operator whose track record indicates a man who is not remotely afraid of controversy. He has long been famous for his bruising, ruthless condemnation of those he disagrees with.

And, if you do get round to reading the Vatican's translation of the Pope's remarks, it is clear that the musings of an ill-remembered Byzantine emperor were chosen precisely because they fitted Papa Rat's argument so well:

[Regensburg University] was also very proud of its two theological faculties... That even in the face of... radical skepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith: This, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question.

I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by professor Theodore Khoury (Muenster) of part of the dialogue carried on -- perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara -- by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both.

It was probably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than the responses of the learned Persian. The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Koran, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship of the "three Laws": the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Koran...

In the seventh conversation ("diálesis" -- controversy) edited by professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the jihad (holy war). The emperor must have known that sura 2:256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion." It is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under [threat]. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Koran, concerning holy war.

Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels," he turns to his interlocutor somewhat brusquely with the central question on the relationship between religion and violence in general, in these words: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

The debate is established as concerning the necessary harmony of reason and faith; into which, after the vaguest of nods towards more liberal - indeed, mainstream - interpretations of Islam, the Pope immediately throws in a quotation describing Islam as "evil and inhuman" from an long-dead emperor perhaps best known for his battles against the Muslims. It's hardly a Jesuitical argument - subtle, it ain't.

But the key points are in later paragraphs:

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: Not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practice idolatry...

So: Islam is not bound by any rationality, claims the Pope; whereas, in the arguments following, the Pope attempts to establish - on the basis of the dual meaning of the Greek word, "logos", "word" and "reason" - that Christianity is inherently tied to reason, and a Greek view of reason at that: "In the beginning was the logos", as John's Gospel has it. Arguments attempting to deny the unity of word and reason, therefore, aim to break this divine link:

In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which ultimately led to the claim that we can only know God's "voluntas ordinata." Beyond this is the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done.

This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazn and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions.

As opposed to this, the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language... [emphasis added]

Let's be clear about this: the Pope begins his argument by citing an obscure Byzantine Emperor, given to warring with Muslims, on the "evil" of Islam; he then claims that Islam is not bound to rationality; he then further claims, arguing against other Christian theologians, that Christianity is tied to a specifically Greek rationality.

He is, in other words, repeating the crudest Orientalist stereotypes about the irrational, sensuous East, and deliberately counterposing it to the rational (and therefore more god-like) West. One of his concluding paragraphs is absolutely clear on this:

The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur -- this is the program with which a theology grounded in biblical faith enters into the debates of our time.

It is, in other words, necessary for "the West" to defend its rationalist heritage through "biblical faith". This is the argument alleged secular liberals use when lining up with Bible-bashing US Presidents; it is the logic of the Clash of Civilisations with a Catholic twist. Is it any wonder it has caused such alarm?

"Crude populism"

2006-09-16T14:14:00.000+01:00

...post at the Sharpener, on Livingstone and Chavez.

Burn the witch

2006-08-31T11:24:00.000+01:00

Comment is Free rank their articles by "activity": the more people posting replies to the original, the higher the ranking. I was vaguely surprised to see that this - fairly nondescript - article was currently top the of the vox pops, until I remembered its authour was a WOMAN with a HEADSCARF and therefore a MUSLIM. It certainly gets the crazies good and excited:

Now, once again, we are subjected to Soumaya Ghannoushi ? what is this, the softly softly steel fist in velvet glove approach?

Are these people so up themselves and their oh so right approach to life that they cannot see the obvious: WE ARE ON TO THEM ALL!!!!...

Yeah, that told her, with her uppity literacy and shit. (Oh, and those "anarchist SWP supporters", a beautiful phrase that offers a tantalising glimpse of the ocean of ignorance behind it.) Depressing stuff; the slack-jawed howlers have more confidence of late. Can't imagine why.

"Wicker Tam"

2006-08-29T19:40:00.000+01:00

Bit slow off the mark, but news from distant parts takes its time. Front page of the Scottish Mirror, Friday 25 August:

Tommy Sheridan's SSP rivals burned an effigy of their former leader in a scene straight out of The Wicker Man.

Activists on a woodland retreat cheered as the life-sized model went up in flames, echoing the climax of the 1973 cult movie.

A witness said: "The event was supposed to be about learning more about socialism. But it soon became clear that most people there only wanted to bitch about Tommy Sheridan.

"There was a bonfire made up and then this effigy of Tommy was brought out and thrown on. It was bizarre." The training weekend, called Camp Secret Squirrel, was organised by the Scottish Socialist Youth (SSY) wing of the SSP...

Mr Sheridan yesterday dismissed the incident as an "embarrassment". He added: "I really don't want to comment any further."

But a source close to the Glasgow MSP said it shows why he feels he must leave the SSP and set up a new socialist party.

The source said: "This is not something he'll be losing any sleep over. But it does show the kind of people we're up against in what remains of the Scottish Socialist Party.

"These people would rather burn effigies of Tommy Sheridan than get out there fighting New Labour and the Tories. It's about time that some of them got a life.

"They really have to ask why they got into politics if all they want to do is burn effigies of fellow socialists. This shows why the time has come to seriously consider the creation of a new, inclusive left-wing party in Scotland that people can feel comfortable with."

More interesting than this sectarian lunacy is the Mirror's editorial comment on Sheridan:

No wonder Tommy Sheridan wants to leave the crisis-hit SSP.

His fellow Socialist MSPs have already tried to bring him down by giving evidence against him in court.

Now some of his so-called comrades have burnt his effigy at a secret camp in the wilds of Lanarkshire.

The crazy stunt is just another example of a nasty streak that seems to run through some in the far-left party.

They seem more concerned with attacking Tommy Sheridan - who helped found the party - than getting on with the job they were elected to do.

At the last election thousands voted for the Socialists hoping they would fight for a fairer Scotland.

And the party's six MSPs made a good start - putting forward popular proposals such as free school meals for all and scrapping prescription charges.

But the party has now become a laughing stock.

The task of rebuilding a credible left-wing party in Scotland will no doubt rest on Tommy Sheridan's shoulders.

But he will only succeed if he ditches the losers and loonies who seem bent on taking over the SSP.

Now, bearing in mind the Mirror's slant - vaguely left-of-Labour - and readership - working class - this is a telling line for them to be taking. It will no doubt be an interesting ride over the few months to Holyrood elections next May, and not just for the SSP: the Scottish Tories, it seems, are at each others' throats.

Revisionist defeatism: the worse, the better

2006-08-28T21:55:00.000+01:00

Presumably deliberately provocative:

If it did lose the next election, Labour could return in 2013-15 with a ministerial team that boasted a rare combination of youth, talent, maturity and experience. Barring a revival of Trotskyist entryism in the Labour party or a cleverly engineered Conservative economic boom, I cannot see the Tories being an appealing alternative in the longer term. There is little sign of a new intellectual ferment of the sort that carried Margaret Thatcher to power.

A period in opposition, far from being a disaster, will be the final test of the durability of Blair's historic transformation. In the past, Labour, turfed out of office, would normally lose several consecutive elections; if it won, it was by the slenderest of margins, as in the 1970s. To fulfil Blair's ambition that it should become the natural governing party of this century, it needs to show that it can bounce back quickly from defeat, as the Tories always did in the 20th century, and as Sweden's social democrats still do.

Given that New Labour's justification for itself is that it won elections, I cannot see how - once it loses an election - it can survive. Surveying Blair's likely legacy - the sad demise of the NHS, the resurgent racism, the disappearance of critical civil liberties, a new generation of nuclear power stations, economic injustice on a grand scale, and Iraq - finding the few voters impressed by the wreckage will be a hard task.

More to the point - and I say this having earlier indicated the Tories' decreptitude - it may yet be wide of the mark to claim the Tories lack "intellectual ferment". Whilst David Cameron is little more than a TV gimmick, and whilst the Tories' current, apparent lead seems more driven by Labour defections to the Lib Dems than their own popularity, there is a certain buzz developing around, for example, the happy-face Thatcherites at the Policy Exchange, and the sour, sinister neoconservative claque Cameron surrounds himself with.

It's nothing like on the scale of the intellectual assualt that preceded Thatcher, and nor is it quite so obviously tied to the Conservative Party. It accepts latter-day Blairite positions (boo to terrorists, yay for cappuccino) in a way Thatcher never tolerated any form of Old Labourism. But the flickerings of a revival are there nontheless. Whether it can produce a popular Conservatism beyond the party's declining and elderly base is a moot point. When national party politics has become, under New Labour, little more than the orderly management of decline, strange things start to happen.

Coming over here

2006-08-28T00:16:00.000+01:00

Back, after a considerble delay, partially extended by John Reid, who from reading your funny English press I now see is going to be the next Prime Minister.

Aside from all that, am mildly puzzled by sudden accelaration in UK economic growth coupled with sudden desire to deport Poles. There are few compelling reasons to think British capitalism's sudden up-turn in growth is anything other than the product of the EU's immense free gift of 600,000 trained workers. Leave aside the alleged effects of World Cup euphoria, strip out North Sea oil, and it is clear the boost has been provided by service sector output: precisely the sector where the physical location of labour matters the most. Sustained by historically cheap short-term borrowing, demand for services has propelled the UK economy forward once more.

But no matter. I see forthcoming Romanians and Bulgarians are evidently Bad People, and doubtless unable to integrate properly. Apparently rather like this:

Our borders are being overwhelmed by migration on an unprecedented scale. Many of these migrants are failing to integrate with their host communities. Some do not even bother learning the local language. Local services are struggling to cope with the influx. Worse still, the UK government seems to know little about the scale or impact of this migration.

(...incidentally, I think the neoliberal response to migration - a good example here - is also inadequate to the task. Not fit for purpose, even. That is for another post, however.)

Summertime

2006-08-02T10:08:00.000+01:00

Another enormous delay, and then I'm away for another week. Posting resumes after that. The indefatigable Lenin continues to blog on Lebanon and the Middle East: if, for some reason, you're not reading the Tomb already, I recommend you vist it forthwith. Attendance on the demonstration this Saturday, meanwhile, is all but mandatory.

Fish and barrels

2006-07-12T20:10:00.000+01:00

Levy arrested! Quick - send for the cavalry:

I'm not convinced that the police really needed to arrest Lord Levy to question him about his role in getting loans for the Labour Party.

What I am convinced about is that to restore public faith in the party funding system we need:

a) at least some element of state funding or match funding to create a more level playing field between the parties and reduce the need for donations and loans and thereby insinuations of "buying influence"...

Fair play to Luke Akehurst, my very favourite Hackney councillor, for trying: but just look at the response: a Labour councillor - a Labour councillor, to paraphrase an Akehurst lookalike - advocating not independent working class representation, but grabbing government largesse.

The only solution these people can offer to venality is institutionalised venality. Anyone promoting state funding of political parties has not the faintest understanding of what democracy means and why people have fought for it.

The Forward March of Liberalism Halted

2006-06-26T22:02:00.000+01:00

Touching honesty, really:

It is quite certain that most of the young men and women who have come forward as Liberal candidates know little (and care little) about the tangled history of the Liberal party in the two decades between 1918 and 1939. They have become Liberal because Liberalism stands for something different from Labour or from Toryism (even Toryism of the reform variety).

It offers something which, better than other parties, satisfies the desire for bold reform combined with freedom and personal initiative. The Labour party can reflect that this revival of Liberalism is a sign of Labour's failure to broaden from a sectional into a national party.

...followed by a small footnote on Labour's 1945 landslide. Another glorious defeat, Guardian comrades! Onwards! I don't think the paper's had a decent sense of history since c. Richard Cobden negotiated the Treaty of Paris, but no matter. Buy it for the Steve Bell cartoon in G2.

Hackney-Nike logo (pt. 37)

2006-06-26T21:28:00.000+01:00

This one could run and run. Our friends in the north - way, way up north, along the bloodspattered Cambridge Heath Road - have an uncanny ability to prolong political grudges (with approximate footnotes):

I told Pipey[1] to keep schtum about this one, but he would have to open his gaper and make a fuss. Poor old Mikey[2] is in for a shock when he gets the reports back from his legal team. It seems that Nike is likely to argue that appropriate use of the logo was included in the deal for the Zoneparcs project to support playground sports activities targeted at the most deprived and socially excluded kids in London boroughs. Apparently they offered a sack of wonga to Mad Max[3] back in 2002 but he was scared of getting his fingers burnt so he refused to touch it and insisted it went to Nicky [4] over at Tender Loving Care[5]. I must ask Pipey to get together with Nicky to sort out where the cash went to and try to dig up the contracts (if there ever were any).

[1] Jules Pipe, Mayor of Hackney and lord of all he surveys;
[2] Gawd knows - some councillor?
[3] The unlamented "Mad Max" Caller, former Chief Exec at Hackney Council;
[4] Possibly Nicky Gavron, New Labour GLA stooge-creature. Could be wrong, though;
[5] The GLA?

Local politics, innit. Also spoofing a (it has to be said) rather easy target who - joy of joys - describes Brown's stance on thermonuclear destruction as "commonsense" and, again without the merest whiff of irony, calls the Chancellor's happy-clappy regime-changey chums "traditional Labour rightwing Atlanticists" - presumably packing their cloth-caps and whippets for trips to British-American Project meetings in Washington after a hard day hewing coal.

Flimsy

2006-06-25T16:46:00.000+01:00

Bob Piper on Jonanthan Ross on David Cameron:

He squirmed in his boxers when Ross pinned him down to say he still thought the Iraq invasion was right, he looked distinctly uncomfortable when he said the old witch of Finchley was right to throw people out of work in Scotland, Wales and the North of England, and he squirmed again when Ross pressed him on the failure of privatised water companies. The highlight, though, was still to come. Ross raised the issue of decriminalising drugs (no, the conversation didn't touch on Dave's flirtation with the nose candy, although the guffaws from the audience indicated that was where they thought it was heading) and Cameron sort of giggled and said he didn't think that was right, and the proper thing to do was to care for the addicts - his touchy feely side showing, he hoped). Ross then said that drugs were actually available now, to anyone who actually wanted them, and that virtually any kid in the street could tell you where to get drugs (and, although he didn't say it, it was hanging in the air... even David Cameron knew where to score). It wasn't a question of caring for addicts, it was about driving the criminals out of the drug scene, said Ross. Dave said ....errrm, he didn't think that was right and the real issue was about caring for the addicts. Obviously not briefed beyond that, Cameron looked immensley relieved when Ross asked him if he could do a 'high five'. That was more like it for the lad... get me off the bloody policy stuff and play at being Ali G.

What's interesting about the Cameron thing is that this entirely superficial rebranding exercise, centred on one rather dull toff, has managed to cripple (if not break) New Labour. It speaks volumes for New Labour's underlying flimsiness that it has done so: we are, after all, talking about a government that slightly over 20% of the electorate actually voted for, and a government whose biggest single policy initiative - invading Iraq - is its biggest single weakness.

"Cargo Cult Keynesianism"

2006-06-18T18:33:00.000+01:00

Really good post over at Aaronovitch Watch on Aaro's bubble-headed attempts to whip up enthusiasm about neoliberalism in India. I'm not too sure about "Cargo Cult Keynesianism", though: partly it's a slight twitchiness about taking Keynes' name in vain (reinforced by the bloody awful posthumous treatment dished out to J.K.Galbraith), partly it's the strong suspicion that Keynes is better read (as Galbraith, arguably, read him) as an economist of institutions, rather than of behaviour - if that distinction makes sense (Toni Negri wrote a brilliant earlyish essay on just this, turning Keynes into a theoretician of "supply side" production relations, rather than effective demand - doesn't seem to be online, but these notes give a flavour).

It's difficult to square, for example, the neoliberal enthusiasm for privatisation and mobile finance capital with Keynes' explicit calls for the "socialisation of investment" and the "euthanasia of rentier": "Keynesianism", in the sense Aaronovitch Watch intend, seems to refer to what Joan Robinson called "bastard Keynesianism": the postwar blending of some of Keynes' less radical insights with existing neoclassical theory. What we have now is still more watery substance, the so-called "new consensus": the reduction of Keynes to little more than a vague idea that interest rates matter, washed up with a framework that looks remarkably like the bankrupt free-market nonsense he spent the latter half of his life attacking.

'Ackney 'ypocrisy

2006-06-18T17:56:00.000+01:00

You might remember Nike nicking Hackney Council's logo a few weeks back. Squeaky clean, painfully New Labour Hackney Mayor Jules Pipe was heard to fulminate about how terribly unfair all this was, Hackney Council poor innocent victims of copyright theft, boo hiss to nasty corporations, etc etc.

Well... I recevied this email:

Just days after making threats to sue Nike for stealing its logo, Hackney Council has launched its London 2012 Olympic Games logo to cries of hypocrisy and theft.

Hackney Council, which has done nothing to help Hackney's arthritis sufferers, has angered them further by stealing their representative body's logo to promote the Olympics, disability activists claim.

Hackney Council has angered many of Hackney’s arthritis sufferers by “stealing a logo well-known and respected by them, to use as its Olympic logo”. Ironically, Hackney Council recently complained that Nike stole their logo to use on their 'Hackney Marshes' brand of sports clothing and equipment.

Hackney Council’s London 2012 Olympic Games design appears to be identical to the NRAS Support Network logo and remarkably close to the main NRAS logo.

“How can Jules Pipe, Mayor of Hackney, denounce Nike for nicking a logo while he carries out the same action himself?” said John Thornton, chair of Disability Sport Hackney and himself an arthritis sufferer. “In my book, that’s outright hypocrisy.”

“Mayor Jules Pipe has rightly come under criticism for doing less than nothing to help people with arthritis in the London Borough of Hackney. He has allowed the swimming pools here to fall into rack and ruin, and even when they do reopen, they will largely be inaccessible to disabled people and it will cost us more to use than to travel to surrounding boroughs, he said.

“He's done nothing for grass-roots sport, he’s working with Olympic planners to turn over the Hackney Marshes football pitches to tarmac crews. Hackney Council Cabinet members have given them to the Olympic crew to be turned into a massive car park. Re-opening London Fields open air lido won’t make up for all the facilities we’ve lost.”

Due to years of under-investment and maladministration it is now not possible to swim in a Hackney Council 25 metre pool and completely impossible to swim in a public pool. Instead the only pools available are the two or three small pools in private gyms. No hydrotherapy facilities exist in Hackney and the closed Clissold Leisure Centre, built at a cost estimated at £45,000,000, was not constructed to be accessible. The works to complete it, which have now been abandoned, have not been specified to improve access beyond what was absolutely necessary in law at the time of its original construction.

“To add insult to injury, the Council have purloined a well-known and well-respected national symbol – the logo for the National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society - and used it for their own self-aggrandisement. It wouldn't be so bad if he cared a jot about enabling disabled people to use sports facilities. Instead, we have no accessible pools in Hackney and, if we are on benefits, we couldn’t afford the exorbitant entry fees.”

Have a look for yourself.

Anyone but...

2006-06-18T13:54:00.000+01:00

Sorry about the absence of posts lately. Been watching the football.

All right, I haven't. I did, however, catch England vs. Paraguay last weekend. The Whitechapel Respect celebratory meal coincided with the game, so a TV and projecter were rounded up and put into service.

I don't see anything unreasonable in doing this; if we hadn't provided the TV, fewer would have turned up. I find the argument that socialists should actively oppose England slightly tiresome: there seems to be no quicker way to have a futile and bitter argument with precisely the people we should be trying to win over. It would have been particularly absurd, in a room full largely of Bengalis, some in England tops, almost all watching the match, to have raised an objection.

I can't think of a single instance - indeed, I'm fairly certain there isn't a single instance - where anybody-but-England has advanced the cause of socialism. It is more absurd, naturally, to pretend that supporting England is a singularly progressive cause, dragooning poor old Orwell into service for the ocassion. But disentangling the threads of identity, culture, and recognition that lead people to support England is not going to be done through bloody-minded opposition.

On finding the real scroungers

2006-05-30T17:28:00.000+01:00

Outrage:

Fraud and overpayment in public sector bodies including primary care trusts, hospital trusts and local authorities hit £111 million in the last two years, it has been revealed.

The Audit Commission's National Fraud Initiative showed a 33 per cent increase in 2004/05 compared with 2002/03 in nearly 1,300 public bodies...

"The message to those tempted to steal from public service bodies is that there is now more chance than ever of being caught," Steve Bundred, the Audit Commission chief executive, said.

The report revealed a number of cases in which failed asylum-seekers were employed by local authorities or NHS organisations, received housing benefit or other state benefits, or had local authority accommodation.

£111m! Asylum seekers! It's daylight robbery!

Tax avoidance by the super-rich is costing the country £10bn per year...

Wealthy individuals - earning millions per year - use loopholes to beat the system, including avoiding National Insurance through bonuses paid in gold and having salaries delivered through offshore trusts and loans which are later written off.

"...more chance than ever of being caught": if only.

Hackneyed

2006-05-24T23:23:00.000+01:00

Hackney. Funny old place. It's council is overthrowing capitalism and replacing it with something nicer:

Hackney Council is calling on Nike to compensate the young people of Hackney for their misappropriation of the Council's logo for use on a World Cup range of sportswear. The Council has threatened Nike with legal action, after the global sportswear giant produced a range of kit and equipment bearing an exact replica of the Council's logo, without seeking permission. The Council is demanding financial compensation to spend on sports development in the borough.

No Logo innit. The council website has pictures. Why anyone in their right mind would want to wear the beastly garments I do not know, though they're (perhaps) preferable to godawful Oxford hoodies. Also naughtily abusing the Hackney Council logo, this.

The North, being grim

2006-05-22T21:34:00.000+01:00

Fascinating creature, John Reid. Been keeping an eye on him and stumbled over this:

Instead, Reid sees the rise of New Labour as the regional Labour heartlands reclaiming a lost extremist metropolitan citadel. But despite the brogue and the working-class roots, Reid is the ultimate Labour iconoclast; there are no sacred cows in his personal political manifesto apart from a determined will to gain power. His policy aims are avowedly market capitalist. "The only thing that is constant is change. We should be permanent revisionists. We should never believe that what we are doing is essentially right because it pleases the party faithful. We must look and apply our analysis of the way society is working and prepare to update and change."

The first sentence is the most important - I just didn't want you to miss out on Reid's nudge-nudge, wink-wink with the "permanent revisionist". That line about Northern hordes descending upon the metropolis, out for loot perhaps, reminded me of this Times article on Cameron's difficulties:

In 1979 the Tories held many constituencies across the North, as well as a dozen in Scotland. Today they have only one in Scotland. Despite being accused of turning its back on the northern cities in the 1980s, the party held on to local government and Westminster seats under Margaret Thatcher and it was not until the 1990s that first Tory councillors, then MPs, were voted out.

There's a whole history to be written of the British Left's relationship to the North-South divide. (Actually, for all I know, it may already have been written. Anyone got any ideas?) It's something that stretches right the way back to Will Cuffay attempting to lead the metropolitan masses against the cowardly, Northern leadership of the Chartists in 1848; or Jarrow marchers refusing to join the London-centred NUWM. The triumphant march of Blairism into Downing Street would probably belong with those two, should we believe Reid's version of events.

Embarrassing memories

2006-05-20T17:07:00.000+01:00

Martin Kettle - he's a very quick way to annoy yourself:

One of the ways New Labour deliberately signalled its break from the past was to burn its bridges with what it saw as luvviedom. Where Neil Kinnock had embraced the arts with exuberance, Blair icily kept his distance.

...what the hell is he on about? This is raging nonsense, it's rolling around on the floor and giggling hysterically, it's banging your fists against either side of your head and howling - "icily keeping his distance"?

And then:

Perhaps politics and the arts don't, can't and maybe even shouldn't mix. That was certainly what Lenin thought; which seems a good enough reason to assert that they can.

Blairites for Proletkult? It figures.

Boo

2006-05-18T17:00:00.000+01:00

Actually properly scary, for once.

This is also frightening, though in different way. They might start breeding.

Vauxhall (briefly)

2006-05-18T15:02:00.000+01:00

That dynamic UK economy, again:

Union leaders claimed last night that manufacturing was being "massacred" after Vauxhall announced plans to axe 900 jobs and the rate of unemployment rose to its highest level for four years.

Unlike the fools on the continet, you see, we've got a wonderful flexible labour market that creates jobs. Andrew Glyn offers a good, short assessment (PDF):

The case for labour market deregulation in Europe is that it would have a major effect on European joblessness... the cross country evidence does not bear this out. Moreover the benefits of labour market regulation and welfare state measures in terms of a wage floor , income security, job security and conditions at work are frequently ignored... The call for comprehensive labour market deregulation in Europe lacks empirical justification in terms of large and predictable effects on employment and thus a more egalitarian distribution of welfare.

(Interesting to note, by-the-by, that New Labour is becoming increasingly open about offering state aid.)

2006-05-16T20:05:00.000+01:00

Post on nuclear power over at the Tomb.

Vaguely worth noting

2006-05-16T18:37:00.000+01:00

In passing, this one:

US investors are rushing for exits in risky markets across the world, accelerating an ugly sell-off in Turkey, Indonesia, India, Russia, and Brazil...

Mr Bloom [HSBC "currency expert"] said fears of a dollar collapse had been the chief source of contagion spreading worldwide...

"I expect the dollar to fall fast and furious against everything because the point of inflexion has been reached in US interest rates," he said. "If the Fed is not going to keep rewarding me with higher rates for the risk of holding dollar assets, why should I hold them?

"The US is importing $750bn more than it is exporting every year and now has $2,500bn in external liabilities. This is a big call on world savings and it can't go on forever," he added.

This overweening desire for security hardly betokens a system enjoying a glorious renaissance, but you may have guessed that already.

Irrational non-exuberance

2006-05-13T18:36:00.000+01:00

Cheap and easy, this one.

May 9:

World stock markets finally expunged the memories of one of the worst bear markets in history yesterday when they surpassed the levels reached ahead of the collapse of the dotcom bubble in 2000.

May 13:

London's financial market suffered its worst day of trading in more than three years as stock markets across the globe responded to fears that accelerating inflation will lead to a hike in interest rates.

London's leading FTSE 100 index experienced its worst day since March 12 2003, the day war broke out in Iraq, as investors moved to take profits amid fears the market has reached its peak.

This was a situation mirrored around the world, with the French CAC 40 down 2.1pc, while Germany's DAX fell 2.3pc. National indices declined in all 17 western European markets.

In New York, the Dow Jones Industrial Average - which fell 141.9 points on Thursday - was 69 points lower at 11431 in afternoon trading...

'course, they could (and quite probably will) bounce back again on Monday - but cheery articles that the worst is over, happy times are here again, etc etc, are wide of the mark. The contradiction between soaring hard primary commodity prices, and flat or even falling manufactured output prices, is becoming pressing.

Questionable

2006-05-13T17:59:00.000+01:00

You know - sorry to go on about this, but hey - the thing I don't fully understand is why the ranks of the pro-war "left" think their Respect-bashing is made more convincing by quoting the BNP in their support. For example:

It is little wonder that after the last general election the BNP itself declared: “The future for British politics is the growth in support and power of the ethno-specific political parties like the BNP, the People’s Justice Party and Respect.”

It's unfair to pick on someone who attempts, in the same piece, to distance himself from Senator Joe McCarthy by providing an apologia for proper "anti-Communist" witch-hunts: it's almost sad when the polemical urge runs ahead of the polemical ability. But you'll recognise the argument. Nick Cohen, a vastly more competent hack, uses the same trick here.

If any member of the Decent Left were to explain, say, historic support for the Communist Party in Jewish areas of East London by reference to Oswald Mosley's deranged beliefs in "ethno-specific" conspiracies, you'd think something was a little amiss. Something not quite right, somewhere - you might think. Why Mosley's successors are currently being paraded as if offering the last word in political analysis is beyond me. I can only assume that once you believe the official fairy stories about Iraq, you'll fall for any damn fool tale that comes your way - regardless of source.

2006-05-13T17:33:00.000+01:00

No postings here for over a week. Tsk. Though I did put some stuff here and here.

Ballot fraud (cont.)

2006-05-03T10:16:00.000+01:00

Fresh developments:

Last week George Galloway's Respect party claimed cheating was rife there, with blocks of residents falling victim to postal vote fraudsters. Nigel Evans, the Conservative MP for Ribble Valley, yesterday confirmed that he had submitted a complaint to the council about the disappearance of his postal voting form which should have been sent to his flat in the borough but failed to materialise.

His concerns mirrored those of Pennie Clarke, a neighbour and Tory candidate in the election, who has also lost her vote. Ms Clarke, a solicitor, insisted on being allowed to examine the relevant documentation and found that the fraudulent application form submitted to the council had not even been signed. Her partner also found that a postal vote had been requested by third party using his identity. In that case the documentation showed that his signature had been forged.

Ok, so the Tories have complained; Respect have complained; and even Labour have made some noises. Which major party - currently with a councillor on bail for fraud - does that leave, I wonder? Whitechapel seems reasonably clean, though with a few surprising registrations, but it's a different story further east:

Sheikh Masud is a charity worker who lives in the Mile End East ward who has had his vote stolen. “I only found out I was on the postal voting list when I received a letter from the council accepting a registration from me and my wife,” he told Socialist Worker.

“I then discovered the vote had been registered to be sent to some other address to the one I live in, one I’ve never heard of. The same thing happened to my elderly father. I’m so angry – I’d never give consent to anyone to take my right to vote away.”

Masud contacted his local Respect candidate, Jackie Turner, and complained to the council.

Mysteriously, shortly after complaining, an unknown man appeared at his father’s door and handed over the postal ballot forms belonging to Masud and his father.

“If I’d found out who the guy was, I’d have given him a piece of my mind,” says Masud. “My wife’s vote is still missing.”

Respect activists have now collected 33 signed statements from people in Tower Hamlets who have had their votes stolen through a postal vote scam.

In a tower block in Limehouse ward 90 of the 93 residents were registered for postal votes, despite the fact that very few had applied for them.

It's galling to think that concerns about the electoral register were raised, this time last year, during the general election:

At one address owned by Abdus Salique, a local businessman and Labour supporter who recently hosted a lunch for the party's candidate, Oona King, and the London mayor, Ken Livingstone, there are 12 names on the roll.

But when the Guardian visited the premises, a businessman who rents an office in the building said that none of those named lived there.

This is still a remarkably common experience: I've lost count of the number of absent voters we've turned up over the last few weeks. Even without any dirty tricks, Tower Hamlets' election services are a thing of wonder. Yet Christine Gilbert, returning officer (and, naturally, Labour-appointed Chief Executive - oh, and wife of Tony McNulty), has claimed throughout that nothing is amiss.

Still, those that can cast their votes as they wish may cause some surprises:

Lesley Ellis has lived on the Cranbrook estate in the Globe Town area of Bethnal Green for the past 19 years. She drives a black cab for a living, as did her father before her.

She describes herself and her family as “staunch Labour voters” for generations—but no longer. On Thursday 4 May, Lesley will be one of thousands of former Labour supporters in Tower Hamlets switching their allegiance to Respect.

“I first came across Respect when we were fighting the attempts to transfer the Cranbrook estate to a registered social landlord, Swan Housing Group,” says Lesley.

“The council were just going to give away the estate to Swan. We would have had no tenants association as such—we were going to be sold off and the banks were going to own us.

“So we started knocking on people’s doors saying, do you realise you’re going to lose your secured tenancy? We felt we were being pushed into the transfer by the council.

“So from August to December we turned a yes vote into a no. We defeated the transfer in a ballot in December—some 73 percent voted against stock transfer.”

It was this campaign that made Lesley realise what the New Labour council was up to. “There were a lot of dirty tricks from the council,” she says.

“Half the estate didn’t get their ballot papers at first. The council people came round and tried to pull down our notices—but we caught them.

“I’ve always been staunch Labour, but to see this from the council—I just thought that they were betraying us.

“I realised that the reason we weren’t getting the estate done up—repairs, horticultural, things like that—was that the council wanted us to get so fed up that we’d switch to a registered social landlord. But now we were seeing beyond that.

“That’s when I started listening to Respect. I thought these people were ex-Labour, people like us, and they’ve formed a political group that opposes selling off public housing.”

And, whilst you're about it:

George Galloway was down here last Saturday, and lifelong Labour men like Danny Woodards are thinking about voting Respect, who have pledged to save the market. 'I had a bowl of milk waiting for George round the back, mind.' At a public meeting the previous night Woodards had said to Sir Robin Wales: do what you have to do, but retain the council running the market. 'He said they hadn't got the expertise. I said what you think you've been fucking doing the last 120 years?'

Blah blah Muslim party blah blah blah communalism blah blah bloop. Tower Hamlets is 35% Bengali - although you've never guess from "Muslim-dominated" reports - and I, as far as I am aware, there is only one ward with a majority of Bengalis. The demographics are dead against you if you want to run a "communalist" campaign: you can try, but you won't get very far. (The New Labour dodge has been to run two separate communalist campaigns. Very Third Way.)

(Nearly) speechless

2006-05-02T19:00:00.000+01:00

It's a multimedia crossover blogging - I'm watching the New Labour election broadcast at the same time as writing this. Incredible. Jaw on floor stuff. A succession of bright sparkly images - happy nurses, cute babies, Angel of the North - with subtitles proclaiming all these staggering achievements - SURE START CENTRES OPEN, TWO MILLION FEWER PENSIONERS, ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US - interspersed with a disarmingly naff late-nineties Cool Britannia stylee Union Jack Mini Cooper motif, very brief flashes of Brown, still briefer flashes of Blair. Oh, and a crap soft rock soundtrack telling us, you'll like this bit, "It's getting better all the time," - didn't recognise it, sort of Oasis without the charm, marginally less subtle than the D:Ream track it's supposed to remind us of, it's like being slapped in the face with a wet Prescott - anyway, said unrecognisable MOR tune included the lyric, "No matter what they say"... precisely the problem, for all I know the near-subliminal achievement flashes may all be perfectly true and fair and accurate but still no-one will believe this shower any more. Grrr.

Right opinions of dead men

2006-05-01T21:23:00.000+01:00

J.K. Galbraith's popped his clogs. (Why do economists always last so long?)

Obituary here. I notice Galbraith's attracted a little encomium from Prudence:

"I enjoyed meeting him in both the UK and America and welcomed his interest in our country and its future," Mr Brown said. "Even in recent years in his 90s he was never slow to give me and others advice, and he will be remembered for his erudition, his wit and eloquence, and particularly for his economic insights into our age."

I should hope he was "never slow to give me and others advice". Pity Brown never bothered paying much attention to it. Here's Galbraith on Bush (PDF), and here he is on Iraq.

"At least nine councillors..."

2006-04-28T12:34:00.000+01:00

The Telegraph's estimate, a few days ago:

Tower Hamlets
In Tower Hamlets the loss of Oona King's Bethnal Green and Bow seat to George Galloway last year suggests that Respect could gain at least nine councillors in predominantly Muslim areas, and perhaps even the ward of Shadwell, solidly Labour since 1919. With the Lib Dems stirring in the north of the borough, and the Conservatives likely to take all six councillors for the Isle of Dogs, Labour will lose this borough in the heart of the East End after being assailed on three different fronts.

The stirring of the Lib Dems is being somewhat disrupted by the presence of Respect, who certainly give every impression of running them close in wards like Weavers.

Some (not many) of the postal ballots have already been counted. Still not finding any Labour voters on the doorstep.

Slightly rambling around Tower Hamlets

2006-04-21T00:06:00.000+01:00

Been reading Michael Young's last book, The New East End, which has appeared to rapturous praise from certain quarters. Will write a proper review/rant about it later, but as a taster: by god, this is shite. (See also here and here. Both articles, if anything, understate how very bad this book really is.)

Throwing this soggy communitarian fag-end aside (complete with unpleasant hacking cough, and promises never to touch the stuff again) and returning to the real New East End: several hours spent, over the last two weeks or so, pounding Whitechapel's salubrious streets with our three Respect candidates has convinced me that we are on the verge of a breakthrough here. (I'm not the only one.) Now, I'm not convinced - but then, I've never been convinced - that Respect is going to win control of the council, although it is a possibility. What seems most likely is that, given the complete fragmentation of the Labour vote, we'll end up with a council split four ways - potentially with Respect as the largest single block.

Particularly striking is that this fragmentation seems to be taking place across the constituency. Whitechapel itself is a poor and predominantly Bengali area that delivered a huge vote for George Galloway last year. From canvassing elsewhere, however, it's clear that sections of the white working class are looking to Respect as a viable alternative to New Labour. As I've said before, Respect simply could not have won George his seat without the support of white working class Labour defectors. The demographics of the constituency dictate as much, and certainly the canvassing returns made clear that our support was arriving from across BG&B.

Given the exceptional circumstances of that election, though, there was no guarantee that such support would be maintained. By all accounts, for a significant minority of longstanding Labour voters, it has been, and has even strengthened: we have an excellent slate of candidates, presenting a solid political programme. Getting the candidates out, meeting people, and having the arguments where needed has materially contributed to Respect's support.

So I'm reasonably chipper about proceedings, thus far. Anybody wanting to see the East London Respect bandwagon rolling onwards should get down to Liverpool Street Station at 10.30am this Saturday for the mass canvassing and leafletting - we're aiming for at least four hundred people out across the constituency, matching last year's near-heroic effort.

New Labour have chosen the same day to mobilise their remaining activists in East London. Curiously, and despite frantically talking up the Nazi threat there, they're chosing not to send them to Barking and Dagenham. Instead, it's all out to prop up their corrupt and ailing council in Tower Hamlets. Important to get your priorities right, I suppose; internal Labour Party polls a few weeks back (I'm reliably informed) put Respect on something over 10% across London - which, considering we're not standing right across London, suggests a very significant amount of support in the east. Another one for the rumour mill: guess which "Party of Liberation" is reportedly offering its support for New Labour in Shadwell?

No Pasarán, New Labour style

2006-04-17T22:43:00.000+01:00

Typical complacent New Labour smug quacking noises:

The Home Office minister, Andy Burnham, said indications of growing readiness to consider a vote for the BNP reflected a trend towards protest voting, especially at local elections, but he played down the significance of the party's threat.

"When people hear their views, I think they will see them for what they are," he told Today.

Someone should tell Margaret Hodge:

White working-class families feel so neglected by the Government and angered by immigration that they are deserting Labour and flocking to the British National Party, a minister admitted yesterday...

"They can't get a home for their children, they see black and ethnic minority communities moving in and they are angry," said Mrs Hodge, the employment minister... Mrs Hodge said the pace of ethnic change in her area had frightened people.

The scale of the idiocy here is close to awe-inspiring. On one side, New Labour minister blithely assumes that the rest of the country is as serenely liberal as he is. Ignore the fascists and they'll just go away. On the other, New Labour minister, in a panic, repeats and embellishes the "views" so complacently dismissed by her colleague. Joined-up thinking where it matters.

Department III

2006-04-14T22:59:00.000+01:00

There are so many wonderful New Labour moments in this:

Des Smith, who resigned from the council of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT) in January after telling an undercover reporter that Downing Street would recommend donors "for an OBE, a CBE or a knighthood", was released on bail after a day of questioning by officers from Scotland Yard's specialist crime directive.

He certainly did, the silly sod, though apparently not to the "fake sheik". Anyway, just to add to the delicious pre-emptive Schadenfreude:

Lord Levy, the Labour party fundraiser who is Mr Blair's tennis partner, is president of the SSAT. Lord Adonis, the junior education minister, wooed potential sponsors when he worked in the Downing Street policy unit as the prime minister's education adviser.

Adonis, profiled in disappointingly crawling fashion here (what were Red Pepper thinking?), is the working-class hero behind the entire Academy scheme. Some more cynical folk out there may well have been wondering why those made very rich by emphatically not dispensing largesse should suddenly blow fat wads of cash transforming failing schools into centres of excellence, ho ho. They might idly glance at Adonis' own democratic credentials. Tsk.

Absolute surplus value II

2006-04-11T08:19:00.000+01:00

Just to add to the post below: the current drive to carve up pensions and extend working lives is a simple smash-and-grab operation to expand absolute surplus value. It's a frontal assault on real wages, something comparatively rare under advcanced capitalism outside of deep recession.

A great deal has been written, recently, regarding an apparent US productivity "miracle". Much of this sudden increase in growth has been attributed to the retail sector, and the introduction of ICT to enable more efficient working practices: just-in-time delivery, minimum number of items in stock, and so on. It strikes me that much of these implicit increases in relative surplus value - to the extent that retailing produces surplus value at all - from improved technology are disguised increases in absolute surplus value: that ICT's major funciton, in low-cost bulk retailing like WalMart, is to improve staff monitoring. Actual working practices, one suspects, remain much the same: it's just somewhat harder to shirk when a computer is logging your every move. ICT, to this extent, is waste production; it does not directly contribute to the system's productivity, but is a necessary function of the system's inability to completely regulate its labour inputs.

(The same argument about improved monitoring is harder to make for ICT in other service sectors - something anyone reading this at work will well appreciate.)

Absolute surplus value, China, and the North

2006-04-10T19:05:00.000+01:00

Ah, splendid:

Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, former president, on Sunday underlined the seriousness of the situation when he said the country's institutions were in a state of disarray not seen since the late 1950s when, amid the Algerian political crisis, the constitution was rewritten to create the Fifth Republic.

"The normal functioning of institutions must be re-established," said Mr Giscard d'Estaing, in an article written for Le Journal du Dimanche. The government, he added, should as soon as possible put forward a new law withdrawing the new job contract. "It is time to get out of this mess."

"The normal functioning of the institutions must be re-established...": which put me in mind of Ed's commentary on Andrew Glyn in the Guardian a few days ago.

Glyn writes:

A piece of conventional wisdom about the world dear to economists is that the share of national income going to workers stays pretty stable. Karl Marx disagreed; he argued that labour-saving capital investment would limit demand for labour, while also bankrupting small-scale producers, in agriculture for example. They would swell the labour supply, creating a permanent "reserve army of labour" that would prevent real wages growing as fast as labour productivity. Workers would thus spend an increasing proportion of working time producing profits for capitalists - a falling share for labour or a rising rate of exploitation, in Marx's terminology.

All well and good, as far as it goes. Ed briefly discusses Glyn's account of the crisis of the 1970s at his blog: in brief, Glyn views the the slide in profit rates commencing from the late 1960s onwards as driven by the strength of organised labour. Capital, in the guise of neoliberalism, was then able to reassert itself, boosting profit rates and restricting labour's share of the national income. The obvious problem with this account is one of timing: the most sustained increases in real wages in the post-WW2 period occur at precisely the same time as the most sustained increases in national income and productivity. It's then difficult, as Ed rightly says, to see why the crisis would then only occur in the 1970s, and not the 1950s. (Glyn's problems are caused by an elision he makes, on the basis of a neo-Ricardian interpretation of Marx, between economic variables in price terms, and economic variables in labour-value terms... but that's by-the-by.)

There are broadly similar difficulties in Glyn's account of China's spectacular economic growth in recent decades. First, the recovery in the rate of profit since the early 1980s was brought about in the developed North by a brutally effective attempt to maximise what Marx called "absolute surplus value". There are two ways to boost profits: you either make your workforce work more effectively, or you make them work harder and longer. "Relative surplus value" is increased with the former; "absolute surplus value" with the latter. If the working day can be extended - and it has been, reversing 100 years of progress - and if real wage growth can be minimised or even reversed - real wages in the US stayed constant between 1975 and 1995 - "absolute surplus value" can be increased: capital can grab a greater share of output. It's crude, but it has been singularly effective for capital, at huge human cost.

Second, the maintenance of the neoliberal order - such as it is - has depended on the intervention of a massively expanded financial system. The problem with restraining real wages is that this also restrains purchasing power; if you don't pay your workers as much, they cannot buy as much; if they cannot buy as much, capital cannot sell as much.

John Maynard Keynes proposed expanding government expenditure to make good the gap between what consumers can afford, and what is offered for sale; after a burst of post-war enthusiasm for the concept of government-led "demand-management", the political risks were, by the 1970s, considered too great. Instead, the extraordinary growth of private, consumer credit was allowed to make good the difference. The second phase of the neoliberal age - the period over which China rose to global economic prominence - has leaned ever more heavily on the crutch of global finance. Consumers, especially those in the US, borrow to buy cheap manufactured goods from the Far East. The system functions, as long as the credit can continue flowing.

Glyn's brief account passes over this critical dependence. A recovery in the rate of profit was only possible globally because of an initial rise in absolute surplus value across the developed world - quite independently of China's later liberalisation. This recovery was then only sustained because a liberalised financial system could ensure markets for goods were maintained on cheap credit. In Glyn's apocalyptic scenario, the appearance of a Far Eastern "reserve army of labour", millions-strong, puts such pressure on workers in the North that "[t]he bargaining chips would be in the hands of capital to a degree not seen since the industrial revolution."

But who, then, would buy the goods this Chinese proletariat produce? If real purchasing power in the North collapses as a result of competition from the South, it would seem neoliberal capitalism has very few options: the only one that presents itself as politically acceptable is a frenetic expansion of an already-bloated consumer debt. This is not a secure position from which to cast "bargaining chips". Other, as yet politically unacceptable solutions may start to present themselves.

Who dares, issues writs

2006-04-09T23:16:00.000+01:00

...not a single post for a whole week, and then all you get is snippet from the Worst Paper in All England (arguably), the Sunday Telegraph. (Actually, scrub that: it's not even the worst Sunday paper; that honour belongs to the Sunday Times, which I wouldn't use to wipe my arse with. I really wouldn't, actually, horrid semi-glossy paper last time I checked, not absorbent.) Between irksome work and less irksome elections, blogging has slipped down the priority list somewhere. Very poor. Will try harder in future.

Ben Griffin followed his storming speech to the international peace conference in November with an interview for the Telegraph, during which the ex-SAS soldier declared the invasion of Iraq to be "illegal". Cue repercussions:

Ben Griffin, who left the Special Air Service in June last year after spending three months on operations in Baghdad, has been informed that the Government is considering "civil proceedings" against him after he described the war as "illegal" in a Sunday Telegraph interview...

In a letter to this newspaper, however, the Treasury Solicitors, who act as the Government's legal representatives, claimed that Mr Griffin had breached a binding and life-long "solemn undertaking" not to disclose any events of his career in the SAS without first informing the Ministry of Defence.

The letter states that to breach the confidentiality contract, which all members of the special forces have to sign before they are allowed to join the elite units, is an "actionable civil wrong"

There's a lot of this low-grade intimidation taking place around various bits of the UK state, sometimes creeping over into slightly higher-grade and more unpleasant proceedings. Quite what whoever is making the decision hopes to gain in Griffin's case is hard to judge, especially given the failure of previous legal warning shots to produce the salutary lesson desired. Ours not to reason why, etc.

Let freedom reign

2006-04-02T10:11:00.000+01:00

Figures within Iraq's majority Shia alliance have for the first time urged Ibrahim Jaafari to stand down as PM to help a national unity government form...

This week senior Shia politicians said US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, had told them President George W Bush "doesn't want, doesn't support, doesn't accept" the retention of Mr Jaafari.

And the punchline:

Mr Jaafari responded by saying the comments undermined Mr Bush's commitment to democracy in Iraq.

It's the Sun Wot Won It

2006-03-31T18:56:00.000+01:00

Struck by the contrast between comments deposited about the pensions strike at the (nominally left-leaning) Guardian site, and those left at the Sun. Bloody liberals.

Standards in Public Life

2006-03-31T18:39:00.000+01:00

Rich Tories, for a change:

The Conservatives today revealed the names of 13 wealthy backers who had lent the party nearly £16m - but repaid a further £5m in order to preserve the anonymity of other lenders...

Among the 13 listed, the biggest lenders are former party treasurer and deputy chairman Lord Ashcroft (£3.6m) and Scottish philanthropist Lord Laidlaw (£3.5m).

How the hell can anyone who gives £3.5m to the Tory Party still be described, straight-faced, as a "philanthropist"? "Misanthropist", possibly.

Dead rich

2006-03-30T00:00:00.000+01:00

Inheritance tax. Tends to make unpleasant people become inordinately concerned about the welfare of the extraordinarily rich. Seems to be popping up quite a bit at the moment, though. This from Andrew Bartlett is worth reading, not least for the large numbers of vaguely unpleasant commenters valiantly failing to defend the indefensible.

The Sun promotes pensions strikes shock

2006-03-29T18:56:00.000+01:00

The Sun is inviting its readers to "HAVE YOUR SAY" on the pensions strike yesterday, below a story about Unison leader Dave Prentis going to watch Arsenal. The comments on the website are (presumably) carefully edited. And yet:

For the first time in my life I went on strike yesterday. I viewed the strike action as a last resort to put pressure on the Local Government Association and Government to see common sense and stop playing politics with my pension. When I first started paying into my pension scheme, the Government at the time allowed local councils to have pension breaks - hence the mess we are left with today.
Donna Abrahart

I fully support the strike. Local government workers have been paying into the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) for their whole careers on the understanding that when they retired they would get the benefit of those contributions. Now the government is trying to change the terms of the contract they made with those workers to cut the payments and make it harder for people to get what they have paid for.
Stephen Booth

Pensions should be improved for all not worsened! Britain is the fourth richest country in world. But we have officially over 1 million pensioners who are poor. What sort of society do we want?
Tim Ellis

Why shouldn’t he go to the football?
Jim Webster

Excellent, excellent...

2006-03-28T19:35:00.000+01:00

This makes for heartening reading, especially alongside the reports and pictures here from France. Recidivists, Luddites, and wreckers, the lot of them; and a good thing, too.

"Student of irony" summed up the prevailing ruling class attitude, the "politics of envy":

It's a point that's struck me many times, that we live in a world where the affluent are envious of the [rest] of us. They never stop going on about how the rest of us have got too much.

I've wondered, in the past, if we're not rapidly approaching what is fashionably called a tipping-point for neoliberalism. As a mode of rule, across great swathes of the globe it is demonstrably failing to deliver the goods: neither reliable economic growth, nor political consent. Resistance to privatisation and deregulation and the rest of it is, whilst still very uneven, becoming sufficient to undermine the programme; whether the strikes today will derail the alleged reforms is a moot point, of course, but you can certainly see the potential.

More New Labour corruption

2006-03-22T16:56:00.000Z

Down in Tower Hamlets:

Nasir Uddin, ex-Labour councillor for the St Dunstan's and Stepney ward, and his younger brother, Ain Uddin, dramatically changed their pleas today (Weds) at Southwark Crown Court in a fraud trial also involving Kumar Murshid, a serving member of Tower Hamlets council and a former top advisor to London Mayor Ken Livingstone.

Nasir Uddin, 33, now of Cotswold Gardens, East Ham, admitted taking £15,694 for personal gain from the Stepney-based Youth Action Scheme four years ago.

Depressing about this story are the pitiful sums of cash involved. Whilst New Labour wallows around in £14m secret loans, dispensing honours as needed, its underlings are reduced to scrabbling around after sums you'd hardly think worth risking prison for - sums that, nontheless, would make a difference if they'd been spent as intended. Tower Hamlets' "corrupt political culture" may yet choke.

"Sleaze"

2006-03-19T13:28:00.000Z

An excellent week: the worse it gets for Blair, the better it can get for the rest of us. New Labour's going to get slaughtered at the local council elections, especially in London; whilst his grip until now has been impressive, Blair's not going to cling on much after that.

I have only one complaint: it's not "sleaze". It's corruption. Why mince words?

Making history: Aznar, Eta, al-Qaida

2006-03-13T19:04:00.000Z

It's possible the glaring omission in this excerpted article arose from dodgy editing, but it is still incredible that an account of Aznar's ignominious exit from office can contrive to ignore the mass mobilisations that preceded it.

In the end, it was not al-Qaida that brought down the People's Party (which was fielding Mariano Rajoy for prime minister, as Aznar stuck to a pledge not to serve more than two terms). It was Eta. Or, rather, it was the party's obsession with Eta which meant it could not - or did not want to - see that the real culprits lay elsewhere.

First, this is a brazen effort to absolve the People's Party of their responsibility: attempting to hide the consequences of the invasion of Iraq behind Eta was a sick piece of spin. Second, this is - in a typical dodge - attempting to write activist politics out of history; in this case, to the point of total implausibility. Here's another view.

Ontology and picket-lines

2006-03-11T16:40:00.000Z

K-Punk, squeezing much from talking to scabs and reactionaries:

An ideological position can never be really successful until it is naturalized, and it cannot be naturalized while it is still thought of as a value rather than a fact. In the case of the lecturers I was talking to, it seems that Capitalist Realism has been so successful in installing Business Ontology that there is no longer any question of evaluating it at all. Business assumptions are now transcendental presuppositions, defining the horizons of the thinkable. It is simply obvious that everything in society, including education, should be run as a business. It is simply obvious that no other criteria can come into play. Hence the reason that my flailing attempts to raise issues of 'justice' were not so much rebuffed as greeted with blank incomprehension.

cf. Tony Cliff:

The class struggle always expresses itself, not just in a conflict between workers and capitalists, but inside the working class itself. On the picket line it is not true that workers are there to try and prevent the capitalist from working. The capitalists never worked in their lives so they will not work during a strike. What the picket line is about is one group of workers trying to prevent another group of workers from crossing the picket line in the interests of the employers.

The question of workers’ power, what Marx called the dictatorship of the proletariat. Why would you need a dictatorship of the proletariat if the whole working class is united and there are only a tiny minority of capitalists in opposition? You could say go home, and we’d finish with the bosses. If the whole working class is united we could spit at them and flood them into the Atlantic!

The reality is that there will be workers on one side and backward workers on the other side. Because “the prevailing ideas of every society are the ideas of the ruling class”, the workers are split between different levels of consciousness.

Mark also thinks The Apprentice "should be compulsory viewing for all Marxists", a sentiment I agree with mightily. "Pathetic self-delusion, baboonery dressed up in Harvard Biz School lingo, massive ego over-investment in projects so abjectly inane that they are not even pointless: suddenly it all becomes clear why Capitalism is so mired in banality and incompetence." (It's the language that really frightens me: my god, these people appear to actually think in terms entirely provided by management self-help books. So nice to see them turning on each other, like underfed dogs in a pit.)

Deep entry

2006-03-11T16:02:00.000Z

I've been woefully lazy with the blog this last month or so. Been horribly busy, just not had much time on my hands.

Someone for whom this clearly doesn't apply has written a biography of Blair as if he were what I believe is known as a "deep entryist". This is really significantly less fun than it sounds: it means being a secret revolutionary lurking inside a large political organisation, becoming a good and dutiful apparatchik, and quietly waiting for the glorious day to arrive when the blinkers are thrown from the masses eyes, the shackles of reformism are cast asunder, etc, and your true politics can be revealed and the masses rally to your banner.

Blair's mask slipped last week when he admitted that Isaac Deutscher's biography of Trotsky got him interested in politics in the first place. (Unusually good taste on Blair's part, it must be said.) So this is the PM as undercover Trot, hell-bent on destroying what one crazed old Stalinist ("17 years a Communist councillor in this borough") of my acquaintance insists on calling the "historic party of the British working class". All of which put me vaguely in mind of Lionel Jospin.

Distance

2006-03-06T22:49:00.000Z

Keeping with the utter cynicism theme, how's about this one - front page of the Independent on Sunday - for a not entirely subtle attempt to make sure the pretty straight kind of guy doesn't have his squeaky-clean hands anywhere too obviously near this particular till?

A furious Tessa Jowell decided to separate from her husband David Mills after it emerged that the businessman had attempted to trade on his relationship with Tony Blair, The Independent on Sunday can today reveal."

Thing is, Mills has been grade-A shady for years:

Now for something else you won’t find in the mainstream media. Mills was under long term surveillance by the Serious Fraud Office for numerous dubious financial transactions. Approximately nine years ago, his office was actually raided by the SFO. As the investigation drew to a close, New Labour came to power. An inside source tells me that SFO staff believed they had a good case, and wondered whether his friendship with the new Prime Minister Blair had any bearing on it not coming to court. A Sunday Times Insight investigation into Mills was spiked by the editors.

So these current peculiar financial dealings do not drop out of a clear blue sky. A lot of taxpayers’ money has been spent investigating Mills before. He is well dodgy.

You have to wonder if at any point in the whole international tax lawyer-bribery allegations-Mafia connections-SFO investigation shennanigans anyone bothered to ask how Mills made his money, exactly. Perhaps. Maybe these things simply aren't done in the better social circles.

Greenwashing?

2006-03-06T21:56:00.000Z

A vague glimmer of sense:

Building new nuclear plants is not the answer to tackling climate change or securing Britain's energy supply, a government advisory panel has reported...

Research by the SDC suggests that even if the UK's existing nuclear capacity was doubled, it would only provide an 8% cut on CO2 emissions by 2035 (and nothing before 2010).

Anything that chips away at the pernicious myth that nuclear power is a carbon-free quick-fix should be welcomed. Particularly insidious is the idea that a our current merry, energy-intensive existence can be sustained if we just build a couple of oh-so-clean, oh-so-cheap nuclear power plants.

It can't, of course.

Prof Jaccard told The Daily Telegraph: "If humanity is serious about huge carbon emission cuts this century, zero-emission fossil fuels will dominate nuclear, renewables and energy efficiency."

He has worked out that Britain would need not only to replace its existing nuclear power stations but to double their number if it were to generate enough electricity and to fuel its transport - whether by charging electric cars or by making hydrogen or biofuels - by nuclear means alone.

He said: "It is one thing to build a nuclear power plant on an existing site, but imagine building 15 new ones."

What bothers me is this. I have a horrible sinking feeling that, after discreetly floating the possibility last year, the government is already pretty well set on building a new generation of nuclear plants. They will attempt, as ever, to take the line of least resistance against corporate interests: they will not contemplate the kind of public investment needed to turn renewable sources into a viable energy prospect, and they're (as yet) demonstrably unwilling to tackle energy efficiency.

The Energy Review and Nick Stern's climate change commission are likely to offer, at best, agnosticism on nuclear power. One or both may end up strongly in favour - most likely the Energy Review. If that's the case, Jonanthah Porritt's well-meaning intervention will be little more than a bright green fig-leaf for a dirty energy policy.

A prize! A prize!

2006-02-28T23:50:00.000Z

There ought to be one for this sort of thing:

Mary Creagh, [MP for] Wakefield

"I would remind MPs that the bill also contains in full the child food measures - the so called 'Jamie Oliver bit' and that is here in it's entirety. I had my concerns - admissions and assets - and I've had my mind put at rest."

Phew. Who cares if you're on the scrapheap, age 11, as long as you don't have to eat turkey twizzlers whilst you're there?

March for Racism

2006-02-28T23:24:00.000Z

Liberal wog-bashers! Western civilisation needs you!

Since we are in favour of free speech, and because the reason why newspapers and magazines across Europe (though not, shamefully, in the UK) have republished the infamous cartoons was principally "We are Spartacus" - we stand together - we will be happy to see reproductions of the cartoons in question at the rally.

Maybe I should go with a big banner saying "MURDER THOSE WHO INSULT VOLTAIRE"? Just to show my support for Western values, you see.

Tom Lehrer all over again

2006-02-24T20:41:00.000Z

It's been difficult watching The Day Today for some time: the gap between the satire and reality appears to have closed, producerts now apparently basing their news programming on dim memories of Chris Morris' inspired spoofs.

It's one thing to see the format begin to parody itself. It's more disturbing to see the news itself start to resemble its own satire:

British pop star Morrissey was quizzed by the FBI and Britain's Special Branch after he called President Bush a "terrorist". The singer said he was "baffled" to be held and interviewed by the authorities. But he was released when they realised the melancholic warbler was not a threat to the free world.

There are plenty of reasons for wanting to lock Morrisey up, but this probably isn't one of them. This comes straight after the detention, at Heathrow, of actors who played alleged terrorists. It's either frightening, or rather funny. Or both.

We'll Treat You Fairly (tm)

2006-02-21T23:14:00.000Z

Another quickie for the oh the glorious irony of it all file:

President George W. Bush rejected congressional pressure to step in and suspend an Arab company's takeover of operations at major U.S. seaports on Tuesday and vowed to veto any legislation to block the deal...

Bush said he was trying to conduct a fair foreign policy.

"I want those who are questioning it to step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a great British company," Bush said.

"I'm trying to conduct foreign policy now by saying to the people of the world 'we'll treat you fairly.'"

"Freedom of Speech"

2006-02-21T22:43:00.000Z

Been meaning to link to David Renton's website for some time, mainly because he's been hassling me to do so... but it's worth a look, lots of interesting stuff - including this nugget, posted on the 7 February, that caught my eye. Dave's discussing one of the organisations that called reproducing racist cartoons a "free speech issue":

...In a previous incarnation, 'Spiked' was the magazine Living Marxism, the publication of a party called the 'Revolutionary Communist Party'. As the RCP started to go down the pan, in the mid-1990s, it dissolved its activities into a series of front organisations, pushing the issue of free speech. I remember being in Sheffield in 1995-8, when the main activities of the group were to promote showings of such films as Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. Leading BNP activist Mark Collett always boasts that he joined the BNP, through the activities of one such RCP front, 'When I came to Leeds University I joined the Free Speech society to fight against political correctness. Then a BNP speaker got expelled, which I thought was absurd. He invited me to a BNP meeting in Burnley and I felt right at home. They were my kind of people.'

"The Great Wen", and John Prescott

2006-02-15T19:35:00.000Z

Iain Sinclair, on his (now-released) book, Edge of Orison:

It kind of continues or completes the trilogy of Lights Out and London Orbital because the actual journey was exactly the same distance as the journey around the M25, but out into the country. It traces something that I've passed through in London Orbital which is Epping Forest and the asylum were the poet John Clare was kept; he did this phenomenal three and a half day march back to his village north of Peterborough and I always wanted to repeat that journey.

So the book starts with a reprisal of his journey, walking at exactly the same dates in July when it's sweltering hot and it was weirder than the M25 because I found that the whole of middle England was just deserted. There's nothing there once you're off the motorway. In the villages the pubs are shut, there were no obvious farmers, abandoned airfields, huge industrial fields of corn and a very very weird landscape. Whereas walking around the edge of London there were always people you'd bump into and stories to hear. This was like emptiness. Emptiness all the way.

It's a version of what's coming up which is John Prescott's motorway growth cities - Thames Gateway and another one that's going to go up Stanstead, Cambridge, Peterborough - that's the future. So without really intending it this third book has become the conclusion to this movement out of London.

(via) This little paen to a disappearing London put me in mind of something else I'd seen only recently, Patrick Keiller's London, a quite brilliant collage of documentary and narrative fiction, filmed in 1992. (Keiller surpassed himself in the follow-up, Robinson in Space, here rightly described as "the best British film of the nineties".)

Keiller's thesis, as related by the arch narration of "Robinson", was that London was slowly dying: neglected by a corrupt establishment of Tories and financiers, deprived even of its own government, the entire city was steadily sinking into more or less inglorious ruin. London's own citizens were abandoning it in droves, as the population figures attest.

A decade later, and quite a different film could be made: London's newly-constitued government now boasting - pace Sinclair - that:

London is growing - and at an unprecedented rate - that's the message from a new Mayoral report launched today...

Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London said: 'These figures show that London's growth is by far the biggest regional issue in the UK. Population and employment growth on this scale demonstrates London's success and is good news for London's economic and social vitality, and for the wider UK economy.'

With the minimal spin, London can be presented as a New Labour success story. A succesful new local administration, a population boom, a massive inflow of investment, the Olympics: a veritable triumph for Blairite governance, even down to Red Ken's rehabilitation.

New Labour is more than happy to talk up London. It is less keen that we examine the rest of the country: as the GLA press release quoted earlier notes, whilst London's population has been expanding at an unprecedented rate, those of "Merseyside, the West Midlands, Tyne and Wear, Greater Manchester and South Yorkshire all fell." The regional differences in real income, productivity and employment growth remain very large by international standards (PDF). All this, whilst London and the south-east surge onwards - flattered, now, by an extraordinary southern bias from the Cabinet's token Northerner.

John Prescott can, of course, be blamed for many things. Curiously - or not - media criticism tends to focus on the superficialities of his alleged stupidity, his maulings of the English language, his handy way with his fists. The significant criticisms that should be made of the debacle that is New Labour's regional policy have been far too muted: Prescott has presided over an utter farce. The regional assemblies died a quiet death, bereft of meaningful political support or purpose; the North-South is reasserting itself with a venegeance; and the best response of New Labour can make to all this is to hawk a regeneration scheme on the back of the biggest circus in the world - to be located, naturally enough, in London.

This regional failure is starting to bite. Larry Elliot, in passing, noted how these concerns came through in the Dunfermline by-election; Scottish politics is a different creature, of course, but there is no reason to think the same issues do not apply in the deprived and almost-forgotten regions of England.

Biting the media on its backside

2006-02-11T11:00:00.000Z

After a couple of weeks of clampdown, it's rather satisying to see the old order rebuffed:

Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott has urged Labour to fight on following a shock defeat to the Lib Dems in the Dunfermline and West Fife by-election.

The Libs Dems took the seat by 1,800 votes, overturning an 11,500 Labour majority at the last election.

Mr Prescott said the government had to "get on" with delivering its programme.

Lib Dems, somewhat predictably, are ignoring the obvious reading of this result - that Blair is an albatross around Labour's neck - to crow about Gordon Brown's "embarrassment". For a group so recently skewered by a witch-hunt against deviant minority parties, they're ludicrously keen to play the big boys' game: they're also ignoring the humiliation this result is for the supposedly rejuvenated Tories:

And while a more unlikely setting for a Tory triumph would be difficult to imagine - Willie Gallagher, Britain's last Communist MP, represented this part of the world - Mr Cameron arrived in Fife yesterday determined to give Mr Brown a bloody nose in his own backyard.

The upshot was more excitement than Dunfermline's High Street has seen since 1968 when the local football team, nicknamed the Pars (short for Paralytics), last won the Scottish Cup. Mr Cameron was mobbed in a way Tory leaders aren't used to in Scotland...

Surely not...?

...The Cameronian message, although not universally accepted, managed to get through the huge media scrum to a few somewhat bewildered voters.

What a nicely revealing moment: the "mobbing" and the excitement the media report is entirely the result of the media itself. The actual voters barely matter - except when they deliver an amusingly significant swing against the Tories.

Freedom of speech, ahahahaha, and the Alliance for White Liberty

2006-02-06T20:04:00.000Z

Gosh, lawks, fancy that, cor stone the crows, etc:

Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that first published the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad that have caused a storm of protest throughout the Islamic world, refused to run drawings lampooning Jesus Christ, it has emerged today.

The Danish daily turned down the cartoons of Christ three years ago, on the grounds that they could be offensive to readers and were not funny.

It's a tribute, I suspect, to the impact of the antiwar movement that not one newspaper in the UK has dared reprint the cartoons. I've no idea if the bar will hold, but it's mildly reassuring that a basic decency has ruled thus far.

Only the political dregs have decided racist provocation has its merits: the BNP, reproducing the most offensive of the cartoons on its website - I won't link to the site, but they helpfully parallel Griffin's acquittal with the actions of European newspapers. The fascists' response is predictable; more disturbing, in its way, is that an organisation allegedly on the "anti-racist" left, the ill-titled "Alliance for Workers' Liberty" has seen fit to republish the pictures, with some ludicrous bleating about "not letting religious authorities" decide what's unpublishably offensive and what isn't - as if a genuine organisation of the left can't see racism for itself. (Clearly this shower can't.) The site seems to be down at the moment - perhaps a last flicker of principle has prevailed - but you can view the Google cache here, should you wish to.

"Joking"

2006-02-02T22:31:00.000Z

Slightly unexpectedly:

How will Hamas make its internal decisions?

"Why are you interested in that? We have no problems. We are not using guns to choose our representatives. We are not using guns in the primaries. We use knives. (Joking.)

Brief letter to assorted European newspaper editors

2006-02-02T20:41:00.000Z

Dear fuckwits,

Hooray! You've struck a mighty blow for freedom of expression. Rather like these two. Europe, arise!

Yours, &c.

[DML]

De Menezes shooting: police "falsified evidence"

2006-01-29T16:31:00.000Z

If you've not seen it already:

Extraordinary allegations that Special Branch officers deliberately falsified vital evidence to hide mistakes which led to the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes at a south London Underground station were made last night...

Alterations were hastily made to amend the wording of the official log once the shocking truth emerged that the dead man was not, in fact, the extremist wanted in connection with the failed 21 July Tube bombings.

Observations

2006-01-29T15:15:00.000Z

It's a been a funny few weeks, all told, and there's still a few puzzles:

1. Why didn't Pete Tatchell out Simon Hughes at any point? If memory serves, he at least nodded at Hughes' sexuality in his account of the 1983 by-election, The Battle for Bermondsey, and has dropped hints since. Regardless of the merits of the tactic, why no outing of Hughes?

2. The same papers now running homophobic campaigns against the Lib Dems are the first to denounce assorted imams and preachers for their "homophobia". Tatchell's conversion from "homosexual terrorist" to national treasure has depended in no small part on his willingness to offer appropriate liberal cover for the Right. Being charitable, Tatchell seems blind to the context of his actions, and how his words will be taken and used. There must be a point at which he realises that the Sun - that's the same Sun this week reporting that "SECOND LIMP-DEM CONFESSES" and "ANOTHER ONE BITES THE PILLOW" - is no friend of gay rights.

3. Consternation that a newspaper can obtain an individual's telephone records. It would appear to be alarmingly easy. A friend of mine had reason to contact one of the Murdoch papers; they subsequently rang his mobile phone operator, pretending to be him, and asked that they check the last few numbers he'd dialled. The phone operator happily complied. (The friend only discovered this later, when some his acquaintances had received calls from the paper in question.) Moral: don't ring the press from your mobile.

4. This is down to the Cameron effect, in part: the old order is reasserting itself: Britain has a stable two-party system and any funny ideas the minor parties might otherwise have need to be kicked into touch, now that the Tories' "credibility" is restored. (There is a glaring contrast between the soft-soaping of senior Conservatives' private lives, and the scouring Lib Dems receive.)

Dissolve the people, and elect another

2006-01-27T02:07:00.000Z

Forsooth:

If Hamas does take power, the Middle East peace process could be placed in serious jeopardy.

Everything about this casual sentence in the middle of an alleged news report is wrong to the point of absurdity.

"Lord Coe is greatest Briton"

2006-01-27T02:05:00.000Z

Bloody hell. Are we really such a shower of shits?

Celebrity

2006-01-25T20:29:00.000Z

Interesting new word usage:

The sense of crisis engulfing the Liberal Democrats has deepened after one of their parliamentary candidates defected to the Conservative Party.

Adrian Graves, who stood at the 1997 and 2005 elections for Suffolk West, said his decision was a response to David Cameron modernising the Tories...

Mr Graves is the first prominent Liberal Democrat to defect to the Tories since Mr Cameron became leader last month.

"Prominent", here referring to an unsuccessful Parliamentary candidate of a party one of whose own frontbench MPs was genuinely shocked that someone he was paying for sex would recognise him. "Prominent".

...speaking of "celebrity", I see Lenin is being interviewed over here. He may "want no part of this narcissistic gang of petit-bourgeois navel-gazers" but they'll catch up with him in the end.

Not a whale in sight

2006-01-22T22:07:00.000Z

(Alongside the usual searches for "bum sex" and "golden showers", I'm now getting hits from "Sarah Teather gagged". What is it with Liberal Democrats?)

Meanwhile, current events in Mongolia are failing to impress Jamie. And, whilst you're here, Ben Watson's obit of free-improv guitarist Derek Bailey; I missed news of Bailey's death over Christmas - I'd only seen him play live the once, in fact, but it has stuck with me: an extraordinarily intense noise that recordings don't really do justice to.

Begging the question

2006-01-22T21:46:00.000Z

Like so:

Worthy, wholesome and usually erring on the cautious side, he seemed one of the most unlikely characters in Westminster to risk a top-flight career for the sake of sordid sex with a male prostitute.

At least no poor dumb animals were hurt this time round.

Where's your daddy gone?

2006-01-18T20:24:00.000Z

Not shedding too many tears over this:

Fathers 4 Justice tonight announced it was to disband following reports of a plot among a "dark underbelly" of former members to kidnap the prime minister's five-year-old son Leo.

Matt O'Connor, the founder, told Channel 4 News he would "cease all operations and call the campaign to a close" because the group could no longer continue in the light of the negative publicity.

It's not the "dark underbelly" that bothers me most; they're unpleasant, but these kidnap plotters are plainly fantasists. It's the presentation of the most vicious backlash politics as cuddly superhero larks. Labour blogger Antonia Bance has more.

"Mind the Tax Gap"

2006-01-15T14:21:00.000Z

The Tax Justice Network have just published the results of their investigation into the tax affairs of the UK's 50 largest corporations. The findings should not come as much of a surprise. From the Observer's write-up:

Britain's 50 biggest quoted companies have avoided paying corporate tax worth £20bn over the past five years, according to a new report...

A detailed study published by the Tax Justice campaign group shows that Britain's largest companies are already paying far less thax than might have been expected. Over the past five years, the biggest 50 have paid just 24.5 per cent on average to the British Exchequer and other tax authorities.

Compare this with the opinons of Digby Jones, head of the CBI:

...many business leaders are increasingly alarmed by the worsening situation and why the government's indifference is so frustrating. These are the people who make the decisions about where to put investment or whether to move to a more competitive tax environment.

Give them an inch and they take your arm off.

Tough on crime, except fox-hunting

2006-01-11T12:43:00.000Z

I noticed that man Cameron, suddenly squeezed from the limelight by the merry antics of other party leaders, ahem, writing in the Guardian the other day. On one level, his attempt to reposition the Tories in the “centre” could not be clearer:

Blair has had nearly nine years in power. He could have mounted a systematic challenge to one-dimensional, knee-jerk populism.

Worth remembering that Cameron wrote the 2005 general election manifesto that demanded 20,000 extra prison places, 5,000 more police, and “proper discipline in school”. So sudden is the switch that it is tempting to conclude that very little is behind it other than “sensation-seeking, turning-over-the-furniture, épater les bourgeois predictability“, and that the Labour voters appealed to will prefer the real thing to “Labour-lite Conservatives.”

I think this is wrong. I may be overestimating their abilities, but Cameron and posse are doing something a bit more subtle than grasping blindly after New Labouresque cliches. The prospect that they actually are trying to redesign Conservatism, roughly along the lines suggested by various neoconservatives, should be taken seriously. Take the Gaurdian article, linked to above.

Instead, we'll set out ideas such as our proposals for Social Enterprise Zones, which would remove the many regulations and bureaucratic obstacles that hold back social entrepreneurs. We want to create a level playing field for the voluntary sector and social enterprises so they can win more contracts to deliver more community and public services.

It’s given a fancy spin, but what here is so disimilar from the aspirations of conventional Toryism? Cameron’s asking for more privatisation (“create a level playing field”) and philanthropy (“social entrepreneurs”). It’s a suitably modernised version of standard Tory rhetoric, but the desired outcomes are the same.

There is a convergence taking place, but it is one the Tories are trying effect on their own terms. This is much as New Labour converged on the governing Thatcherite consensus, but did so by way of its own traditions, and arrived at something near-unique. The key difference is that, to create New Labour, the last vestiges of utopianism had to be stamped out. Even the most fossilised and decrepit of right-wing, Old Labour union bureaucrats retained the sense of opposition and optimism that is built into the language of class. The Tories, never having been utopian in even the weak sense intended here, should have no such difficulty; where their problems lie is in their (hopefully fatal) belief that New Labour won its three elections, rather than the Tories losing them.

New blogs

2006-01-10T18:00:00.000Z

The exponential growth of blogland continues. Pretty soon everyone in the world will have their own blog, except for the 70-80% of humanity who've never heard a dial-tone, but they're poor and irrelevant.

Disreputable Lazy Aliens seems to run by a potty-mouthed anarchist. Which is a good thing, readers, anarchists should be potty-mouthed, I expect nothing less, it's like the sudden eruption of the suppressed radical ego in a society of bland and straitened conformity. Speaking of which.

Through the Scary Door, meanwhile, has a peculiar tale from De Beauvoir Town. Scary doors aplenty.

Kennedy: not dead, merely drunk (once)

2006-01-06T00:55:00.000Z

Kennedy on his way out - quite inevitable, when a poxy little magazine edited by greasy sixth-form debating society nerk can somehow inspire national headlines regarding your imminent departure.

The Lib Dem dynamic - so to speak - is a little hard to discern. If he hadn't just (apparently) ruled out standing himself, I'd assume Mark Oaten would receive a media-led Cameron bounce to the top, thus ensuring all two (and a half) main parties have exactly the same leader. God knows what'll happen now. I suggest Maggot from GLC as a good interim.

"Die, you bastard, die"

2006-01-06T00:49:00.000Z

It was a branch of the dockers' union that sent the pithy telegram, recorded above, to General Franco as he lay on his death-bed.

A commendable sentiment for a tyrant, don't you think?

The Society of the Spectacle, or, It's Crazy But It Might Just Work

2006-01-06T00:32:00.000Z

Always good to have advanced warning, even if at short notice, even if you assume someone is winding you up.

Still, George in the Big Brother house is quite something. What to make of it?

One the one hand, there is

"Sir, I salute your courage, your strength..."

...on the other, there's this and this. There's the occasional dropped bollock (see above) but otherwise the guy has got an uncanny political ability. His political judgement is, in general, superb.

More particularly, I can't think of a politician who better knows how to handle the media - how many won libel cases? how many inerviews? how many TV appearances? I have no idea, absolutely none, whether the Big Brother appearance will work out. But there's no other MP who could come close to pulling this one off... and if he does, of course, it'll be quite spectacular.

(You know what pisses me off? Whining about "missing votes". In a two party Parliamentary system, with a rock-solid whipping system, there's little bloody point turning up for most votes. Big Brother's going to a reach a bigger damn audience than an ill-attended speech, broadcast exclusively on BBC Parliament, will ever do. So good luck to George, and let assorted Blairites and wannabe progressives suddenly discover the unlikely merits of Crown-in-Parliament and woolsacks.)

...incidentally, here's a bunch of BB fans on GG...

Update: Unbelievable amount of comments, below, on an ephemeral TV show. Presumably we are all, like George, prisoners of the Spectacle.

"Tortured as MI6 watched"

2006-01-04T23:05:00.000Z

Socialist Worker has an account from one of the Pakistani-born men tortured in Greece under the eyes of MI6:

Munir Mohamed, one of the three, said, “On 17 July we were in our garden when seven or eight persons claiming to be police appeared. They showed no identification and asked for our mobile phones. I was the only one not having a mobile.

“I was a newcomer in Greece from Pakistan and I hadn’t yet bought one. They said, ‘You are a liar. You have hidden your mobile.’

“So they took me to a separate room. They handcuffed me, pressed me against the wall and started beating. After a while they took me outside with the others. I had blood on my lips.

“They put our shirts on our heads and put us in a van and took us to an unknown place. There I was kept separated. They interrogated me for about two and a half hours. They were asking, ‘What do you know about London? What happened in the tube?’

“They were threatening me. I stayed there two days. Then they put me in a car and took me to another unknown place, still blindfolded. I stayed in that second place for five days. The interrogation continued there, three times a day.

“When they finally let me go, they told me, ‘Don’t you dare tell a word about what happened in here. If we find out you said something, either we’ll bring you here again or we’ll cut your throat’.”

As if by magic

2006-01-04T22:41:00.000Z

Letter in the Guardian the other day:

Brian Wilson, the former energy minister, talks of the need for Britain to have indigenous energy supplies such as nuclear (Russian gas row reignites nuclear debate, January 2). As the fuel for nuclear power stations is uranium, could he let us know where the indigenous supplies of uranium are located?
Graham Jones
Bedford

Meanwhile:

Germany will review plans to close nuclear power plants at a national summit after a dispute between Russia and Ukraine cut gas shipments to Europe, Economics Minister Michael Glos said.

It'd be quite funny if it weren't so worrying. The long-term problems of conventional energy shortages and climate change have produced the most crassly short-term response possible. The complete failure of imagination on the part of New Labour and the CDU is not surprising, obviously, but do they really take us for absolute chumps?

Oh, and incidentally:

The cost of cleaning up the sites of Britain`s aging nuclear power stations could be more than $121 billion, up from an earlier estimate of $96 billion.

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, set up last April to supervise state-owned nuclear plants, says it is 'almost certain' the earlier estimate will need to be revised upward to adjust for revision and to account for additional costs resulting from a closer look at some of the older nuclear sites, reports the Independent newspaper.

Oh happy day.

New Year irritations

2006-01-02T16:56:00.000Z

This lot must be high up on the list, I feel sure... as if, as mentioned earlier, Brown wasn't an impeccably neoliberal Chancellor, ultra-Blairite plotters gather in darkened NW1 rooms to find a more suitable candidate for PM. (Incidentally, never mind Brown's neoliberal, free-market credentials: what's with his neocon flirtations? Glowing blurb praise for long-standing confidant Irwin Stelzer's anthology Neoconservatism, hints about being "proud" of Britain's imperial past, and now recommending Gertrude Himmelfarb's implausibly Francophobe history of the Enlightenment. All very strange for a, ha ha, closet socialist, mmm? Strikes me that he's-a-secret-lefty isn't going to work... shades of the demon eyes, in fact.)

(Also irksome, with apologies: recent comments box issues due to an overly-ambitious attempt on my part to swap comments provider; the net result of which is that previous comments on posts have, erm, disappeared - annoying, but since Haloscan deletes everthing after two months or so, anyway, probably not that annoying.)

2006-01-01T12:36:00.000Z

Happy new year etc. This is ideal for stinking hangovers.

2005-12-30T18:17:00.000Z

The proper media is picking up the Craig Murray story. It was headline news on Radio 4's PM programme, and it looks like the Times is running it tomorrow.

Hurrah for the RMT

2005-12-30T16:19:00.000Z

London tubeworkers are threatening to go on strike tomorrow evening.

First up, I live in London. If there's no tubes running, it will have a direct impact on my evening. (Just to make that clear.)

But there's not a chance in hell I'm going to line up with the predictable furore about "greedy unions" and "£30,000 a year" and "35-hour weeks" and all the rest of it. Nor can I stand the equally tiresome claims that yes, of course we support the right to strike... but not at New Year! Have these people no shame? It's funny; these people support the right to strike, except when it's actually used.

This strike's not about money, or some perverse desire to "spoil a great night out" on the union's part. It's about Transport for London wanting to break arrangements it had previously made over rostering. The RMT claims this will reduce safety on the tube.

Now, as a reasonably regular tube passenger, frankly I'd place the drivers and station staff of the RMT in a better position to make judgements about my safety than employers prepared to sign up and contract out repair work to notorious cowboys like Jarvis. If a strike's necessary to defend my safety on the tube, so be it.

There's a wider issue, however. Tube drivers are better-paid than others because they have a strong, well-organised union. Breaking that union won't suddenly mean, say, nurses getting paid more; quite the opposite.

Weakening the most powerful and best-organised elements of the working class makes grinding away at the rest of the workforce so much easier. The only way lower-paid workers will improve their lot is through organisation. Anything that undermines their attempts at organisation weakens their ability to win better pay and conditions.

Historically, unionisation amongst lower-paid and previously unorganised workers has tended to follow the better-organised and better-paid workers. Successful strikes provide an excellent example for others; moreover, the support of the better-organised can be vital in defending the weaker sections - the solidarity between baggage handlers and food-packers in the recent Gate Gourmet dispute was an excellent example of this.

With that in mind, I wish a happy new year to Bob Crow and the RMT. I hope many more will follow their lead over the coming 12 months.

(Also at the Sharpener.)

Torture

2005-12-30T02:36:00.000Z

I'm sure you'll have seen this already, but Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, has been hassled by the Foreign Office to return a few documents in his possession relating to details of the UK's use of "evidence" obtained from torture in Uzbekistan. The particular embarrassment here is that Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has claimed that does not use "information" obtained through torture elsewhere.

You can see why any documents even whispering otherwise would cause some bother. Documentary evidence that the Britsh government was both aware of torture in Uzbeki jails, and considered evidence obtained through torture as legitimate, would be most unfortuante. Proof that, for example, the Uzbeki authorities boiled prisoners alive would be particularly unfortunate if there was even a hint that the UK government had relied on "information" obtained through such means.

Craig has taken the option of circulating documents which say that as widely as possible. The Independent has (partially) picked up on the story.

Gordon Wilson/Harold Brown/fresh Tory eccentricities

2005-12-29T11:59:00.000Z

A minor masterpiece of the type, this Telegraph opinion piece from Thomas Utley. Not one word, at any point, is directed towards explaining why - and on what particular planet - Gordon PFI Brown can be compared to Harold Wilson. Instead, we are offered a brisk rehash of Thatcher's founding myth: the tragic decline from Britain's glorious past at the hands of greedy unions, until the "biggest crisis of all" (Utley's words), the so-called "Winter of Discontent". After this abasement, the glorious redemption and happy march into the promised land of decency and free-markets. Complete tosh, on several levels, and made even more ludicrous by attempting to drag Brown into it.

The blunt truth, and one until very recently generally recognised by British business, is that Gordon Brown is the best Chancellor of the Exchequer they are likely to get. There just has not been any available political alternative; no-one else could have so assidiously promoted continual privatisation, deregulation - yes, deregulation - and so delicately courted business opinion with provoking significant opposition. Even where Brown has found it necessary to increase public spending, he has been careful to involve private business in the management of public expenditure.

The Tories were simply in no position, post-ERM, to maintain this balance. The question now is whether they, in cahoots with the Lib Dems, could now do so. It will take more than bowdlerised history lessons to answer it.

Turkeys coming home to roost

2005-12-28T19:35:00.000Z

Like its greying, sweat-encrusted real-life counterparts, I've ditched DML's electronic Make Poverty History wristband. And not a moment too soon, either, because that raging cretin Geldof has decided to campaign for the Tories:

Sir Bob told Sky News: "I am not giving tacit approval. What I am trying to do is agreeing to help formulate a policy that I would agree with."
He added: "Narrow definitions of what politics are do not interest me.

"I am not party political. I am completely non-partisan, as are those dying of want. It doesn't concern me what people think about me."

It's a pity Geldof isn't "dying of want": he would be less ready to condemn those who actually are to the passive, voiceless status of token victims. Christ almighty, what a monstrous cockwit the man is. Anyway.

Worth mentioning, once more, how many of its tricks Cameron's "compassionate conservatives" are learning from the US. I blogged a while back about Bush's increased funding for "development" aid, which now arrives tied explicitly to the Nation Security Strategy. Meanwhile, a key neoconservative strategist has been appointed head of the World Bank.

Geldof, being largely a hopeless ego-driven patsy and a self-inflating sack of flatulent platitudes, may be unaware of the nuances here. His fulsome praise for George Bush's many and varied good works in Africa, however, suggests a certain flickering political awareness.

2005-12-23T15:10:00.000Z

Off to Berlin for Christmas. Back in New Year, I expect.

"Destroy every fucking grammar school in the country"

2005-12-23T14:10:00.000Z

Right then, S&M's wrongness - more as an example of the type than any particular wrongness on his part. He wonders why Prescott - and Labour backbenchers - are setting themselves against the 11-plus, and decides:

Paternalism. Giving poor but bright students an education is bad for them. it takes them out of their natural society and places them in an alien environment. Even if they jump through the hoops, pass all the exams and get well-paid jobs, they suffer isolation and loneliness. Why not protect them from this fate?

...because clearly there aren't any proper reasons for opposing the reintroduction of goat/sheep distinctions at age 11.

I have to admire the utter confidence of the grammar school apologists. They've all learned the rhetorical arts rather well, perhaps in-between double Latin and extra-hard sums such as were learned in Proper Schools back in the Good Old Days, c.1950. Maybe this is why they feel a return to those happy years are so important. It is impressive, in its own way, that a deeply elitist and anti-egalitarian system should be wheeled on-board under the guise of giving the deserving poor a chance, &c.

Because the last thing grammar schools promoted was social mobility. Isakofsky summarised the problem well, in an earlier discussion at DML:

The defenders of grammar schools all went to grammar schools. Amongst those, some were working class, though the research done at the time found that many of the people who described themselves as working class grammar school boys or girls had one parent who came from a distinctly professional background - mother at home was concealed in the stats.

People like John Marks claim that grammar schools created class mobility. Problem here: only a small percentage at grammar school came from (on their classification) manual working class. Meanwhile, grammar schools on average across the country were less than 25% of population. So how much social mobility can you squeeze out of that. Add in the imponderable effects of immigration having the consequence of squeezing the host working class up a notch into supervisory roles and the supervisors into lower management...and talk of grammar schools creating social mobility is tosh. John Marks and others argue from their own experience. We never hear from the 75%. It's bogus history we keep being fed.

This missing 75% is rather strange: where are all those former secondary modern pupils demanding a return to selection? If, as the meritocrats claim, the 11-plus is so clearly a superior system, why are not more of these (doubtless) happy, contented failures, secure in their particular places, beseeching the government to deliver more grammar schools?

Better yet than this apparently selfless concern for the suitably aspirational working classes is the pretence that the 11-plus will undermine the market. Now, there's no doubting that house-price selection, age 11, is a problem. But introducing more selection at the same age hardly seems the best way to tackle the inequalities it produces. More likely to reinforce them, in fact: not only are the supposedly objective, value-neutral "intelligence" tests of the type favoured by the 11-plus notoriously value-heavy and subjective, but - as isakofsky suggests - middle class parents will already have performed some house-price selection.

You want little Timothy and Tabitha to attend the grammar school? You'd better get them in the right primary school, then: pay through the nose for the right catchment area, use - if little Tim is indeed nice but more than a little dim - private tuition, and leap through the appropriate financial hoops on their behalfs. Unless our Tory anti-capitalists want to introduce selection at age five - a possibility, I suppose, leading on to selection at age 2, age zero, and then perhaps a pre-natal multiple-choice test - they're going to have to think a little harder about this one. Selection is not the answer.

Still, the apologists continue. Research evidence showing decreasing social mobility is dragged out to support a return to grammars, drawing protests from the researchers themselves. Complaints about history teaching in schools are press-ganged into support for selection. Prescott, for one of the few times in eight years of government, says something sensible on the issue, and is denounced - and you can smell the class hatred here - as too stupid to understand.

It's slightly depressing; or it would be, if I thought that the argument was even close to being won for the elitists. The truth is that no working-class parent is going to accept a system that, more likely than not, will so obviously and so arbitrarily condemn their child at such an early age. Grammar schools will remain electoral suicide.

...tho not complete chiz becos Justin uterly wet and weedy tho he his draw atention to st custerd's online site hurah hurah.

Local politics

2005-12-23T11:00:00.000Z

Just received a rather heartening press-release from Tower Hamlets Against Transfer:

Tenants vote NO in 5 out of 7 ballots
Tenants voted NO to transfer in five out of seven of the housing privatisation ballot results announced today in Tower Hamlets.

'People are seeing through the empty words, glossy pamphlets and hard sell. Once you see the blackmail, threats and dirty tricks it gives the game away. Once you get out on the doorstep and discuss it with neighbours, tenants can smell a rat with Housing Choice,' says Kay, a Cranbrook tenant.

Tenants against transfer to new private sector housing association landlords have worked hard trying to make sure we knock on every door, and counter the years of glossy propaganda, DVDs and hard sell by the would-be landlords, Council and so-called 'Independent Tenant Advisor' staff.

'We want improvements on our estates - not privatisation. Why should we give up our security, lower rents and charges, and accountable landlord? We don't want these RSLs doing private luxury developments all over our green space. They want to make money at our expense - it's not on,' says Sean, one of the tenant on Longnor, Osier and Norfolk (Bancroft East) who voted no.
'It's a disgrace the lies they tell - they promise new homes to loads of desperate people, they say there's no difference in tenancy rights. Lots of tenants were not sent voting papers. But we kept up campaigning to the end, and the tenants stood together to say NO,' says Habib of the Clichy and Stepney Green campaign.

The five latest No votes are on Barleymow (56% no) , Cranbrook (72% no), Granby/Hereford (63% no) Longnor,Osier and Norfolk (54% no) and Stepney Green/Clichy (63% no). On Lansbury the campaign faced intimidation and threats from HARCA staff, with voting conducted in a HARCA-run hall. On Exmouth estate most tenants voted before hearing any alternative point of view.

Today's results follow no votes on Wapping and Lincoln estates in October 05, and a controversial Bow Parkside ballot in July 05 where the Council's claim of a 7-vote majority is being legally challenged. Tenants on the Ocean estate in Stepney are also furious that their vote, due in November 05 has now been postponed until summer 06 due to the mood on the estate. A deputation from the estate to the Council meeting last week demanded that the vote is held immediately or abandoned. 'We believe they have postponed our vote because they know we would vote no,' the deputation told the full Council meeting 14.12.05.

Tenants against transfer are demanding the Council put all housing funding into repairs and improvements on estates immediately, and back the local and national campaign for direct investment in council housing as an alternative to stock transfer or other privatisation options.

Tower Hamlets council is fighting estate-by-estate for New Labour. And fighting is pretty much the word: on the Lansbury estate, HARCA (the “registered social landlord” looking to run the place) used its own employees to bust up a Defend Council Housing meeting: in a bizarre simulation of genuine protest, a group of HARCA staff, complete with HARCA placards (and a token representation from the estate), marched into the community hall screaming and shouting abuse, and sufficiently disrupted the meeting that the chair had to call the police. Though HARCA’s, ahem, politically independent, it struck me as a classically New Labour manoeuvre: a completely simulated “movement” papered over the atomisation of social and political life New Labour strive for.

Elsewhere, Tower Hamlets council is victimising a long-standing member of staff for her involvement in Defend Council Housing. They know that each vote against stock transfer is a blow against New Labour; what they absolutely dread is that Respect will gain as a result. Whilst I don’t share the confidence that Respect will win control of the council next May, I’m sure that we will be the biggest single party represented in the chamber in a few months’ time.

That, by itself, would be fantastic: one of the most deprived boroughs in the country has been subjected to over a decade of crackpot New Labour schemes, a Blairite gloss that barely masks over a deeply corrupt political culture. The extent of New Labour’s failure in the East End, is quite stunning. Misplaced talk about “communalism” during the general election campaign out here was a shoddy attempt to divert attention from the underlying reasons Respect has gained a traction there; yes, the war matters, but so do local schools, the PFI scheme at the hospital, the proposed Crossrail development, and, above all, housing. The war alone would not have won George Galloway his seat, and it will not deliver council seats for Respect in the spring.

We Are All Chavs

2005-12-22T15:18:00.000Z

I've always thought that the contempt in certain middle class circles for 'the chav' is born of bewilderment, incomprehension at how the working class have had the cheek to develop an authentic, vibrant, meaning-ful material culture of their very own. In contrast to the middle classes, who struggle to define themselves through the 'style' section of glossy magazines.

From, after. I thought both were spot-on. I wonder whether it's time to reclaim the word: the splendid Goldie Lookin Chain - and the similarly marvellous Lady Sovereign - are examples for us all, clever and funny, with none of this smug dullard so-called "irony". Death to Little Britain!

See, also, Stumbling and Mumbling getting education all wrong, with subsequent discussion. (Paralleled, in a more bad-tempered and shouty fashion, after this post. Will respond properly to S&M tomorrow.)

Sheep

2005-12-22T11:02:00.000Z

Eventually, it will sink in that "compassionate Conservatism" does not mean "One Nation" or "cuddly" or "not wholly unpleasant" or "vaguely sort of left-wing" Conservatism. It's a neoconservative euphemism.

Before enlightenment dawns on the bewildered herds of Westminster, expect more confused bleating from those, like this Liberal Democrat, who think they can see a wolf, but are baffled by its downy soft wooly jumper. Particularly entertaining, in a cruel way, is the absolute bewilderment that a Tory, and a right-wing Tory at that, should lay claim to environmental credibility.

It’s easily done, as these examples from the US show. All that is needed is to drop the leftist language of social choice and economic impacts from environmental concerns, and replace it with the classically liberal rhetoric of personal consumption decisions. Cameron’s redefinition of the environment as a "quality of life" issue is an attempt to do precisely that.

Morales wins, Telegraph whines

2005-12-20T10:51:00.000Z

Excellent news from Bolivia:

A FORMER coca farmer who was elected President of Bolivia yesterday is threatening BG Group with the nationalisation of its gas assets in the Andean states.

Evo Morales, who leads the Movement towards Socialism party and who describes himself as “Washington’s nightmare”, said that he would revoke the rights of natural gas producers at the well head.

Foreign control over Bolivia’s vast natural gas reserves was a key issue in the election, alongside coca farming, which is under pressure from Washington over concern that it fuels the drug trade. Señor Morales said that he wanted to change the terms on which foreign companies, such as Repsol, of Spain, Petrobras, of Brazil, and BG Group, of Britain, extract gas.

It's always a pleasure to read what the Right have to say after events like Morales' election, but I wasn't expecting them to be quite so defensive. Here's the unusually meek Daily Telegraph leader:

In the past 30 years, Latin Americans have abandoned the generals in favour of democracy and are now using that freedom to push the continent to the Left...

Such tweaking of Uncle Sam's nose will delight those who hate Mr Bush. Yet two words of caution are in order. The Washington/International Monetary Fund free-market prescriptions may have led to a widening of the gap between rich and poor. But, looking beyond the anti-yanqui rhetoric, that does not mean their outright rejection south of the Rio Grande.

See, for example, the moderate economic policies pursued by President Luiz Inácio da Silva in Brazil. Second, protectionism has been tried before in the region and found dismally wanting. That should serve as a lesson to a small, poor country such as Bolivia, which, despite its natural gas resources, needs foreign investment to build its infrastructure almost from scratch.

How fitting that the hapless Lula should held up as an example; if there's one direction that would be catastrophic for Bolivia, it would be following the same course that the Workers' Party have taken up the backside of the IMF. "Protectionism" may well have been "found wanting", but it still was not as disastrously bad as the free-market alternative.

The graphic failure of neoliberalism in Latin America is a difficult one to argue around, admittedly. But this mealy-mouthed criticism just won't do. All that is need is a little imagination. Mark Steyn's got the right idea. The US as rape victim? The man has a certain style, has he not?

Down with skool

2005-12-19T12:12:00.000Z

Behold your future executioners:

"I see a bit of 'class' is coming back now with Cameron and his outfit. The Eton Mafia. We [Labour] are always better against class. When it's a class issue.

"It's the Eton mob isn't it? They used to fight their wars on the Eton playing fields. Now they win elections on the Eton playing fields. I always feel better fighting class anyway - bring the spirit back into the Labour Party."

This would be less absurd if the man Prescott deputises to hadn’t been to Scotland’s own Eton. New Labour lets certain, carefully-vetted and basically toothless old bulldogs off the leash every now and again: witness Dennis Skinner’s contribution to the Labour Party conference. The punters like it – never mind the lack of substance, just admire the burnished patina of proletarian struggle. This is a New Labour simulacrum of class war; a re-enactment staged for entertainment only, rather like those strange men who dress up as Cromwell’s footsoldiers and parade around local parks.

If John Prescott had suggested that Labour were going to close Eton (and indeed Fettes), we might be getting somewhere. Nonetheless, the whiff of damp saltpetre and the flash of blunt swords is more than enough to set the Tories off:

The Tories yesterday sought to deepen the prime minister's discomfort by urging him to ignore Mr Prescott's "class war" battle and stand firm. David Willetts, shadow education spokesman, said: "What we are seeing with John Prescott is a guy who has this deep resentment about not having passed the 11-plus and still, 50 years, 60 years on, is fighting these battles."

Here we see the new language of the class war: deference to the "meritocracy". John Prescott is just thick, you see, and riddled with spite when he sees the clever people doing so well. Never mind that social mobility is on the slide, or that educational outcomes are becoming more – not less – attached to social class.

Fortunately, as Roy Hattersley points out, the 11-plus only really appeals to those who’ve already passed it: the prospect of writing off 80% of children, aged 11, is not one that appeals greatly to most parents - something that Prescott doubtless appreciates. The cries of grammar school swots – and the whisperings of their public-school masters - will fall on deaf ears.

Bang on cue

2005-12-16T19:58:00.000Z

Well, lo and behold:

The new Conservative leader, David Cameron, today ratcheted up the pressure on under-fire Charles Kennedy with a direct appeal to Liberal Democrat MPs, councillors and voters to defect to his new-look Tory party.

In a lunchtime lecture Mr Cameron said that Lib Dems with an interest in the environment and social justice will find a "natural home" under his "modern, compassionate" leadership - and announced a new website, libdems4cameron, to evangalise for Lib Dem defections.

'pon said website, we find Cameron thus:

Issues that once divided Conservatives from Liberal Democrats are now issues where we both agree. Our attitude to devolution and the localisation of power. Iraq. The environment. I’m a liberal Conservative. I’m determined to tackle the challenges faced by our country and our world in a moderate, forward-looking, progressive way. And I hope, over the next weeks, months and years, that many Liberal Democrats will want to join us: to build a modern, compassionate Conservative Party; to help address the big challenges our society faces, and to be a growing voice for change, optimism and hope.

Notice the presence of Iraq. If Kennedy goes, the only serious divide that remains between the two parties will go with him: even a notorious - ahem - leftwinger like Simon Hughes would not symbolise opposition to the war in quite the same identifiable way. Party conference this autumn was pretty much the death of Kennedy, in any case; he may be popular amongst his membership, but it's the latter-day Thatcherites in the party leadership that are making the running. (I don't, incidentally, view the opposition of the Lib Dem membership as a "serious divide" to a Tory-Lib Dem love-in. They will be disciplined, just as Labour members were.)

It's notable that it's the Tory Party that have made the first move, too. You wonder if they'll bag themselves a sprightly young Woodward. More likely, a period of mutually admiring glances and flirtatious remarks, sickening to behold, will commence before an amicable pre-election pact is agreed upon.

Nuclear power and the free market

2005-12-16T10:59:00.000Z

David King, the government’s chief scientific advisor inadvertently spilling the beans about nuclear power:

I emphatically do not believe in direct government subsidies for nuclear energy. The decisions about the economics will be made by the private utilities sector, guided by government considerations on the need to meet our emissions targets and to have a secure energy supply.

This isn’t “political expediency”, so much as repeating the TINA mantra that guides all policy: the government is inherently badly placed to make decisions, therefore let the free-market do it. The logic that demands more nuclear power plants – and dismisses any alternatives – is grounded in the idea that only decentralised and market-based policy implementations can really work, and that the market should not be interfered with.

This is questionable at the best of times. When applied to the environment, it is downright ludicrous. The fact that so many activities, via the market, simply dump their costs on the environment is as good an example of market failure as you could hope to find. We shouldn’t be attempting to prop up and even maintain these failures. We can’t tackle global warming on a piecemeal basis: there is an urgent need for central planning: for a central strategy that encompasses transport, housing, food consumption, industrial use, and so on, and addresses each from a determination to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the most equitable manner possible.

It is folly, then, to think we can leave the economy largely unmolested by swapping gas- and coal-burning power plants for nuclear. It’s not carbon-neutral, in any case, and – despite King’s pious hopes – it is so unsafe and so hideously expensive that an extension of the UK’s nuclear power schemes will require extensive government intervention. Far better to apply the state’s resources to tackling the problems at source, which means (as a first step) radically improving public transport, serious investment in sustainable energy, imposing the true costs of greenhouse gas emissions on producers, and subsidising energy-efficient consumption.

Faith in human progress

2005-12-15T11:49:00.000Z

At some point, everyone will realise that Little Britain is shit.

Johnson exposed

2005-12-15T11:47:00.000Z

This Boris Johnson=lovely cuddly bumbling oaf thing. Utter nonsense, getting quite sick of it – particularly when he’s penning stuff like this:

We live in an age of easy, gifted telegenic politicians who never put a foot wrong or slur their words on Newsnight, and it is therefore magnificent that the Liberal Democrats continue to have a leader with a Churchillian ability to slot it away.

Vicious, no? But never mind the cheap and dirty laughs, here’s the meat:

Only Charles Kennedy is capable of bubble-gumming this coalition together. It is now quite clear that if he were to go, he would be replaced by someone who might come perilously close to endorsing one position or the other, rather than keeping up the amazing Lib Dem strategy of endorsing both. The party would be taken over either by the likes of Mark Oaten and Nick Clegg, who seem in many ways to be very similar to David Cameron's Tories; or else it would go Left under Simon Hughes and the rest of the tofu-munching busybodies.

This coziness with the Orange Book gang, from senior Tories, is going to get more and more frequent over the coming months.

NB: Tory environmental concern=get on your bike (and look for work?) Cunning.

A Very British Neoconservatism (preliminaries)

2005-12-13T14:19:00.000Z

New blog, Shackled Up to the Rigmarole, has a few comments on Douglas Murray, who some of you may vaguely remember as the mildly prodigistic author of Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas a few years back. Seems Murray has had a bit of funny turn of late, penning a shortish tract enticingly entitled Neoconservatism: Why We Need It.

Shackled Up..., extending a convenient parallel, remarks on how the sad decline of anti-homophobic Bosie biographer to Ratzinger groupie mirrors that of Lord Alfred Douglas himself. There's something broader taking place here: Murray's polemic can be filed safely alongside Oliver Kamm's "racist" screed, Anti-totalitarianism: The Left-Wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy, the recentish British publication of Irwin Stelzer's Neoconservatism (complete with important set-piece essay by Michael Gove), the foundation of the Henry Jackson Society[*] (see also), and - perhaps most significantly of all - David Cameron's election victory, as masterminded by George Osborne.

It's been brewing for a while, fuelled by the heady excitements of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Belmarsh, but a serious attempt has been concocted to transplant neoconservate thought to this side of the Atlantic. I've remarked before that, even on its home turf, neoconservatism of itself is not desperately popular; but there's no reason to become complacent about messianic Tories. We have, after all, seen their type before.

[*] A small footnote, and a genuine question: why is Daniel Brett, otherwise a nice liberal sort, writing for this lot? Dan?

Shiny happy people: investment

2005-12-12T19:58:00.000Z

Stumbling and Mumbling's advising the Tories not to bank on a recession. Reasonably good advice, as far as it goes: Labour in 1992 made the mistake of assuming economic woes would shoo them into office, and there's no great reason to think that Black Wednesday Cameron in year x will be necessarily better placed Kinnock was to exploit the issue.

More of a problem, however, with Chris' happy view of the UK's fortunes. In particular,

Companies have lots of cash. In the last 12 months, their retained profits have exceeded capital spending by £21.7bn, or 2.3% of GDP - the highest proportion since 1983 (table I of this pdf). In theory, this could be a sign of realistic pessimism about the future. But history shows otherwise. Such surpluses have been a great predictor of stronger growth, as firms eventually spend the money on jobs and equipment.

It's the "eventually" that sticks. There's clearly any number of other, far more exciting things for firms to spend their money on - shares, properties, fat bonuses, all sorts of goodies. It's also much easier for them to spend their money like this, the handy by-product of financial globalisation - which, incidentally, has helped weaken the link between retained earnings and business investment, at least for the larger companies.

British business investment in general is at its lowest (as a share of GDP) for forty years, but that's not reason enough to think it will recover. Eight years of persistent New Labour poking and prodding haven't solved this one: despite a slight recovery since 2003, British capital investment lags significantly behind other, similar economies (PDF). It's far more likely that Britain will remain much where it is now: as a low investment, low productivity economy dependent on low wages and long hours to compensate.

Climate change and the necessity of politics

2005-12-12T11:55:00.000Z

Jarndyce, at his spangly redesigned blog, wonders whether the climate change march will really make any difference. His reckoning that, at this stage in proceedings, its main benefit will be in stirring the pot, and keeping the issue on the boil, is probably about right. Ten thousand protestors is good – far bigger than anything before on the issue – but it’s not yet enough to start really shifting the issue politically.

This is rapidly turning into a problem, because – having fought for years against the lunatic idea, tragically supported by at least one powerful government, that climate change either isn’t happening, or doesn’t matter – the environmental movement is facing something of a dilemma. There’s a consensus that climate change is happening and does matter, regardless of a few recidivists’ beliefs, but that it can be treated like any other policy issue.

In the neoliberal world, this means reducing it to an issue of management. Targets can be fixed, competent administrators found to work towards them, and all will be well. Oliver Letwin, the Tories’ former shadow environment minister, has floated the classic technocratic fix: set up an independent committee to monitor progress towards targets, allow markets to work their magic, and don’t let messy political wrangling get in the way. We have the technology, you see, and it doesn’t really matter what that technology is, including nuclear power.

Except nuclear power – as discussed elsewhere – is not carbon-neutral, but is fanatically expensive and demonstrably unsafe.

Moreover, even if we swapped, overnight, all our current fossil-fuel power generation for nukes, the relatively slight, one-off reduction in carbon emissions would be overwhelmed, in a few years, by increased emissions from transport. Taking climate change seriously means addressing transport use in the UK (PDF): greenhouse gas emissions from all transport (including aviation) were 47% higher in 2002 than in 1990, compared to a 10% reduction in emissions from all other sectors. This increase is entirely due to private transport use: emissions due to public transport have fallen 8% - at the same time as passenger-miles have risen. (This ONS Excel file has the raw statistics.)

Either the Tories are prepared to hand over transport policy to this independent emissions monitor, or it will be a drowned duck. Quite clearly they won’t, since it would interfere with their longstanding commitments to ”ending the war on motorists” and accelerated road-building. This is leaving aside the anti-democratic founding principle of the proposed commission: that it should be "independent", and hence free of politics.

Any solution here will be, of necessity, holistic: neither the market alone, nor narrow-minded government policies, will resolve the issue. That is part of the reason why a politically-minded mass movement is needed; it’s the only way to keep the issue out of the hands of the technocrats.

The wretched of the earth, and Boris Johnson

2005-12-08T16:50:00.000Z

Boris Johnson demonstrating “compassionate conservatism”:

The real divide is between the entire class of people now reposing their fat behinds on the green and red benches in the Palace of Westminster, and the bottom 20 per cent of society - the group that supplies us with the chavs, the losers, the burglars, the drug addicts and the 70,000 people who are lost in our prisons and learning nothing except how to become more effective criminals.

Yes, folks, it’s the residuum - given a suitably early C21 spin with Johnson’s nods towards libertarianism: let them eat chips. Of course, as before, he’s picked up on a genuine issue: social mobility is declining, and New Labour is doing precious little about it.

But cuddly, compassionate Boris has a remarkably short memory: indeed, two whole decades worth of palpable decay in public services appear to have disappeared: the rot only began when beastly do-gooding New Labour arrived in power. Yet here he is, decrying the expansion of higher education for reducing mobility:

As we all know, there has been a huge expansion in higher education in this country, and Gordon and Tony will not rest until 50 per cent of the population receive it. But this expansion has overwhelmingly benefited the middle classes, and especially the rich.

Absolutely true; but it was the Tories who started this expansion, and they did so by raising barriers to access for the poorest. It was the Tories who reduced the grant to negligible levels, removed unemployment benefits, and introduced a system of education through loans. New Labour has simply travelled a little further down the same road.

There’s another curious absence in Johnson’s outraged screed. Nowhere does he talk about inequality, instead peddling the happy myth that 80% of Britain are now comfortably middle-class, or even rich. This is ludicrous. Inequality in Britain has been rising almost continuously for two decades. The great acceleration of inequity began under Thatcher; things improved marginally under Major; inequality increased again under the first Blair government, and now may or may not have fallen slightly (PDF file).

The result is that, far from the income distribution cutely resembling a “bowler hat, or a python that has swallowed an elephant”, it peaks somewhat above £10,000, and then stretches on and on into the distance. There is no “great bulge” in the middle where we all sit contentedly. The Institute of Fiscal Studies report that (PDF):

In 2003/04, almost two-thirds of the population had incomes below the national average income of £408 per week. The distribution is skewed by a relatively small number of people on relatively high incomes. Median income in 2003/04 was
£336 per week – in other words, half the population had household income below
this amount.

Figure 2.1 in the IFS reports shows the picture very clearly. The top 10% all earn at least £670 per week – that’s twice the median. The top 20% earn at least £520 a week.

Social mobility and social inequality are distinct ideas, of course, but the one has a direct effect on the other, most especially through education. We’ve already seen that access to higher education is skewed towards the children of the rich. What’s also important is that earnings received from education are skewed towards the rich, too. In other words, not only is access to education biased against social mobility, but outcomes from education are biased against it. Inequality and social mobility form a direct relationship, through education.

Boris Johnson won’t address this, naturally: he’s a Tory, and the alleged “solutions” he hints at are equally old-fashioned: reduce university attendance, promote on-the-job training, and hark back to apprenticeships. Singing the praises of social policies in decades long passed seems an odd way to show how modernised the Conservative Party are; but better this than do anything that would seriously address social injustice. They remain, at heart, the Nasty Party.

David Cameron's real dirty secret

2005-12-07T11:38:00.000Z

Nothing to do with Mistress Pain, Olivia Channon, or anything else truly salacious, I'm afraid. Squeaky-clean Cameron's big dirty secret, one his supporters are keen to hide behind the flannel of "modern, compassionate conservatism", is just how right-wing he is. And becoming more so.

Take Iraq, where Chris at the Virtual Stoa has done some digging. Cameron described himself, back in February 2003, as "confused and uncertain" about the issue; prepared to support the Labour government, but only “in the right circumstances”. He indicates his constituents’ concerns about the planned invasion, and even concludes that Blair “might be in for a surprise”, losing the support of Tory MPs – himself, it is certainly implied, amongst them.

Two years later, and Cameron’s position, as Chris says, is “utterly different”:

The mission to establish a representative government in Iraq is a cause worth fighting for.
As a Conservative, whose natural instincts are to be wary of grand schemes and ambitious projects for the re-making of society, I had my concerns about the scale of what is being attempted.

Moving from the position of deterring a foe - Saddam - to an approach of pre-emptive action to remove him, was a profound change. That is why specific endorsement from the UN - through a "second resolution" - was so desirable.

But when - principally due to French obstruction - that was not possible, a decision still had to be made.

Should we enforce a stream of UN resolutions against Saddam, remove a key element of instability in the region and neutralise a continued threat - or should we back off?

I thought then that, on balance, it was right to go ahead, and I still do now.

If we are to defeat the global Jihadist terrorist threat we must realise that we're all in this together.

It's full-on neocon howling at the moon craziness. It's not something, I'd wager, too popular at present with the voters.