Category: Political ideology

The UK is now the most unequal country in EU, and Cameron has been very conservative with the truth

May 20, 2015January 26, 2016 · 61 Comments ·

Last year I wrote an article – Cameron’s Gini and the hidden hierarchy of worth – and I said: On 04 June, 2014, at 3.52pm BST, Cameron said that inequality is at its lowest level since 1986. I really thought I’d misheard him. But of course Cameron lies, that’s an established fact.

This isn’t the first time Cameron has used this lie. We have a government that provides disproportionate and growing returns to the already wealthy, whilst imposing austerity cuts on the very poorest. How can such a government possibly claim that inequality is falling, when inequality is so fundamental to their ideology and when social inequalities are extended and perpetuated by all of their policies? It seems the standard measure of inequality is being used to mislead us into thinking that the economy is far more “inclusive’ than it is.

A newly published report by the Dublin-based Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound) states that the UK has become the most unequal country in Europe, on the basis of income distribution and wages.

The report also says that the UK has the highest Gini coefficient of all European Union (EU) member states – and higher than that of the US. The coefficient is a widely used measure of the distribution of income within a nation, and is commonly used to calculate inequality.

According to analysts at Eurofound, Britain has a Gini coefficient of 0.404, whilst that of the US is 0.4. Portugal and Latvia followed the UK with Gini coefficients of 0.358 and 0.357, respectively. The average Gini index for the EU as a whole in 2011 was 0.346.

Eurofound was established in 1975 to contribute to the planning and design of improved living and working conditions. This role is undertaken in partnership with governments, employers, trade unions and the European Union institutions.

The report says that there was a decrease in inequality before the global crisis that was entirely due to a significant reduction in between-country wage differentials (in other words, a process of convergence in pay levels – see: Labour’s excellent record on poverty and inequality – which came to a halt, reflecting the effects of the global crash, in 2008, and then started to reverse towards the end of the period of this analysis, in 2011.

My friend, the British economist Michael Burke, observed that Eurofound’s study demonstrates the previous claims by David Cameron that Britain’s economy is recovering from the recession were false.

Speaking to RT on Tuesday, Mr Burke said: “The Tory government is fond of making spurious claims about Britain being the strongest economy in Europe. But the reality is that Britain under the Tories is the European capital of inequality.”

“All of the deterioration in the Gini coefficient in the EU is caused by the worsening of inequality,” he added.

“The jobs machine that David Cameron [is referring to] is in reality low-paid jobs, many of them providing unproductive services to the ultra-rich.”

The UK now has the worst Gini coefficient in the EU. Gini is the most widely accepted measure of how fairly income is distributed amongst a nation’s residents and is the standard measure of inequality. Cameron, parroting Thatcher, has claimed that there is no such thing as “public money,” indicating clearly that the economic enclosure that was initiated by the Tories under the guise of austerity, affecting the poorest citizens most of all, but leaving the wealthy unaffected by cuts, is going to be permanent.

A YouGov survey conducted this month and published on Monday found that most voters in the UK believe the government should prioritize tackling inequality – reducing the gap between rich and poor – over faster economic growth.

The findings, which suggest strong public support for redistribution, will complicate the debate about precisely how the Labour Party lost the general election, particularly given the Labour manifesto, outlining strongly redistributive and progressive tax policies, which had disgruntled a number of super petulant super-rich celebrities, who threatened to flounce from the UK if Labour gained office.

YouGov found that of the main parties, only Conservative supporters were significantly more likely to care about economic growth than inequality. Bearing in mind that Cameron won with 36.9% of the vote, the considerable gap between the priorities of Conservatives and those of the other parties will most likely mean a difficult five years for the prime minister.

With homelessness increasing by 55% between 2010 and 2014, whilst food bank use has surged, malnutrition and absolute poverty, not seen in this country since before the inception of the welfare state, are becoming more commonplace, and with more draconian cuts planned by the Tories for the already diminished and essential support for the poorest – many of whom are in low waged work – it’s going to be an extremely punishing five years for those already at the poorest end of the UK’s steeply hierarchical society.

Last year, I wrote about the study from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), who found what most of us already knew: that income inequality actually stifles economic growth in some of the world’s wealthiest countries, whilst the redistribution of wealth via taxes and benefits encourages growth.

The report from the OECD, a leading global think tank, shows basically that what creates and reverses growth is the exact opposite of what the current right-wing government are telling us, highlighting the truth of Ed Miliband’s comments in his speech – that the Tory austerity cuts are purely ideologically driven, and not about managing the economy at all.

But many of us already knew this was so.

Pictures courtesy of Robert Livingstone

Human rights, the reintroduction of hanging and what we have lost

May 11, 2015December 30, 2020 · 24 Comments ·

Michael Gove, former Education Secretary, has been appointed Justice Secretary: he is now in charge of the Department for Justice. With this appointment, it is clear that Cameron has plans for potentially radical reform, and regards justice as an area that needs a hardened, radical and senior Tory politician to drive through changes that are likely to be controversial. Gove does have form.

Gove’s first task is to scrap the Human Rights Act, (HRA) which was the previous Labour government’s legislation designed to supplement the European Convention on Human Rights, it came into effect in 2000. The Act makes available a remedy for breach of Convention right without the need to go to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

As I have previously reported, the rights protected by the Act are quite basic. They include the right to life, liberty and the right to a fair trial; protection from torture and ill-treatment; freedom of speech, thought, religion, conscience and assembly; the right to free elections; the right to fair access to the country’s education system; the right NOT to be given the death penalty; the right to marry and an overarching right not to be discriminated against.

Cameron has argued that it should be repealed just 15 years after its implementation … so that he can pass another unspecified Act – a British Bill of Rights. Dismantling UK equality and human rights legislations is a long held ambition of Conservatives, and they also plan to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights.

But why would any government object to citizens being afforded such established, basic protections, which are, after all, very simple internationally shared expectations of any first world liberal democracy?

One sentence from the misleadingly titled document that outlines how the Tories plan to scrap the Human Rights Act – Protecting Human Rights in the UK, (found on page 6 ) – is particularly chilling: “There will be a threshold below which Convention rights will not be engaged.”

Basically this means that human rights will no longer be absolute or universal – they will be subject to stipulations and caveats. The government will establish a threshold below which Convention rights will not be engaged, allowing UK courts to strike out what are deemed trivial cases.

However, the whole point of human rights is that they apply universally; that every social group is protected from political abuse, eugenics, discrimination, prejudice and oppression.

The Tories’ motivation for changing our human rights is to allow reinterpretations to work around the new legislation when they deem it necessary. The internationally agreed rights that the Tories have always seen as being open to interpretation will become much more parochial and open to subjective challenge.

The government may claim, for example, that any legal challenge is simply ‘politically motivated’. Or that cases of open discrimination or abuse as a result of government policy are merely ‘anecdotal’.

Any precedent that allows a government room for manoeuvre around basic and fundamental human rights is incredibly dangerous. Universal human rights exist to protect citizens against governments precisely for this reason – to hold those in power to account for abuse of that power.

No other country has proposed de-incorporating a human rights treaty from its law so that it can introduce a Bill of Rights. The truly disturbing aspect of Cameron’s Bill of Rights pledge is that rather than manifestly building on the HRA, it’s predicated on its denigration and repeal. One has to wonder what his discomfort with the HRA is. The Act, after all, goes towards protecting the vulnerable from neglect of duty and abuse of power of the State. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was an International response to the atrocities of World War Two and the rise of fascism and totalitarianism.

During their last term, the Tories contravened the Human Rights of disabled people, women and children. It’s clear that we have a government that regards the rights of most of the population as an inconvenience to be brushed aside. ‘Red tape’.

I also previously reported that Cameron has pledged to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. Cameron has expressed a wish to break the formal link between British courts and the European Court of Human Rights. In future Britain’s courts will no longer be required to take into account rulings from the Court in Strasbourg.

Observation of Human Rights distinguishes democratic leaders from dictators and despots. Human Rights are the bedrock of our democracy, they are universal, and are a reflection of a society’s and a governments’ recognition of the equal worth of every citizens’ life. But the government have an ideology that is founded on distinctly social Darwinist principles, and have systematically devalued the lives of historically marginalised social groups. Conservatives think that the lives of ordinary ‘others’ are cheap and disposable, because they see UK citizens as a means to their own ends, based on their own priorities and eugenic ideology. What matters to the Tories is how, as citizens, we contribute to enriching the already wealthy class by providing cheap labour. We are simply reduced to statistics and units of ‘economic stock’.

These principles support economic neoliberalism and political conservatism. Class/social division is justified on the basis of “natural” inequalities among individuals, for the control of property is ludicrously claimed to be a correlate of superior and inherent moral attributes such as industriousness, temperance, and frugality. Attempts to reform society through state intervention, therefore, interfere with natural processes; unrestricted competition and defense of the status quo are in accord with biological selection, from this perspective. The poor are “unfit” and should not be supported and aided; in the struggle for existence, wealth is a sign of success. The Tories believe that some lives, therefore, “naturally” have much more value than others.

Gove, now the Justice Secretary, has previously called for hanging to be reintroduced. Writing in 1998 as a Times columnist, he said Britain was “wrong to abolish hanging” in the 1960s, when the death penalty was outlawed. Gove made the irrational claims that banning hanging had “led to a corruption of our criminal justice system and the erosion of all our freedoms rather than “a great liberal victory,” as it was seen at the time.

Gove made the incoherent claim that banning hanging has made punishing innocent people “more likely,” he went on to conclude that public opinion had moved in favour of reintroducing hanging and that doing so could repair the broken trust between voters and politicians. Gove said he supported the “return of the noose out of respect for democracy”, and because it would force the courts to act with “scrupulous fairness.”

This deranged, barbaric relic actually said: “Hanging may seem barbarous, but the greater barbarity lies in the slow abandonment of our common law traditions. Were I ever alone in the dock I would not want to be arraigned before our flawed tribunals, knowing my freedom could be forfeit as a result of political pressures. I would prefer a fair trial, under the shadow of the noose.”

At the beginning of the 19th century, children in Britain were punished in the same way as adults. They were even sentenced to death for petty theft. It has historically been the case that the poorest tend to be executed, and it remains true: there are no millionaires on death row. (See also: Amnesty International UK – Death penalty.)

In 1965, in the UK, Parliament passed Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act, temporarily abolishing capital punishment for murder for 5 years. The Act was then renewed in 1969, by the Labour government under Harold Wilson, making the abolition permanent.

And with the passage of Labour’s Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and their Human Rights Act 1998, the death penalty was finally officially abolished for all crimes in both civilian and military cases, also.

The Human Rights Act is to be abolished, and Cameron has pledged to withdraw from the European Convention. In case you missed the connection, repealing the Human Rights Act will make the reintroduction of capital punishment much easier. The full range of potential consequences of losing our human rights laws are truly terrifying to consider.

For those of you that have campaigned against the Labour Party, claiming that they aren’t quite “left” enough, despite the fact that Miliband was actually offering the most progressive, redistributive policies of ALL the parties, and smaller cuts and for less time. (I guess some of you never bothered reading the Institute of Fiscal Studies Report, or Labour’s manifesto).

Under a Labour government, our Human Rights, NHS and welfare would now be safe. The bedroom tax would now be repealed. We would be rebuilding and making progress as a society instead of regressing and fearfully discussing the threats of tyranny and the possibility of the reintroduction of capital punishment.

We are about to lose everything that made us a civilised first-world country, from our human rights to our post-war democratic settlement: welfare, our National Health Service and what remains of our access to legal aid. I predict that by 2020, this undermining of the fabric of our society: the mechanisms that make us civilised, will be almost undone. The loss of democratic safeguards will affect many more citizens, and it will become much more evident that the Conservatives are the most corrupt, authoritarian and nationalist government that the UK has known for many generations.

Until the people of this country take some responsibility and demand that politics is based on truth and the needs of the majority, we will continue to have a corrupt authoritarian elite serving only the wants of the 1%.

Love and solidarity to all my comrades, who are mutually grieving a future we have lost, and who acknowledge and face the losses yet to come. Stay brave and true.

It’s never been more important to help each other through, and we really are going to need to.

Many thanks to Robert Livingstone for his excellent memes.

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Sturgeon’s threats demonstrate the anti-democratic, uncooperative inflexibility of nationalism

May 4, 2015May 4, 2015 · 11 Comments ·

Thanks to Dr Éoin Clarke for the infographic

Nicola Sturgeon threatened that she would be prepared to have her MPs vote down a Labour Budget if Ed Miliband was not prepared to cut a deal with the Nationalists at Westminster. Taking part in a live televised debate in Edinburgh with the leaders of the other three main Scottish parties, Ms Sturgeon said she intended to block Labour’s first Budget before negotiating a series of amendments. The Scottish National Party (SNP) leader’s position, revealed just days ahead of Thursday’s general election, was immediately seized upon by the Conservatives as the tedious stuck record styled electioneering “evidence” yet again that a Labour government supported by Ms Sturgeon’s party would result in “absolute chaos” for the country.

Bravo, Nicola Sturgeon. She seems determined to allow a Conservatve victory because of her constant and unqualified attacks on the Labour Party, the issuing of threats like this one, and the perpetuation of nationalist myths aimed at undermining the chance of a Labour victory. It’s bad enough with the Tories’ scaremongering in the press about the prospect of a Labour/Scottish National Party coalition, without Sturgeon fueling it.

I have to add that Cameron’s claim, repeated ad nauseum, that a minority Labour government would be held hostage by the SNP is purely propagandarised tosh. The truth is that the SNP will not in reality be able to hold a minority Labour government hostage unless the Tories allow them to do so, because of course, the Tories also get to vote on things like budgets, defence and so forth, in Parliament.

Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy said that Sturgeon had already threatened to block his party’s Queen’s Speech.

It’s worth a reminder at this point that crucially, the Scottish National Party’s spending plans imply deeper cuts than Labour’s plans entail over the next five years, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said in a report last month, highlighting a “considerable disconnect” between the nationalists’ rhetoric on austerity and their policies.

“The “anti-austerity rhetoric” of the Scottish National Party is not matched by its detailed spending plans and it would impose deeper cuts than Labour,” said the respected independent fiscal watchdog. The IFS also said that austerity would last longer under the SNP than under the other parties.

Furthermore, the IFS stated: “There is a considerable disconnect between this [SNP] rhetoric and their stated plans for total spending, which imply a lower level of spending by 2019–20 than Labour’s plans.”

This exposes Nicola Sturgeon’s attempt to portray Labour as “Tory-lite” on spending cuts for the outright lie that it is. Sturgeon is no longer credible on every claim she has made, parading the SNP as the only alternative to austerity. In plain language, Carl Emmerson, deputy Director of the IFS said: “There would be more spending cuts under the SNP than under Labour or the Liberal Democrats according to the numbers in the SNP manifesto.”

Shadow Scottish Secretary and Scottish Labour Glasgow East candidate Margaret Curran said: “For all the bombast and the bluster of the SNP it has now been conclusively shown that their anti-austerity posturing is nothing more than a front. Their plans would extend austerity and harm Scotland. And as is always the case the cuts would be felt by the poorest and most vulnerable in our communities. We cannot let that happen.”

She added: “The choice is now simple – continued austerity with the SNP, or an end to Tory austerity with Scottish Labour.”

Nicola Sturgeon claimed to have committed her party to kicking the Tories out of Downing Street. It might be a tad tricky for her to explain to her supporters a Commons vote which could, in theory, allow the Tories back in again. That’s why, it’s was a positive move on Miliband’s part to call her bluff.

And let’s look carefully at the details: Milband has not ruled out the possibility of discussions, consultations, or taking into consideration SNP views when framing future legislation. But he has made it clear he will not be manipulated or threatened.

“The Conservative plans to eliminate the deficit implied at least £10bn a year of unspecified cuts to child benefit, tax credits, housing benefit, disability benefits and other working age benefits out of a total budget of about £100bn,” the IFS said in their report

Even if these cuts were achieved, the Tories would have to cut unprotected departments’ budgets by another 18 per cent in real terms, about the same amount again as over the past five years. These cuts are also unspecified by the Conservatives, who have chosen, undemocratically, to hide the details from the electorate. We simply cannot risk another term of devastating Tory cuts to our welfare, public services and the NHS. Especially considering that risk would be founded on misinformation and lies.

Sturgeon’s most recent revelation that the party could bring the Budget of a Labour government down came under fire from Kezia Dugdale, Labour’s deputy leader in Scotland.

Ms Dugdale said: “Many people who have trusted Nicola Sturgeon will be shocked to hear her say she will vote down a Labour Budget. A Budget which will bring in measures such as the mansion tax and the bankers’ bonus tax.

“This shows that the people of Scotland should not gamble with the SNP.”

Ed Miliband, a principled internationalist, said: “Nationalism never built a school. It never lifted people out of poverty. It never created a welfare state that healed the sick and protected our most vulnerable. Nationalism cannot create the jobs we need.”

“Labour believes in “the principles of sharing and solidarity”, he added, “that underpin the partnerships of four nations in the modern UK.”

He said: “If we set England against Scotland, if we set any part of our country against another, it does not help working people, it harms working people. It undermines the ability to share resources. It drives down wages and conditions in the race to the bottom.”

Mr Miliband hit back at Ms Sturgeon’s claims that if Labour “fails to work with the SNP,” this would see David Cameron win a second term as Prime Minister. He added that if the Scottish Nationalists win dozens of seats from Labour in Scotland, this would increase Tory chances of being the largest party.

Mr Miliband vowed: “I will never put the Tories into government. I have spent my entire political career fighting them.”

However Nicola Sturgeon has spent most of her career fighting the Labour Party and propagating lies about them. (See A crib sheet of responses to the crib sheet of lies about the Labour Party: Part one and Part Two.)

Sturgeon has suggested that though the SNP could be relied upon to help “lock out” the Tories from power, she would “be inclined,” if voting in England, to endorse the Greens.

Doing the latter, it should be observed, makes achieving the former rather less likely. The more Green MPs there are the fewer Labour MPs there are and the fewer Labour MPs there are the more probable it is that David Cameron somehow stumbles his way into a second term. Sturgeon has some strange logic.

Given that the IFS have said that the true scale of the gap between Labour and the Tories has been further revealed – director Paul Johnson said at the post-Budget briefing: “Our latest estimates suggest that Labour would be able to meet its fiscal targets with no cuts at all after 2015-16,” Sturgeon’s ridiculously unevidenced, pure electioneering claim that Labour are “Tory-lite” – so easily refuted – is just one of the many lies she has told, and gives us good reason not to trust her.

If the SNP remain so aggressively uncompromising, divisive, chancing manipulation instead of cooperation, they will usher in another Tory government at Westminster, and in that event, they will certainly face paying a heavy political price among their supporters – as happened in 1979. Unfortunately, the rest of the UK will also pay a heavy price.

Despite Sturgeon’s undoubted rhetoric skill, Scottish nationalism continues to be what all nationalism always has been: parochial, vicious, ugly, divisive and insular. It’s evident that this has fostered a narrow tribalism, an inability to negotiate, or to build cooperation, and an inability to understand and comprehend the rational, logic and legitimacy of differing opinions, which is very evident in the non-democratic threats that Sturgeon has issued. It’s a pity she doesn’t oppose the Conservatives, rather than attacking the only viable progressive party for the UK. Sturgeon presents a superficial progressive rhetoric with no integrity, and no grounding in reality. The SNP’s self-claimed progressive credentials don’t stand up to scrutiny. When Sturgeon was asked at her manifesto launch to name a redistributive policy enacted by the SNP in Holyrood, she was unable to cite a single example.

Sturgeon simply chats about progressive ideas to advance the regressive goal of separatism. It’s all style, with no real substance at all. Other than a clan SNP nationalist agenda.

For people living in England, NOTHING is more important than getting the Tories out. I suspect that is true for many in Scotland, too. So please make sure that your vote is a considered, informed and responsible one. If the Tories get another term, we will lose all of the gains of our post-war settlement. We will see our Human Rights Act repealed, (Labour’s legislation, and Cameron has also pledged to leave the European Convention.) That is why we MUST ensure that the Tories don’t get the opportunity, preferably ever again.

The only sure way of defeating the Tories is with a Labour majority.

The real progressive in the leader’s debate is Ed Miliband

SNP appeal to Tory voters: We are just like you

If you think the SNP are a left-wing force, think again – David Clark

Many thanks to Robert Livingstone for his excellent memes

Conservatives, cruelty and the collective unconscious

April 22, 2015June 9, 2019 · 18 Comments ·

This offensive image mocks the Stroke Association’s Act FAST poster – illustrating each of the charity’s three signs of a stroke, “Face, Arms and Speech”, with a picture of Ed Miliband, being mocked as a victim of brain damage.

The Conservatives, using social media accounts for Kensington and Chelsea borough, have been accused of circulating this offensive and callous graphic mocking Ed Miliband as a stroke victim, finishing with the phrase “Time to LOL.”

The entire Twitter account has since been deleted and the ward’s Facebook page has changed its name to “London parks and trees” and now, strangely, to “Parks Lnd.”

Since when, in the 21st century, did it become an acceptable part of democratic dialogue to attempt to ridicule and reduce political opponents by systematically mocking their physical characteristics? Or by contemptuously defining, discrediting and dismissing them as ill and disabled? Moreover, how has it become acceptable that ill and disabled people are held up as objects of political derision?

Amidst claims of an attempted cover-up, Campden’s three Tory councillors have denied having anything to do with the post. Councillor Catherine Faulkes said that she and her two elected colleagues do not run the page – but has refused to say who does.

She told the Mirror:“I don’t want to comment on who operates it. We’re investigating them and we’re investigating the Twitter account because there’s the possibility it might have been hacked.”

I don’t buy that. Conservatives have always coldly conceived society as a hierarchy of human value, and they have, from their pinnacle of supremicist, self-appointed authority, historically cast the poorest and the most vulnerable citizens as the putative “enemies of civilization.” Social Darwinism is written in bold throughout their policies.

There has never been a clearer contrast between the values and approach of the two main political parties: the Tories are undemocratic, they state plainly that some people’s lives don’t matter – the food bank debate and the bedroom tax debate are further examples of how Conservatives reduce human subjects to objects of derision.

While Labour MPs spoke out in the debates about the terrible hardships that vulnerable families in their constituencies are facing, we were faced with the unedifying spectacle of Tory MPs laughing, jeering and shouting their spiteful glee at the plight of those people that this government have intentionally impoverished – after all, policies are plain and legislated statements of intent.

By contrast, the Labour Party have fostered a counter-narrative that is decent, democratic, inclusive and about a fundamental equality of the worth of each human life, founded on a strong commitment to human rights – without which there can be no meaningful social justice and democracy.

The narcissism of nudging

Labour recognise human potential, and surely that is what progressive politics is about, ultimately: human and social development. The Tories, on the other hand, never fail to stifle our individual potential, social evolution and development.

Progressives liberated themselves from the pre-occupation with superficial characteristics and taxonomic ranking of human beings – the emphasis on “what” we are – and began to cherish “who” we are, delving into our human potential and celebrating one o our greatest assets – our diversity – as much as our individual, equal worth.

The Conservatives have created a Darwinist socioeconomic landscape – they always do – and yet take it upon themselves to “civilise” we “irrational” heathens, using disdainful behaviourist nudges that deny our autonomy by acting upon us, telling us how to be, rather than acting for and with us. They construct rhetoric peppered with authoritarian morality, blame, ascribed motives – the poor are dismissed as “scroungers” for example. Projection is a defence process by which personal inferiority is recognised as a perceived moral deficiency in others. It’s a bully’s way of protecting their ego – an assembled fantasy – from their psyche.

I have often thought that beneath the need to control others and cruel behaviour lies a profound emptiness. Scorn, spite, rage, anger, and hatred are ways of filling the emptiness. Perhaps some people believe it is better to feel sadistic than to feel nothing at all. To stop feeling, after all, is to die. Or perhaps investing such hatred in others is a way of undoing their own profound self-loathing.

We are being led by a group of people that have failed to grasp the myth of individualism: identity is a deceit, it is nothing more than a constructed, superficial mask that is tied to largely unconscious impulses. Whilst we, in appalled fascination, watch on, these preachers of materialism measure out our human worth in meagre pounds and pennies, whilst presenting us with reductive, impoverishing sermons on primitivity, dominance and cruelty. They ask us to blame ‘them’ not ‘us’ for the increasing problems we face as a society.

Not content with scapegoating societies’ most vulnerable groups, the Conservatives want to take away their lifeline support as well,on the grounds that they are ‘non deserving.’

I’ve often wondered where does human cruelty towards fellow humans come from, and why do we permit it, as a so-called civilised society?

We are climbing Allport’s ladder

I’ve previously discussed Gordon Allport’s work which explored the psycho-sociological processes that led to the Holocaust. Allport knew that it’s crucial to recognise social prejudices and dehumanization, because these processes push our rational and moral boundaries, gradually eroding the natural inhibitions that prevent us from inflicting harm on other human beings. The stages of prejudice unfold, permitting bullying, cruelty, persecution and ultimately, Allport’s end-stage: systemic genocide.

It’s a social process of barely perceptible stages: the perpetrators become increasingly confident in the “validity” of their prejudice, the public are systematically desensitised and indoctrinated. Mocking, negative stereotypes and negative images become a part of our everyday culture and language: hate speech is normalised, discriminatory policies and practices flourish, hate crimes are permitted.

On a psychic level, our repressed, destructive urges; the reservoir of darkness that is our shadow selves; our uncivilised rage and fear – previously sublimated – are manipulated and directed at politically constructed scapegoats.

For me, Gordon Allport and Carl Jung respectively show us that when those who have never confronted our instinctive, collective fear of the dark are urged to open their own cellar door, it is others that are consumed by the ferocity of the straining beast that is found there.

Those right-wing critics of left-wing political correctness are wrong. Far from it stifling free speech, political correctness liberates us by actually acknowledging the straining beast within us all, and helps us to begin a dialogue about how we can help each other find our way in the dark. That has got to be so much better than denial and projection, which happens beyond the light of reflection, integration and consciousness. Hate speech isn’t free speech at all: it’s aim is to intimidate, silence and to close down democratic debate.

And the consequences of denial and projection are scapegoating, prejudice, discrimination, persecution of others, all of which may lead to genocide if we fail to address such social manifestations from our psyche.

Jungians believe that our own shadow contains and reflects the shadow of society, which is fed by ancestral, abandoned, neglected and repressed collective values: the collective unconscious. Our psyche is an assemblage of our timeless collective fantasies. There are shared, fundamental elements that make up the collective unconscious and generate a limiting framework around which our psychic material organises. Jung referred to those elements as archetypes.

We are much more than that which we choose, embody, perform, and identify with. The common importance of the collective unconscious makes people especially vulnerable to political manipulation, especially in an era of mass media.

Psychopathology is considered by Jungians to be the independent ability of the psyche to create morbidity, disorder, illness, abnormality and suffering in any part of its manifest behaviour and to imagine and experience life through a distorted perspective. Social psychology has shown us that even at a basic normative level, social group values, beliefs and behaviours are very vulnerable to manipulation and corruption. (See Milgram experiment, Stanford Prison experiment, for example.)

The medium is the message

The media is far from objective, benign and politically neutral, in fact we have handful of offshore billionaires that have subverted democracy and established a cultural hegemony. This self-appointed elite are telling you that some human lives are worthless, whilst investing in their own, quite literally, at all cost to our society.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has said recently that UK tabloid coverage of “immigration” is directly linked to the loss of life (of refugees) in the Mediterranean, for example. The media have created a category of others, and desensitised the public to the humanitarian crisis that has unfolded. Using the word “immigration” implies that people are travelling from choice. These people are not migrants: they are desperate refugees.

The United Nations statement says that an article in which Katie Hopkins described refugees as “cockroaches” and “feral humans” resembled dehumanizing, pro-genocide propaganda. (See also – Media Migrant Propaganda ‘Can Cost Lives’ (Video).)

This dear human child tragically lost her precious life on Sunday. Her “feral” family were fleeing for their lives.

They were trying to save her.

The number of people fleeing war, oppressive regimes, unspeakable horror, pain and absolute poverty in the Middle East and Africa has risen sharply in recent months. Around 65% of the refugees are from the Syrian civil war zone. Their desperation is being exploited by profiteering smugglers, linked with organised crime, who charge exorbitant fees for transport in often unseaworthy cargo vessels, cramming hundreds of human beings into locked holds.

It is now estimated that for every 1,000 refugees that are known to have crossed the Mediterranean, more than 46 lose their lives in shipwrecks. The actual number might be much higher.

In a strongly worded statement issued on Friday, the High Commissioner said tabloid “misinformation” about immigration was fed into a “nasty underbelly of racism” lurking beneath the migration issue. He noted that the media in Nazi Germany “described people their masters wanted to eliminate as rats and cockroaches.”

“Under the guise of freedom of expression, [negative coverage is] being allowed to feed a vicious cycle of vilification, intolerance and politicization of migrants,” High Commissioner Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said in the statement.

However, the word “migrant” implies choice of movement. These people are fleeing for their lives, they are not migrants: they are refugees.

Prejudice multitasks

For those of you that hate refugees, and fail to recognise others as being of equal worth to you, perhaps it’s worth considering that the Nazis didn’t simply exterminate the ethnic group of public choice, they also exterminated sick and disabled people, social democrats, socialists, trade unionists, freemasons, communists, and anarchists, the Roma, Slavs, Polish people, gay people, poor people, vagrants, pacifists, people with mental illness – including those with war-induced PTSD, unemployed people, drug addicts, people who were better artists than Hitler, and the list was continually extended. You see, prejudice and cruelty multi-task very well, and scapegoating and persecution doesn’t stay confined to the social group you may dislike: fascists are mercilessly fascists, regardless of who you are.

Jung once remarked on Hitler: “You know you could never talk to this man; because there is nobody there … It is not an individual; it is an entire nation.” He was referring to the collective unconscious. I am reminded of ancient cultures sacrificing to their “Gods”, offering up their joys of cruelty to appease.

Conservatives are liturgists of competitive individualism, market forces and minarchism. The ecclesiastical procession of our own right-wing state is ritualistically sacrificing people to appease their own god: neoliberalism.

The ability to recognise and translate our collective, remnant, dark impulses, and excercise self-control is a rare and remarkable virtue. Yet the collective conscious contains all aspects of human nature: light and dark, beautiful and ugly, good and evil, if we would only turn to look at it.

The Holocaust is the most thoroughly documented example of the extreme savagery and hideousness of dehumanization. It’s a little too easy to imagine that the Third Reich was an aberration. We can take the easy option and dismiss the Holocaust as a very unusual phenomenon – a mass insanity instigated by a small group of deranged ideologues who conspired to seize political power and exercise their monstrously evil will.

It’s comforting to imagine that these were uniquely cruel and savage people. However, one of the most disturbing discoveries about how the Holocaust happened is not that all of the Nazis were madmen and monsters. It’s that they were mostly ordinary human beings.

Behind the cellar door

My point is simply this: every one of us is vulnerable. Every single human being is susceptible to frailties – we are each partial, and easily compromised: open to the ravages of fear, doubt, insecurity, anger and loneliness, and to the shadow of our unchosen choices – the person we choose to be always invites a dark double – the person we choose not to be – the psychic twin we keep leashed deep in our psychic basement, as it were. The more we repress, the darker our shadow becomes, and the greater its influence.

By alienating our self and our own shared, instinctual foundation, we fail to recognise when it motivates us, animates us and directs our deeds. It is all to easy, therefore, for those who are politically motivated to manipulate our perceptions, to touch and rouse the ancient predatory instincts we all have locked away in the cellar of our psyche.

Perhaps a definition of evil is suffering transferred to others. In the process, whatever started the original pain is forgotten and the energy of it moves around amplifying revenge and cruelty until someone somewhere contains it, and transforms it by walking in the shoes of many others towards empathy, wisdom, kindness and compassion. We have that wonderful potential. All we need to realise it is the courage to face our selves. Beyond the cellar door. And by facing our selves, we recognise all others.

Anyone who has recognised transference as a potentially therapeutic tool in a group setting will tell you that emotions are a tangible, primordial, manifest life-force, moving indiscriminately, relentlessly from person to person, animating, hating, hurting, loving and healing. E-motion -> movement.

We are primarily emotional creatures. Advertisers and propagandists know this. Many of us deny it. However, as developed human beings we endeavour to learn and to recognise the base elements of the psyche and arbitrate: mature adults liberate their self, both from the deceptive cover of the persona, (some call this the ego – our superficial individual identity – though the ego is also considered to be a mediator between self and society) and from the power of (universal and personal) unconscious impulses. But the more we repress, the more the leashed shadow strains for release from the force of our resistance.

Perhaps if we were to rename and redefine the shadow archetype as “teacher”, we would find the motivation and courage to face what is in the darkness of our collective basement. And learn.

Know thyself – Delphic maxim.

Picture courtesy of Robert Livingstone.

Endnote

Here, I’ve used Jungian concepts as a frame of analysis. Jung provides us with an expansive frame of reference and an invaluable therapeutic tool, yet his work has all too often been devalued and dismissed as “new age mysticism.” But for me, any kind of personal development may be deemed “spiritual” without necessarily having any reference to a systemic religion.

It is proposed that Jung had a profound influence on the development of quantum theory through his own theory of synchronicity – as a mode of relationship that is acausal and non-local – an idea that influenced Wolfgang Pauli, in particular, as well as other physicists.

Jung’s archetypes have also been identified as universal and this seems to have been verified at an anthropological level.

They certainly have a powerful cross-cultural resonance.

I don’t make any money from my work. I am disabled because of illness and have a very limited income. But you can help by making a donation to help me continue to research and write informative, insightful and independent articles, and to provide support to others. The smallest amount is much appreciated – thank you.

What will the Tories suggest next. “Compassionate” genocide?

April 15, 2015May 5, 2017 · 17 Comments ·

The Tory parliamentary candidate for Cambridge, Chamali Fernando sparked outrage and horror after saying mental health patients should wear wristbands to identify their conditions. Fernando was speaking at a hustings event hosted by the campaign group Keep Our NHS Public when she made the comment.

Andy Burnham, Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary, said:

“There has been an enormous amount of work in Parliament to challenge the stigma surrounding mental health. But comments like this are so disappointing – they set us back and remind us how far we have to go. Jeremy Hunt must disown these comments, instruct his candidate to apologise and make it clear that they form no part of Conservative Party policy.”

“This proposal shows the candidate’s harmful views on mental health.”

Disability and Mental Health Adviser at University of the Arts, London Annabel Crowley said.

“Research carried out by the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King’s College London shows personal contact with mentally ill people is the most effective way to reduce discrimination.”

Crowley says Fernando’s proposals would only alienate the mentally ill and “further curtail their freedom,” which would encourage further stigmatization.

“We need to provide adequate care and support, not blame the victims of a failing health service,” she added.

Mental Health Services are in crisis because of Coalition cuts to funding. The Government has been criticised for allowing mental health services to be cut disproportionately, as the NHS as a whole undergoes the most severe budget cut in its history. And let’s not forget that under the guise of a “policy of deinstitutionalisation,” Thatcher’s “Care in the Community” Bill was about anything but care: it was all about cutting costs, as reflected in the experiences of many people leaving long term institutional care and being left to fend for themselves in the community. “Compassionate Tories”: there is no such thing.

Dr. Pooky Kingsmith, a mental health specialist, said that she [Fernando] “fails to understand” what the wristbands would achieve “beyond increasing the stigma and prejudice already experience by mentally ill people.”

A petition has since been set up calling for Fernando to stand down in the election. The description on the petition read:

“This kind of thinking has no place in modern society and especially not in someone who is hoping to be elected as an MP.

I can’t see any possible justification in allowing Ms Fernando to continue to stand for election after showing such prejudice against the mentally ill, and if allowed to do so, shows a total disregard to the people in this country, who already have to battle against the misunderstanding and ignorance of their mental illness.”

Chamali Fernando was asked how the authorities could help the police better deal with people with mental health issues.

Fernando responded that wristbands which disclose a person’s illness could help barristers, such as herself, to better aid the public.

She said wearing colour-coded wristbands indicating the nature of the person’s condition would be helpful to professionals as “they often could not explain themselves.”

Perhaps Fernando had designs that are something like this in mind:

1936 illustration of Nazi camp ID-emblems.

The red triangle was used by the Nazis to identify social democrats, socialists, trade unionists, Freemasons and communists, for example. The pink triangle was primarily used for identifying homosexual men, and the black triangle was used to identify “asocial elements” (asozial) and “work shy” (arbeitsscheu) including those who were mentally ill, pacifists, vagrants and the Roma.

And for anyone itching to invoke Godwin’s law at this point, I suggest you hang fire and read about Allport’s Ladder of Prejudice. Whilst I am very aware that we need take care not to trivialise the terrible events of Nazi Germany by making casual comparisons, there are some clear and important parallels on a socio-political level and a psycho-social one, that I feel are crucially important to recognise.

Gordon Allport studied the psychological and social processes that create a society’s progression from prejudice and discrimination to genocide. In his research of how the Holocaust happened, he describes socio-political processes that foster increasing social prejudice and discrimination and he demonstrates how the unthinkable becomes acceptable: it happens incrementally, because of a steady erosion of our moral and rational boundaries, and propaganda-driven changes in our attitudes towards “others” that advances culturally, by almost inscrutable degrees.

The process always begins with political scapegoating of a social group and with ideologies that identify that group as an “enemy” or a social “burden” in some way. A history of devaluation of the group that becomes the target, authoritarian culture, and the passivity of internal and external witnesses (bystanders) all contribute to the probability that violence against that group will develop, and ultimately, if the process is allowed to continue evolving, genocide.

As I have discussed elsewhere on this site, we have a government that uses words like workshy to describe vulnerable groups. This is a government that is intentionally scapegoating poor, unemployed, disabled people and migrants. One Tory councillor called for the extermination of gypsies, more than one Tory MP has called for illegal and discriminatory levels of pay for disabled people. (See also David Freud was made to apologise for being a true Tory in public.)

David Freud’s comment that disabled people are not worth the minimum wage was not a momentary lapse, nor was it unrepresentative of Tory views more generally. He is the contemptuous architect of the grossly punitive Tory Bedroom Tax that disproportionately affects households of disabled people. The Tories endorsed Freud’s discriminatory policy proposal, and savagely ridiculed the UN rapporteur, Raquel Rolnik, when she pointed out, very professionally and reasonably, that the policy contravenes human rights.

He is the same government minister that rejected suggestions that austerity policies have led to an increase in food bank use – making the jaw-droppingly astonishing suggestion that food bank charities are somehow to blame. This former investment banker and peer told the Lords that the increase in the usage of food banks was “supply led”. He said:

“If you put more food banks in, that is the supply. Clearly, food from the food banks is a free good and by definition with a free good there’s almost infinite demand.”

Poverty reduced to blame-the-individual neoliberal motivational formulae. Yet it is the government that are responsible for policies that create and sustain inequality and poverty.

We need only look at the discriminatory nature of policies such as the legal aid bill, the wider welfare “reforms” and research the consequences of austerity for the vulnerable – those with the “least broad shoulders” – to understand that these comments reflect how conservatives think.

This is a government that is using public prejudice to justify massive socio-economic inequalities and their own policies that are creating a steeply hierarchical, society based on social Darwinist “survival of the fittest” libertarian, minarchist principles.

The Tory creation of socio-economic scapegoats, involving vicious stigmatisation of vulnerable social groups, particularly endorsed by the mainstream media, is simply a means of manipulating public perceptions and securing public acceptance of the increasingly punitive and repressive basis of the Tories’ welfare “reforms”, and the steady stripping away of essential state support and provision.

Let’s not forget that we were recently informed that the Tories plan to limit child benefit to the first two children because it would save money. The idea is being examined by the Conservatives, despite previously being vetoed by Downing Street because of fears that it could “alienate” parents.

Asked about the idea on the BBC’s Sunday Politics programme, Duncan Smith said:

“I think it’s well worth looking at. It’s something if we decide to do it we’ll announce out. But it does save significant money and also it helps behavioural change.”

This is a clear indication of the Tories’ underpinning eugenicist designs – exercising control over the reproduction of the poor, albeit by stealth. It also reflects the underpinning belief that poverty somehow arises because of faulty individual choices, (as opposed to faulty political decision-making and ideologically-driven socio-economic policies), that those choices are non-rational, stereotypical, and that reducing cost to the State involves making people change their “faulty,” stereotypical behaviours.

This government’s policies are contibuting significantly to mental illness: Suicides have reached a ten year high and are linked with welfare “reforms”.

And Osborne announced in the budget that the government will be funding a “package of measures” to improve “employment outcomes” which will entail putting Cognitive Behaviour therapists in more than 350 job centres to provide “support” to those with “common mental health conditions” who are claiming employment support allowance (ESA) and job seekers allowance (JSA).

As I have written elsewhere, the government have put up an online contract notice which specifically states:

“This provision is designed to support people with common mental health conditions to prepare for and move into work, with intervention at the earliest possible point in a claim to benefit or access to the Fit for Work service.”

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) is used to change how you think (“Cognitive”) and what you do (“Behaviour”). It bypasses emotions, personal history and narrative, to a large extent, and tends to focus on the “here and now.” In this case, the here and now consists of taking any job available, regardless of its suitability, or face being sanctioned.

CBT is an approach that facilitates the identification of “negative thinking patterns” and associated “problematic behaviours” and challenges them. This approach is at first glance a problem-solving approach, however, it is of course premised on the assumption that interpreting situations “negatively” is a bad thing, and that thinking positively about bad events is beneficial.

The onus is on the individual to adapt by perceiving their circumstances in a stoical and purely rational way.

So we need to ask what are the circumstances that the government are expecting people claiming benefits to accept stoically. Sanctions? Work fare? Being forced to accept very poorly paid work, abysmal working conditions and no security? The loss of social support, public services and essential safety nets ? Starvation and destitution?

The political vilification of sick and disabled people and the poor, amplified in the media, has preceded policies particularly aimed at the steady removal of State support, indicating a clear scapegoating process, and this isn’t indicative of a government that is “neglectful”- it is patently intentional, hence the pre-emptive “justification” narratives to garner public support and acceptance towards such punitive and harsh policies.

As Frances Ryan says:

“The ideology of a small state or the belief that benefits build dependency are crass, irrelevant details to what at its core is simply a decision about how to treat a human being. This is particularly damning when one person has all the power and the other is forced through economic necessity to take whatever humiliation or pain they are given. To do that to someone – let alone hundreds of thousands – is no accident. It is a conscious decision, that has been made over and over again by this government.”

I’ve consistently expressed my own well-founded, carefully considered, evidenced view that the Tories are authoritarians, social Dawinists, and their social policies are founded on a creeping and implicit eugenics by stealth, fueled by their preference for a steeply hierarchical, unequal society, anachronistic ideas about “deserving” and “undeserving”, which belong to the 1834 Poor Law era, and a behaviourist approach to socio-economic circumstances .

In Edgbaston, Keith Joseph, (1974) announced to the world that:

“The balance of our population, our human stock is threatened … a high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world and bring them up. They are born to mothers who were first pregnant in adolescence in social classes 4 and 5. Many of these girls are unmarried, many are deserted or divorced or soon will be. Some are of low intelligence, most of low educational attainment.”

And in 2010, the former deputy chairman of Conservative Party, Lord Howard Flight, told the London Evening Standard:

“We’re going to have a system where the middle classes are discouraged from breeding because it’s jolly expensive. But for those on benefits, there is every incentive. Well, that’s not very sensible.”

These comments are not momentary lapses, nor are they unrepresentative of Tory views more generally. They reflect the true colours of the ~~nazi~~ nasty party.

Pictures courtesy of Robert Livingstone

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This unsnookered isle

April 12, 2015April 14, 2015 · 4 Comments ·

Writing in the New York Times, Paul Krugman said Britain’s performance since 2010, after the global financial crisis struck, has been “startlingly bad,” with a tentative recovery that began in 2009, which was stalled in the last quarter of 2010. In his article entitled This Snookered Isle, Krugman provides an indictment of the Coalition’s claims and their methods of managing the UK economy. Mr Krugman echoes many leading economists in Britain.

Krugman says: “Unfortunately, economic discourse in Britain is dominated by a misleading fixation on budget deficits. Worse, this bogus narrative has infected supposedly objective reporting; media organizations routinely present as fact propositions that are contentious if not just plain wrong.”

Simon Wren-Lewis of Oxford University has dubbed this narrative “mediamacro.” As his coinage suggests, this is what you hear all the time on TV and read in British newspapers, presented not as the view of one side of the political debate, but as simple fact.

Yet none of it is true.

Krugman goes on to ask: “Was the Labour government that ruled Britain before the crisis profligate? [As so often claimed by the Conservatives.] Nobody thought so at the time.”

In 2007, government debt as a percentage of G.D.P. was close to its lowest level in a century (and well below the level in the United States), while the budget deficit was quite small. The only way to make those numbers look bad is to claim that the British economy in 2007 was operating far above capacity, inflating tax receipts. But if that had been true, Britain should have been experiencing high inflation, which it wasn’t.

What about growth? When the current British government came to power in 2010, it imposed harsh austerity — and the British economy, which had been recovering from the 2008 global slump, soon began slumping again. In response, Prime Minister David Cameron’s government backed off, putting plans for further austerity on hold (but without admitting that it was doing any such thing). And growth resumed.” (See also: The Return of Expansionary Austerity.)

He adds: “If this counts as a policy success, why not try repeatedly hitting yourself in the face for a few minutes? After all, it will feel great when you stop.

Given all this, you might wonder how mediamacro gained such a hold on British discourse. Don’t blame economists. As Mr. Wren-Lewis points out, very few British academics (as opposed to economists employed by the financial industry) accept the proposition that austerity has been vindicated. This media orthodoxy has become entrenched despite, not because of, what serious economists had to say.”

Cameron has misled the public by making Government debt analogous with personal debt. It isn’t. If a person misses a mortgage payment, for example, they may risk damaging their credit rating, and possibly even losing their home. So if we owe money, we need to find a way to pay it back as soon as possible. But government debt does not need to be paid back overnight – in fact, it’s widely recognised to be potentially damaging to do so.

In an economy, one person’s spending is another person’s income. So when the government cuts spending, it reduces people’s income, leading to less business, more unemployment, and a vicious spiral of slowing down the economy.

Osborne’s austerity measures have achieved nothing, except deepening poverty, widening economic inequality, and suffering for the poorest and most vulnerable communities – and Osborne announced in his Autumn statement that we face at least four more years of it, should the Tories gain office again.

Austerity is not an economic necessity, nor is it temporary measure to balance the books, but rather, it reflects the Conservative’s long-standing ideological commitment to dismantle the gains and achievements of the post war settlement: public services, the welfare state and the National Health Service. This is where most of the cuts have been aimed.

With a shortfall in tax receipts set to increase the size of the deficit by at least £25 billion during the next parliament, the Office for Budget Responsibility have said the only way Osborne could balance the books would be through shrinking the state to a level not seen since before the Second World War: “Total public spending is now projected to fall to 35.2 percent of GDP by 2019-20, taking it below the previous post-war lows reached in 1957-8 and 1999-2000 to what would probably be its lowest level in 80 years”. Robert Chote.

Despite facing a global recession, the Labour Government invested in our public services, and borrowed substantially less in thirteen years than the Coalition have in just five years. UK citizens were sheltered very well from the worst consequences of the global bank-induced crash.

Gordon Brown got it right in his championing of the G20 fiscal stimulus, agreed at the London summit of early April 2010, which was a continuation of his policies that had served to steer the UK economy out of the consequences of a global recession, and to protect citizens from those consequences.

Osborne’s policy of imposing austerity and budget cuts on an economy that was actually recovering was a catastrophic error. The austerity cuts propelled the economy backwards and into depression; and, far from using public spending as a countervailing force against the cutbacks in private sector investment, the Coalition’s budget cuts served to aggravate the crisis. Many people are suffering terribly as a consequence, many have been reduced to a struggle for basic survival.

The Conservatives have been engaged in a significant transfer of income from the least well-off half of the population to the more affluent in the past five years. Those with the lowest incomes have been hit hardest by austerity. Deliberately so.

It’s inconceivable that Coalition policies were formulated for anything other than profiting the wealthy at the expense of the poorest.

The following cuts came into force in April 2013:

1 April – Housing benefit cut, including the introduction of the bedroom tax
1 April – Council tax benefit cut
1 April – Legal Aid savagely cut
6 April – Tax credit and child benefit cut
7 April – Maternity and paternity pay cut
8 April – 1% cap on the rise of in working-age benefits (for the next three years)
8 April – Disability living allowance replaced by personal independence payment (PIP)
15 April – Cap on the total amount of benefit working-age people can receive.

Here are some of the Tory “incentives” and consquences for the wealthy:

Rising wealth – 50 richest people from the Midlands region increased their wealth by £3.46 billion in 2010 to a record £28.5 billion.
Falling taxes – top rate of tax cut from 50% to 45% for those earning over £150,000 a year. This is 1% of the population who earn 13% of the income.
Benefited most from Quantitative Easing (QE) – the Bank of England say that as 50% of households have little or no financial assets, almost all the financial benefit of QE was for the wealthiest 50% of households, with the wealthiest 10% taking the lions share
Tax free living – extremely wealthy individuals can access tax avoidance schemes which contribute to the £25bn of tax which is avoided every year, as profits are shifted offshore to join the estimated £13 trillion of assets siphoned off from our economy.
£107,000 each per year awarded to millionaires as a tax cut.(From: Follow the Money: Tory Ideology is all about handouts to the wealthy that are funded by the poor (2013).)

In November last year, my proposition was also verified in a study of the cumulative impact of tax and welfare changes, from in-work benefits to council tax support, to the cut in the top rate of income tax and an increase in tax-free personal allowances, the report concluded that Coalition policy has been regressive across the income spectrum.

Its authors, Paola De Agostini and Professor Holly Sutherland at the university of Essex, and Professor John Hills at the LSE, wrote: “Whether we have all been ‘in it together’, making equivalent sacrifices through the period of austerity, is a central question in understanding the record of the coalition government … It is clear that the changes did not lead to uniform changes in people’s incomes. The reforms had the effect of making an income transfer from the poorer half of households (and some of the very richest) to most of the richer half, with no net effect on the public finances.

“In effect, the reductions in benefits and tax credits financed the cuts in taxes. Some groups were clear losers on average – including lone-parent families, large families, children, and middle-aged people (at the age when many are parents).”

Last year, the scale of Britain’s growing inequality was revealed by a report from the leading charity, Oxfam, showing that the country’s five richest families now own more wealth than the poorest 20% of the population.

Oxfam urged the chancellor to use the 2014 spring budget to make an assault on tax avoidance and introduce a living wage, in a report highlighting how a handful of the super-rich, headed by the Duke of Westminster, have more money and financial assets than 12.6 million Britons put together.

In the report, A Tale of Two Britains, Oxfam said the poorest 20% in the UK had wealth totalling £28.1bn – an average of £2,230 each. The latest rich list from Forbes magazine showed that the five top UK entries – the family of the Duke of Westminster, David and Simon Reuben, the Hinduja brothers, the Cadogan family, and Sports Direct retail boss Mike Ashley – between them had property, savings and other assets worth £28.2bn.

And:

Increasing inequality is a sign of economic failure rather than success. It’s far from inevitable – a result of political choices that can be reversed.

The Labour Party have announced this week that tackling tax avoidance and evasion is a priority, and they plan to push emergency laws through parliament designed to impose far higher fines and close tax loopholes. This move alone will raise more than £7.5bn a year in revenue for the Treasury. It’s a measure that sends out a clear message: the poorest people should not have to pay more to compensate for tax abuses by the rich.

Also announced this week was Labour’s intention to abolish archaic rules that allow wealthy “non-domiciles”, who live in the UK but claim to be domiciled overseas, to avoid paying tax in this country on what they earn outside of Britain.

Labour’s careful, costed and evidence-based policies also include: a Bankers’ Bonus Tax; a Mansion Tax; repeal of the Bedroom Tax; a reversal of the Pension Tax relief that the Tories gifted to millionaires; a reversal of the Tory Tax cut for Hedge Funds; freezing gas and electricity bills for every home a the UK for at least 20 months; the big energy firms will be split up and governed by a new tougher regulator to end overcharging; banning exploitative zero hour contracts; introduction of a living wage (already introduced by some Labour councils); a reversal of the £107,000 tax break that the Tories have given to the millionaires; reintroduction of the 50p tax; scrapping George Osborne’s “Shares for Rights” scheme that has opened up a tax loophole of £1 billion; ensuring Water Companies place the poorest households on a Social Tariff that makes it easier for them to pay their Water Bills; breaking up the banks and separating retail banking from investment banking; introduction of measures to prevent corporate tax avoidance, scrapping the Profit Tax Cut (Corporation Tax) that George Osborne has already announced for 2015 and many more.

These are not austerity measures. They are much needed, strongly redistributive policies.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has recently found what most of us already knew: that income inequality actually stifles economic growth in some of the world’s wealthiest countries, whilst the redistribution of wealth via taxes and benefits encourages growth.

Will the super-rich leave the UK, bag, baggage and all, as the right-wing scaremongers bleat, if we have a fair government that expects tax contributions from the cosseted rich? I seriously doubt it. They could start an exodus to New York I suppose, a city with a currently heavier tax regime, yet curiously not short of thousands of super-rich residents.

Ask yourself this: what are these tax-evading, hoarding and loudly complaining people actually contributing to our society? As far as I can see, they are supported by enormous state handouts, at everyone elses’ expense. They are propped up in their greed for ever-increasing profits,

Tax avoidance is costing us at least £70bn each year.

The most costly benefit payments in the UK are Tax Credits, Housing Benefit and Child Benefit, totalling £56.4bn a year. These are not out of work benefits. Some 65% of the total spent on working age benefits, is paid to people in work, whose wages are below subsistence levels.

Add to that the corporate tax benefits, such as the value of the cheap credit made available to banks and other business, the insurance schemes run by the government to protect exporters, the marketing for British business laid on by Vince Cable’s ministry, the public procurement from the private sector … a recent study conducted by Kevin Farnsworth, a senior lecturer in social policy at the University of York, concludes that direct corporate welfare costs British taxpayers just short of £85bn a year.

The Tory’s justification for allowing exploitative tax avoiders to have all of their own way is the mythological “trickle down effect.” Or “voodoo economics” to Keynsians. It was also known as the “horse and sparrow theory” a couple of centuries back. The idea being that if you feed a horse plenty of oats, the sparrows in it’s wake will also be fed .

And we are most certainly being fed horsesh*t.

It’s time to put an end to corporate welfare, and state handouts to the wealthy. We can do that by voting for a Labour government.

And if some thieving, hoarding, greedy misers threaten to leave the UK, why, I think I’ll offer to help them pack.

Big thanks to Robert Livingstone for his excellent memes.

The Conservatives are guilty of great deceit in blaming Labour for the deficit – Ed Miliband.

April 3, 2015April 26, 2017 · 12 Comments ·

The first part of this article was originally posted in the Guardian, on Thursday 6 January 2011:

Ed Miliband accuses the Conservatives today of a “great deceit” in blaming Labour for the national deficit and warned that they have concocted a false narrative to justify politically driven cuts. Speaking at Labour’s campaign centre in Oldham yesterday, the Labour leader attacked the Tories for rewriting history.

In announcing a raft of swingeing public spending cuts the coalition government has repeatedly sought to portray that its hands are tied because of the size of the deficit it inherited from the last government.

The same argument was rolled out this week to defend this week’s rise in VAT from 17.5% to 20%, after warnings of the likely impact on low and middle-income families and the fragile economy. Amid Labour concerns that the opposition has not been forcefully contradicting the coalition’s narrative on the deficit, Miliband insisted that it was not caused by Labour overspending but by the global financial crisis.

“My concern is that a great deceit designed to damage Labour has led to profoundly misguided and dangerous economic decisions that I fear will cause deep damage to Britain’s future,” he writes in today’s Times (paywall).

The Labour leader says that by blaming the deficit on overspending the Conservative-led government is seeking to win consensus for its policy of cutting the deficit “as far and as fast as possible”. But he accuses the chancellor of “gambling on a rapid rebalancing of the economy” and says he is going “too far and too fast on the deficit”.

Accusing the Tories of attempting to rewrite history, Miliband points out that Britain’s debt at the outset of the economic crisis was the second-lowest in the G7 and lower than it was under the Conservatives in 1997 and says neither of the parties in the coalition government called for lower spending at the time.

Miliband repeats his warning from earlier this week that the VAT increase will squeeze families on middle and low incomes and says growth will be restricted as a consequence. He argues that while some would argue those are prices worth paying in the short-term, the effect will be to store up greater problems for the future.

He says Labour is not opposed to every cut, but that he does oppose those being inflicted on the county’s poorest. He added: “but neither is it true that Labour is to blame for the deficit or that the deficit-reduction programme being pursued by this government is necessary and fair. Because this Conservative-led government is trying to deceive people about the past, it is making the wrong judgments about the future”.

David Cameron said yesterday that the joint impact of increases on duty and VAT meant things were “very painful and difficult” and raised the prospect of introducing a fair fuel stabiliser which would keep fuel duty down when oil prices rise. He also admitted that the rise in VAT to 20% this week was regressive in terms of people’s income but “might not be if it was looked at in terms of people’s spending.”

Ed Miliband’s speech shows that he is a very perceptive and conscientious leader.

The claims made by the Conservatives that Labour “left a mess” don’t stand up to scrutiny. Here is a little evidence which demonstrates that the Tories have a track record of lying, and of blaming everyone else for their own ideological preferences, policy decisions and economic incompetence:

Thanks to Richard Murphy, who produced this graphic, all data is from the HM Treasury Pocket Bank for 30 September on the Government’s own website.

OBR head rebukes Osborne: the UK was never at risk of bankruptcy. Osborne was rebuked by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) for telling the great big lie about Labour leaving the country “near bankrupt”, yet Cameron has used that same lie in the televised leaders debates. You’d think that a near “bankrupt” country would have had the Fitch and Moody triple A credit ratings downgraded …oh hang on, didn’t that happen … under the TORIES?

And haven’t the Tories borrowed more in 5 years than Labour did in 13? Surely we must be bankrupt now, by the Tories’ own reckoning.

Then there is the oft-cited Liam Byrne note. The jest recalls a similar note left by Tory Reginald Maudling to his Labour successor James Callaghan in 1964: “Good luck, old cock … Sorry to leave it in such a mess.”

Byrne clarified at the time that the note was meant in jest: “My letter was a joke, from one chief secretary to another,” he said. “I do hope David Laws’s sense of humour wasn’t another casualty of the coalition deal.”

Treasury sources said the full text of the letter from Byrne – dated 6 April, the day Gordon Brown called the general election – was: “Dear chief secretary, I’m afraid there is no money. Kind regards – and good luck! Liam.”

Byrne’s notes have caused bemusement before. When he was promoted to the cabinet in 2008, he gave officials a set of instructions entitled “Working with Liam Byrne”, which included the lines: “Coffee/Lunch. I’m addicted to coffee. I like a cappuccino when I come in, an espresso at 3pm and soup at 12.30-1pm … If I see things that are not of acceptable quality, I will blame you.”

Gary Gibbon of Channel 4 News remembers that former chancellor Alistair Darling had also left a note for his successor, George Osborne, as well as a bottle (how very civilsed) – but, in Gibbon’s words, “no revolver.”

It’s an indication of how desperately determined this government are to blame the previous government for the consequences of their own policy decisions and economic catastrophe, that the Tories have to seize on a traditional and humorous exchange between outgoing and incoming ministers as “proof” to bolster their spurious claims and to prop up such deception.

The Office of National Statistics (ONS) has said that David Cameron has presided over an economy with the weakest productivity record of any government since the second world war, and revealed that output per worker fell again in the final three months of 2014.

In a separate blow to the credibility of the government, two-thirds of leading UK economists said they believed George Osborne’s austerity strategy had been damaging for the economy.

The Centre for Macroeconomics polled 50 leading economists, asking them whether they agreed that the government’s deficit-reduction strategy had a positive impact on growth and employment. One third disagreed and a further third strongly disagreed.

Furthermore, 77% feel that the outcome of the general election will have serious (“non-trivial”) consequences for the economy, and are clearly not in favour of the Conservatives’ “long-term economic plan.”

The Tories seem to think we have forgotten that it was they that lost the Moody’s Investors Service triple A grade, despite pledges to keep it secure. Moody’s credit ratings represent a rank-ordering of creditworthiness, or expected loss.

The Fitch credit rating was also downgraded due to increased borrowing by the Tories, who have borrowed more in 4 years than Labour did in 13.

I remember that we were very well sheltered from the consequences of the global banking crisis by the last government. It’s remarkable that despite George Osborne’s solid five-year track record of failure, the Tories still mechanically repeat the “always cleaning up Labour’s mess” lie, as if increasing the national debt by 11% of GDP in 13 years, mitigated by a global recession, caused by bankers, as Labour did, is somehow significantly worse than George Osborne’s unmitigated record of increasing the national debt by 26% in just 5 years. Osborne has ironically demonstrated that it is possible to dramatically cut spending and massively increase debt. Austerity doesn’t work as a means of reducing debt, but works exceptionally well as a smokescreen for an ideologically-driven reduction of the state.

The Tories have seized an opportunity to dismantle the institutions they have always hated since the post-war social democratic settlement – institutions of health, welfare, education, culture and human rights which should be provided for all citizens. The Tories attempt to destroy fundamental public support for the health, education and welfare of its people. Offering and inflicting only regressive, punitive policies and devastating cuts, the Tories lie, lie and lie some more to attempt to justify the unustifiable.

The Conservatives have not encouraged investment in the UK either:

The Tories have told many lies. Here’s a list of those that have earned them official rebukes – A list of official rebukes for Tory lies.

A few facts about the deficit and the economy, since the Tories are determined to peddle pre-election lies

April 2, 2015September 26, 2015 · 12 Comments ·

The study can be found here.

From the excellent Richard Murphy:

I think this graph tells a story very few seem to know about:

All data is from the HM Treasury Pocket Bank for 30 September. I have extrapolated 2014/15 borrowing from the August data to suggest whole year borrowing of just over £107 billion based on average proportion of total year borrowing to 31 August over the past five years.

The conclusions are stark: the Coalition has borrowed more than four times more a year than 3.3 times a year what Labour did, on average.

In five years the Coalition has borrowed more than Labour did in 13, by a considerable margin.

And there wasn’t an unforeseen banking crisis on the Coalition’s watch.

So why is the story still told that it is Labour who borrowed too much? Purely objectively that makes no sense and says that there is another entirely different story to be told here.

—

From the excellent Simon Wren-Lewis, Professor of economics, who explains how Tory austerity has actually wrecked Britain’s economy, not helped it. Radio 4 World At One, today. (4 minutes)

Just more proof of what we already know – not only that austerity wrecks an economy, but that the Tories were going to make their cuts ANYWAY, because that’s what they believe in, and simply used the Global Crash of 2007-8 as their excuse, and the previous government as their scapegoat. With many thanks to Robert Livingstone for capturing both audios: Listen here.

And from the excellent Professor David Blanchflower – austerity has prevented recovery: Listen here.

Ideology is the reason for the Tory austerity cuts and not economic necessity.

Austerity has not encouraged investment in the UK:

The Coalition have a track record of lying and trying to mislead the public. David Cameron has now been rebuked several times for making false claims: on NHS spending, the rising national debt and the impact of his tax rises and deep spending cuts on economic growth. The Tories invented figures to claim people are now “better off”, but which totally ignored and excluded an account of the impact of significant factors like the rise in VAT, the cost of living, cuts to tax credits and other benefits.

The government is committing fraud on a grand scale. The reason for such deceit has nothing to do with public finances or the state of the economy, and everything to do with shrinking the public realm. There is an irreducibly ideological dimension to Tory economics, and by making it sound “scientific” when really, it’s more akin to philosophy or Tory buck passing, they attempt to lend it an air of authority and legitimacy it does not deserve.

The only thing that unites Tories is wealth, they mostly thrive on creating social divisions. The Tories have used a justification narrative based on a moral entrepreneur approach to scapegoat and vilify vulnerable social groups in order to justify transferring our public wealth to private bank accounts, behind the façade of austerity. What we are witnessing is a governments’ nonchalant adherence to Tory ideology, no matter what the consequences for the poorest, the sick and disabled, the unemployed and most vulnerable. Or the economy.

The Tories peddled the lie that due to Labour’s management of the economy, the UK was “on the brink bankruptcy” and claim the solution to is to cut government spending with a painful programme of austerity cuts. Of course the UK economy was growing in 2010 when the Tories took over and was subsequently plunged back into recession by Osborne’s austerity policies which have meant that the economy has not grown at all under the coalition; and for much of their tenure , it has been contracting.

Many economist have said consistently that this is the wrong approach. The best solution is to borrow or, better, create money to invest in infrastructure. But what we have instead is Osbornes’ closed economy, with a colossal redistribution of public funds to few private businesses and millionaires, who are sat on our money, whilst the government is steadily removing even more of our public capital through deep cuts. There is no investment in the infrastructure, public services – it’s a framework of increasing and devastating socio-economic entropy.

The Fitch credit rating was also downgraded due to increased borrowing by the Tories, who have borrowed more in 4 years than Labour did in 13. In fact this Tory administration have borrowed more than every single Labour government ever, combined.

The Tories have seized an opportunity to dismantle the institutions they have always hated since the post-war social democratic settlement – institutions of health, welfare, education, culture and human rights which should be provided for all citizens. The Tories attempt to destroy fundamental public support for the health, education and welfare of its people. Offering and inflicting only regressive, punitive policies and devastating cuts, the Tories lie to drag the compliant, conforming and increasingly shell-shocked electorate along as they dismantle our social democracy, our public services, fundamental rights and the very basis of our civilisation.

Whenever this authoritarian government have been challenged and opposed effectively, they simply ignore or edit the law, veto tribunal rulings or invoke archaic government privilege to bypass opposition and to get their own way with unpopular policies, such as The Health and Social Care Bill and the Welfare “Reforms”.

That a government needs to engage in such underhanded methods to pass their policy through the legislative process, and justify such policies by lying, and by the malevolent scapegoating of vulnerable sections of society via the media, informs us that those policies are not addressing public needs, and wishes; that they are not democratically motivated or processed and that they reflect a political ideology which does not accommodate social and economic realities, nor is it fitting for a so-called first world liberal democracy that is a signatory to several international human rights charters to witness a government so deceptive and arbitrary in its approach to legitimacy.

Here is a catalogue of officially recognised Tory lies used to justify their unjustifiable policies which have resulted in official reprimands.

The Tory election strategy is more of the same: Tories being conservative with the truth.

The Great Debt Lie and the Myth of the Structural Deficit.

One of the most destructive Tory myths has been officially debunked.

“The mess we inherited” – some facts with which to fight the Tory Big Lies.

Political scrapbook: Telegraph business leaders letter ‘was padded out with Sam Cam’s luvvie friends’

Thanks to the excellent Robert Livingstone for the excellent memes.

There is no such thing as a ‘one nation’ Tory: they always create two nations

March 28, 2015November 23, 2016 · 29 Comments ·

CnUOm0-WYAIa-NE Tomorrow is cancelled

Cameron has announced that he will not seek a third term of office as Prime Minister. He named three of his senior colleagues – Home Secretary Theresa May, Chancellor George Osborne and London mayor Boris Johnson – as possible replacements for the conservative leadership when he stands down. It doesn’t matter who leads the Tory party: they all share the same despotic tendency.

I’ve often thought that Conservatism is an enclave for those with socially destructive dark triad personality traits (Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and Psychopathy). Tories share the same regressive social Darwinist ideology, so they will always tend to formulate the same policies that divide society into steep hierarchies of wealth and privilege, resulting in massive inequalities, suffering and poverty, lies, corruption and indifference to the majority of the publics’ needs. No matter who is in the driving seat of the Tory tank, it will still knock most of us down and drive over us.

Cameron’s soundbites, such as “we are all in it together” and concepts like “the Big Society” hark back to a traditional paternalist Conservatism that had an element of communitarianism to offer. But without a “big state.” One nation Conservatives are often seen as being less harsh and a tad more “cuddly” than New Right Conservatives. Whilst one nation Conservatism is sometimes hailed as “progressive,” (but only ever amongst Conservatives,) that is tempered by the fact that all tories tend to hold onto a misty-eyed illusion of some great Victorian golden-age and the Feudal era “good ole’ days.” They never look forwards, only backwards.

It was the dominance of so-called “Red Toryism” that facilitated the post-war consensus which saw the welfare state embraced by the major parties in the 1940s. However, most Conservatives, including the new so-called Red Tories, claim that the post-war expansion of the state led to a “breakdown of once-strong communities.” Not only is this claim immensely counter-intuitive, it’s utter pseudo-nostalgic nonsense.

Cameron’s rhetoric is full of references to “rolling back the state”, the “re-awakening of community spirit”, and a restoration of the kind of “intermediate civic institutions” that preceded the welfare state. The whole idea of Cameron’s “big society” is that private charities fill the holes created by public spending cuts. Food banks have increasingly replaced welfare, for example, yet the point of post-1945 European welfare states was to free the needy from dependence on the insecurity of private generosity, which tends to miss out the socially marginalised, and to be least available when times are hardest.

Welfare, or social security, if you prefer, has provided a sense of security and dignity that we never previously enjoyed, it established a norm of decency, mutuality of our social obligations and created a parity of esteem and worth which was, until fairly recently, universal, regardless of wealth and status. The “big bad state” is comprised of civilised and civilising institutions. It is such stable and enduring institutions and subsequently secure individuals that are raised above a struggle for basic survival which provide a frame for coherent communities. The Conservatives, with their demagoguery of rigid class division, and policies of social stratification, tend to create ghettoes, not communities.

Traditional Conservatives were very influenced by Malthus, and opposed every form of social insurance “root and branch”, arguing, as the economist Brad DeLong put it:

“Make the poor richer, and they would become more fertile. As a result, farm sizes would drop (as land was divided among ever more children), labor productivity would fall, and the poor would become even poorer. Social insurance was not just pointless; it was counterproductive.”

Malthus was a miserable, misanthropic clergyman for whom birth control was anathema. He believed that poor people needed to learn the hard way to practice frugality, self-control, and chastity. He liked to hand out allegoric and austere hair shirts and birch rods for the poor. The traditional Conservatives also protested that the effect of social insurance would be to weaken private charity and loosen traditional social bonds of family, friends, religious, and non-governmental welfare organisations.

The moralising scrutiny, control and punishment of the poor is a quintessential element of Tory narrative. Tory ideology never changes. They refuse the lessons of history, and reject the need for coherence. Tories really are stuck in the Feudal era. They have never liked the idea of something for everyone:

“The crisis is an opportunity to sweep away the rotten postwar settlement of British politics. Labour is moribund. But David Cameron has a chance to develop a “red Tory” communitarianism, socially conservative but sceptical of neoliberal economics.” Phillip Blond, The Rise of the Red Tories, 2009.

The Telegraph identified Blond as a key “driving force behind Cameron’s Big Society agenda.” There are possibly two kinds of Tory. But both types will always engineer two nations: fundamentally demarcated by wealth and privilege: one nation of haves and another of have nots.

Conservatives also believe they have moral superiority, and they always impose a framework of moral authoritarianism on the poorest. For example, Cameron’s idea of “social responsibility” does not extend to the behaviours of irresponsible bankers, the finacial class and the tax-avoidant wealthy. It’s not just a cognitive dissonance amongst Conservatives – many in the UK fail to recognise the direct relationship between high salaries and a concentration of wealth at the top of society, and low salaries paid to the poor, and poverty at the bottom: there you have it – two nations.

The paternalism of traditional Tories and the authoritarianism of the New Right are profoundly undemocratic: neither design can reflect the needs of the public since both frameworks are imposed on a population, reflecting only the needs of the ruling class, to preserve social order.

Solidarity was said to be the movement that turned the direction of history. But we have turned away from it. Émile Durkheim, one of the three founding fathers of theoretical sociology, first developed the concept of social exclusion to describe the manifold consequences of poverty and inequality.

Much of Durkheim’s work was concerned with how societies could maintain their integrity, order and coherence. Durkheim’s answer is that our collective consciousness produces society and holds it together. His view that societies evolve through a stage of mechanistic solidarity to progress to a state of organic solidarity betrays his traditional conservative roots. But Tory notions of solidarity are not based on any belief in the value of cooperation, community, collectivism or altruism: Tories don’t feel any connection with ordinary people. It’s entirely a detached and pragmatic consideration: for Tories, social solidarity serves the sole purpose of maintaining the status quo. Preserving the two nations.

Disraeli’s Conservatism favoured a paternalistic society with the hierarchical social classes maintained but with the working class receiving support from the establishment. He emphasised the importance of social obligation rather than individualism. Disraeli warned that Britain would become divided into two “nations”, of the rich and poor, as a result of increased industrialisation and inequality. Concerned at this stark division, he supported measures to improve the lives of the people, to provide social support and protect the working classes.

One nation Conservatism originally emphasised the obligation of those at the top to those below. This was based on the Feudal concept of noblesse oblige – the belief that the aristocracy had an obligation to be generous and honourable. Disraeli felt that governments should be paternalistic, because it is “good” for society as a whole, to maintain social order. So his ultimate motivation was to simply prop up the established status quo.

Disraeli became Conservative prime minister in February 1868. He devised one nation policy to appeal to working class men as a solution to worsening divisions in society. But conservatives always conclude that the preservation of social hierarchy is in the interests of all classes, and therefore all classes should collaborate in its defense.

Both the lower and the higher classes should accept their roles and perform their respective duties.

The rich man at his castle, the poor man at his gate.

The stability and the prosperity of the nation was seen as the ultimate purpose of collaboration between classes.

Traditional Conservatives believed that organic societies are fashioned ultimately by natural necessity, and therefore cannot be improved by reform or revolution. Indeed, reform or revolution would destroy the delicate fabric of society, creating the possibility of radical social breakdown, from this perspective.

Disraeli once said: “If the cottages are happy, the castle is safe.” Characteristically pragmatic and relatively paternalistic, then.

One nation Conservatives such as R. Butler, I. Macleod, H. Macmillan and Q. Hogg, who harked back to the Disraeli pragmatist tradition, were prepared to accept the expansion of state activity ushered in via by the 1945-51 Labour government programmes, involving selective nationalisation, expansion of the welfare state, Keynesian economic policies and tripartite decision-making.

Though the Tories continued to place emphasis on the most profitable sectors of the economy, which would remain in private control and they still supported the perpetuation of economic inequality because of their belief that private property was a prerequisite for liberty and that capitalist economic inequality could best promote wider economic growth and rising living standards. However, in fairness, one nation Conservatives also recognised that full employment and the expansion of the welfare state were necessary to improve health, housing, education and to reduce poverty if the UK was to be cohesive.

Thatcher’s New Right neoliberalism was quite a radical break from Tory tradition and it embodied a regressive, mechanistic, individualistic theory of society. She said: “There’s no such thing as society; only individuals and families.”

Traditional Conservatives had a deep mistrust of human rationality and reason and a deep dislike of the abstract, certainly since Edmund Burke. In contrast, the New Right’s neoliberalism heralded a new image of “human nature,” which was very much based on the imported philosophy of Ayn Rand: we are rational and entirely self-seeking, in the context of negative economic freedom (free from state intervention, in theory, a least), within the free market. Rand rejected altruism and opposed collectivism.

Rand was a major inspiration for the American Tea Party movement, which has swept a new generation of Republicans and self-described Conservatives into power in the USA. The Randian neoliberalist economic context has also framed a political, social and moral authoritarianism, disciplinarianism and illiberality that has replaced traditional paternalism, and in this respect, the New Right pioneered a strongly anti-democratic, over-controlling state.

The ideological roots of the New Right also lie partly in the liberal free market economy that dominated the Victorian era, (and liberalism has always been about individualism), along with a strong belief in social hierarchy based on a natural order. However, laissez faire was a form of industrial capitalism. Neoliberalism is a newer form of financial capitalism. As an ideology it is totalising, because it’s also about literalising the market metaphor; thinking all interacations as governed by a rationale like that of markets.

New Right Conservatism weds meritocratic principles to the strong class divide tradition, though it’s an insincere partnership. References to meritocracy are usually used to bolster the claim by the wealthy and powerful that their wealth is deserved. Of course, by inference, poverty is also deserved. Yet we had certainly learned by the 1940s that it is social policies that create inequality and poverty.

Cameron claims Disraeli’s one nation Conservatism as a mantle. However, he has much more in common with Thatcher. Disraeli’s notion of a “benevolent hierarchy” bears little resemblance to the New Right’s persistent attacks on the dependency or entitlement culture deemed to have been created by the welfare state.

And one nation Conservatives would not privatise our public services, NHS and dismantle welfare. Nor would they endorse such unrestained neoliberalism.

The New Right is rather more about noblesse disoblige.

One nation Tories would recognise that the welfare state is a necessity that arose to protect citizens against the worst ravages of unfettered capitalism. It’s really the very least they can do to preserve social order. Inequality didn’t change as a consequence of welfare, but at least poverty was relativised, until recently.

Cameron’s policies of anti-welfarism have resulted in the return of absolute poverty. There’s a certain irony in the Tory preoccupation with preserving social order: their rigid ideologically-driven policies create the very things they fear – dissent, insecurity, disorder, and the recognition of a need for social change and reform. It’s always the case that Tory governments prompt a growth of radicalism and revolutionary ideas. That happens when people are stifled and oppressed.

Social Security policy resulted in the development of what was considered to be a state responsibility towards its citizens. Welfare is a social protection that is necessary. There was also an embedded doctrine of fostering equity in these policies, although that doctrine arose from within the Labour Party, of course.

As I have said elsewhere, New Right rhetoric is designed to have us believe there would be no poor if the welfare state didn’t “create” them. If the Conservatives must insist on peddling the myth of meritocracy, then surely they must also concede that whilst such a system has some beneficiaries, it also creates situations of insolvency and poverty for others.

This wide recognition that the raw “market forces” of laissez-faire and stark neoliberalism causes casualties is why the welfare state came into being, after all – because when we allow such competitive economic dogmas to manifest, there are invariably “winners and losers”. That is the nature of competitive individualism, and along with inequality, it’s an implicit, undeniable and fundamental part of the meritocracy script. And that’s before we consider the fact that whenever there is a Conservative-led government, there is no such thing as a “free market”: in reality, all markets are rigged for elites.

New Right Conservatism has blended classical liberalism, with its roots in competitive individualism and with ideas of a status-based social order. In contrast, democratic socialism has its foundation in solidarity. The former framework atomises society, breaking our sense of common bonds, pitching us against each other to compete for resources, fracturing our narrative of collective, common experience: it is about social exclusion. The latter framework unites us in cooperation, mutuality, mutual aid and reciprocity of perspective: it is about social inclusion.

I’ve said elsewhere that the Conservatives are creatures of habit rather than reason. Traditionalists, always. That is the why their policies are so stifling and anti-progressive for the majority of us. It’s why Tory policies don’t meet public needs. We always witness the social proliferation of fascist ideals with a Tory government, too. It stems from the finger-pointing divide and rule mantra: it’s them not us, them not us. But history refutes as much as it verifies, and we learned that it’s been the Tories all along. With a Conservative government, we are always fighting something. Poverty, social injustice: we fight for political recognition of our fundamental rights, which the Tories always circumvent. We fight despair and material hardship, caused by the rising cost of living, low wages, high unemployment and recession that is characteristic of every Tory government.

I think people often mistranslate what that something is. Because Tory rhetoric is all about othering: dividing, atomising of society into bite-sized manageable pieces by amplifying a narrative of sneaking suspicion and hate thy neighbour via the media.

The Tories foster incoherence and division. The world stopped making sense in 2010. The Tory-led government don’t even pretend to be rational policy-makers. Our foundations and our grounding are being knocked away. Everything becomes relative and fleeting. Transient and precarious.

Except for the rich and powerful: they still have their absolutes. We ordinary people are left just coping with crumbling logic, crumbling lives and a crumbling sense of what is real.

It strikes me that whilst we appear to have enclaves of consensus – and the media help perpetuate that impression – when you step back from that, you begin to see how divisive that apparent group consensus actually is, paradoxically. It’s really a form of bystander apathy.

We have in groups/out groups. We divide and make people into “others.” Each group fighting for something in a manufactured context of “scare resources”, the rising cost of living, sometimes against each other, but with no combined effort and genuine cooperation amongst us, that leaves each individual group wishing in the wind.

Now is the time for people to work together and value cooperation, joint efforts and pooled resources. People’s identities only make sense in the context of society, anyway. The Tories are historically unempathically, unremorsefully and irresponsibly wrong. We are social and interdependent, inter-relating creatures. Social hierarchies damage our bonds.

The barbarians are not outside the gates: they are inside the castle governing us, inflicting irremediable economic deprivation, extending inequalities and divisions of wealth and income, organising our society into competing and antagonistic interests.

Two nations.

Thanks to Robert Livingstone for the excellent memes.

It’s time to end the lie that Labour and Tories are ‘the same’ on austerity – Sunny Hundal & Sue Jones

March 28, 2015April 2, 2018 · 9 Comments ·

It is a claim so ubiquitous that most people repeat it without even having to explain it:

‘there’s hardly any difference between the main political parties’.

It’s a claim the Greens, SNP and UKIP now repeat endlessly without being challenged. It is also a claim exposed as complete falsehood last week.

For all the Chancellor’s giveaways and triumphant rhetoric during the Budget, the most significant change was a capitulation to Labour’s charge that the Tories were cutting spending to 1930s levels. In fact the difference between Labour and Tories – especially on economic matters – is the biggest it has been in over a generation. To claim otherwise is to be ignorant of the facts.

Let’s go over the numbers first. In December last year, Osborne said he would slash government spending until it reached 35.2% of GDP, a level last reached during the 1930s.

Rather than accept the cuts, Labour attacked his plans as “extreme and ideological” and said they would not match Osborne’s race to the bottom.

The difference between Labour and Tory plans on spending is colossal. To cut spending to 35.2%, the IFS said Osborne would have to cut departmental spending by £55bn from 2015 to 2020, over £20bn more than what has been slashed over the last five years. Key government departments would have to cut spending by over 50%, after already being cut to the bone. It would render many of them useless.

Labour plans are significantly different but lost in technical detail, which has allowed many on the left to wrongly claim they are the same. Firstly, they have committed to raising taxes to cut the UK’s £90 billion yearly budget deficit (i.e. the 50p rate, Mansion tax, bankers’ bonus tax, a higher bank levy), while Osborne has pledged to focus on spending cuts rather than tax rises.

More importantly, the Tories plan an overall budget surplus by 2018-19, while Labour has only committed to a current budget surplus in the next parliament. This sounds like a boring technical detail – and in many ways it is – but the practical difference is vast.

It means that while Coalition had planned over £55 Billion in spending cuts, Labour had pledged only to plug potentially a £4 Billion gap – which could even come from tax rises. A difference of Labour and Tory plans of more than £50 Billion is not to be sniffed at (in comparison the entire Scottish Budget of 2014 was £35 Billion).

To claim that Labour and Tory ‘austerity’ is the same, as some on the left have done, isn’t just ludicrous but a bare-faced lie. It illustrates a huge distortion of the facts. Of course, the Greens and SNP have an interest in saying that Labour and Tories are the same, but that doesn’t make it true.

Last week was significant because Osborne was forced into a u-turn on the biggest issue of the past five years. Of course, the press played this down. He retreated, somewhat slightly, from extreme austerity: pledging to cut spending to 36% of GDP rather than 35.2%. This mostly came from the OBR’s projection that spending on debt interest in 2019-20 will be £9bn less than it expected earlier.

But Osborne’s sleight-of-hand had bigger meaning for Labour: now it means they don’t have to make any cuts over the next parliament, as the IFS pointed out. The difference between the two parties is now even more stark.

To the naysayers who still maintain that Labour and Tories are ‘the same’, a bit more explanation is required. Last year Osborne said he would publish a ‘Budget Responsibility Charter’ and test whether Labour would vote for it. It put Labour in a lose-lose position: they would be painted as ‘profligate’ if they didn’t sign up, and painted as signing up to Tory austerity by the left if they did. Neither was true, since signing up was consistent with Labour’s initial plans. Labour decided to avoid Osborne’s trap and he didn’t bother publishing the Charter. It changed nothing.

Furthermore, the claim that Labour has signed up to Tory austerity until 2016 is untrue. As a matter of technicality, Labour cannot reverse plans already put in place for that fiscal year after being elected.

This has always been a somewhat technical debate, obfuscated by many who have an axe to grind. For political and economic reasons, Labour could never be like Syriza, so it has always been ridiculous to hope it could. Plus, it’s easy for the Greens and SNP to make wild claims about rejecting austerity without spelling out how a massive increase in spending required would be funded.

I suspect that most people who have already decided that Labour and Tories are the same won’t ever be convinced. Labour’s plans won’t catch the world on fire, but to claim they are the same as Tory austerity plans is a lie that has finally been laid to rest.

With big thanks to Labourlist author Sunny Hundal.

Recently, the SNP, Greens, TUSC and other parties on the so-called left have made the claim that: “Labour voted for austerity.” This is such a blatant lie. The vote, clearly stated on the Hansard record (see 13 Jan 2015: Column 738, Charter for Budget Responsibility), was pertaining strictly to the motion: “That the Charter for Budget Responsibility: Autumn Statement 2014 update, which was laid before this House on 15 December 2014, be approved.” That isn’t about austerity at all.

The charter sets out that the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) will continue to monitor our fiscal rules. As we know, the OBR has written extremely critical economic forecasts and analysis of austerity and the Tory spending cuts, clearly expressing the risks that the Chancellor is running and the scale of the damage his strategy will inflict on what remains of our public services.

Furthermore, austerity and fiscal figures are not mentioned at all in the Charter.

It’s worth noting that whilst Ed Balls challenged Osborne, there was a curious silence from the SNP and the Green Party. It was Ed Balls that challenged Osborne’s outrageous claims regarding “halving the deficit”- such a blatant lie, upon which even the exceedingly Conservative Spectator spluttered contempt. Or any of the other lies, some of which have already earned the Conservatives official rebukes from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). (See “bankruptcy lie” for example, on the hyperlinked article)

Furthermore, it’s about time that some MP’s, including Caroline Lucas, amongst others, recognised that there is a fundamental difference between the meaning of the word budget and the word austerity. Conflating the two for the purpose of politicking is unprincipled and dishonest.

It’s also worth noting from the same debate on the Hansard record:

13 Jan 2015 : Column 746

Caroline Lucas: Does the Chancellor agree with me that with the feeble and inconsistent opposition coming from the Labour Front Bench, there is a very good reason for seeing the SNP, the Greens and Plaid as the real opposition on this issue because we are clear and consistent about the fact that austerity is not working?

Mr Osborne: That shows why we want the hon. Lady’s party in the TV debates.

Yes, I just bet they do, to collaborate with the Tories in attacking and undermining the Labour Party, not the Coalition, who are, after all, the ones responsible for introducing austerity measures. I don’t imagine for a moment that Osborne values further challenges to his outrageous claims of efficacy regarding austerity measures.

What is very evident when you read through this debate, is that Ed Balls and a couple of other Labour MPs presented the ONLY challenges to Osborne on this matter, just to reiterate this important point.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that Ed Miliband established the International ANTI-austerity Alliance. Back in 2012, Miliband said: “There is a grip of centre-right leadership on Europe which has said there’s only one way forward and that’s austerity, and you’ve got to have a decisive move away from that.” (See also: Labour leader Ed Miliband’s anti-austerity alliance will fight for the European dream.)

And why would Miliband be attending ANTI-austerity protests if he supported austerity?

Labour leader Ed Miliband speaks on stage at Hyde Park, during the TUC organised protest against austerity measures in London

Labour leader Ed Miliband speaks on stage to over 150,000 at Hyde Park, during the TUC organised protest against austerity measures in London.

It’s interesting to see the Chicago Tribune’s article: Ed Balls, UK’s anti-austerity finance chief in waiting. Balls dismissed Osborne as a “downgraded chancellor” after Britain lost its triple-A credit rating.

One of his main charges has been that the government is unfairly spreading the economic pain it deems necessary to fix the economy. Austerity cuts are the burden of the poorest citizens.

Balls says that a decision to cut the top tax rate amounts to an unjustified “tax cut for millionaires”, whilst his party has been scathing of the Conservative “reform” of the welfare system.

A point echoed many times by Ed Miliband, too. Accusing the government of making lower or no income groups pay for the recovery while shielding the rich is a claim which strikes a chord with some voters who view Cameron and his government – many of whom were educated at the same top fee-paying school – as out of touch.

Caroline Lucas was born in Malvern to Conservative parents and attended Malvern Girls’ College (which became Malvern St James in 2006), a fee-paying private school. Ed Miliband, on the other hand, went to a comprehensive school.

Polls also show that many voters approve of the government’s drive to rein in welfare costs and the government has demanded that Labour spell out what they would do to fix the economy. They have, but with understandable caution.

Labour’s careful, costed and evidence-based policies include: a Bankers’ Bonus Tax; a Mansion Tax; repeal of the Bedroom Tax; a reversal of the Pension Tax relief that the Tories gifted to millionaires; a reversal of the Tory Tax cut for Hedge Funds; freezing gas and electricity bills for every home a the UK for at least 20 months; the big energy firms will be split up and governed by a new tougher regulator to end overcharging; banning exploitative zero hour contracts; introduction of a living wage (already introduced by some Labour councils); a reversal of the £107,000 tax break that the Tories have given to the millionaires; reintroduction of the 50p tax; scrapping George Osborne’s “Shares for Rights” scheme that has opened up a tax loophole of £1 billion; ensuring Water Companies place the poorest households on a Social Tariff that makes it easier for them to pay their Water Bills; breaking up the banks and separating retail banking from investment banking; introduction of measures to prevent corporate tax avoidance, scrapping the Profit Tax Cut (Corporation Tax) that George Osborne has already announced for 2015 and many more.

These are not austerity measures. They are strongly redistributive policies.

It’s difficult enough opposing the manipulative, lying authoritarian Conservative-led government, without having to constantly counter lies and smears from fringe parties claiming to be on the Left, while propping up the Right simply to gain votes and undermine the only feasible opposition to the Tories, currently.

Shame on them.

Sue Jones

Labour’s fiscal responsibility and caution isn’t austerity, so stop doing Lynton Crosby’s job for him.

The ultimate aim of the “allthesame” lie is division and disempowerment of the Left.

Narxism

Electioneering and grandstanding: how to tell the difference between a moral political party and a moralistic one.

Pictures courtesy of Robert Livingstone