I did wonder during the lead up to the Scottish independence referendum why Prime Minister David Cameron was campaigning so hard for Scotland to remain in the Union. With Scotland independent, the Labour Party would be denied 41 of its current 256 MPs. In contrast the Conservatives have only 1 MP from Scotland among their 304 currently in the House of Commons. It would have probably made it impossible for Labour ever to get back into office on its own ever again. While this would not have ensured a Conservative government for ever more, it would certainly have increased the chances of that happening. I realise now that I was naive to wonder why Cameron was behaving in the way he did.
Today the explanation has become clear. In fact it did not matter which way the referendum went, he had plans on how to permanently reduce Labour's majority at Westminster. This can be seen as the next step in his shaping of democracy to constantly favour his party. We know that boundary changes will favour the Conservatives anyway. However, now he is going to exclude Scottish MPs from voting on legislation that is about England (and presumably Wales too). The argument is that with certain powers being given to the Scottish Parliament it is argued Scots MPs in Westminster should not then vote on things that English, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs cannot affect in the Scottish Parliament. Of course, 83% of the UK population lives in England and with the royal prerogative legislation passed can be extended in time or scope without reference to Parliament. Thus, now Cameron can simply introduce purely English laws, be guaranteed of opposition not being able to muster sufficient seats and then extend it to the other nations through royal prerogative.
Cameron has steadily adopted steps to reduce democracy. The introduction of the fixed 5-year term was the first move in this direction, making it almost impossible to break the coalition or bring down his minority government. The vote on proportional representation similarly dismissed another chance to make the UK more democratic. Only one, poor model was offered and yet its rejection is seen as ruling out any electoral reform. At the last election the Conservatives received 36.1% of the vote but 47.2% of the seats; Labour won 29.0% of the votes but 39% of the seats; the Liberal Democrats got 23% of the votes but only 8.7% of the seats, they should have received 149 rather than 57. However, these things such as fair representation are seen as 'not British'. The Conservatives benefit from the fact that most British people feel politics is somehow inappropriate for them even though they complain about its impact.
Of course, the chipping away of democracy was begun under the Blair regime. With hindsight it appears that the governments of Tony Blair had very little to do with Labour Party values, they were simply a repackaged form of Thatcherism something Cameron is taking to new extremes. The erosion of civil liberties under Blair, notably the extension of detention without charge; the declaration of war based on faked evidence, the elimination of some critics and steps like identity cards and the RIPA anti-terrorism legislation which has constantly been abused by local authorities, let alone the constant use of the royal prerogative established a culture in which Cameron's steps to erode democracy can prosper.
In future I will be sure to try to see behind every step Cameron takes and recognise that no matter what he says it is about, all the rubbish about being passionate for the Union, in fact his core agenda is about creating a Britain where the Conservatives will never leave office and many of our remaining freedoms will be gone. Today I really pity the Scots for not having chosen to escape from this developing dictatorship. I know it would have left people in England in a tougher position, but even if you cannot escape from the prison yourself it is always good to see that someone else has made it out. Now we are simply going to share our bitter fate together and I am sure many who voted for Scotland to stay under the yoke of Westminster yesterday will soon be regretting it.
Showing posts with label democracy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label democracy. Show all posts
Friday, 19 September 2014
Friday, 5 November 2010
What If France Had Suffered a Coup in February 1934?
My views on this topic can be found in my e-book ‘Other Roads:
Alternate Outcomes of the Second World War’ It is available for purchase on
Amazon:
UK readers might prefer to access it through:
Canadian readers can access it through: http://www.amazon.ca/Other-Roads-Alternate-Outcomes-Second-ebook/dp/B00J44F2L0/ref=sr_1_25?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1395342737&sr=1-25
Friday, 14 May 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, 2 February 2010
Proportional Representation: Why Has It Taken So Long To Even Get This Close?
I was interested to hear on the news as part of the pre-election campaign that the government is now scheduling a vote on whether the UK moves to a referendum on introducing proportional representation for elections to the Westminster parliament. These days, which parliament you are referring to is an important distinction because, despite the UK's apparent adherence to the first-past-the-post electoral system, in fact now for a number of elections in the UK, proportional representation is already in use.
There is proportional representation for all elections to the European Parliament from UK consituencies, for the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly since their creation in 1998, for the Northern Ireland Assembly since 2003 and in Scottish local elections since 2007. So the concern that the British public would find it difficult to understand proportional representation seem to be disproved. I know it does not apply to England where 83% of the UK population live, except for European elections which have a poor turnout, but anyone who has been a student and this is now more than 40% of 18-year olds will have the chance to engage with proportional representation in student union elections too.
Of course, when New Labour was uncertain of winning a clear majority in 1997 it laid out a series of constitutional reforms to attract what was seen as centre ground middle class people, especially those who back the Liberal Democrats in local or national elections. This ground is very muddied now with the Liberal Democrats having seemingly been to the left of Labour in the early 2000s and now to their right, leaving a void on the left (and too much on the right with the UKIP and BNP attracting extremists). Of course, given that Labour had been out of office for 18 years mainly in opposition to a government that had one a minority of the actual total votes, you could understand why they were sympathetic to an electoral system which more truly reflected their level of suppport and would have prevented what was termed the 'elected dictatorship' of the Thatcher years. Naturally smaller parties, notably the Liberal Democrats and their predecessors, have always been supportive of proportional representation. As I observed back in March 2008: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/03/what-if-proportional-representation.html if the UK had had proportional representation it would have been a three-party state for much of the 20th century.
When Tony Blair's New Labour won the largest majority seen in the 20th century in British elections, the need to woo Liberal Democrat MPs into working with Labour disappeared immediately. Not only the 'big tent' approach which had even envisaged Liberal Democrats in the Cabinet went instantly, a lot of the Liberal Democrat attracting ideas went too. In the almost 13 years since Labour came to power we have seen minimal reform of the House of Lords, and as the MPs' expenses scandals showed, parliament as a whole has been neglected in terms of reform. We are no nearer to an elected upper house than we were back in 1997 and in fact faith in the parliamentary system has been damaged. Of course, the large majority's Labour won and the lack of need to actually address the parliamentary system suited Blair's personal, presidential, arrogant style of rule. The extent of this was revealed to us further today in Clare Short's testament to the Chilcot Inquiry. Behind the facade of chummy government, in fact the Cabinet system was as suppressed under Blair's smiling approach as it had been under Thatcher's scowling one; both were smug and unapologetic over the lack of democracy, accountability and discussion at the core of government as well as in each branch.
So, in 2010, Gordon Brown finds himself in a position which resembles in part the one Tony Blair was in back in 1997. He is concerned that there will be a hung parliament and he is stacking up the policies that will woo the Liberal Democrat MPs if they are willing to fall for the trick again. He is also building up a policy which may prevent Labour being out of office for the next one to two decades. This is a real danger as it is estimated that the Conservatives' plans for redrawing of constituencies would make it far harder. As Scotland and Wales places where Labour has always been strong, go more their own way, this may mean them losing any chance of a majority in England, and certainly for now, thus in the UK. Of course, it is too late. It was a mistake to wait 13 years to move towards proportional representation. It would have been better in, say, 2000 once the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly were up and running and people could see proportional representation working and could talk to British people who were not confused by it. The Conservatives have never had an interest in proportional representation. Unsurprising given that they were in power for a majority of the time in the 20th century. Keeping the first-past-the-post system will also slow the haemorraging of Conservative supporters or potential Conservative supporters among the formerly politically inactive towards UKIP and the BNP, which after the European elections seems a reality with all the violence and harship even small gains by these parties bring in their wake.
The UK has been prevaricating over proportional representation for over ninety years now and it is time to move towards it. Yes, it will mean extreme parties appearing in parliament, but it will also mean that sectional interests get a look in, drawing more people to democracy. I can see the benefits of Green Party, a grey party, an Islamic party, a Socialist party let alone regional interest parties, having representation at Westminster. Of course, the right wing is in fact already better equipped, with UKIP and the BNP able to get representation quickly as well as probably people like the Countryside Alliance. Having such parties will mean that the existing parties will be compelled to shake off their complacency and be compelled to argue their case much more vigorously. Blair could never have coped with a parliament chosen by proportional representation, he believed he was always right and had no need to explain himself. In a parliament where more sections of society is represented and new groups can rise up if people are dissatisfied, politicians have to work harder. In such a context we more likely would have been spared a fudged decision to invade Iraq and had had a strict policing of MPs' expenses.
Monday, 23 November 2009
Undemocratic Appointments to the EU: No Surprise Given the Approach the UK Favoured
It is bitterly ironic that now that the president of the EU and other 'ministers' or high representatives have been appointed for the EU that Britons are whining about the process. The British have in fact always favoured a less democratic approach to the EU as Tony Benn has long noted, there has been a 'democratic deficit'. This goes back to the period 1978-9 when the European Parliament was being created. It is not like most parliaments in that it is not the place for legislative initiative, this insteads come from the European Commission, effectively the civil service of the EU, and like most civil services members are appointed rather than elected. Britain was more than happy for the European Parliament to be toothless and by the early 1980s it was clear that the Council of Ministers, made up of the prime ministers of the member states was to be the real driving force of the community. This is why you tend to see legislation for the EU coming out of those meetings hosted by the prime minister of whichever country was currently holding the presidency of the EU. The British liked this approach because it made them feel they were yielding no sovereignty to the EU and in fact that they were pulling back some degree of sovereignty lost in simply joining what was then the EEC. It could be argued that the Council of Ministers is democratic as the members of it were elected in their individual countries, but in fact it meant the electorate did not have a say on how the EU is being run. In addition, this simple assumption that the prime minister was the natural person to sit on the Council created the kind of atmosphere in which last week's deal to appoint a president seemed quite natural.
Of course, new president, Herman van Rampuy was elected prime minister by the Belgian people and you could argue that he has gone through a partial democratic process. I think he should have his position ratified by the European Parliament. A better process would have been for the parliament to elect the president and the other ministers. Many countries have an indirect election of presidents, notably the USA where the decision comes through a college system rather than directly electing the president as happens in France. However, because of the sustained weakness of the European Parliament, encouraged by the British for the past thirty years, such an approach was ruled out for selecting a president.
The British are not a politically sophisticated nation. Most people have little understanding of the UK political system and a large majority of the potential electorate never votes. They argue that they 'don't do politics' but then turn round demanding very political changes such as the expelling of immigrants and the return of the death penalty. To the British the kind of balances which are sort when a coalition government comes to power are an alien concept. The UK has not had a coalition in 64 years so unlike in neighbouring states we have not come used to how these systems work, so they seem even more improper to us than countries which do truly engage with their political systems. Of course, the UK is currently the least democratic of all the member states of the EU in having half of its parliament appointed predominantly for life rather than elected. This is one of the comic things about Lady Ashton becoming high representative for foreign issues. She was appointed head of a local health authority an unelected position and then was made a life peer and appointed commissioner for trade before being appointed to her new role. Only in the UK where members of parliament, i.e. members of the House of Lords, can be appointed could such a career path happen. This is why it is ironic when right-wing commentators like Daniel Hannan whine on about the lack of democracy in the EU process. The problem begins here in the UK and its undemocratic system, something the Conservatives have always backed. Our undemocratic tendencies have led us to support rather than challenge when these things are built into the EU structure.
Of course, it is handy for the right-wingers to portray the EU as undemocratic. By being unwilling to engage with the European Parliament which has representatives directly elected by the British public, they have hampered the one element which could promote democracy. This is partly because they have a patronising attitude to the British public and as a result the electorate is going towards the demagogues of the UKIP and the BNP who offer politics on the level of the average person with lots of shouting and jumping up and down that Britons love. We want policy stemming from indignation rather than rational thought. All of these difficulties are great for those who want the UK to leave the EU. Some have a fantasy of entering NAFTA others want us to simply float on the edge of Europe trying to get our goods in passed the EU tariff barriers or expect to re-invent trade with former colonies the bulk of whom need development aid and are not in a strong position to buy from the UK certainly not when compared to the millions of well-off EU consumers. Even independent states Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein are in the EEA and Switzerland has numerous bilateral deals with EU, not its member states.
As always the British want to have their cake and eat it. They insist on democracy in the EU but have always favoured a structure which actually weakens the most democratic part of the union. They want democracy elsewhere in Europe but also want to retain half their parliament unelected and do not even get me on to having an unelected head of state and the fact that so much legislation is implemented and extended through royal prerogative (I know it is delegated to the prime minister who is elected, but it allows him/her to introduce numerous laws without parliamentary scrutiny which in itself is undemocratic). The bulk of British people have always been told the EU does them harm, but where would the majority of items in Lidl and Aldi be if we were outside the EU? If we want to have more of a say in what happens in the EU we need to engage thoroughly with it (the UK always has only half of its quota of European Commission staff because so few people apply and the number has to be made up by English speakers from other European states, even from ones outside the EU); heckling from the sidelines achieves nothing. Support the European Parliament and ensure it gains the powers it needs to democratically monitor and police the EU otherwise the back-room deals the UK has always favoured before will continue to dominate.
Of course, new president, Herman van Rampuy was elected prime minister by the Belgian people and you could argue that he has gone through a partial democratic process. I think he should have his position ratified by the European Parliament. A better process would have been for the parliament to elect the president and the other ministers. Many countries have an indirect election of presidents, notably the USA where the decision comes through a college system rather than directly electing the president as happens in France. However, because of the sustained weakness of the European Parliament, encouraged by the British for the past thirty years, such an approach was ruled out for selecting a president.
The British are not a politically sophisticated nation. Most people have little understanding of the UK political system and a large majority of the potential electorate never votes. They argue that they 'don't do politics' but then turn round demanding very political changes such as the expelling of immigrants and the return of the death penalty. To the British the kind of balances which are sort when a coalition government comes to power are an alien concept. The UK has not had a coalition in 64 years so unlike in neighbouring states we have not come used to how these systems work, so they seem even more improper to us than countries which do truly engage with their political systems. Of course, the UK is currently the least democratic of all the member states of the EU in having half of its parliament appointed predominantly for life rather than elected. This is one of the comic things about Lady Ashton becoming high representative for foreign issues. She was appointed head of a local health authority an unelected position and then was made a life peer and appointed commissioner for trade before being appointed to her new role. Only in the UK where members of parliament, i.e. members of the House of Lords, can be appointed could such a career path happen. This is why it is ironic when right-wing commentators like Daniel Hannan whine on about the lack of democracy in the EU process. The problem begins here in the UK and its undemocratic system, something the Conservatives have always backed. Our undemocratic tendencies have led us to support rather than challenge when these things are built into the EU structure.
Of course, it is handy for the right-wingers to portray the EU as undemocratic. By being unwilling to engage with the European Parliament which has representatives directly elected by the British public, they have hampered the one element which could promote democracy. This is partly because they have a patronising attitude to the British public and as a result the electorate is going towards the demagogues of the UKIP and the BNP who offer politics on the level of the average person with lots of shouting and jumping up and down that Britons love. We want policy stemming from indignation rather than rational thought. All of these difficulties are great for those who want the UK to leave the EU. Some have a fantasy of entering NAFTA others want us to simply float on the edge of Europe trying to get our goods in passed the EU tariff barriers or expect to re-invent trade with former colonies the bulk of whom need development aid and are not in a strong position to buy from the UK certainly not when compared to the millions of well-off EU consumers. Even independent states Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein are in the EEA and Switzerland has numerous bilateral deals with EU, not its member states.
As always the British want to have their cake and eat it. They insist on democracy in the EU but have always favoured a structure which actually weakens the most democratic part of the union. They want democracy elsewhere in Europe but also want to retain half their parliament unelected and do not even get me on to having an unelected head of state and the fact that so much legislation is implemented and extended through royal prerogative (I know it is delegated to the prime minister who is elected, but it allows him/her to introduce numerous laws without parliamentary scrutiny which in itself is undemocratic). The bulk of British people have always been told the EU does them harm, but where would the majority of items in Lidl and Aldi be if we were outside the EU? If we want to have more of a say in what happens in the EU we need to engage thoroughly with it (the UK always has only half of its quota of European Commission staff because so few people apply and the number has to be made up by English speakers from other European states, even from ones outside the EU); heckling from the sidelines achieves nothing. Support the European Parliament and ensure it gains the powers it needs to democratically monitor and police the EU otherwise the back-room deals the UK has always favoured before will continue to dominate.
Wednesday, 6 February 2008
The Death of 'Democratic' Capitalism
Many people would argue that capitalist economies by definition are exploitative. That they rely on comparatively cheap labour to produce items to sell to consumers who are generally the cheap labour themselves and their pay is kept at a level which is only sufficient to allow them to buy those things in the long-run and not to advance through accumulating their own wealth so they can establish their own exploitative businesses. However, for most of the 20th century and certainly following the Second World War, there was a gradual movement away from that crude form of capitalism towards something more tempered. Most visibly we saw the evolution of welfare states across Europe which meant that by the 1960s most people were guaranteed housing, schooling, health care, public transport, etc. which allowed them to accumulate enough to allow them to enjoy things like holidays and consumer goods. This in turn boosted the consumer industry and capitalists found it was quite a good idea to keep this going especially as heavy industry began to decline in the 1970s and the service industry sector boomed. In the UK it is now sustained by credit rather than decent salaries, so is pretty fragile, but elsewhere in Europe and other industrialised parts of the world it is still roughly in place. The Communist states provided the basics for their people but had very little to offer in consumer items and with the fall of Communism they gave up the basics in return for opportunity to have access to such consumer items, and even more sharply than in the West, those who could get access did well, those who could not (the majority) were worse off, hence the continuing popularity of the Communists in the post-Communist countries as after the First World War.
As the Italian historian Donald Sassoon (see 'One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century' (1998)) who has spent his life looking at Socialism, has argued, actually more things that Socialists aim for such as health care, education, care of the elderly, decent salaries and working conditions, etc. are not achieved when capitalism is in crisis but when it is booming. I have termed this 'democratic capitalism' in that while consumers and workers are still effectively exploited, they also receive protection from the worst fluctations of the capitalist economies. In addition, there is an element in this 'democracy' which tends to get overlooked. The workers and the big capitalists are the usual focus of commentary on our economies, but I would argue, that those who make the jump and stop working for someone else and begin running their own business are also a characteristic of that democratic element. In the same way one would contrast say a monarchy in which only members of the royal family could run the country with a democracy where, in theory, anyone can be elected prime minister, and also take up many other lower positions locally, regionally and nationally to which they would have no access in a monarchy or a dictatorship. In the UK small business people gained this right gradually from the the 18th century onwards and while it took time for such people to be accorded anything like the access to influence that big businesses (especially those based on land) had, by the 20th century they had clearly won it. Thus, I see the ability of people to turn from workers to running small businesses as a further element of the democratic capitalism we once had. Of course many business go bust and these people return to the workers, but like someone who loses an election, generally they can try again.
So, you might be thinking, well this is a common example of capitalism with big business, small business and employees, with protection for those people who need it. However, I am arguing that such a form of capitalism is now dead and that we have almost reverted to the unfettered capitalism of the mid-19th century which meant the rich were immensely wealthy and the bulk of the population lived vicariously; in addition, the rich shaped all governmental policy and behaviour and anyone beneath them had no power. In addition, the ability to make the jump from worker to small business person is being crushed by the all encompassing corporations. In 1996 Michael Heseltine when Deputy Prime Minister (1995-7; he had been Secretary for Trade & Industry 1992-5) advised large companies effectively not to settle their bills to small businesses knowing that once they collapsed they would not be liable for the debt. This came from a leading Conservative and the party was supposed to be the one that backed business people whatever their size. Heseltine of course had become a millionaire at the age of 30 in 1963 so could be scathing of those struggling with small businesses. What this seemed to mark was a shift in the UK from backing any capitalism to backing the capitalism of the super-rich (or turbo-rich as they seem to be being called now). This was aided through the Thatcher years (1979-91) by selling off utilities which became very profitable businesses. On the surface this seemed to benefit small investors, but of course by the 1990s all their shares had been bought up by the big investment companies. Similarly encouragement to allow people to buy their council houses seem to be the democratisation of house ownership, but in fact with the slump of 1990-3 engineered by Thatcher's government and that of her successor John Major (1991-7) they lost control of these to the hands of multi-property owning landlords who rose to be millionaires too. Thus, the 1980s and 1990s saw the squeeze put on those people who would normally have been rising capitalists in favour of the richer.
Of course, Thatcher also ran through the welfare state stripping it of funds, making people feel guilty about using it and blaming anyone who did (which is one reason why millions of pounds of benefits go unclaimed each year), banning councils from building social housing, wrecking union rights, forcing public sector jobs to go to private companies paying the lowest wages, not allowing pensions to rise with inflation and so on. She did a very good job of stripping away so much of the safety net that had taken decades to construct. This is why the UK saw the rise of the underclass who have dropped out of society that no longer makes an effort to support them. Pressure on ordinary people came from many directions. I have noted how invidious the utility companies are and just today are reports about the percentage of poor families with children who cannot afford to heat their homes properly. Due to the use of metered utilities poor people actually have to pay more for their fuel than rich people, the same goes for food as they cannot access out-of-town stores that have the cheaper food; they cannot get bank loans and even legitimate loan companies can charge quite legally many times as much interest as those richer people can access. Thus, the system is engineered in the UK that once you have fallen into the poor category you are never going to get out. Increasingly, nor are your children, as schools become more selective, and as I have noted in previous posts even intelligent poor children fall quickly behind at school, they are condemned to live the same lives as their parents, however hard they might work. Due to the attitudes fostered in the 1980s such people are made to fill guilty and portrayed to the rest of us as lazy and deserving of their situation. Every class has lazy people in it, but poverty is an incredible motivator and I believe the greatest scroungers are among the rich.
So, for over twenty years, Britain has been moving to a less democratic capitalism, in which those who have least ability to pay are paying more. This was shown most sharply by the so-called Community Charge (better known as the Poll Tax) introduced to Scotland in 1989 and to the rest of the UK in 1990 and scrapped in 1993 following some of the most severe civil unrest the UK had seen for almost a decade. This tax was deemed 'fair' because everyone in a district no matter what they earnt paid the same amount to live in a house or flat in that district no matter how scummy or luxurious the property was or if they just rented one room in a house or had a whole mansion to themselves. About 1 million people disappeared from records overnight as they sought to avoid being stung by this tax which made up much more of your outgoings if you were poor or if you were rich. Even now in a borough like Tower Hamlets (small but densely populated, in East London) there are 60,000 (out of a population of over 200,000 people) fewer on the census register than registered with local doctors, because of the lingering fear of being found, despite the shift to the Council Tax which is based on property size.
Despite this steady erosion democratic capitalism it has now entered a new phase going beyond even the rich of the past. Even they are weak in the new set-up. This has been highlighted in a new book 'Who Runs Britain? How the Super-Rich are Changing Our Lives' by Robert Peston (2008) which though apparently flawed, highlights how that the people who run the UK are these so-called 'turbo-rich', going beyond the plutocrats of the past in their wealth and power. Of course Thatcher laid the ground for this by scrapping restrictions on taking capital generated in the UK out of the country, though this was simply jumping the gun as the EU insisted on it for all member states by 1990. Now, if a wealthy individual dislikes the government's policies they can simply threaten to shift some of their wealth elsewhere. Apparently, according to Peston the 1000 most wealthy people in the UK (out of a population of 62,000,000) owns £360,000,000,000 (€496 billion; US$716 billion) equivalent to 50 times the economy of Uruguay; roughly the same as the economy of Taiwan or Indonesia (which are the 20th and 21st richest countries in the world; about £10 billion more than even oil-rich Saudi Arabia in 22nd place). Beneath this 1000 must be many more billions owned and think of this replicated across the USA, Germany and Japan. In past postings I have referred to a map which showed the percentage of people living in various parts of the UK who were wealthy enough to be exempt from the norms of social behaviour. These 1000 people are rich enough to be exempt from the norms of government behaviour. They can murder people, make them disappear, drive them out of their homes and business and no-one can stop them.
You may say, well there have always been the rich. What is worsening the situation is the permitting of things like equity funds which simply buy up successful businesses and then load them with debt like a parasite draining their host rather than allowing that business to grow, pay better wages and employ more people. The richer you are the smaller a percentage of your income goes on tax. Multi-national companies learned this as early as the 1910s with oil companies leading the way. Peston claims that the tax 'efficiencies' of the super-rich deprive the government of equivalent to the rest of us paying 5p in the £ (i.e. a 5% tax rate) and so equivalent to hundreds of schools, hospitals, houses, battleships, space rockets, whatever you want to spend it on. This is just what we lose through their tax fiddles. They have distorted the economy of the whole South-East of England as I have noted before, pushing the cost of housing out of the reach of the bulk of even well-off people, and because their friends in the Thatcher regime smashed social housing, people cannot fall back on that as they would do in the past. It is almost as if these super-rich want to rub our noses in the muck to show how deprived we actually are. They are further pushing into health care, prisons, the Post Office, all the utilities, places where we previous got a bit of leeway if were not that rich, or in fact just comfortable. It is as if it is not only their greed wishing to earn more than whole states, it is that they feel they have to get us back for the 20th century when they were pressed a little bit to contribute to the rest of the population who actually power the businesses that they suck money from. Now we are being told, you stepped out of line, accept your station, here is the whipping to remind you not to get cocky again, not to ask for a welfare system, but to fight with each other for health and a house and an education so that you have no strength and we can pay you as low as we like to.
This is what the New Right agenda of the mid-1970s was working to. It was put into action in the 1980s and 1990s in the UK and the USA effectively forcing other more reluctant countries to follow suit (now with Sarkozy in France even the last outpost of a welfare society is being dismantled) and the countries coming out of Communism to rush blindly down the same path. As I have noted before Bush has favoured the super-rich as his core constituency and has engineered wars on their behalf (I think they fear fundamentalist Islam because it does not support consumerism and Iraq was just about the oil supply and business opportunities anyway). In Britain Blair was too enamoured of the Thatcher image to challenge it and even courted the super-rich. Maybe a Labour victory in 1992 was the last chance to reverse it, maybe it was too late by then, it certainly is now.
So what is our future? Well, probably by 2030 we will look very much like 1830. The welfare state is crumbling so fast in the UK that free at point of need dentistry is all but gone and health care will follow. Schooling is increasingly segregated and opportunities increasingly limited. There will always be a few people who will break out, but increasingly it will be because they win the lottery or a talent show than through hard work. Optimism will be sapped from us, the sense that we can achieve, especially through establishing our own businesses, will be taken from us. We are returning to a kind of feudal society in which we remain in our place in society and the bulk of us get the basics we need to surivive at the sufferance of our suppliers. Once we become old or no longer useful we are discarded. I think if even Winston Churchill, the Conservative prime minister (1940-5; 1951-5) let alone the ministers of Clement Attlee's Labour governments (1945-51) would look in utter horror at beggars so numerous on Britain's streets. We are charging back to the Victorian era with the plutocrats farther reaching and more powerful than ever before.
Suddenly while writing this a quote came back to me which I managed to track down and now it seems eerily prescient. It was made in 1983 by Neil Kinnock warning the audience about what would happen if Margaret Thatcher won the election (which she did with a large majority). He was Shadow Cabinet spokesman on education at the time but went on to lead the Labour Party to defeat in 1987 and 1992. He was condemned as a 'windbag' but actually was more a old school speaker who used rhetoric in the way Welsh politicians of the past like Aneurin Bevan and David Lloyd George did, so was increasingly out of step with the 'sound bite' era rising in the 1980s. This, I think seems a classic and it may weaken my argument to refer back so far for a comment and to someone unsuccessful, but I do not think it weakens the warning which is probably even truer now than it was 25 years ago.
"... I warn you.
I warn you that you will have pain — when healing and relief depend upon payment.
I warn you that you will have ignorance — when talents are untended and wits are wasted, when learning is a privilege and not a right.
I warn you that you will have poverty — when pensions slip and benefits are whittled away by a government that won’t pay in an economy that can’t pay.
I warn you that you will be cold — when fuel charges are used as a tax system that the rich don’t notice and the poor can’t afford.
I warn you that you must not expect work — when many cannot spend, more will not be able to earn. When they don’t earn, they don’t spend. When they don’t spend, work dies.
I warn you not to go into the streets alone after dark or into the streets in large crowds of protest in the light.
I warn you that you will be quiet — when the curfew of fear and the gibbet of unemployment make you obedient.
I warn you that you will have defence of a sort — with a risk and at a price that passes all understanding.
I warn you that you will be home-bound — when fares and transport bills kill leisure and lock you up.
I warn you that you will borrow less — when credit, loans, mortgages and easy payments are refused to people on your melting income.
...
— I warn you not to be ordinary
— I warn you not to be young
— I warn you not to fall ill
— I warn you not to get old."
As the Italian historian Donald Sassoon (see 'One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century' (1998)) who has spent his life looking at Socialism, has argued, actually more things that Socialists aim for such as health care, education, care of the elderly, decent salaries and working conditions, etc. are not achieved when capitalism is in crisis but when it is booming. I have termed this 'democratic capitalism' in that while consumers and workers are still effectively exploited, they also receive protection from the worst fluctations of the capitalist economies. In addition, there is an element in this 'democracy' which tends to get overlooked. The workers and the big capitalists are the usual focus of commentary on our economies, but I would argue, that those who make the jump and stop working for someone else and begin running their own business are also a characteristic of that democratic element. In the same way one would contrast say a monarchy in which only members of the royal family could run the country with a democracy where, in theory, anyone can be elected prime minister, and also take up many other lower positions locally, regionally and nationally to which they would have no access in a monarchy or a dictatorship. In the UK small business people gained this right gradually from the the 18th century onwards and while it took time for such people to be accorded anything like the access to influence that big businesses (especially those based on land) had, by the 20th century they had clearly won it. Thus, I see the ability of people to turn from workers to running small businesses as a further element of the democratic capitalism we once had. Of course many business go bust and these people return to the workers, but like someone who loses an election, generally they can try again.
So, you might be thinking, well this is a common example of capitalism with big business, small business and employees, with protection for those people who need it. However, I am arguing that such a form of capitalism is now dead and that we have almost reverted to the unfettered capitalism of the mid-19th century which meant the rich were immensely wealthy and the bulk of the population lived vicariously; in addition, the rich shaped all governmental policy and behaviour and anyone beneath them had no power. In addition, the ability to make the jump from worker to small business person is being crushed by the all encompassing corporations. In 1996 Michael Heseltine when Deputy Prime Minister (1995-7; he had been Secretary for Trade & Industry 1992-5) advised large companies effectively not to settle their bills to small businesses knowing that once they collapsed they would not be liable for the debt. This came from a leading Conservative and the party was supposed to be the one that backed business people whatever their size. Heseltine of course had become a millionaire at the age of 30 in 1963 so could be scathing of those struggling with small businesses. What this seemed to mark was a shift in the UK from backing any capitalism to backing the capitalism of the super-rich (or turbo-rich as they seem to be being called now). This was aided through the Thatcher years (1979-91) by selling off utilities which became very profitable businesses. On the surface this seemed to benefit small investors, but of course by the 1990s all their shares had been bought up by the big investment companies. Similarly encouragement to allow people to buy their council houses seem to be the democratisation of house ownership, but in fact with the slump of 1990-3 engineered by Thatcher's government and that of her successor John Major (1991-7) they lost control of these to the hands of multi-property owning landlords who rose to be millionaires too. Thus, the 1980s and 1990s saw the squeeze put on those people who would normally have been rising capitalists in favour of the richer.
Of course, Thatcher also ran through the welfare state stripping it of funds, making people feel guilty about using it and blaming anyone who did (which is one reason why millions of pounds of benefits go unclaimed each year), banning councils from building social housing, wrecking union rights, forcing public sector jobs to go to private companies paying the lowest wages, not allowing pensions to rise with inflation and so on. She did a very good job of stripping away so much of the safety net that had taken decades to construct. This is why the UK saw the rise of the underclass who have dropped out of society that no longer makes an effort to support them. Pressure on ordinary people came from many directions. I have noted how invidious the utility companies are and just today are reports about the percentage of poor families with children who cannot afford to heat their homes properly. Due to the use of metered utilities poor people actually have to pay more for their fuel than rich people, the same goes for food as they cannot access out-of-town stores that have the cheaper food; they cannot get bank loans and even legitimate loan companies can charge quite legally many times as much interest as those richer people can access. Thus, the system is engineered in the UK that once you have fallen into the poor category you are never going to get out. Increasingly, nor are your children, as schools become more selective, and as I have noted in previous posts even intelligent poor children fall quickly behind at school, they are condemned to live the same lives as their parents, however hard they might work. Due to the attitudes fostered in the 1980s such people are made to fill guilty and portrayed to the rest of us as lazy and deserving of their situation. Every class has lazy people in it, but poverty is an incredible motivator and I believe the greatest scroungers are among the rich.
So, for over twenty years, Britain has been moving to a less democratic capitalism, in which those who have least ability to pay are paying more. This was shown most sharply by the so-called Community Charge (better known as the Poll Tax) introduced to Scotland in 1989 and to the rest of the UK in 1990 and scrapped in 1993 following some of the most severe civil unrest the UK had seen for almost a decade. This tax was deemed 'fair' because everyone in a district no matter what they earnt paid the same amount to live in a house or flat in that district no matter how scummy or luxurious the property was or if they just rented one room in a house or had a whole mansion to themselves. About 1 million people disappeared from records overnight as they sought to avoid being stung by this tax which made up much more of your outgoings if you were poor or if you were rich. Even now in a borough like Tower Hamlets (small but densely populated, in East London) there are 60,000 (out of a population of over 200,000 people) fewer on the census register than registered with local doctors, because of the lingering fear of being found, despite the shift to the Council Tax which is based on property size.
Despite this steady erosion democratic capitalism it has now entered a new phase going beyond even the rich of the past. Even they are weak in the new set-up. This has been highlighted in a new book 'Who Runs Britain? How the Super-Rich are Changing Our Lives' by Robert Peston (2008) which though apparently flawed, highlights how that the people who run the UK are these so-called 'turbo-rich', going beyond the plutocrats of the past in their wealth and power. Of course Thatcher laid the ground for this by scrapping restrictions on taking capital generated in the UK out of the country, though this was simply jumping the gun as the EU insisted on it for all member states by 1990. Now, if a wealthy individual dislikes the government's policies they can simply threaten to shift some of their wealth elsewhere. Apparently, according to Peston the 1000 most wealthy people in the UK (out of a population of 62,000,000) owns £360,000,000,000 (€496 billion; US$716 billion) equivalent to 50 times the economy of Uruguay; roughly the same as the economy of Taiwan or Indonesia (which are the 20th and 21st richest countries in the world; about £10 billion more than even oil-rich Saudi Arabia in 22nd place). Beneath this 1000 must be many more billions owned and think of this replicated across the USA, Germany and Japan. In past postings I have referred to a map which showed the percentage of people living in various parts of the UK who were wealthy enough to be exempt from the norms of social behaviour. These 1000 people are rich enough to be exempt from the norms of government behaviour. They can murder people, make them disappear, drive them out of their homes and business and no-one can stop them.
You may say, well there have always been the rich. What is worsening the situation is the permitting of things like equity funds which simply buy up successful businesses and then load them with debt like a parasite draining their host rather than allowing that business to grow, pay better wages and employ more people. The richer you are the smaller a percentage of your income goes on tax. Multi-national companies learned this as early as the 1910s with oil companies leading the way. Peston claims that the tax 'efficiencies' of the super-rich deprive the government of equivalent to the rest of us paying 5p in the £ (i.e. a 5% tax rate) and so equivalent to hundreds of schools, hospitals, houses, battleships, space rockets, whatever you want to spend it on. This is just what we lose through their tax fiddles. They have distorted the economy of the whole South-East of England as I have noted before, pushing the cost of housing out of the reach of the bulk of even well-off people, and because their friends in the Thatcher regime smashed social housing, people cannot fall back on that as they would do in the past. It is almost as if these super-rich want to rub our noses in the muck to show how deprived we actually are. They are further pushing into health care, prisons, the Post Office, all the utilities, places where we previous got a bit of leeway if were not that rich, or in fact just comfortable. It is as if it is not only their greed wishing to earn more than whole states, it is that they feel they have to get us back for the 20th century when they were pressed a little bit to contribute to the rest of the population who actually power the businesses that they suck money from. Now we are being told, you stepped out of line, accept your station, here is the whipping to remind you not to get cocky again, not to ask for a welfare system, but to fight with each other for health and a house and an education so that you have no strength and we can pay you as low as we like to.
This is what the New Right agenda of the mid-1970s was working to. It was put into action in the 1980s and 1990s in the UK and the USA effectively forcing other more reluctant countries to follow suit (now with Sarkozy in France even the last outpost of a welfare society is being dismantled) and the countries coming out of Communism to rush blindly down the same path. As I have noted before Bush has favoured the super-rich as his core constituency and has engineered wars on their behalf (I think they fear fundamentalist Islam because it does not support consumerism and Iraq was just about the oil supply and business opportunities anyway). In Britain Blair was too enamoured of the Thatcher image to challenge it and even courted the super-rich. Maybe a Labour victory in 1992 was the last chance to reverse it, maybe it was too late by then, it certainly is now.
So what is our future? Well, probably by 2030 we will look very much like 1830. The welfare state is crumbling so fast in the UK that free at point of need dentistry is all but gone and health care will follow. Schooling is increasingly segregated and opportunities increasingly limited. There will always be a few people who will break out, but increasingly it will be because they win the lottery or a talent show than through hard work. Optimism will be sapped from us, the sense that we can achieve, especially through establishing our own businesses, will be taken from us. We are returning to a kind of feudal society in which we remain in our place in society and the bulk of us get the basics we need to surivive at the sufferance of our suppliers. Once we become old or no longer useful we are discarded. I think if even Winston Churchill, the Conservative prime minister (1940-5; 1951-5) let alone the ministers of Clement Attlee's Labour governments (1945-51) would look in utter horror at beggars so numerous on Britain's streets. We are charging back to the Victorian era with the plutocrats farther reaching and more powerful than ever before.
Suddenly while writing this a quote came back to me which I managed to track down and now it seems eerily prescient. It was made in 1983 by Neil Kinnock warning the audience about what would happen if Margaret Thatcher won the election (which she did with a large majority). He was Shadow Cabinet spokesman on education at the time but went on to lead the Labour Party to defeat in 1987 and 1992. He was condemned as a 'windbag' but actually was more a old school speaker who used rhetoric in the way Welsh politicians of the past like Aneurin Bevan and David Lloyd George did, so was increasingly out of step with the 'sound bite' era rising in the 1980s. This, I think seems a classic and it may weaken my argument to refer back so far for a comment and to someone unsuccessful, but I do not think it weakens the warning which is probably even truer now than it was 25 years ago.
"... I warn you.
I warn you that you will have pain — when healing and relief depend upon payment.
I warn you that you will have ignorance — when talents are untended and wits are wasted, when learning is a privilege and not a right.
I warn you that you will have poverty — when pensions slip and benefits are whittled away by a government that won’t pay in an economy that can’t pay.
I warn you that you will be cold — when fuel charges are used as a tax system that the rich don’t notice and the poor can’t afford.
I warn you that you must not expect work — when many cannot spend, more will not be able to earn. When they don’t earn, they don’t spend. When they don’t spend, work dies.
I warn you not to go into the streets alone after dark or into the streets in large crowds of protest in the light.
I warn you that you will be quiet — when the curfew of fear and the gibbet of unemployment make you obedient.
I warn you that you will have defence of a sort — with a risk and at a price that passes all understanding.
I warn you that you will be home-bound — when fares and transport bills kill leisure and lock you up.
I warn you that you will borrow less — when credit, loans, mortgages and easy payments are refused to people on your melting income.
...
— I warn you not to be ordinary
— I warn you not to be young
— I warn you not to fall ill
— I warn you not to get old."
Friday, 18 January 2008
Removing One 'Wrong' Does Not Automatically Put A 'Right' in its Place
It is always interesting listening to apologists of something who know that general consensus about what they are saying will be hostile so they wrap up their statements in conciliatory phrases especially if they are eating in your house at the time, but then with rather veiled statements proceed to make outrageous statements. In the UK it is not the done thing to say to them 'your views are entirely offensive stop', society requires you smile and admit they have a point. I would support this view, because I heartily support the view that whilst I may disagree with someone they have the right to express any views they choose and if I tried to prevent them then I would be behaving as badly as the views they outline. As noted in a recent post, some will see that as a weakness of the liberal humanist approach, but in fact in line with a comment I saw in a newspaper recently referring to the BNP (British National Party the main UK fascist party) 'given them enough string [i.e. not even rope] and they will hang themselves' as typically bigots show themselves up as stupid and hateful far better themselves that we could ever hope to do.
Now, in this context, I had a white former South African woman in my house last week. She is 28 so was born in 1980 when apartheid was in place but still only a teenager when it finally ended in 1994. Like people interested in the country she has seen the difficulties with crime, violence, poverty and AIDS that have plagued it since and she now argues that many Blacks in South Africa would prefer a return to the apartheid system because it at least had stability. To some degree that is a rather rosy view of the 'stability' of South Africa especially in the 1970s and 1980s with its economy suffering spiralling inflation and heavily armed police riding around beating and shooting people and internicine murders between different Black factions. It is clear that many Whites who grew up during the period were oblivious to the severity of events going on. They say the British had exaggerated information, but it is clear that having a free press we did not have to have exaggerated reports to see how bad the situation was. South Africa had no television broadcasts before 1977 to help keep people in ignorance and even then news was heavily censored. The one incident that they are most suprised to hear about the attack of the extreme AWB against the ANC conference in 1990 which almost triggered a civil war.
Apartheid South Africa was a society divided on racial grounds denying people access to areas and facilities such as schools and hopsitals based on their racial categorisation, something that had only otherwise been seen in Nazi Germany, hardly a good role model. The woman knew I had been in the Anti-Apartheid Movement in the UK in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which for liberals in the UK was almost assumed and I recognise now I could have been much more active than I was. Anyway, she said to me, had I been to South Africa and I said no (partly because flights there are beyond my income) but I also said because I knew how violent and crime-ridden the country was. She ridiculed me saying well, surely those were the people in control that I had campaigned to liberate. Of course that is a foolish statement but you can see why Whites in South Africa see a direct connection between the end of apartheid and the rise on social problems. This, however, is a very simplistic view and is similar to the difficulties in both Iraq and Afghanistan. It is right to campaign against dictatorships but you cannot assume that simply removing them will create peace and democracy; that is actually the harder job than removing the dictatorship and yet it is the one people pay least attention to.
The Anti-Apartheid Movement campaigned not to create a South Africa which was crime-ridden and violent, it aimed for a state which did not have a divisive social and political structure and gave the majority a voice but in the context of freedom for all people no matter what their ethnic background. It also gave people the freedom to be criminals and to be violent in a way that they have that freedom (and use it) in the UK, USA, France and so on. There are some points to note. Democracy does not suddenly manufacture a feasible economy. As in the USSR before its collapse, a distorted economy of the kind which is prevalent in Africa and was also in the Communist state is going to leave certain people in poverty to an even greater extent than they are in the democracies, because the authoritarian state can restrict their movement to find work and to protest against conditions in a way democracies cannot do. So in Russia and South Africa you still have the weak economy from before but people can take action to improve their situation and the easiest way is always to commit a crime. In addition creating democracy does not overnight erase social inequalities and whilst Blacks and Coloureds are now in a position to become prosperous in South Africa, the richest people there are still White as they were in previous decades. This will also take time to change and the Mugabe model in Zimbabwe has proven itself to be the wrong way to go about it.
Democracy itself (let alone a fair society and despite many Americans' views the two are not necessarily linked) takes a long time to establish. In the UK it took centuries and as yet we are still not a truly democratic state as half of our parliament is unelected. In France it took centuries and a bloody revolution. In Germany it took two world wars and the Nazi regime before enduring democracy was established. The USA had a colonial war, a vast civil war, rioting and unrest to even establish its current form of democracy, again taking centuries. So why does anyone think that democracy can really truly be established in South Africa, Russia (which had never even tried democracy before the 1990s), Iraq, Afghanistan in the space of a few years and peacefully, when the bulk of the lauded democracies had to go through decades and decades of bloodshed to get to often quite imperfect democracy now.
It is a human tragedy that when dictatorships end it takes so long to establish some degree of stability, even to reduce the 'normality' of violence to an extent when it becomes exceptional rather than taken for granted. However, this is no excuse to say, well as democracy is so violent and unstable in the first few decades then we should not bother and stick with authoritarian regimes instead. This is like saying a woman should not let the baby out of her womb simply because it is going to be a painful process often needing lots of input from doctors and nurses. When things change you need to look forward. No-one fights to help criminals prosper, they fight for all the ordinary people, the bulk of South Africans and Iraqis who simply want to be able to go work in the morning, feed their families, come home, eat and go to sleep; to not be stopped and checked all the time, not to be arrested with no cause, to disappear, to be tortured or shot. In addition, they would like to be able to shape the government in the direction which fits with their values (though most people are quite happy if it just leaves them alone) and to be able to protest freely when things upset them. These are the people that anyone opposing a dictatorship is campaigning for. Yet, everyone, especially governments must remember, that taking away the dictatorship is not the end of the process rather it is just the brief introduction to a process that will stretch over the following decades.
Now, in this context, I had a white former South African woman in my house last week. She is 28 so was born in 1980 when apartheid was in place but still only a teenager when it finally ended in 1994. Like people interested in the country she has seen the difficulties with crime, violence, poverty and AIDS that have plagued it since and she now argues that many Blacks in South Africa would prefer a return to the apartheid system because it at least had stability. To some degree that is a rather rosy view of the 'stability' of South Africa especially in the 1970s and 1980s with its economy suffering spiralling inflation and heavily armed police riding around beating and shooting people and internicine murders between different Black factions. It is clear that many Whites who grew up during the period were oblivious to the severity of events going on. They say the British had exaggerated information, but it is clear that having a free press we did not have to have exaggerated reports to see how bad the situation was. South Africa had no television broadcasts before 1977 to help keep people in ignorance and even then news was heavily censored. The one incident that they are most suprised to hear about the attack of the extreme AWB against the ANC conference in 1990 which almost triggered a civil war.
Apartheid South Africa was a society divided on racial grounds denying people access to areas and facilities such as schools and hopsitals based on their racial categorisation, something that had only otherwise been seen in Nazi Germany, hardly a good role model. The woman knew I had been in the Anti-Apartheid Movement in the UK in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which for liberals in the UK was almost assumed and I recognise now I could have been much more active than I was. Anyway, she said to me, had I been to South Africa and I said no (partly because flights there are beyond my income) but I also said because I knew how violent and crime-ridden the country was. She ridiculed me saying well, surely those were the people in control that I had campaigned to liberate. Of course that is a foolish statement but you can see why Whites in South Africa see a direct connection between the end of apartheid and the rise on social problems. This, however, is a very simplistic view and is similar to the difficulties in both Iraq and Afghanistan. It is right to campaign against dictatorships but you cannot assume that simply removing them will create peace and democracy; that is actually the harder job than removing the dictatorship and yet it is the one people pay least attention to.
The Anti-Apartheid Movement campaigned not to create a South Africa which was crime-ridden and violent, it aimed for a state which did not have a divisive social and political structure and gave the majority a voice but in the context of freedom for all people no matter what their ethnic background. It also gave people the freedom to be criminals and to be violent in a way that they have that freedom (and use it) in the UK, USA, France and so on. There are some points to note. Democracy does not suddenly manufacture a feasible economy. As in the USSR before its collapse, a distorted economy of the kind which is prevalent in Africa and was also in the Communist state is going to leave certain people in poverty to an even greater extent than they are in the democracies, because the authoritarian state can restrict their movement to find work and to protest against conditions in a way democracies cannot do. So in Russia and South Africa you still have the weak economy from before but people can take action to improve their situation and the easiest way is always to commit a crime. In addition creating democracy does not overnight erase social inequalities and whilst Blacks and Coloureds are now in a position to become prosperous in South Africa, the richest people there are still White as they were in previous decades. This will also take time to change and the Mugabe model in Zimbabwe has proven itself to be the wrong way to go about it.
Democracy itself (let alone a fair society and despite many Americans' views the two are not necessarily linked) takes a long time to establish. In the UK it took centuries and as yet we are still not a truly democratic state as half of our parliament is unelected. In France it took centuries and a bloody revolution. In Germany it took two world wars and the Nazi regime before enduring democracy was established. The USA had a colonial war, a vast civil war, rioting and unrest to even establish its current form of democracy, again taking centuries. So why does anyone think that democracy can really truly be established in South Africa, Russia (which had never even tried democracy before the 1990s), Iraq, Afghanistan in the space of a few years and peacefully, when the bulk of the lauded democracies had to go through decades and decades of bloodshed to get to often quite imperfect democracy now.
It is a human tragedy that when dictatorships end it takes so long to establish some degree of stability, even to reduce the 'normality' of violence to an extent when it becomes exceptional rather than taken for granted. However, this is no excuse to say, well as democracy is so violent and unstable in the first few decades then we should not bother and stick with authoritarian regimes instead. This is like saying a woman should not let the baby out of her womb simply because it is going to be a painful process often needing lots of input from doctors and nurses. When things change you need to look forward. No-one fights to help criminals prosper, they fight for all the ordinary people, the bulk of South Africans and Iraqis who simply want to be able to go work in the morning, feed their families, come home, eat and go to sleep; to not be stopped and checked all the time, not to be arrested with no cause, to disappear, to be tortured or shot. In addition, they would like to be able to shape the government in the direction which fits with their values (though most people are quite happy if it just leaves them alone) and to be able to protest freely when things upset them. These are the people that anyone opposing a dictatorship is campaigning for. Yet, everyone, especially governments must remember, that taking away the dictatorship is not the end of the process rather it is just the brief introduction to a process that will stretch over the following decades.
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