Enough Already: Too Much Praise For Thatcher

Following on from my reminder four years ago: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2009/04/bitter-legacy-of-margaret-thatcher.html 
I guess I am not the only person who has been angered perhaps even sickened by the incessant coverage of the death of Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013).  I am sure it will drag on until the actual funeral on 18th April.  At least some of the media acknowledge that she was a 'divisive' politician.  However, few seem to point out that whilst 28% of the population think she was the best prime minister Britain had, many of the majority utterly despised her and all that she stood for.  Her greatest success is probably to have survived until a government was elected that actually made hers look moderate in some respects.  Thatcher denied the existence of society whereas Cameron clearly believes in it and is driving very hard to restore the pattern it had in the mid-19th century if not earlier.

I am sickened that there is to be a military-style funeral for Thatcher.  It is called a ceremonial funeral rather than a state funeral; this is the style that was introduced for Princess Diana and the Queen Mother.  The Queen is attending, so the difference to a state funeral is minimal.  The military involvement seems particularly inappropriate as Thatcher's policies led to the death and mutilation of British soldiers in an unnecessary war which was carried out primarily for her personal electoral benefit.  There are people who are dead who would have been alive if Thatcher had not been elected.  They did not receive a ceremonial funeral.

There are millions of people whose lives have been wrecked because of Thatcher.  Generally they are not the people who are asked to comment, though I am glad that there has been some coverage from former coal-mining villages and from MPs willing to speak out against her.  Whole communities were wrecked by her policies.  Thatcher aimed to destroy the coal mining industry right from the beginning of her regime and stock-piled two years' worth of coal for the purpose.  Her policy not only drove up unemployment and the associated costs in police overtime payments and social benefit for those made jobless, but also put Britain's fuel security at risk.  We face a large challenge in providing enough energy in Britain and are having to pay for expensive gas, simply because of the fuel policy of the Thatcher years.

Thatcher praised greed and rewarded those who exploited others.  The selling off of utilities to companies that make vast profits and provide an ever declining service at rising costs were another direct Thatcher policy which we are still suffering from even today.  The risky adventurism of the financiers of the City of London freed and encouraged by Thatcher led to the dire economic circumstances of today which continue to lead to unemployment and the destruction of the lives of millions.

Thatcher promoted the privatisation of public services at local authority level and created the marketplace in the National Health Service which directly led to the death of patients in locations such as Mid Staffordshire and right across the health service due to 'super-bugs' allowed to persist through insufficient hygiene by private cleaning companies.  The compulsion to have the cheapest service ironically fuelled the demand for cheap migrant labour which the Conservatives now feel is a problem themselves.  Without Thatcher they would not be facing that challenge.

Thatcher's policies through the compulsory selling of social housing has led to the homelessness we see today, not simply people living on the streets but families jammed into unhealthy bed & breakfast hotels across the country.  This is a costly way to house people.  They are not tenants; they suffer ill-health because the conditions are poor and they cannot eat well.  Living in a council house was never luxury but it did not push adults and especially children into the difficult situations they are with the current policy on housing.

I could just keep going on and on about how much Thatcher damaged Britain and the lives of millions of people living here.  Cameron follows a different form of Conservatism to Thatcher as he does not even both to try to reach out to ordinary Conservative voters and has seen a rapid reduction in the police and armed forces that were strongly supported by previous Conservative governments.  Yet, despite all Cameron's praise for Thatcher, his government is having to deal with many social and economic problems created by her government.  The things they whine about are a legacy of her smashing up of British society as it had been developing.  She left a legacy which still impinges on us thirty years later in so many bad ways.  Yes, some people have prospered, but they were the privileged anyway and would have done well whoever was in office.  Their prosperity, however, clearly provided no benefit to Britain as it is a more dangerous, poorer and more unhealthy place than it was in 1979.

Given this record and all that Thatcher rained down on this country, I guess no-one will be surprised that I find it impossible to listen to any comments about how 'impressive' she was.  She had rigid ideas that have meant misery for millions of people even after she left office and no doubt for years, probably decades after her death.  If I believed in Hell I know she would be there answering for all of her crimes.  Unfortunately in this secular world, it is just those who have suffered as a result of her policies who have to keep reminding society actually what has been inflicted on them and whose fault it was that of Margaret Thatcher.

The Myth Of An Alternative To The Bank Bail Out

Last month I was particularly angered by a comment from Defence Secretary Dr. Liam Fox when he said that the main reason for the cuts in defence expenditure was no fault of the coalition government rather it was the consequence of the sustained damage Dr. Gordon Brown had inflicted on the economy as prime minister 2007-10.  Among leading Conservative politicians, Fox has been one of the most vocal in attributing the blame for the UK's economic problems on the previous Labour governments, more so even than Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osbourne.  Cameron and Osborne use the large deficit created by bailing out the banks at the onset of the recession as the excuse for their harsh public spending cuts, which would have been imposed even if the UK was in a boom because the current batch of Conservatives believe that the state is too large and needs to be culled as abruptly as possible.  Fox, however, takes it a step further and peddles the idea that for some reason Brown and his government deliberately 'wrecked' the economy for some unknown motive.  Fox, in many ways, is a throwback to the 1970s and 1980s seeing some Communist conspiracy at the heart of British government trying to do the worst for the decent British public.  The reality was that whilst governments do and pursue a particular agenda, and Brown less vigorously than the prime ministers that bracketed him, a lot of their activity is responsive rather than proactive, particularly in the age of the globalised economy when the demand from copper in China leads to thieves in the UK disabling electricity sub-stations and sections of railway in order to get the scrap copper.

All governments say that they could have done things better than their rivals.  There is an implication in everything that Cameron, Osborne, Fox, et al say, that if, for example, rather than Tony Blair handing the premiership to Gordon Brown in June 2007, there had been an election and David Cameron had come to power, then the banking crisis and the recession which came the following year, would have been handled so differently, so much 'better', if Fox is to be believed, that, in fact, we would not now be facing such a large deficit and the consequent 'need' to slash so much of public service.  So let us look at what the Conservatives might have done differently.

The first thing to establish is what would have happened if the government had done nothing.  Even before the global recession had started, in the UK, the Northern Rock bank ran into problems.  It lent 18.9% of all of the mortgages in the UK and handled deposits of £24 billion compared to loans and assets of £113 billion.  In the summer of 2007 it found it difficult to borrow money to cover its lending.  As the US sub-prime market began to stagger, lenders became reluctant to lend on any mortgages even though British lending was generally on a far more restricted basis.  I was not surprised that Northern Rock was struggling having had much anecdotal evidence of its poor customer care combined with its aggressive marketing of products including very high percentage mortgages; this has raised its market share from 14.6% in 2006.  Rapidly fading faith led to a 'run' on the bank with £1 billion in deposits being withdrawn on 14th September 2007. This was the first run on a British bank for more than a century.  To stop the bank from collapsing, the British 'lender of last resort', the Bank of England lent the company £27 billion and in 2008 bought up £3 billion of effectively worthless shares in the company.  In February 2008 the bank was de facto nationalised. 

At least ten other offers to buy the bank were rejected because these potential owners were unable to repay the public money loaned to the company.  Interestingly, the US company Lehman Brothers which was soon to collapse in a spectacular way was one of the bidders.  Others were equity funds such as Terra Firma Capital Partners, J.C. Flowers and Ceberus, investment companies like Olivant and other banks like Bradford & Bingley and Lloyds-TSB.  If Terra Firma's bid is anything to go buy, some of the equity fund purchases would have been de facto asset stripping processes.  Interestingly, before Northern Rock was effectively taken over by the state 40% of its best business accounts was transferred to a company called Granite based in the Channel Islands which have different tax laws.  Though Granite does not receive new business, this effectively meant the cream of the bank's business (and profit potential) remained free of state control.

Now, if the state had not stepped in, then we would have seen the run on the bank continue, reducing the amount of deposits even further than before in relation to its loan commitments. There was one incident in which one bank manager was barricaded in their office because two customers were unable to withdraw their £1 million after the online banking facility of Northern Rock collapsed.  It is likely that violent scenes would have continued as the bank would have found it impossible to cover all the withdrawals with the relative low level of reserves it kept. At this stage the bank would be compelled to foreclose on its mortgages, i.e. insisting lenders immediately repay their loans or lose their homes to the bank.  This would not have helped the bank much as they would have had to dispose of the property quickly to recoup funds and in many towns the housing market would have been utterly disrupted as numerous properties were auctioned off.  As it was some borrowers, including charities, accused Northern Rock of pursuing aggressive repossession especially in 2007-8.

Some borrowers could have transferred their mortgages to other banks but this would have brought pressure on to them as they would increasingly have faced the challenges Northern Rock had already faced to raise loans to cover the mortgages they lent.  Thus, even before the main recession started, not bailing out Northern Rock could have become a crash in the UK economy. The issue for many was that the total support to Northern Rock came to £100 billion which was added to the National Debt meaning it was equivalent to 37.5% of the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) close to what is seen as the highest permitted level of debt by a state. 

I suppose that the difference that the Conservatives would have done, is being so averse to nationalisation, they would have allowed Northern Rock to have been sold to another bank, with no guarantee that the public funds put into the bank would ever be returned.  Under the de facto nationalisation, by August 2008, the bank had already paid back £9.5 billion of what it had been given, so reducing its part of the National Debt.  It seems unlikely, given that so much Conservative support comes from property owners that they would have allowed Northern Rock to collapse, it held too large a market share.  Thus, there would have been addition to the National Debt just in the way the Conservatives complain about.  In addition, there approach would have meant that the government would not have had a chance of ever seeing the money it had provided returned at some date in the future. 

The key difference would have had to have occurred back in the 1990s when regulation of banks and The City financial bodies was far too lax.  The Blair government like the Major and Thatcher ones that had preceded it, seemed beholden to the financial institutions and was happy for them to act recklessly and earn big profits.  The 'invisible' trade of financial products has been Britain's strongest industry since the 1980s and no prime minister seemed to have the will or the wish to temper the behaviour of not only merchant banks but also high street banks too.  The conversion of mutual building societies into banks after 1986 and their focus on shareholders rather than customers did not help the situation in the mortgage sector, because they were prone to take more risks.  A lot of this could be foreseen, the Bank of England had apparently been working through scenarios of such difficulties as early as 2004 and like many others saw Northern Rock and Halifax/Bank of Scotland (popularly referred to these days as HBOS) as likely candidates.

The ongoing sub-prime mortgage crisis in the USA and the subsequent tightening of loans to banks meant that many UK banks beyond Northern Rock began to experience crises.  The Bank of England offered £4.4 billion in relief in September 2007 and it was drained by banks within hours. In October 2008, the Bank of England offered £37 billion to Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), Lloyds TSB and HBOS who were struggling to cover their loans and certainly to grant new ones.  Would the Conservatives have refused to offer such funds to the banks and so, having avoided the collapse with Northern Rock, have seen even greater problems as these banks collapsed?  RBS had assets of £2.5 trillion in December 2008 and Lloyds Banking Group £1.195 trillion, thus the scale of their demise would have made that of Northern Rock seem minor.

RBS had had difficulty in raising funds from April 2008 and in the end first 60%, in March 2009 70% and in November 2009, 84% of the bank was taken over by the state.  RBS has been shedding assets since early in 2008 but did not close its tax avoidance department until March 2009 and in December 2009 stood by plans to pay £1.5 billion in bonuses to staff in its investment arm.  Lloyds-TSB already an amalgam of an old bank and a building society turned bank, took over HBOS in September 2008.  Like these other banks, through 2008 HBOS itself an amalgam of a bank and building society turned bank, saw rapid falls in its shares.  The government approved of the combination of Lloyds-TSB with HBOS even though it was effectively counter to competition as the 'super-bank' has 38 million customers, compared to a UK population of 61.8 million people.  This buy-out effectively relieved the government of having to take over HBOS itself.  However, the continued difficulty in banks raising funds meant that in 2009 the government bought 43% of the Lloyds Banking Group.  EU rules means that by 2013, it will have divested itself of the TSB brand and hundreds of branches of the retail group.  Now, it seems unlikely that the Conservatives would have overseen the nationalisation of any bank.  They certainly would have backed the buy-out of Lloyds-TSB of HBOS, but then in 2009 what would they have done with this super-bank running into difficulty given that so many people and businesses were dependent on its stability?  The likely solution from their view would have been to sell it to a consortium of equity funds.  Given equity funds' desire for fast profit, it is very likely that we would have seen even faster shedding of staff than the 15,000 made redundant by the company in 2010, a fifth of the total workforce.  By November 2009, RBS has similarly shed over 19,000 jobs.  Again, if the state had not stepped in and the only remaining source of support had been equity funds or perhaps foreign banks, then this figure is likely to have been higher. 

The Bradford & Bingley bank's mortgage book in was bought by the government in December 2008 whilst the savings and bank network was bought by Abbey National, itself owned by Spanish bank, Santander. Without UK state intervention, the only way to have avoid collapse of banks, many far bigger than Northern Rock would have been to hawk them to equity funds or to institutions from other countries.  Spain with its insistence on higher reserves being held by its banks almost inadvertently put its banks in a stronger position to weather the financial crises of 2007-9.

Aside from the state taking over banks, the British government, following the US model, but leading the way in Europe also provided funds that could be used by other banks, 'quantitative easing' to stand in for the lack of available funds on the commercial market. In October 2008 the government made available £500 billion but only RBS and Lloyds-TSB took any of these funds.  Barclays (with £2.3 trillion assets at the end of 2008) refused assistance and turned instead to the Qatari government for funds.  So, even though it would not accepted one government's funds it was happy to take them from another government.  This may have been a model that a Cameron government coming into power in 2007 would have promoted more widely for UK banks in the place of the British government nationalising or providing funds.  HSBC (with £1.736 trillion assets), the other key bank in the UK, was able to weather the financial crisis in the UK through share issues and that unlike the other banks discussed it was a multi-national bank on an already large scale.  A second package of another £50 billion in January 2009 and an increase of state ownership of Lloyds-TSB shares to 65% was announced due to the bank suffering from having taken on HBOS's losses. 

Now, the Conservatives may argue that there was no need to come forward with these funds, especially by 2009 when things seemed to be settling.  To them, no doubt, it all appears far too Keynesian in approach, stimulating the economy through state intervention.  However, much of what happens in the financial world depends on confidence.  A key problem for British banks was not that they had so many bad loans (though some did have a sizeable number) more that international lenders lost confidence in lending to any business engaged in lending mortgages no matter the quality of them.  Thus, the extra funds put forward in the latter stages were important in rebuilding this confidence, not only of lenders, but vitally of savers.  Banks have moved far from when they were dependent on depositors to provide the funds for their businesses, but what is saved cannot be ignored.  In fact, banks that weathered the situation were those who tended to have more deposits and reserves.

In total, the government paid out £131 billion in funds to keep banks from collapsing; including £107 million in fees for financial advice from companies from December 2007 to December 2009.  Other potential expenses such as borrowing support, money put into increase liquidity and protection for savings, brought the total costs to £850 billion, though of course with the easing of the situation not all these funds were called upon.  In addition, through nationalising banks, the government to some extent ensured they would get some of their money back; having them sold to private companies especially foreign ones would have meant that the government's investment to bring stabiliy, and, vitally, to try to increase the amount of lending needed by businesses and house buyers, would have never come back and in fact would have left the UK economy.

To blame the Labour government for the size of the National Debt resulting from the support it gave banks 2007-9 is false.  No government would have been able to allow Northern Rock let alone RBS or HBOS to collapse.  Even the folding of Bradford & Bingley would have had severe consequences beyond just those who saved with or borrowed from that bank.  The Conservatives, many of whom come from banking backgrounds, would not have let their friends go to the wall.  Thus, billions of pounds was needed and this would have gone on the National Debt.  I accept that rather than nationalising, the Conservatives most likely would have encouraged buy-outs by private equity companies and foreign companies.  Whilst this would have saved funds in the short-term, it would have meant that any money paid to banks most likely would never have come back, and, particularly with the private equity companies, the stability would be short lived as the banks would be broken up for what assets they could release.  The UK since the 1950s if not longer has had a real focus on privately-owned housing as a core element of its economic life, much more than any other country.  Instability in the housing market impinges widely in the UK economy and society.  Thus, the closure of banks, the foreclosure of loans, even just a greater restriction on lending than we see now, would all have dented this important sector of the economy, having a knock-on effect on purchasing and in turn jobs and economic activity.  Perhaps the Conservatives could have save a few billions by now bailing out the banks to the extent they were, but the cost would have been more instability and in turn falling tax returns, so reducing any saving they may have made.

The increase in the National Debt was a responsive policy not a proactive one as Fox and other Conservatives pretend.  If they had been in power they would have been compelled to do very much the same.  The alternatives would have only saved some small sums and at a cost to longer-term stability that many would have baulked at.  If seeking blame, one focus has to be on the freedom which financial institutions have had since the years of the Thatcher governments, though, of course, this has been a global trend, especially in the USA from where so often the UK takes its lead.  The Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, in line with other Conservative governments throughout the 20th century but boosted by New Right attitudes that appeared in the 1970s, believed in deregulation and the state standing back in many sectors of the economy, not least in the banking world.  Allowing building societies to become banks was one element in this trend building towards the UK aspect of the crisis of 2007-9.  However, on coming to power in 1997 under Tony Blair, Labour was beholden to the Thatcherite attitude.  Blair was a Thatcherite, making the Bank of England independent was an element of this.  Gordon Brown as Chancellor of the Exchequer was prudent, but in many ways was simply lucky.  No-one during the Blair years tried to rein in the behaviour of the banks and it was only sheer good fortune that meant the crisis did not hit in 1999 or 2003 or some other time in that period. 

Of course, the current government is a clear advocate of deregulation, unsurprisingly as it has been an unchallenged political trend of the last 30 years.  However, it means that the banks remain as free as ever to behave irresponsibily.  It is right that protestors from UK Uncut go into banks and turn them into libraries or woodland.  We could not let the banks collapse, it would have led to a social and economic crisis in the UK unlike anything we had seen.  The taxpayer provided the funds to bail them out after their mistakes, driven by pure greed for massive profits.  We have paid twice because now to fund that the government says it has to be taken out of public services with huge cuts, not by getting the banks to pay back what they received and in this I mean not only funds but also the steps to boost confidence and stop runs.  They do not even have the grace to curtail their vast earnings, they just behave as they did before, uncowed by what happened.  There is nothing to stop a similar crisis manifesting itself this year, next year, sometime soon and then where will be the funds to save the banks this time? It is not a scare story to recognise that in the life of this parliament we could see the end of a banking system that we have become familiar with in the last 40 years and a return to something very dated and very out of step with the rest of the world. 

It seems that, next time, UK banks will, in large part, stop being owned by British companies but by European and probably Chinese institutions.  A number will be asset stripped by equity funds, the only ones who have the money to afford to intervene.  Say goodbye to your savings, say goodbye to getting a mortgage unless you are already wealthy, say goodbye to free banking, say goodbye to even having a bank account if you do not have a well-paid job (especially once the Post Office accounts are privatised).  The current government panders to its banking friends and uses the myth that somehow Brown deliberately wrecked the economy as the excuse for their reverse social engineering and smashing up of the state.  It is a myth.  In the same position they would have done minimally different and like Blair and Brown, have done nothing to stop the chance that it will happen again, this time with no safety net.

Cameron's Blunder with the Electorate

It seems very few people voting in the May 2010 election were aware that the Conservative Party, if it came to power, even as part of a coalition, was going to pursue a hard monetarist policy that makes the policies of the Thatcher years look bland.  I complained on this blog that there was very little in the party leader, David Cameron's statements on policy before and during the election and now it is apparent why that was the case as his intentions were clearly to smash the public sector, stimulate the unemployment of millions, crush demand and find many more opportunities for his friends and potential future friends to make money providing previously state-provided services.  The borrowing taken out by the Brown government 2008-10, following Keynesian principles, though ironically to buoy up only the banking sector (who without a gram of gratitude to us tax payers who saved them have continued to take huge salaries and bonuses), rather than stimulate the whole economy, has supposedly given Cameron as prime minister the right to smash up the British economy on the basis of ideology rather than any real practical economic approach.

Of course, we have seen this before.  Margaret Thatcher was a convert to New Right monetarist views in the mid-1970s and they caught hold in different degrees of virulence in both the Conservative and Labour parties in the late 1970s, assisted by interest groups, notably in the UK's case, the International Monetary Fund.  Consequently we saw in the economic policies of the Callaghan government 1976-9 the foundations of what Thatcher would pursue more vigorously 1979-90.  The approach was echoed especially in the USA but also large parts of Europe and was seen as the path all the states coming out of Communist control towards the end of this period should follow.  Thatcher's approach was to reduce direct taxation whilst increasing indirect taxation (i.e. VAT on goods) and severely reduce the public sector through privatisation in order to reduce the supply of money in the economy and keep down inflation.  It was not applied that clinically and Thatcher also took revenge on certain sectors of the economy, notably coal mining and also embraced ideological, not only economic elements of the New Right, such as crushing trade union power, which, it was argued was an inflationary pressure too.  Many supporters of Thatcher benefited, having their companies take over everything from collecting refuse and cleaning hospitals to running the major utilities, though railway privatisation was not to come until John Major succeeded Thatcher.

Thatcher's policies led to mass unemployment.  People do not seem to realise/remember the way that unemployment was measured during the Thatcher years; the figures excluded numerous people who these days are counted as unemployed.  Thus, when official figure in 1982 was 3.072 million there were actually hundreds of thousands more people out of work.  In 1997 the new Labour government moved towards ILO figures which are more accurate, yet continued to massage their figures to an extent.  You can see the gap when looking even at Labour figures in 2001 which claimed unemployment was below 1 million when, in fact, on ILO measurements it was 1.535 million.  With such errors we can estimate that in 1982 unemployment was probably at least 3.5 million if not 4.5 million, anyway between one eighth and one fifth of the working age population was unemployed, depending on the region you were in, even under official Conservative government figures.  The UK which had moved to have service-sector industry as the largest contributor to the economy over manufacturing as early as 1974, now rushed headlong into shedding much more of its manufacturing and primary industry, i.e. coal mining, agriculture.  Of course, this was part of the European trend at the time but it was done sharply and far faster due to government policies.

Despite hitting record levels of unemployment, Margaret Thatcher kept on being voted back into power, being the longest serving prime minister since 1827.  Her government had a 44-seat majority in 1979; 144-seat majority in 1983 and 102-seat majority in 1987.  She was removed from power by her own party in 1990 so never actually lost a general election as leader of the Conservative Party.  Her successor, John Major, who continued her policies, but tried a more 'human face' to them won a majority of 21 seats, though ironically receiving the highest number of votes any party had won up until that date, scoring over 14 million (of course rising population levels made this easier, but Major got 1 million more votes than the Labour Party scored in 1951 when it actually lost the election despite getting more votes than the Conservatives: this is a consequence of the distortion of the popular vote in the British system).  Now, Cameron has no majority, he can only remain in power either with the acquiesence of the Liberal Democrats, or what he was fortunate to be able to do, having them in a coalition with the Conservatives.  I doubt even if he manages to limp to the end of his (hoped-for fixed) term of office, he will not win the next election.

Why do I think this?  Cameron has learnt from George W. Bush('s adviors) that if you use something so apparently scary, then you effectively get a blank cheque to carry out whatever extreme policies you want to.  I have already outlined what cutting 25% from the Department for Education will mean to your local school in terms of teacher numbers, let alone what it will mean for prisons, social workers, health care professionals, job centre staff, etc.  To reach that figure you could easily wipe out whole departments of government and their employees, e.g. laying off all teachers and all prison staff only scratches the surface of the cuts.  Thus, all of us, even if we use private education, private health care and drive our car everywhere are going to see the impact.  Have you tried telephoning a tax office recently?  Will you dispose of all your own refuse when the dustbin collectors come once per month?  Will you feel safe when every prison has lost a quarter of its staff and the police have lost a quarter of theirs and there are literally no social workers in some towns?  Yes, Bush's policies work to a certain extent, but they do not buy you or your ideas longevity, you can see that the US electorate preferred a (half-)black President over more of Bush.

While Cameron may have learnt from Bush, he does not seem to have learnt at all from Margaret Thatcher.  What enabled her to come back to office time after time, despite her running down so much of the British economy and so throwing people right across the social spectrum out of work, was that she worked on building a core constituency across the country.  There has always been the 'working class Tory' in the UK, i.e. someone from an ordinary background who may not have had many opportunities in life but adheres to the aspirational aspects of Conservatism, driven by patriotism and a belief that personal problems are not shaped by impersonal factors like the economy or society but by personal effort.  Thatcher knew that beside the big business people who went round gathering the fruits of lower taxes, deregulation of working environments and privatisation, there was another constituency to attract.  These were the people enabled to buy their own council houses and who bought a few shares in British Gas.  These were the people who were told it was the trade union at their workplace causing the unemployment not the employer making cuts to reduce costs and re-employ the same people at lower wages.  These are the people that won John Major the 1992 election and bolstered Thatcher's majorities.  These are the people who went over to Blair who seemed to speak their language, had a bit of the tawdry glamour they like, was not going to reverse the Thatcher policies and Thatcher bigotry against 'laziness' that they love.

Cameron is not addressing this constituency.  Instead, he has gone for his 'big society' which sounds painfully like a Liberal Party policy from the mid-1970s.  It may be based in Christianity, but these days it seems rooted in a kind of wishy-washy hippy approach to things.  Of course, Cameron sees charities and volunteers as stepping into the void left by sweeping aside huge swathes of national and local authority provision.  However, he does not realise, since Thatcher declared there was 'no society' people feel absolutely no obligation to help their neighbours, and their sense of 'community' is very narrow, excluding a large range of people in their district on basis of class, ethnicity, age, even which town they were born in.  They have no interest in helping these people and feel uncomfortable in being pressed to do so.  They never despised 'the state' in the way Thatcher did, because in fact through the 1980s it was the state which gave them the fruits.  In addition, the state, takes away from them all the things they would otherwise have to worry about, like where the young people of their district will live.  In fact, they want a stronger state with more police and stricter rules about who lives where.  Cameron's big society depends on shared vision and a willingness to help the less fortunate, this is not what the Thatcher supporters want, they favour segregation and their 'fair share' of state provision.  Just look at the schools they have flocked to, faith schools with selection.  Cameron, and especially Michael Gove, in contrast, tell them to set up their own schools, something they do not have the time from watching sport or going to the tanning salon, to do.

Cameron's problem is that he has been far too distant, all his life, from mainstream society.  Thatcher came from a grocer's family and went to grammar school.  John Major worked in a garden ornament business, for the electricity board and in a bank.  Cameron and Blair were clearly part of the elite and for much of their lives never mixed with ordinary people.  Even though Thatcher and Major were certainly above working class, they met and saw people who were far worse off than themselves.  They may have then seen it as the way to get on was through your own efforts, but they saw people who were less lucky or did not have the inclination to 'pull themselves up'.  Thatcher knew that out of the batches of the ordinary she had to engage and get political support at least from the people like herself who ended up somewhere better than they had started.  Cameron has no idea how to do this; I doubt he has any real understanding of such people, and unlike Blair, the prime minister he most resembles, he lacks the simple charm and good advisors to enable him to approach the interests of such people.  Blair also had 'Old' Labour members still around to keep dragging him back to contact with ordinary people; Cameron seems to lack even the small business person connections, let alone any route into the views of the Disraelian-style working class Tory, whose watchword is not monetarism, but 'decency'.  Cameron is too much like Bush when he told the ultra-wealthy that they were his core constituency.  With the electoral college system and some jiggery-pokery that was sufficient for Bush to win twice.  However, the British political system, even without proportional representation will not be that forgiving to Cameron.

Cameron is offering nothing to those people who will tip the balance between him winning or losing the next election or in fact, if the coalition chooses, to go for an election before then to boost the Conservative majority.  The only thing we keep hearing is about cuts and even for those voters who like to pride themselves on being self-made, they will begin very soon to see the impact of those all over in terms of the condition of the roads, how long they have to wait in government offices, the level of crime and so on.  Cameron could win them over by stealing more ideas from the UKIP, because one thing that this constituency likes is to bash Europe and foreigners in general.  However, Cameron has backed away from even the kind of bigotry and high profile complaints over immigration we heard around election time.  They have shut off immigration of the kind big business likes, i.e. low-paid, but I imagine they expect to fill those jobs with the growing domestic unemployed.  The failure of the BNP at the last election and banning of English Defence League marches is taking some pressure off Cameron from the right, but the 'soft' bigotry of UKIP supporters and sympathisers is still a force out there.  I am glad he is not tapping into it, but I think as a consequence he has lost the one tool for connecting with that constituency that Thatcher won and held for so long.

I imagine part of the problem is that Cameron's thinking is so distant from the middle classes let alone the working classes of Britain.  Edward Heath raced yachts but had come from middle class background, not too different from Thatcher.  You have to go back to Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who only managed one year as prime minister to find someone so far away from even the well-off in Britain let alone the ordinary people.  Cameron, like Bush, moves in such high wealth and privileged circles that he finds it difficult to engage with people who in fact got him into power.  Fortunately for the moment in Britain, money does not entirely match votes and Cameron needs to find a way, as Thatcher unfortunately did, of engaging the 'ordinary Tory' if he wants to stay in power for any length of time.  I do not think he has the capability of doing it.

Getting Through to Blair?

Having seen that Tony Blair has been compelled to cancel signings of his autobiography due to anti-war protests not just in Britain but also in Eire, I began to wonder what it will take to shake his self-view that he was God's gift to this country?  I remember back to the time of the Bernie Ecclestone scandal of 1997 when the leading promoter of Formula One racing had given £1 million to the Labour Party and then his sport was was exempted from the ban on tobacco advertising.  Of course, being immune to scandal this did not compel Blair to step down, not even to apologise.  The perceptive impersonator and satirist Rory Bremner did an excellent impression of Blair at the time being forgiving to us, the public.  He said that he accepted that we made mistakes about what was right and wrong, but this time he was willing to understand that we were fallible and to forgive us and move on.  That sketch was incredibly perceptive of Blair's character.

I suppose you have to have utter self-confidence to succeed in politics and those prime ministers, like Major and Brown have suffered for it.  However, Blair's attitude seems completely untempered by any recognition that he is fallible and has made grave mistakes that have led to the death of thousands.  It seems ironic that he moved from a Church of England stance, which though not really fully Protestant has some truck with those elements of Christianity which believe in predestination such as Calvinism, more prevalent in Scotland than in England.  Under such a creed Blair could believe that his greatness was all part of God's great plan.  One would expect such an attitude from George W. Bush in a USA which still adheres to the myth of its 'manifest destiny', i.e. that it was always going to be the size and as powerful as it has turned out, hence their dislike of counter-factuals.  However, Blair is now a Roman Catholic and that brand of Christianity is one which is very aware of fallibility (if not always of the Pope) and allows more regularly for contrition and foregiveness.  Unlike Protestantism which has only grace by belief, i.e. you will get into Heaven if you believe in God; Roman Catholicism needs you to have both belief and to do good works if you are to get into Heaven.  However, as Graham Greene noted in much of his writing the ability in Catholicism to confess and be absolved regularly, can lead people to do bad things in the confidence that if they pay up quickly on Earth it will not affect their entrance to Heaven.

Blair did lots of things wrong in his premiership but the one that continues to haunt him is his compliance with George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq simply to control the fifth largest oil reserve in the World.  There were spurious claims about what a threat Saddam Hussein was to the planet, or more particularly the USA, but it was forgotten that a large part of his weaponry was sold to him by western powers when fighting Iran.  In many ways removing him was like the Americans removing General Noriega, he was one of their tools that they had tired of or for political reasons no longer needed.  It is certain that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 actually increased terrorist activity across the World and whilst it freed the Iraqis from one dictator it simply plunged them into a different kind of violence and depridation.  As I noted at the start of this blog, Blair has never waivered from his self-belief that everything he has done is right.  He was very fortunate that he was able to mutate the Labour Party into the Blairite Party.  His dislike of Brown was because he was of that previous party rather than being a Blairite.  On that basis he could never have reconciled with him.  No wonder Blair found Brown 'maddening' as he says in his autobiography, he would simply not accept that Blair was the best thing ever to happen in British politics and be a true believer in the Blairite cult.  It seems like that David Miliband will be the next leader of the 'Labour' Party and so the Brown phase will be seen in retrospect as an aberration from the growth of the Blairite Party.  I have regularly given examples of this, Gaullism and Peronism being two that always come to mind; Blair with his Christian Democrat approach is very much in that mould.  It is interesing that we are so concerned with 'fundamentalists' but forget that with Bush and to a great extent Blair, we had them already in power.

Right-wing commentators have argued that the protests against Blair have been orchestrated by political groupings.  They, like Blair, still do not understand how unpopular the Iraq war was and that it has lost supporters every month.  They forget the huge and the persistent protests against it.  Blair was the favourite Labour leader of the right-wing press and wealthy because he was so like them.  He did nothing to shake the Thatcherite legacy and avoided policies which actually helped what should have been the natural constituency of the Labour Party.  The cutting out of the ordinary people has continued under Cameron, in fact, as I will analyse next month, has sharpened and accelerated.  Again, looking back from fifty years in the future I am sure we will put Blair in the same category as Major and Cameron, Thatcherites who gave some superficial elements to the policy but continuing with what Thatcher established in the 1980s and not repairing any of the damage she inflicted.  Brown tried to reverse that trend, but the hostility to his attempt is apparent in the still virulent attacks in the media on him even now he has left office.  Their fear, of course, is that with Ed Balls or even Ed Miliband will come to lead Labour, so they keep trying to scare Labour supporters and the general public so that the Thatcherite-Blair trend can continue.  In many ways Thatcher has achieved in her legacy what she set out to do as part of her mission in the 1980s, was to move to a situation where the two main political parties would be close together in policy the way the Republicans and Democrats were in the USA, though these days many Americans might dispute their proximity.

Tony Blair's self-confidence is unnerving.  It is the kind of self-confidence generally found in dictators rather than rulers of democratic countries.  I suppose winning repeatedly in elections and seeing his successor just about fall has added to Blair's ego.  However, I also believe it is a real flaw within him and the fact that he was able to run Britain and believe constantly that only his view was the correct one, shows how vulnerable the UK is to dictatorship.  I kept hoping that he would see one day that he could be wrong.  However, it does not seem to be the case, and I am coming to conclusion that only when he is turned away from Heaven will he finally realise what he did.  Then, he will probably blame someone else.  I would certainly use Blair as a model for children warning them of the dangers of such arrogance.  As yet, he may not have paid the price (though interestingly on the 'Daily Telegraph' blog there is someone threatening to assassinate him), but I hope that these protests which stop him lording around bookshops, squeezing out just that little more adoration which he clearly needs like a drug, may begin to penetrate.  I hope in time that he will be disgraced and ignored, because the danger of Blair is not only what he wreaked on people, but the fact that he has become too much of a model for other politicians and the UK and the rest of the World cannot live safely when we have politicians who believe that their personal decisions are the work of God and thus beyond even questioning, let alone challenging.

The Dark Days Return

When Margaret Thatcher was kicked from office as prime minister by her own party in 1990, I really hoped that we would have seen the last of the nasty, selfish, hopeless days that we had seen when she came to power in 1979.  Throughout that period and as a direct result of her policies, Britain faced the highest unemployment it had ever seen, many industries disappeared and many people lived in poverty and others lost their homes.  Society became sharply divided and this was expressed by the numerous riots the UK experienced in the early 1980s.  Public service deteriorated as local authorities were compelled to take the lowest bidders for any service and they achieved this by paying poor wages; public bodies like utilities were broken off and sold off to the great benefit of speculators and already wealthy business people.  The rights of the individual were seriously eroded and it took almost another decade to even get some of these back.


Of course, after Thatcher we had seven years of John Major.  Whilst also a Conservative he did not pursue the assiduous campaign to undermine the UK.  He did not deny that society existed in the way Thatcher had done and for much of the time he had too small a majority to introduce forceful policies, though railways were privatised much to the detriment of the British economy and society.  Some of us hoped that he would fall in 1992, the last time the UK ever had a chance for a Socialist government, but through scare tactics and electoral irregularities the Conservatives remained in power until replaced by the Christian Democrat, New Labour Party which came to power in 1997.  Of course, by then the 'centre' of British politics had moved far to the right of where it had been in 1975 and now privatised utilities, even an independent Bank of England were seen as acceptable.  New Labour did introduce the minimum wage and signed up to the Social Chapter provided by the European Union but its other policies such as electoral reform and removal of the unelected House of Lords were soon dropped.


Now we have a coalition government, but as William Hague, the new Foreign Secretary noted, the 'bulk' of the Conservative election manifesto will be put into effect.  Tactical voters like myself who voted for the local Liberal Democrat candidate they thought might keep the Conservatives out of a seat now feel utterly stupid.  Effectively anyone wanting progressive approaches has no voice in this country.  Of course, that is precisely what the wealthy like Lord Ashcroft and other corrupt ultra-rich want.  The election of New Labour in 1997 was no restoration of democracy, given the deals Tony Blair had to make to get into power, it, in fact marked a further step in the erosion of the influence of ordinary people on politics.  With David Cameron in charge control of politics and the economy is now more blatantly in the hands of the elites than it has probably been since Sir Alec Douglas-Home, a former lord, left office in 1964.  Cameron is far less 'ordinary' than even Margaret Thatcher.  Fortunately a number of his 'babes', young, glamorous, privileged candidates parachuted into constituencies did not get elected, but there are are tens of MPs who owe their position to Cameron and will follow him devotedly the way Blair was able to build a large coterie of devotee MPs around him when he came to power in 1997.

Even with my fear of the Cameron government I was startled at how fast he has moved to further damage democracy, by moving to 5-year fixed term parliaments and making the dissolution of parliament require a 55% majority rather than a 1 vote majority.  Yes, of course, this brings stability in the way that a dictatorship brings stability by doing away with those tiresome things called elections.  It is interesting that even Conservative MPs are opposing this step, barely days into Cameron's government.  I just pray they give him a hard time over this threat to our polity.  Cameron seems to combine all the worst of Tony Blair with the worst of Margaret Thatcher.  This means not only will he pursue policies that will put millions of us out of work and hundreds of thousands to lose their houses, but he will expect thanks for all the suffering he is putting us through and like Blair be surprised when we complain about what he has done. 

I hope that my expectations do not come true.  I hope the Liberal Democrats and even Conservative backbench MPs can rein in Cameron's Frankenstein's monster of New Labour media manipulation, Thatcherite economic policies and an elitist focus on carrying out policies that benefit the already highly privileged.  However, what I see at least is a return to the 1980s with mass unemployment and as a result social discontent leading to increased racism and rioting.  I hate to think of how many wasted years we have ahead of us in which the average person is going to have to battle week after week just to keep a job and somewhere to live.  People have analysed how much the people born just before and during the Thatcher period have suffered throughout their lives.  I really pity the children of today who from this week onward will have their lives blighted as education and health funding is slashed.  In the course of a day, the opportunities of millions were closed down.  From now it will be the privileged who get the job, who get that place at university, not the average young person who will be marched into whatever schemes Cameron and his lackeys think up, notably the military-style national service for 16-year olds that he has already promised on numerous posters.  Cameron seems to have been raiding Mussolini's handbook for policies.  I can only hope that the day will come when I am among the crowd cheering as Cameron is strung up by his feet in Westminster.  In the meantime we have to mourn yet another lost generation blighted by economic and social policies aimed at benefiting the very rich and in particular enabling them to deny opportunities and exploit the average person in the UK. 

Emigrate now.  How many people wished they had left Nazi Germany sooner? Leave now before the UK is turned into an utter wasteland populated by a bullied people struggling just to survive as the privileged literally lord it over them as we take step after step to an authoritarian regime.

Encountering Michael Foot

I met the veteran British Labour politician, Michael Foot, who died last week at the age of 96, twice, with a spread of twenty years between the two occasions.  The first time I met him was in the Autumn of 1979 a few months after the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher had come to power that May.  He was 66 at the time and had broken his ankle.  I remember hobbling up to the urinal next to the one I was using.  I engaged him as best I could while we washed our hands.  He was speaking at a talk on 'Forty Years On' from the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, something he had witnessed as an MP and in 1940 had written 'Guilty Men' attacking the appeasers of Hitler. Interestingly he wrote it under the Classical pseudonym Cato and later wrote another book under the name Cassius.  In some ways I feel an affinity with him in terms of the need to protect your private life and especially those you love, when making political points.

The thing about Foot which I was to witness that day was though at times his speeches wandered, they were always engaging and full of life.  He was able to quote extensively and was very adept at using people's own words against them.  On the day of his death I listened to the speech he made in 1979 (in those days there was only radio coverage not television coverage) at the time of the vote of no-confidence in the Labour government of James Callaghan; it was played on the Parliament channel.  It was both funny and poignant in the ideas and challenges it laid out.  I cannot remember when I last enjoyed a political speech so much.

I met Michael Foot again when he was launching 'Dr. Strangelove, I Presume' (1999).  He was standing in Bloomsbury waiting to be collected.  I had seen him at a bus stop in the Charing Cross Road a couple of years earlier.  Despite his age (86 in 1999), he seemed full of energy.  I had once met his doctor who outlined how he walked vigorously across Hampstead Heath.  He had been rejected from volunteering for the army for the Second World War on the grounds of his asthma and he seemed to wear thick glasses all his life.  One might have thought in his late 80s he was going to slow down, but as it turned out he had another entire decade of life ahead of him. 

Anyway, again I had encountered Foot on his way to an event that I was actually attending myself.  I took the opportunity to approach him and recounted how we had met twenty years earlier, though of course he would not have remembered.  The world seemed incredibly different to 1979 to me and I got a bit of a sense of how the full expanse of his life appeared.  The event was a small scale thing and had a kind of collegiate atmosphere.  Some of the audience seemed to presume that his age was making him forgetful and this seemed to be the case when he did not respond to one question.  The same question was asked again and very honestly, he said that he had not responded to it earlier, though he had taken in on board fully, because he had no answer for it.  It was clear that his mind was as sharp as ever.

Michael Foot was an easy focus for ridicule, something that really haunted him when he was leader of the Labour Party, 1980-83.  He was ridiculed for appearing at the Cenotaph in a duffel coat as if it was offensive.  However, in my eyes, it was practical for a man of his age (Thatcher was 54 when she came to office) standing around in November and to some degree the extent of the ridicule suggests that he was still seen as a challenge by the Conservatives.  In her first term of office Thatcher was not as secure as people now assume.  There was uncertainty even within her own party about the direction she was going in, certainly away from the policies of Edward Heath towards an anti-European Community (ironically something she shared in common with Foot), far more pro-America and certainly pro-nuclear policy, backed by New Right monetarist economic policies which were wrecking so much of British industry.  If it had not been for the Falklands Conflict of 1982 and the populist chauvinism that that threw up she would have found it far harder at the 1983 election than she did.  Politics had turned very nasty as seen by the comedian Kenny Everett's (1944-95) call to a baying Conservative crowd to 'kick away Michael Foot's stick!'.  Foot had used a stick to walk since a car accident in 1963.

Neil Kinnock made a very important point last week about Foot's role in keeping the Labour Party alive during the dark days of the Thatcher regime.  The tendency among many Labour supporters in 1979 and beyond was to become more radical and move over to revolutionary politics.  This threatened to remove the Labour Party from the mainstream of British politics, and as we know from the extreme left and extreme right parties, let alone people like the Green Party, such a location means not having representation in the UK parliament.  Thatcher stated that she wanted to move towards a political system like that of the USA with two parties that were pretty close together around a rather right-wing 'centre' and in a television interview said she wanted to see the end of Socialist and semi-Socialist parties (a way she had characterised the Liberal Party on another occasion).  A more radical Labour Party would possibly have allowed her to do that.  However, given the fact that we have the kind of political pattern that Thatcher wished for, circulating around the Thatcherite Consensus with Labour and the Conservatives so close, perhaps the purging of the extremists under Kinnock after he became leader in 1983 might suggest that it meant moving to what Thatcher desired.

Foot's integrity and willingness to embrace challenging, if not utterly radical policies, meant he could not be beaten down by extremists like Militant Tendency, within his own party.  While Labour now might be shorn of true radicalism it is intact and in fact that might be Foot's greatest legacy.  The creation of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) including disgruntled right-wing Labour MPs in 1981, showed the risks of fragmentation for the Labour Party.  Even if Labour managed to lose the argument for reforming policies the party did not shatter in the way it had after 1931 condemning it to impotence for a decade or the way the Liberal Party did after 1922 leaving it feeble for the rest of the 20th century.  Becoming a number of small differently shaded left-wing parties would have meant no hope for anyone opposed to Thatcher.  Kinnock had a party to take over even if it had to lose a lot of what he and Foot had stood for before it could come back to power, or, perhaps not, given the irregularities of the 1992 election.

Foot was particularly condemned in the 1980s for supporting unilateral nuclear disarmament.  He did this because he had long believed in the immorality of nuclear weapons, but of course there would have been a real economic benefit for the UK if it had given up on nuclear weapons in the 1980s.  The Trident nuclear weapons cost £1 billion per year to keep and the estimated total is £97 billion by the time they will have been scrapped.  To replace them will costs £130 billion.  These are sums which make bailing out the banks look pretty minor.  The Polaris system, that preceded Trident, which the UK bought for £300 million in 1962 (worth around £6 billion at today's values) .  If this money had gone into hospitals or transport or education or power generation, Britain would be in a very different situation to where it is today.  We know that the fear of a Soviet invasion was constantly falsified and certainly from the 1970s onwards the USSR would have found it impossible to invade West Germany even if they had wanted to.  The Soviets had minimal concern about the UK and yet we had to cripple our economy for the sake of a fantasy, making lots of US arms manufacturers very rich in the meantime.  Even President General Dwight Eisenhower (president 1953-61) spoke of the 'military-industrial complex' that was so influential in the USA and clearly in the UK too.  British jobs were not created by the regular purchase of US nuclear weapons.  The current Labour government does not support the abolition of the UK's nuclear weapons, only the SNP (Scottish Nationalist Party) backs such a policy even though the Cold War has been over for twenty years.
In many ways, however, Foot represented an older generation of politician.  He was probably out of date even in the 1960s when Labour prime minister Harold Wilson had adopted his pipe and raincoat as his trade marks for the television era.  Foot appeared as he was, an ordinary old man of the kind you might see in the post office.  However, the public want someone with a certain style than marks them out from the ordinary; John Major only really succeeded by being painfully ordinary.  For Foot it would always be ideas and good policies that would mark out a politician but the public no longer felt that, for them style was now more important than substance.

Foot was more of the style of the Gladstone era in which long speeches which showed the erudite knowledge of the speaker were the norm and were a kind of entertainment and education as well as stirring.  In the sound bite age, his wandering speeches could not be easily 'chunked' for the short attention span viewers.  His legacy fed into Neil Kinnock, his successor as leader of the Labour Party, who though far younger (41 when he became Labour leader in 1983) did not shake off the lengthy expositions that Foot had favoured.  These men were right, politics is not simple and simplifying it makes policies have a tendency to error.  However, after the 1970s British society was 'tired of politics' and no-one can be bothered to listen to policy outlined, they would rather have emotionally swaying chunks of information that they can be certain are 'true' without analysing them at all.

Foot held fast to the deeply held views he had.  He was not a pragmatist as that would have been to betray his views.  He was a republican (seeking abolition of the monarchy) and was ardently opposed to nuclear weapons at a time when they had been made to seem 'vital' for Britain despite their huge expense and the hazard they presented.  Similarly he believed in a mixed economy, i.e. with state-run and privately-run businesses, which ironically in the era of the enduring Thatcherite consensus fostered by Tony Blair, we have ended back with.  Yet, the 1980s were seemingly all about 'free enterprise', well in fact not really free, just enterprise for the privileged and the already wealthy.  Whilst millions were losing their jobs this fantasy of a society where ordinary people could be rich was sold very successfully to too many voters.  Foot could not have lied to the public that way.  Providing opportunity for all is costly but is morally right.  In that respect, Foot can be seen as contributing to a humanist morality (he was an atheist) something which seems very at odds in the current UK where we have a choice between selfish, (in effect immoral), behaviour fostered by the right and the left seemingly to adhere to a sense that only faiths can supply morality, especially fostered by the Blairite New Labour, though more muted under Gordon Brown.

Michael Foot was a living reminder of a different, moral-based, intellectually-engaging form of politics which we seem so far away from these days even though the extremities of Thatcherism have been curtailed (for now).  One has to admire someone of such ability and conviction and I feel proud that I was able to meet and talk with him on two occasions.

Are Britons Only Socialist in Times of Crisis?

Many people argue that the British population is inherently conservative and for most of the time, Conservative, i.e. supporting the policies of the Conservative Party.  I suppose that most people who are generally comfortably off, no matter where they live have a tendency not to want that disrupted and to keep out others from enjoying what they and their families have.  It is a trend even in states such as China, which is Communist and founded on revolution and in which a lot of things still need to change, let alone countries, that whilst suffering from a recession currently, are far better off than those countries where the bulk of the world's population lives.  Recently I have noted people who whilst they want to reduce pressure or upset for themselves actually want other people to suffer more 'for their own good'.  Of course, the standard thing about pressurising unemployed people to take low-paid work and uproot and move right across the country or face punishment have been wheeled out again as the level of unemployment has risen.  However, I have encountered people saying Sweden is now lagging because its policies of equality means there is no 'edge' to drive people to work harder.  These people love having the whip cracked as long as it is on other people not themselves.

You might ask, well, 'what has this to do with Socialism?'  You may ask 'what is Socialism, anyway?'  It is a term that even the Labour Party dropped more than a decade ago.  The wealthy actor, Alan Cummings, when interviewed recently listed it as the extinct thing he would like see revived.  A lot of people equate it with Communism and they think that died the day the Berlin Wall was knocked down in 1989.  Of course, saying all Socialists are Communists is like saying all Conservatives are Fascists: inaccurate and ignorant of how the political spectrum works.  Of course, that was how many people have liked it.  In particular, Margaret Thatcher (British prime minister 1979-90), who, on more than one occasion said she wanted the elimination of a spectrum of political parties and preferred to have simply two very close to each other as is the case in the USA, often equated not only Socialism but the Labour Party (which often had more Liberal than Socialist policies) with the Communist.  In that way she could portray them as a the 'fifth column' or 'the enemy within', in league with the USSR to undermine democracy in the UK during the Cold War.  Of course, Socialists are passionate defenders of democracy as are most Conservatives.

What is Socialism? Well, the key word is 'social', it is a political philosophy which sees the benefit of the whole of society as the key driving force.  Of course, Margaret Thatcher argued that there was 'no such thing as society' and emphasised that it was individuals' desires and units no greater than families who should drive what happened politically and economically.  Socialism argues that people are different, they have different needs and abilities but they should be looked after when they cannot look after themselves (such as when ill, pregnant, unemployed or elderly) but also that they have responsibilities to the rest of the community and that whilst they are free to make their own way in the world and make profits (this is crucially where Socialism differs from Communism) they should not do so by exploiting people whether in their own country or in other countries.  This means employers should pay decent wages, have reasonable working hours and conditions and listen to the people that they are employing.  A key objective of Socialism is that everyone has equal opportunity, whether it is in terms of access to health care or education or to get on in their lives.  Vitally Socialism is against people being barred from certain jobs or other opportunities simply because of what social class they come, what gender, age or ethnicity they are.  In the 1960s this approach, seen with the creation of numerous new universities to allow people greater opportunity to go into higher education, was condemned as 'meritocracy', i.e. that people with ability could succeed.  Of course, this has been turned around from a negative term to a positive one.  As I have noted regularly on this blog since the 1980s we have moved too far away from a meritocracy to too many people simply getting good positions because of what family they were born into or which elite school they attended.  Opportunity is now less than it was thirty years ago.

A lot of Socialist principles overlap with Liberal ones and probably the most Socialist governments in British history, those under Clement Attlee 1945-51 actually pursued a Liberal policy.  Rather than having a controlled economy in line with what Socialism advocates, after 1948 they used Liberal Keynesian approaches, manipulating rather than directing the economy, notably through shifting interest rates.  In terms of health and social welfare, though they created the National Health Service, they permitted private, fee-taking doctors to continue practising and rather than funding a lot of health and social welfare from direct taxation as you would expect a Socialist government to do, they widened welfare insurance, which had been introduced in the 1910s and created National Insurance in line with what the Liberal, William Beveridge had advised during the war.  The idea is that you pay into national insurance as you would any insurance so that you build up a fund that you can draw upon when you need it, for example, when ill or elderly or out of work.  Of course, as with all insurance, some people never make a claim whereas others claim often, but that reflects the diverse needs of our society and that is not something we should try to restrain.

The most Socialist element was nationalisation of key sectors of British industry.  The focus was on the 'commanding heights', i.e. those sectors of the economy that fed through into many others.  Thus, coal mining and the railways were nationalised.  The fact that these industries had been run poorly or inefficiently before was a good reason for the state to take over.  Gas extraction and provision; electricity generation; water supply; coach transport; airlines; freighting and later steel manufacture were all nationalised; though some steps, such as with airlines had been taken before the war.  Other countries, notably France did the same kind of thing.  The British, however, even with nationalisation, tempered Socialism with Liberalism and had a very 'arms length' control by the state of these industries and did not direct them in the ways they should stimulate the economy the way that even right-wing governments in France did especially with the largest state-owned company in France, Electricite de France (now EDF Energy).  Often, as with the example of gas and water supply what we saw in the UK was really just grand 'muncipalisation'.  Many suppliers had been established by city councils in the 19th century and the regionalised approach to gas and water supply (and some water regions, such as City of York, were very small) was continuing this 19th century approach rather than moving to a really Socialist method. 

In later years nationalisation in the UK was not used as a way to try to stimulate the economy but rather to bail out failing companies such as Rolls Royce in 1971 (nationalised by Edward Heath's Conservative Government), British Leyland car manufacturers in 1976 and British Aerospace made up of a number of aeronautical manufacturing companies and British Shipbuilders, the same for that industry, in 1977.  It is unsurprising that nationalised industries that had failed continued to suffer but it meant that nationalisation was now seen as a failed economic policy and this was at the time when New Right ideas were rising both in the USA and the UK emphasising the reduction of all state control or even regulations and clearly nationalised industries were an anathema to such thinking (notably the economic viewpoint held by Margaret Thatcher).  Ironically Thatcher's government nationalised collapsed chemical company, Johnson Matthey in 1984. 

Despite the emphasis on nationalised industries the state sector was never larger than 20% of the economy compared to 90%+ in Communist countries.  In the 1980s and 1990s the nationalised industries were sold off by the government which brought revenue to the state.  The idea was ownership would be held by numerous small shareholders but generally they were bought out by large companies and increasingly ones from abroad.  Whilst there have been regulators of these former nationalised industries control over prices and profits and trying to keep up quality has not really worked; many have a near monopoly and as has been seen in the past couple of years attempts by government to stop them charging high prices and providing poor service have failed.

Conservative propaganda about Socialism has always been pretty successful.  In 1992, Labour did not win the election after a successful campaign arguing that its policies would lead to higher taxation, a view that even Labour supporters seem to come to believe.  In the 1950s the Conservatives argued that Labour's nationalisation was akin to a command economy and though Winston Churchill shot himself in the foot in 1945 likening the Labour approach to the Gestapo by the 1950s the Conservatives were successful in portraying themselves as the party of freedom against Labour's restraint and austerity.  In the late 1940s, of course, the public had been used to both restraint and authority so that argument had little impact.  In addition, Labour does seem to offer solutions to ingrained problems and in 1945 the public had been really voting on the problems of 1931 rather than the post-war era.

The reason why Tony Blair was so focused on manipulating the media was because he knew from history how long it had been manipulated against anything Labour had done.  However, he went so far in making the Labour Party seem acceptable to the media that he sheared it of the bulk of its Socialist principles.  Clause 4, the part of the Labour Party constitution which advocated nationalisation, was scrapped in 1994.  On coming to power in 1997, Labour in fact went further than the Conservative governments by denationalising the Bank of England and so giving up even Keynesian control over interest rates.  I believe that Tony Blair was neither a Socialist or really a Conservative, he was a Blairite and created a personal party out of the shell of the Labour Party; using Christian Democrat principles as the covered, but really based on his own ambitions and simply what he felt was 'right'.  This is why people feel Socialism is dead in Britain, but in effect we probably have not even seen a mildly Socialist government in Britain at least since 1976 if not since 1970 and that is the way company bosses like it.

The key problem for Labour, aside from the fact that the financial sector always tries to make a run on the pound and destabilise the economy, in fear of what constraints they will be put under, is that trade unions see an opportunity to get the deals that they have battled to achieve under a Conservative government.  Now, as in 1978/9, they are busily undermining the Labour government with demands and strikes that make it appear to voters, ironically most of whom will be workers, that the government has no control.  Of course, part of the problem is that no British government has been able to tackle the greed and huge profits of those who run business, so it is unsurprising that workers want more.  If the utility companies had been compelled to pay a windfall tax and bankers to limit their vast bonuses, ironically I think we would be seeing less industrial action.

Anyway, having cantered through Socialism, you might be thinking why is that relevant now?  Well, it is my suggestion that the British population while Conservative most of the time, turns to Socialism when things are going wrong.  In 1945 Socialism was seen as the way to avoid a return to the Depression of the 1930s and the economic slump that had followed the First World War.  In 1964 Socialism was seen as the way to stop Britain's industrial stagnation, unwillingness to modernise and thus its slipping competitiveness from worsening.  In 1974 Socialism was seen as a way to heal the sharp rifts in society and especially in industrial relations.  Of course, there has always been ambivalence as the elections of 1951, 1964 and 1974 showed and the wealthy always pull out the stops to prevent the advent of a truly Socialist government.  This is one reason why Gordon Brown who, unlike Blair, is a Labour leader, has come under sustained media attack throughout his term in office.  However, it is clear that the British public is drifting back in a Socialist direction once more.

Of course, it is not pure, unadulterated Socialism, there are other trends such as blaming problems of immigrants, which are an anathema to Socialism but almost seem to have become a norm in much discussion.  However, adherence to the National Health Service and a national innoculation programme to combat swine flu is one characteristic of a more Socialist outlook. People do not seem to realise that in the USA they would have to have health insurance for things they currently get for free and once they were elderly they would find it difficult to get cover.  Most likely they would be paying for innoculations.   I know prescription charges have risen but no-one pays for innoculation and the elderly and people like me with a lifelong condition, diabetes, who need constant medicines, do no pay.

There are, in fact, demands that the NHS expands it role and does more to provide treatment for the elderly, and for example, one-to-one care for premature babies.  Such things are costly and perhaps people are unwilling to tolerate the tax to pay for these.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, whilst re-inforcing pride in the military among the British population, are seen increasingly as hopeless and people are calling for an exit.  The Conservatives argue that Labour has not provided the military with the equipment it needs, something I agree has been a problem, but how does anyone expect David Cameron with all his emphasis on cutting public spending to be able to afford to send even one more helicopter to Helmand province? 

The key area where we are seeing a return of Socialism is, ironically, in terms of the previously most controversial aspect of the ethos, nationalisation.  We now have a larger nationalised sector in the UK than at any time since about 1986.  The British government took over the Docklands Light Railway in 1997 and effectively the railway track of Britain is run by Network Rail a company without shareholders but underwritten by the government.  In 2008 Northern Rock building society and the mortgage lending part of Bradford & Bingley building society were nationalised. The government took over 60% of the Royal Bank of Scotland and 40% of the HBOS-Lloyds-TSB banking conglomerate giving it a large slice of the British banking sector, especially in mortgage-lending which has always been a key element in shaping the British economy.

It is unlikely that even Clement Attlee would have been able to control such a large aspect of the financial sector.  The closest we came was when Roy Hattersley, deputy leader of the Labour Party said around the time of the 1992 election that the investment group 3i would be nationalised under a Labout Government to form the basis of state investment in private industry.  The uproar was such that the idea seems to have been entirely forgotten almost immediately.  Interestingly, this year, finally, the government is compelling credit card companies to raise the minimum repayment level on the amount people owe.  This should have come in at least 10 or 15 years ago and could have restrained some of the overheated consumption and massive debt that amounted during the late 1990s and early 2000s that has distorted the economy in an unhealthy way.

All of these steps have been taken with no dismay from the general public.  When there is a crisis they expect the government to step in and sort it all out for them.  The rest of the time they whine about over-regulation, the 'nanny state', that taxes are intolerable and so on, not realising that lack of regulation has led to much of the crisis we are now in and that expensive bail-outs can only be funded by taxes.  Again nationalisation, which seems such a dirty word in most years, is seen as the solution.  Again, however, as in the 1970s, it is being used to catch falling businesses.  This is the wrong way to approach the economy.  Northern Rock should have been nationalised before it started its mad approach to mortgage lending.  I would have taken it over in 2005 at the latest and then, rather than it being a drag on the British economy it could have been used to stabilise house prices and provide stimulus to new business. 

With the first £1002 train ticket for the journey from Newquay in Cornwall to Kyle of Lochalsh in western Scotland, a distance of 2,720 Km (a round the world air ticket can be bought for £800 and you can travel from London to Zurich on the luxury Orient Express for £1000 or from Moscow to Beijing on the Trans-Siberian Railway - 5,806 Km for only £995) and most inter-city rail fare prices having trebled in the past 15 years, a period in which inflation has been below 3%, it seems apparent that if we want a mobile population using the greenest form of transport around, i.e. electric trains, then we need the whole rail system back in state control.  You find that the only people who praise the privatisation of the railways are people who never travel on trains.

So, are we seeing a Socialist conscience developing among the British population, wanting a tax on bankers' bonuses, limits on the pay of the wealthy, better value public transport and a health service expanding its scope combined with a tolerance, possibly even an enthusiasm for privatising what are now the controlling sectors of the British economy?  People would argue, as historian Corelli Barnett did in the 1980s that the British have become too used to the 'teat' of state intervention and would be traumatised to have it taken away from them and left to fend for themselves.  However, of course, with Thatcherite policies a great deal has been taken away and yet there are still billions of pounds of benefits that people who are entitled to them do not claim.  Britons are an independent people that still like to make their own way as best they can, despite all the propaganda about benefit swindlers and dole scroungers.  Ironically no-one goes after the tax defrauders who owe millions in total to the British economy but they have taken out to tax havens.  We need to go after these people and make them contribute the way I and the large bulk of ordinary British people do.  We have no choice about paying or not paying tax, so why should the wealthy get to make that choice?  Hopefully people are beginning to realise that only a tiny fraction of the population are ever going to win the lottery or set up a business we can sell for millions or become a pop star or some other kind of celebrity, so instead of thinking it is alright for the rich to get away without pulling their weight because one day we might be one of them, more of us need to make sure there are opportunities for a decent life for all.

The veteran Socialist politician Tony Benn often recounts when he was on a train that broke down and how it suddenly seemed as if people were becoming Socialist, sharing out the food and other supplies they had, working together to make the best of a bad situation.  When the train was running smoothly of course they did none of this.  People often refer back to the 'wartime spirit' when people supposedly collaborated in the way that Benn saw them do on that train.  Historian Nick Tiratsoo has shown that a lot of that was exaggerated and we know that 'outsiders', often Jews, were kept out of air raid shelters and whilst the bulk of the population was struggling to feed their families on rations, those who could afford to, could eat unrationed food in restaurants.  However, though it might have been exaggerated it does seem that, possibly counter to what you might expect, in crises Britons become less rather than more selfish.  It is a shame that they cannot maintain that attitude in the better times.  I know David Cameron thinks he will walk into being the latest Conservative prime minister but the recession has reawakened the dormant Socialist tendencies in the British population and if Labour appeals to those rather than trying to be a pale version of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative party, it may win at the next election.

Cracking the Whip of Unemployment

Well, as I had feared, just as has been the case, unemployment has completely sapped my inspiration. Despite having more time to blog, the spirit has gone out of me. Unemployment is terribly insidious it saps the will to do anything much. I suppose this is because most of us are people of routine. When you are unemployed, you can make yourself a routine: I rise at the same time each day (7.30am) and look for jobs in set locations on set days of the week, but I know it is false and it is only because I am compelling myself to do it that I do not let the apathy of unemployment completely swallow me. Of course, I have only been unemployed for two months, so it might be tougher in the future to overcome this. I have heard that women find it easier to cope with unemployment than men do, because their lives change much more than men's; every month their period throws them off track to a greater or lesser extent and they learn how to overcome feeling tense or tired or washed out and yet continue with the daily chores much better than men do. Perhaps this is why men are becoming obsolete in modern society, but that is a topic that I have already tackled.

One thing which is not the case is that I have not lost the desire to work. To some extent the more unemployment saps me the more I want to escape the effect it is having on me and I know that will only come from having a job. Consequently, when I do have a focus, i.e. a particular job to apply for I put lots of work into it. I have an interview tomorrow and I have spent a day reading all I can about the company and the people who are going to interview me, so that even if they are not well prepared for the interview and like many interviewers even uncertain about what they actually want, I can hopefully demonstrate that I am the person they need to employ. Of course the job is temporary, not permanent and pays £9000 per year less than I earned in my last job, but that is what happens when unemployment rises. It provides an excellent opportunity for employers, especially in the UK, to force down salaries (though prices are not falling as fast, of course) and to reduce job security.

British employers always feel their workers are lazy and over-paid. It may have been proven that when compared to workers in eastern Europe, British workers do not work the longest hours, but certainly when compared to neighbouring states such as France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, post-industrial, western European economies which we should be on a par with, UK workers do work long hours. In terms of pay, well, we have the added burden that the price of housing, food and petrol exceeds the costs in neighbouring states and we receive only 12 salary payments per year compared to the 14 they get in Belgium and the 13 workers even get in South Africa. Despite this, the xenophobia and lack of language skills of the British, means most of us are ignorant of these facts so sit back while employers tell us we are lazy and greedy and should be grateful that they deign to give us any work while they take salaries and bonuses equivalent to the combined pay of large sections of their employees.

Last year, I wrote about how many employers felt that with the prosperity of the UK since the 1990s, they had lost the 'whip' of unemployment to frighten workers into being compliant and accepting poor pay and conditions without complaint. Ironically, even immigrant workers especially from elsewhere in Europe were unwilling to take what employers felt was 'fair'. People complain about migrant workers but forget they would not come if employers did not seek to bring them into the UK as a cheaper alternative to training British workers and skilling them. You notice that there is a sector of society which despite being right-wing, is pretty quiet on the immigration issue and these are employers who want the cheapest labour they can get. Now that Poles and other migrants are returning to their own countries now that the UK economy is in downturn, their only option is to pressurise British workers to take lower wages.

Radio news broadcasts today have reported that 'the economy is picking up' and that there are more jobs available. UK unemployment remains at 2.4 million, the highest level since 1996 and conflicting reports say it will worsen. Peaks in unemployment tend to lag behind the economic crises. The economy in the UK nosedived in 1981 but unemployment did not touch 4 million until 1983 (of course real levels were concealed by the Thatcher government's distorted methods of reporting the figures). Unemployment did not start falling until about 1987 and still remained around 2.2 million in the supposed boom of 1989. There was another peak in the recession of 1990-3 getting back to 3.5 million briefly before a steady decline through the remainer of the 1990s and into the 200s, returning below 1.5 million around 2004 for the first time since 1980; 24 years earlier.

Such broad figures conceal the fact that often the people in work were in part-time or temporary jobs rather than permanent ones and at lower salaries than they had been previously. Of course, such factors dent consumer confidence and slow down the economy so holding up recovery in other elements of the economic system outside employment. Ironically, I have not seen any figures on how many jobs the introduction of the minimum wage created. Right-wingers whined that it would wreck the economy, whereas in fact by increasing consumption it helped stimulate service-sector orientated Britain in the late 1990s and most of the 2000s.

To me it seems that employers do not feel that the recent recession has stung hard enough yet. I think most would love to get to a situation where they could say 'we could employ so many more people if there was no minimum wage in the way, it needs to be suspended or scrapped'. Though this is not in David Cameron's list of policies (assuming he actually has one; it is not visible) but I could imagine him being sympathetic to such arguments if he comes to power in 2010. British employers always think they pay too much tax even when it is at historic lows, far below what they paid in 1981. They always feel salaries are too high, even though if they fall further consumption in Britain will continue to be suppressed. I know of no country where business is so indignant about what it sees as its rights and the fabricated 'uppity' nature of its workers that it would cut its own throat in terms of sales to get back at employees. Greed in Britain blinds employers to the fact they are part of a complex economic machine and if they keep banging one part of the machine the rest of it will not work that well. Just look at the German government's policy of paying businesses to keep people in work compared to the slash-and-burn attitude with jobs in the UK.

Anyway, this brings me to my main point about today's 'news' about recovery. If everyone believes that there are more jobs available, then employers can whine 'anyway unemployed is not trying hard enough to find work; they are demanding too much in terms of salary/security'. This happens through individual behaviour already. I am applying for jobs that last only 2 years (so far I am ignoring maternity cover jobs as I know it will cost me more to move to the area than I could make back in 9 months) and at salaries two-thirds of my previous level. Thus, even if I get work, I am still going to be going on no holidays, not buying any clothes or DVDs or a new car. My contribution to the economic recovery is going to be minimal, it is just that I will not lose my house. I know we consume too much, but until you can work part-time locally and travel on wonderful public transport to reach your job and still afford to pay rent on even a small house, then I need to push for better terms. The bulk of us will never be self-sufficient and live in a yurt, so we have to make living in 3-bedroomed terraced houses with a 10-year old car out front at least feasible on an income which is 50% above the national average salary. Heaven forbid that some of us might want to take time to train as a teacher or a social worker! No way of doing that without becoming homeless. Saying this, as someone pointed out after training as a social worker (which the UK is desperately short of) you can earn £28, 000 (€31,640: US$46,200) per year and get attacked in the media at every turn whereas if you train as a manager of the discount supermarket Lidl you can earn £45,000 (€50,850; US$74,260) per year and get hassle only from the occasional irate customer not newspapers selling millions of copies.

We will all jump at the poorly paid, insecure jobs because the bulk of us want to work and any work is better than unemployment. However, again we will have allowed employers in their delusions about their own personal greatness and our supposed greed, to knock us back into living a life that is nerve-wracking and does not permit us to plan or save or experience life. The whip of unemployment is being cracked by this latest claim that there are jobs and the only people not taking them are the lazy or the too-demanding. It is a lie. Unemployment is high and rising and forcing people into temporary, low paid jobs is going to continue that situation for far longer than would be the case.