The demise of launderettes/laundrettes (the first 'e' seems optional and however it is spelt, it is most often pronounced simply as 'laun-drette'; apparently called laundromats in the USA) has long been promised, but they still seem to cling on. I have spent a lot of my time in launderettes over the years both in the UK and in Germany and have a wide range of experiences in them. They are a feature of many high streets in the UK and other countries and though their purpose is the same, i.e. to provide somewhere for people to wash their clothes and bedding, they vary considerably. For someone, like me, who enjoys mid-20th century modernist architecture and typography, launderettes often have a wonderfully dated feel. You certainly can have the sensation when sitting in one that little has changed from 1975 and, in some cases, 1955. In contrast, some have become very funky. The one I used to see in central London in the mid-1990s equipped with sofas and a pool table seems to have gone, but I passed one the other day offering coffee and a chance 'to chill out' and it is the second one in recent weeks that I have seen offering internet access while you launder.
The reason why launderettes persist is because many people live in small, jammed flats, bedsits and other facilities without a (working) washing machine. With local authorities housing people in bed & breakfast hotels and other such locations there are many dependent on a laundrette to wash their clothing. Though I know some universities have closed their campus launderettes, students living out in the town often still need them, because landlords/ladies are often slow to replace washing machines which are liable to break down quickly if five adult residents are using them week in/week out rather than a nuclear family. In addition, even in family homes, having a washing machine can be a challenge. I used to live in a well-equipped flat in Poplar, East London, but the kitchen had been designed to hold only a very narrow washing machine. When this broke down there were no longer any washing machines on the market that could fit the slot in kitchen unit. It subsequently turned out that the machine had been sabotaged by the plumber. Upset at being chastised by the landlord when he found him lying in the bath smoking, he rearranged the pipes so they flowed upwards and wedged a sponge into the pipe for good measure. The advantage of that was it only blocked after a while. Anyway, before all this was uncovered I ended up using the launderette from which many of my stories come. Even in the house I live in at present, the previous owners put the washing machine into the kitchen unit so precisely that it was impossible to remove when it broke down. A lot of people seem to forget that the way to get a washing machine (and I have installed a handful) into a slot is to 'step' it, i.e. move it side-to-side as if it is walking. With insufficient or no gap around the machine, you cannot step it out. It is impossible to pull out a washing machine especially one that has been allowed to settle in its slot over months or years. In this case we literally had to saw off the side of the unit before we could remove the washing machine and get a working one in.
So, as a student, tenant and home owner I have had recourse to use launderettes. There seems to be an infinite variety, but if I outline some of the ones I have used over the past 20 years, I think it will give you a flavour of the kind of establishments you can find in the British high street. I first regularly used a launderette when I went to university. There was a spin dryer in my hall and an ironing room, but no washing machine. Probably sensible given there were 20 people per kitchen. The campus laundrette was a classic of its kind, built in the late 1960s it looked a decade older. It was all linoleum on the floor and large, pale yellow, upright washing machines and vast hot dryers. It was always very busy, but unlike launderettes in the high street its clientele were all of a particular age, usually 18-19 and 20-1 (1st and 3rd year undergraduates) with the occasional older postgraduate thrown in. Many of these people were inexperienced at washing clothes. Many got distracted while doing the job and it was not uncommon to find a full set of cold wet clothes left in a washing machine long after their cycle was over.
Living out in my second year, I started using a launderette at the end of my road. It was small and the washing machines ran parallel to the street rather than at right angles as is common. It was all dark wood panelling. Nothing exceptional happened there. It was near enough to my house that I could leave clothes there and go home so there was little time for interaction with other customers. Back on campus in my third year, I realised I could save money by handwashing my clothes in my bath. I was fortunate to be among some of the first students to have an en-suite bathroom. These came in the late 1980s when universities realised that if they built accommodation like that they could charge conference attenders a daily rate that was the same as the weekly rate paid by students during term-time. Business people do not want a student room, they want something looking like a hotel room, so some lucky students, me included (being slightly older than the average undergraduate I believe helped my luck) got our own bathrooms/laundry.
Moving to Norwich began my real encounters with the more eccentric side of launderettes. I lived equidistant from three and went round and tried each out. The first was quite small, but looked fine. There were two attendants, it was bright and airy and had comfortable chairs to sit on. It seemed that this would be a suitable launderette for me. However, by the time of the second visit, I realised that a trip to that launderette would always be a lengthy one. It was a place where the customer came last. The two attendants spent all their time simply washing the clothes of their clearly very extended family, each huge bag was referred to by name and you soon learnt all about their various aunts, sisters-in-law, cousins, etc. If you got a machine they would glower at you and hassle you to use a shorter cycle and trying to get a drying machine was impossible as they filled them with enough coins to keep them running for an hour. I guess the owner simply made their money off these two women. It may have been the time of day I went (early afternoon, which I had imagine would be a quiet time), but given that there were two other launderettes around I went off to try them.
The second one was in a strange little shopping centre with a flat roof and dark wood panelling that made it look like a ski resort from 1966. The launderette here was run by a man. It was immaculate. The linoleum shone as did the stainless steel machines. The walls were decorated with huge jigsaw puzzles made up and sealed behind plastic. The man trouble was the owner who seemed to want to instruct you in minute detail about every aspect of his launderette. If you spilt even a few crumbs of washing powder he would rush out and wipe it up all a terribly over-solicitous manner which made you feel guilty for dirtying his pristine establishment. Everything worked well, but I found the experience so stressful that I never returned.
The final launderette was fine and was the one I used throughout the rest of my time in Norwich. Some of the washing machines leaked, but it was clean enough and the attendants neither cared too much nor too little. It had the bright blue style and big windows of the family-obsessed one, with more space and an 'L' of machines with the join of the shape facing outwards to the door. You went in, did the business and came out. It was in this launderette and inspired by it that I wrote: 'Sure Plays A Mean Pinball' - http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/04/sure-plays-mean-pinball-short-story.html though I relocated it back to the West Midlands which I had just left.
After Norwich came Oxford. A wonderfully richly wood panelled launderette, the shade of walnut veneer. A standard lay out with a line of washing machines facing a line of dryers, perpendicular to the pavement. It never seemed to have many customers and many evenings I would be in there alone. I never saw any workers associated with that place. It was just open and closed. I once encountered two American women, students I guess from their age. They asked me for change for the dryers, which in this time, all took 20 pence pieces, no matter where you were. I kept a stack of these and was happy to give them the change. They were surprised when I gave them five for one pound. It turned out they had thought the 20 pence pieces to be 'quarters', i.e. 25p, just like the 25 cent coins in the USA, so had been taking only four of them in exchange for a pound. I explained they should think of them as 'fifths'. This launderette, once when I was walking past it going home, was the first place I ever saw anyone using a laptop computer. A woman was sitting on the seat which was the sill of the main window, parallel to the window with her legs stretched out and had this computer on her lap. It was to be another 13 years before I would get to use one. It was quite incongruous seeing a young woman with such an expensive piece of computer hardware (this was 1992) and yet using a launderette.
The next launderette I used was the one I was with for longest (1994-2001) and is probably the most famous one I have been in. It used to feature in the title sequence of the British police series, 'The Bill', in the late 1990s. If a bus had not pulled up at the stop at the precise moment you would have seen me standing watching the camera crew from the pavement. It is also passed in a scene in the movie 'Secrets and Lies' (1996) when a car drives down Mile End Road - Bow Road. Knowing the area you know that when the shot switches from the driver to the passenger and back again, what is in the background is not on corresponding sides of the road.
The laundrette was located in Bromley-by-Bow (which as the name suggests is next to the district of Bow and not the Bromley in Kent). I used it first when living in Poplar to the South and continued going there once I had moved to Mile End to the West. Sometimes, especially in London, it is difficult to find laundrettes tucked away down small streets so a prime reason for using this one rather than one nearer to where I lived was because I found it when cycling around looking for one. I could have easily ended up using the one opposite. There was a launderette nearer my room in Mile End and the Afghan man who ran it, did wonderful tailoring on the side. He sewed a pocket in a suit jacket for me which looked so good you would have believed it had originally come with the jacket. His boss always tried to get me to come to his laundrette, but I explained my loyalty to the one I had been using for five years by then and he seemed to understand. The launderette was narrow but long with a single row of washing then drying machines down one wall and the seats facing them.
Over the years I got to know the two attendants, Liz and Lorraine very well, to the extent that they would make me a cup of tea and give me biscuits whenever I appeared. They would also tell me their problems and I would try to counsel them. When I first went there they earned £1.80 per hour [equivalent to £3.14 now]; they were earning £2 per hour in 1999 [equivalent to £2.85 now] when the minimum wage was introduced and their pay rose to £3.60 per hour [equivalent to £5.12 now; current minimum wage is £5.80 if you are over 22]. Their employer never paid national insurance for any of his staff but used to whine to me who he saw as an educated man who (he thought) would support his views, that the tax rate was so high that it prevented entrepreneurialism (he owned a chain of laundrettes and drove a very expensive car). Until the minimum wage the woman kept the additional money paid for service washes, usually around £1.20-£1.40 per time. When compelled to pay the minimum wage he started keeping this money himself. The spending power of the women with the minimum wage immediately rose and you really saw the impact on the shops around the area. The women could afford daytrips to the Blue Water mall in Essex from then on. They could not afford to buy anything and took sandwiches with them to eat, but the trip out to look around the shops brightened up the day of people who usually did not travel farther than 3-4Km of their home and to whom me going to Covent Garden, less than 30 minutes ride on the underground, was like me going to Paris.
The big difference was that they could pay their television licences month in/month out. Non-payment of television licences at that time (and it might still be the case now) was the most common reason why a woman would end up in prison in the UK. There was a real fear when the monthly payment could not be paid (and at that time there was an additional charge for paying monthly rather than annually). I remember one of the attendants who could not pay that month ringing the licencing company and being told to unplug and move her television into the centre of her room and to cover it over until she could pay, in case an inspector came round. She did precisely what she was told, worried she would get caught out. The harshness of publicity about the penalties of not paying the licence, it is unsurprising, terrified the woman.
Service washes are not a feature of all launderettes, but are present in many. Basically you pay extra money and the attendants wash (and sometimes iron) your clothes for you in their machines. Even for people who have their own washing machine, this feature is appealing. As a consequence, this laundrette attracted customers from the Bow Quarter, luxury gated community that was close by. I would chat with people who worked for a Swiss bank and regularly with a retired doctor who used to travel out to Vietnam for a month each year to help with children who had been mutilated by mines left from the war or were mutated as a result of the use of Agent Orange. A whole host of characters came through that laundrette. People used to say that the laundrette shown on the soap opera 'Eastenders' bore no relation to reality. I rarely watched the series, but certainly can confirm there are launderettes in East London precisely like that often with all the drama that you would see in a soap opera. Theft, violence, drug and drink problems could all be see in or around the launderette. The other well-known cultural reference to launderettes was 'My Beautiful Launderette' (1985) in which a polished up launderette (or laundrette given the title) is the location of a gay love affair between a young Pakistani man and a member of the racist National Front, with Daniel Day-Lewis in one of his roles in which you find it difficult to believe he is the same actor you have seen in his other roles. Nothing that exotic went on in any launderette I knew, but I guess it is possible.
Certainly there were more comic moments that I experienced in launderettes too. I remember a man pulling up on a long motorbike in what appeared to be his shorts. It was only when he went over to the drying machine and pulled out the jeans that were in there and put them straight on that we realised he had been motorbiking in his underpants. This was reminiscent of the very well known Levi's jeans advertisement of the 1985 in which in a 1950s US launderette a man comes in and simply strips down to his boxer shorts [sparking the 1980s trend for that style of underpants] and puts his jeans and some rocks into the washing machine to achieve the 'stone washed' look to the tune of Marvin Gaye's 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine'.
I remember two teenage boys coming in with huge bags of washing. They put them through the process and not for a moment in all the 45 minutes did they stop talking, often across each other. By the time they left me and Lorraine were exhausted. I have no idea how they managed to sustain their speaking for so long. Another time, a French-speaking black female nurse (for some reason Poplar and Bow have a lot of Francophone people from the Caribbean and from India [though I knew the French had owned Pondichéry I had never realised India had so many people with French as their language; from a quick search I find there were over 200,000 people in India under French control at the start of the 20th century] and it was common to hear French being spoken). Unfortunately, the only word of French that Lorraine spoke was 'oui' ['yes'] and she got great delight saying 'oui, oui' repeatedly. I used my poor French to ascertain what the woman wanted and it turned out she had lost her nurse's uniform and wondered if it was in the launderette. To every question, Lorraine said 'oui, oui' utterly confusing the situation. Ultimately I had to keep repeating 'pas d'uniform' and tried to usher Lorraine off to make some tea. The other memorable incident were the preparations for a service for travellers at a nearby church. There was a travellers' site in Bow and you would see whole families dressed up in their finest outfits in the hours leading up to the evening service. Many would pass by the laundrette.
I did a lot of reading (more than once having to have my book rescued from the washing machine by Liz or Lorraine when I had left it in with the washing) and met a whole host of characters in that launderette. By the time I reached Milton Keynes, where there was no washing machine in my flat, until I bought one after over a year, I had service washes. This was partly due to the distance to my nearest launderette. The 'new town' Milton Keynes is very zoned and being in a middle class district there was no provision for a laundrette as it was assumed that everyone would have their own washing machine; my landlord did not provide one. I had to cycle for 15 minutes to the Netherfield district which had been zoned for the poorest of Milton Keynes and the disabled (the district sits right next to the hospital). In many ways it was like a slice of Bromley-by-Bow dropped into a wood. The laundrette had the usual two rows of washing machines facing dryers and was staffed by women who looked sixteen. They did a reasonable job, but one night left a dryer running overnight and the launderette caught light and was closed for months. I tried going to one in Bletchley, an old town asorbed into Milton Keynes, but it was only open 9 a.m.-5 p.m. so it was useless trying to go there before or after work as I had done with the Netherfield one and it was an even longer cycle ride to reach, ruling out going there during the lunch break. I was compelled to buy a washing machine and that ended my contact with launderettes and a slice of British culture. Given I see having this house repossessed sometime in the next few months I imagine a future return to using launderettes lies on the horizon. Perhaps I will pick the one that lets me 'chill out' and surf the internet rather than simply watching my shirts spin round.
Showing posts with label minimum wage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label minimum wage. Show all posts
Wednesday, 7 July 2010
Wednesday, 9 September 2009
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.
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.
Sunday, 27 July 2008
A New Thatcherite Nightmare Approaches
With the overturning of such a large majority in the Glasgow East by-election last week, Labour's 25th most safest seat there are a lot of ill-judged statements that Labour will be down to only 20 MPs following the next election in 2009/10. As I state before, that is a very faulty conclusion to draw from the evidence, as was information from the recent by-election in Henley which is ultra-conservative and where Labour did not stand a chance (the relative success of the BNP there has been mainly overlooked and should not have been, especially for the Conservatives). However, it does seem that the Brown government is under siege especially from the media and that there is now a high chance that he will be pushed out by his own party before any election occurs. However, I believe that people are unaware of the hazards that the UK faces if Labour loses the next election whether under Brown or someone else.
One of Brown's problems, is of course, that in 1997 the British electorate did not vote the Labour Party into power, they in fact voted for the Blarite Party, a Christian Democratic party with authoritarian overtones and an excellent control of the media. With Blair's departure the government has lost those characteristics. Blair knew this would be the case which is why he hung on so long. On his terms, his great failure was not to groom a Blairite successor who was strong enough and not corrupt to face down Brown and continue the Blaritie legacy. In addition Brown plays fair in a way that Blair never did. Brown believes people vote for policies, whereas, in fact, as Blair and especially his media sidekick, Alastair Campbell, knew, people vote the way they are told or are frightened to do by the media. Brown has let go that control of the media. I would hate him to be as manipulative as Blair was, but at least he needs to be better about getting his message and items of good news (like falling crime rates in many parts of the UK) across.
This failure is why David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party, has managed to get away with having no policies, because everyone is focusing on Brown, and for the past few months, in seeking on his removal. As they are not being prompted by the media, no-one is looking around to see what the alternative actually offers. Cameron could slide into power more easily than any British leader before. Of course his lack of policies puts him in favour with the ultra-rich who effectively control the UK economy. With the economic crisis the world is facing, Cameron, most likely behave like Stanley Baldwin during the economic chaos of the 1920s and adopt a kind of 'Safety First' approach, i.e. one that means sacrifices from the ordinary populous in order that the wealthy are not upset a great deal. In fact this has been the Bush Jr. approach right throughout, so perhaps it should not be expected.
Of course in their rush to find more nails to put into the coffin of the Brown administration, many commentators seem to have been lazy in interpreting what went on in the Glasgow East election. Yes, it was a 22% swing in the poll, but to apply that across the UK and say it would lead to 20 Labour MPs after the next election, entirely misses which way the swing went. This, to some extent, shows up the differences between England and Scotland, especially its cities. The SNP (Scottish Nationalist Party) is in theory a party striving for Scottish independence, but that is not why most people vote for it. The SNP is to the left of Labour and certainly has been since the 1990s so it gains support from those people wanting a more Socialist approach to policies. In Scotland whereas late as 1980s 60% of the population rented social housing, and where education is still seen far more importantly than it is in England, this is the natural environment for left-wing policies. In 1997 the Conservatives lost all their seats in Scotland. I hardly envisaged that we have seen such a shift to the right that suddenly all of Scotland is going to love the Conservatives. Of course as in the 1980s and 1990s a Conservative government in London encourages many more Scots to think about breaking away so that they can have governments more to their taste, which for the majority are to the left of the current government.
The governments in power from 1997 have done far less than they should have done. Even if it had been Brown rather than Blair who had come to power in 1997 and only remained until 2001, then I believe more would have been achieved than we have witnessed with even a further 7 years of power. However, there are things that will cause real pain to ordinary people when the Conservatives come to power and neglect or scrap them. You might say that they are not going to overturn this legislation, but the one thing that has come out of Cameron is to say this:
"The Labour Party for a long time said it could deal with deep poverty because it understood about transferring money from rich to poor. I think we have reached the end of that road."
Thanks to Polly Toynbee in 'The Guardian' for highlighting this. She also noted how pleased right-wing commentators were about how 'brave' Cameron was to highlight that the 'experiment' of moving wealth from rich to poor should end. This is even worse than Margaret Thatcher. I loath her, but at least she believed there was a 'trickle down' effect in that if people at the top were prosperous then money would shake slowly down to the lower people in the economy. It never really worked that way, but being a daughter of a grocer and having gone to grammar school rather than the elite public schools that Cameron and the buffoon Boris Johnson attended, she at least saw people worse off than herself. She also emphasised hard work, rather than wealth coming to people as a 'right' in the way that Cameron and his ultra-rich supporters believe. Of course people made obscene profits under Thatcher and will again under Cameron, but there will not even be a gramme of moral censure on them for living that way.
One of the most effective coups of the Conservative of the 1980s was to portray the Labour Party as unable to deal with the economy. They achieved this by also effectively shutting themselves off from the legacy of the Conservative government of 1970-4. Though Thatcher did not name it so, effectively the Conservatives post-1975 were 'New Conservative' and so different economically from the Heath government. They condemned the economic policies of Labour as leading to unemployment under the 'Labour's Not Working' slogan, though of course once they were in power, unemployment rose from 1.6 million to 4 million. The Conservatives also oversaw the ever biggest crash in UK house prices 1990-3. Of course given how tied the British economy is to housing this had severe effects all over the economy and effectively shoved many middle class people, the very supporters of the Conservatives, down the social ladder. The Conservatives these days are no longer the party of the comfortably well-off or even the prosperous, like the Republicans in the USA, they have become the party of the extremely rich but use those well-off people lower down society as their base of support though actually not benefiting them. Conservative supporters are surprisingly masochistic and you still hear that terrible lie about Thatcher, 'she did things that had to be done, everyone agrees about that'. That statement which I have been hearing since the mid-1980s is still infuriating. Thatcher wiped out the lives of many middle class people, they know that and yet they feel they had to sacrifice their prosperity and the futures of their families because it was 'necessary'. Dictators love this kind of sacrifice and the average Conservative supporter is lining up to sacrifice themselves all over again in the 2010s. Meanwhile the rest of us are going to suffer in their race for martyrdom.
There are two policies which the Conservatives will scrap or let become moribund that will have a vast impact on social inequality. I can tell you for certain that by 2015 the UK will have far more people in poverty and will be a far more divided society than it is now. The first policy is the minimum wage. This was introduced in 1999, more than a hundred years after it had come to Australia and New Zealand. I have not seen much written on the social impact of the policy in the UK. Of course businesses said it would bankrupt them, but that in fact was not the case, and many still get away with flouting the law. However, I was living in East London at the time, one of the poorest areas of the UK. The minimum wage came in at £3.60 (€4.53; US$7.20) per hour for workers over the age of 21. At the time I knew workers in shops on £2.00 per hour (before tax of course). My father, working in Newcastle-under-Lyme met a woman working in a fish-and-chip shop where the cheapest meal was £1.90 and she was only earning £1.80 per hour. That indicates how low such people's purchasing power was as fish-and-chips are the cheapest takeaway food in the UK. This October, the rate for over 21s will rise to £5.73 per hour (€7.21; US$11.46) but given that 1 litre of petrol now costs £1.20, a loaf of bread costs around £1.30 (€1.63; US$2.60), and 1 pint (about 0.45 litres) of beer costs £3 (and is expected to rise to £4 this year) no-one is going to be wealthy on that income.
One reason why there has not been such an extreme slump in consumption in the UK that people expected is because of the minimum wage. The week it came into force you could see the shift in East London, the supermarkets, the buses, the underground trains, hairdressers, newsagents, the laundrettes, the pubs, the takeaways all suddenly had new customers or customers spending more. This in turn meant they could cover their increased wage bill and even employ more people. Everyone forgets that the poor are far more numerous than people in every other social category. Even the wealthiest person wants only one dinner however expensive it might be, a block of flats housing say 2000 people, need 2000 dinners and even if they are just fish and chips, this stimulates the economy at the grass roots far more than the single rich person. It becomes even greater when people in that block start all buying a fridge or a television.
Of course the minimum wage, the ultra-rich feel, must wither away as they feel it is making the population too cocky and unwilling to work in low wage jobs and also to stay compiant when in them. In fact given that so few people in the UK can save anything (and utility bills in particular are strongly cutting into the benefits of the minimum wage) they are actually as scared as they used to be. The harsher benefit regulations being introduced will add to that fear.
The other thing is the Working Tax Credits. Tax Credits were introduced in April 2003 and brought together tax credits that had covered families and disabled people before with a wider scope. The thing is that the people affected by them is now vast compared to what it was before, 82% of UK families with children now receive tax credits. It is a major source of income for single parent families. As the rate is related to the amount people are earning encourages people to find work. It does not cover the cost of child care which is the prime obstacle to parents of either gender working, but primarily women. Child care workers earn about £3 per hour per child and can make a reasonable income if they take in up to their maximum, which is about 4 pre-school children per adult. However, the cost of such care even at the lowest rates (and of course many charge even more) is £24 per day, £6000 per year for a parent working full-time, which you can compare to the average annual salary of £24,000 which 80% of the population earns less than. So I believe there is some way to go with Tax Credits, especially from a government which supports people having children (though Brown does this less than Blair whose Vichy-like Catholic influenced attitude was much more active in this). Taking away the hundreds of pounds per month that the large majority of families gain would actually increas unemployment almost immediately and would lead to a shooting up of child poverty.
What is fascinating is that Tax Credits prove that salaries are far too low in the UK. Though we are a country of many multi-millionaires, we have reached a state where the cost of living in the UK is so high that the government has to effectively subsidise more than 8 out of 10 families to be able to keep them out of poverty. The British have faced a year-on-year decline in how much their salaries can buy. If a teacher had the purchasing power that profession had in the mid-1950s they would be earning £80,000 now rather than the £25-30,000 that they do. When people complain about wage inflation they forget that a £1 million pound bonus for some utility company boss could pay the salaries of 33 teachers for a whole year. The cost of basics in the UK is cripping, with combined gas and electricity bills reaching £1000 per year for the average family, we are all effectively going to become dependent on the state to be able to pay for these things. Of course the British are big consumers of luxuries, but given our service-sector faced economy the inevitable fall away in consumption of these as is already happening, leads to unemployment.
So, with the UK already seeing a rise in unemployment and in inflation we are on track to have a government from a party which has no ability to manage unemployment and all it does is point the blame at those who lose their jobs and make them feel guilty for being discarded by businesses. Even Labour has had no ability to rein in the greed of utility companies and it will be worse when the party that gave those utility companies such freedom returns to power, especially as many of their friends are on the boards of these companies. Of course the UK like every country is buffeted by global economic challenges, but the way you weather them depends highly on the policies adopted by the domestic government. Just at the time when we need the economic strength of Brown when he was Chancellor, we are facing having an elitist party that does not care a damn about the bulk of population. We are rushing headlong towards a revival of 1983 and anyone who lived through that era must fear its return.
One of Brown's problems, is of course, that in 1997 the British electorate did not vote the Labour Party into power, they in fact voted for the Blarite Party, a Christian Democratic party with authoritarian overtones and an excellent control of the media. With Blair's departure the government has lost those characteristics. Blair knew this would be the case which is why he hung on so long. On his terms, his great failure was not to groom a Blairite successor who was strong enough and not corrupt to face down Brown and continue the Blaritie legacy. In addition Brown plays fair in a way that Blair never did. Brown believes people vote for policies, whereas, in fact, as Blair and especially his media sidekick, Alastair Campbell, knew, people vote the way they are told or are frightened to do by the media. Brown has let go that control of the media. I would hate him to be as manipulative as Blair was, but at least he needs to be better about getting his message and items of good news (like falling crime rates in many parts of the UK) across.
This failure is why David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party, has managed to get away with having no policies, because everyone is focusing on Brown, and for the past few months, in seeking on his removal. As they are not being prompted by the media, no-one is looking around to see what the alternative actually offers. Cameron could slide into power more easily than any British leader before. Of course his lack of policies puts him in favour with the ultra-rich who effectively control the UK economy. With the economic crisis the world is facing, Cameron, most likely behave like Stanley Baldwin during the economic chaos of the 1920s and adopt a kind of 'Safety First' approach, i.e. one that means sacrifices from the ordinary populous in order that the wealthy are not upset a great deal. In fact this has been the Bush Jr. approach right throughout, so perhaps it should not be expected.
Of course in their rush to find more nails to put into the coffin of the Brown administration, many commentators seem to have been lazy in interpreting what went on in the Glasgow East election. Yes, it was a 22% swing in the poll, but to apply that across the UK and say it would lead to 20 Labour MPs after the next election, entirely misses which way the swing went. This, to some extent, shows up the differences between England and Scotland, especially its cities. The SNP (Scottish Nationalist Party) is in theory a party striving for Scottish independence, but that is not why most people vote for it. The SNP is to the left of Labour and certainly has been since the 1990s so it gains support from those people wanting a more Socialist approach to policies. In Scotland whereas late as 1980s 60% of the population rented social housing, and where education is still seen far more importantly than it is in England, this is the natural environment for left-wing policies. In 1997 the Conservatives lost all their seats in Scotland. I hardly envisaged that we have seen such a shift to the right that suddenly all of Scotland is going to love the Conservatives. Of course as in the 1980s and 1990s a Conservative government in London encourages many more Scots to think about breaking away so that they can have governments more to their taste, which for the majority are to the left of the current government.
The governments in power from 1997 have done far less than they should have done. Even if it had been Brown rather than Blair who had come to power in 1997 and only remained until 2001, then I believe more would have been achieved than we have witnessed with even a further 7 years of power. However, there are things that will cause real pain to ordinary people when the Conservatives come to power and neglect or scrap them. You might say that they are not going to overturn this legislation, but the one thing that has come out of Cameron is to say this:
"The Labour Party for a long time said it could deal with deep poverty because it understood about transferring money from rich to poor. I think we have reached the end of that road."
Thanks to Polly Toynbee in 'The Guardian' for highlighting this. She also noted how pleased right-wing commentators were about how 'brave' Cameron was to highlight that the 'experiment' of moving wealth from rich to poor should end. This is even worse than Margaret Thatcher. I loath her, but at least she believed there was a 'trickle down' effect in that if people at the top were prosperous then money would shake slowly down to the lower people in the economy. It never really worked that way, but being a daughter of a grocer and having gone to grammar school rather than the elite public schools that Cameron and the buffoon Boris Johnson attended, she at least saw people worse off than herself. She also emphasised hard work, rather than wealth coming to people as a 'right' in the way that Cameron and his ultra-rich supporters believe. Of course people made obscene profits under Thatcher and will again under Cameron, but there will not even be a gramme of moral censure on them for living that way.
One of the most effective coups of the Conservative of the 1980s was to portray the Labour Party as unable to deal with the economy. They achieved this by also effectively shutting themselves off from the legacy of the Conservative government of 1970-4. Though Thatcher did not name it so, effectively the Conservatives post-1975 were 'New Conservative' and so different economically from the Heath government. They condemned the economic policies of Labour as leading to unemployment under the 'Labour's Not Working' slogan, though of course once they were in power, unemployment rose from 1.6 million to 4 million. The Conservatives also oversaw the ever biggest crash in UK house prices 1990-3. Of course given how tied the British economy is to housing this had severe effects all over the economy and effectively shoved many middle class people, the very supporters of the Conservatives, down the social ladder. The Conservatives these days are no longer the party of the comfortably well-off or even the prosperous, like the Republicans in the USA, they have become the party of the extremely rich but use those well-off people lower down society as their base of support though actually not benefiting them. Conservative supporters are surprisingly masochistic and you still hear that terrible lie about Thatcher, 'she did things that had to be done, everyone agrees about that'. That statement which I have been hearing since the mid-1980s is still infuriating. Thatcher wiped out the lives of many middle class people, they know that and yet they feel they had to sacrifice their prosperity and the futures of their families because it was 'necessary'. Dictators love this kind of sacrifice and the average Conservative supporter is lining up to sacrifice themselves all over again in the 2010s. Meanwhile the rest of us are going to suffer in their race for martyrdom.
There are two policies which the Conservatives will scrap or let become moribund that will have a vast impact on social inequality. I can tell you for certain that by 2015 the UK will have far more people in poverty and will be a far more divided society than it is now. The first policy is the minimum wage. This was introduced in 1999, more than a hundred years after it had come to Australia and New Zealand. I have not seen much written on the social impact of the policy in the UK. Of course businesses said it would bankrupt them, but that in fact was not the case, and many still get away with flouting the law. However, I was living in East London at the time, one of the poorest areas of the UK. The minimum wage came in at £3.60 (€4.53; US$7.20) per hour for workers over the age of 21. At the time I knew workers in shops on £2.00 per hour (before tax of course). My father, working in Newcastle-under-Lyme met a woman working in a fish-and-chip shop where the cheapest meal was £1.90 and she was only earning £1.80 per hour. That indicates how low such people's purchasing power was as fish-and-chips are the cheapest takeaway food in the UK. This October, the rate for over 21s will rise to £5.73 per hour (€7.21; US$11.46) but given that 1 litre of petrol now costs £1.20, a loaf of bread costs around £1.30 (€1.63; US$2.60), and 1 pint (about 0.45 litres) of beer costs £3 (and is expected to rise to £4 this year) no-one is going to be wealthy on that income.
One reason why there has not been such an extreme slump in consumption in the UK that people expected is because of the minimum wage. The week it came into force you could see the shift in East London, the supermarkets, the buses, the underground trains, hairdressers, newsagents, the laundrettes, the pubs, the takeaways all suddenly had new customers or customers spending more. This in turn meant they could cover their increased wage bill and even employ more people. Everyone forgets that the poor are far more numerous than people in every other social category. Even the wealthiest person wants only one dinner however expensive it might be, a block of flats housing say 2000 people, need 2000 dinners and even if they are just fish and chips, this stimulates the economy at the grass roots far more than the single rich person. It becomes even greater when people in that block start all buying a fridge or a television.
Of course the minimum wage, the ultra-rich feel, must wither away as they feel it is making the population too cocky and unwilling to work in low wage jobs and also to stay compiant when in them. In fact given that so few people in the UK can save anything (and utility bills in particular are strongly cutting into the benefits of the minimum wage) they are actually as scared as they used to be. The harsher benefit regulations being introduced will add to that fear.
The other thing is the Working Tax Credits. Tax Credits were introduced in April 2003 and brought together tax credits that had covered families and disabled people before with a wider scope. The thing is that the people affected by them is now vast compared to what it was before, 82% of UK families with children now receive tax credits. It is a major source of income for single parent families. As the rate is related to the amount people are earning encourages people to find work. It does not cover the cost of child care which is the prime obstacle to parents of either gender working, but primarily women. Child care workers earn about £3 per hour per child and can make a reasonable income if they take in up to their maximum, which is about 4 pre-school children per adult. However, the cost of such care even at the lowest rates (and of course many charge even more) is £24 per day, £6000 per year for a parent working full-time, which you can compare to the average annual salary of £24,000 which 80% of the population earns less than. So I believe there is some way to go with Tax Credits, especially from a government which supports people having children (though Brown does this less than Blair whose Vichy-like Catholic influenced attitude was much more active in this). Taking away the hundreds of pounds per month that the large majority of families gain would actually increas unemployment almost immediately and would lead to a shooting up of child poverty.
What is fascinating is that Tax Credits prove that salaries are far too low in the UK. Though we are a country of many multi-millionaires, we have reached a state where the cost of living in the UK is so high that the government has to effectively subsidise more than 8 out of 10 families to be able to keep them out of poverty. The British have faced a year-on-year decline in how much their salaries can buy. If a teacher had the purchasing power that profession had in the mid-1950s they would be earning £80,000 now rather than the £25-30,000 that they do. When people complain about wage inflation they forget that a £1 million pound bonus for some utility company boss could pay the salaries of 33 teachers for a whole year. The cost of basics in the UK is cripping, with combined gas and electricity bills reaching £1000 per year for the average family, we are all effectively going to become dependent on the state to be able to pay for these things. Of course the British are big consumers of luxuries, but given our service-sector faced economy the inevitable fall away in consumption of these as is already happening, leads to unemployment.
So, with the UK already seeing a rise in unemployment and in inflation we are on track to have a government from a party which has no ability to manage unemployment and all it does is point the blame at those who lose their jobs and make them feel guilty for being discarded by businesses. Even Labour has had no ability to rein in the greed of utility companies and it will be worse when the party that gave those utility companies such freedom returns to power, especially as many of their friends are on the boards of these companies. Of course the UK like every country is buffeted by global economic challenges, but the way you weather them depends highly on the policies adopted by the domestic government. Just at the time when we need the economic strength of Brown when he was Chancellor, we are facing having an elitist party that does not care a damn about the bulk of population. We are rushing headlong towards a revival of 1983 and anyone who lived through that era must fear its return.
Thursday, 10 May 2007
Goodbye Mr. Blair: go quickly, go quietly, just go
The news is alive with the build up to Tony Blair's resignation today, though of course he will remain prime minister for another couple of months or so. Like many people in the UK I am looking forward to him going. I think the fact that the condemnation of him stretches across the political spectrum from the far right to Old Labour reinforces what I posted recently. Blair has not really been a Labour prime minister he has been a Blairite prime minister, that mix of Christian Democrat approaches with his desires, however tempered, to adopt a more authoritarian approach to things. Whilst I would not want a prime minister who was uncertain about themselves and what they stood for (this was John Major's problem by 1997) Blair has gone too far in the opposite direction, he has had total arrogance in everything he believed and more than that found it difficult to accept that anyone who thought differently from him had legitimate views. He was lucky in 1997 that he was really the only option for those who wanted to dismiss the Conservatives from office and that included many Conservative supporters, but never has he really engaged with more than a small circle of supporters. There has been a small Blairite circle who have shared his vision, but have been alien not only to the UK as a whole, but also the Labour Party itself, it simply acted as a machine to get this clique, this junta, to the pinnacle.
Blair learned most of his political approach from Margaret Thatcher, hence reference to 'presidential politics', the kind of Gaullist approach, eschewing Cabinet government, simply having bilateral talks between premier and another minister on an issue. Blair would have done better to have learned from Clement Attlee (Labour Prime Minister 1945-51) who went to efforts to balance his Cabinet in terms of their backgrounds, even which parts of the country they came from and to let those with ability exercise it, rather than hold them back because they did not agree precisely with what he thought. Yes, the prime minister should be charismatic, but should ensure that he does not plunge his colleagues into the shade.
Possibly the best way to characterise Blair's behaviour in the British political system is like one of the rulers of the Italian city states of the Renaissance, say for example, the De Medicis. He has had a clique to which he has been very loyal: Peter Mandelson, David Blunkett, Ruth Kelly, Tessa Jowell, Alan Milburn no matter what they did, no matter how bad it was in political terms, they were always forgiven and more than that, lifted back up to high office. Those with talent and yet outside the group, such as Mo Mowlam and Robin Cook were marginalised. Blair had his vizier, his henchman, the equivalent of the wizard he consulted to achieve the black arts so granting that person power over him to - Alastair Campbell his communications officer as with all black magicians, suspected and feared by others at the court. In addition, Blair has followed the precept 'keep your friends close, but your enemies closer', hence Gordon Brown being the longest serving Chancellor of the Exchequer in British history (the UK equivalent of the Minister of Finance).
Blair's departure today (assuming he does not make himself leader for life instead) will also mean the end of these Renaissance politics at the heart of the UK system, and (hopefully) the end of the term of office of the Blairite Party. The curious thing about the Blair regime is that it had such immense power, so much popularity at the start, such a large majority in parliament and yet so much of its efforts from the start seem to have gone into preparing Blair's legacy almost from the first day. He has been the pharoah who has diverted his strong army into building his pyramid rather than pushing back the enemies at the border. These enemies for the UK remain poverty, ill health among the population, a deteriorating environment, increasing racial tension, a lack of engagement with opportunities in Europe, the increasing difficulty of housing and the expense of living in the UK. He could have done so much but rather he prefers to strut on the world stage, causing misery for hundreds of thousands and further dividing the UK population.
There are some good things that the last 10 years have brought. The one I would point to is the minimum wage which was long overdue. British people remain underpaid and overworked, but I knew people whose weekly income doubled the moment the minimum wage came in, people who were on the bottom of society and victims of its capriciousness. So many companies whined that it would drive them out of business. This has proven to be untrue and it is obscene to run a business that depends on paying people so little, especially when the salaries of those who run businesses are so many more times larger than those of their workers. Prove to me that a managing director does 20, 30, 100 times more work than his employees.
Tax credits have also been a good step, helping those people hovering on the fringes of benefit and employment, especially for families as children make up half of all the people in poverty. However, tax credits have been handled and administered so badly. Had no-one learned from the fiasco that was the Child Support Agency? Millions of people have had tax credits overpaid, underpaid, clawed back. You cannot behave like that especially with people for whom £40 per week is a huge difference between whether they eat, pay their rent, heat their homes, can get the bus to work, etc.
The Freedom of Information Act was another overdue step, but one again that has been weakened in the execution. The Data Protection Act, actually supposed to protect us from the 'Big Brother' surveillance culture, is actually used by the Big Brothers, the authorities to bar us from information which we need. FoI is a good policy and yet latterly as the government pushes for expensive identity cards which will carry data we have no knowledge of and wants to bring biometric data and other information together in one huge database, you feel that their heart was not really in giving us access to what is held about us. We lag behind countries such as Sweden and even the USA in what we can find out. Rather the Blair government has preferred to move towards the surveillance approach of every aspect of our lives so common in totalitarian regimes.
It would be nice if someone could remind me of some of the positive things that the Blair regime has done for this country, because I cannot think of any at present. I accept that few others could do much better, but few others could do much worse, and why should I be compelled to accept a leader because he is the least worst option as Blair has long been portrayed to the ranks of the Labour Party. I do not even have to mention the word 'Iraq'. The thing that makes the Blair years so bitter is that you feel he has grabbed you by the back of the head and rubbed your nose in what he has produced saying 'you ungrateful moron, look how good I have been to you, look, look harder; now: love me, worship me'.
The one thing I now dread in the post-Blair rule period is that he will linger on strutting around London with his coterie, undermining anything his successor does, hoping as I imagine he will, that there will be a crisis and he will be called back to save the country, as the King Arthur or the Sir Francis Drake re-awakened from their slumber. Peron and De Gaulle, those two egoists that Blair so resembles, did have this opportunity and I just pray that Blair never gets such a chance. Berlusconi, please offer Blair a nice quiet villa where he can sit in retirement out of our way, somewhere in Tuscany, not Elba!
Blair learned most of his political approach from Margaret Thatcher, hence reference to 'presidential politics', the kind of Gaullist approach, eschewing Cabinet government, simply having bilateral talks between premier and another minister on an issue. Blair would have done better to have learned from Clement Attlee (Labour Prime Minister 1945-51) who went to efforts to balance his Cabinet in terms of their backgrounds, even which parts of the country they came from and to let those with ability exercise it, rather than hold them back because they did not agree precisely with what he thought. Yes, the prime minister should be charismatic, but should ensure that he does not plunge his colleagues into the shade.
Possibly the best way to characterise Blair's behaviour in the British political system is like one of the rulers of the Italian city states of the Renaissance, say for example, the De Medicis. He has had a clique to which he has been very loyal: Peter Mandelson, David Blunkett, Ruth Kelly, Tessa Jowell, Alan Milburn no matter what they did, no matter how bad it was in political terms, they were always forgiven and more than that, lifted back up to high office. Those with talent and yet outside the group, such as Mo Mowlam and Robin Cook were marginalised. Blair had his vizier, his henchman, the equivalent of the wizard he consulted to achieve the black arts so granting that person power over him to - Alastair Campbell his communications officer as with all black magicians, suspected and feared by others at the court. In addition, Blair has followed the precept 'keep your friends close, but your enemies closer', hence Gordon Brown being the longest serving Chancellor of the Exchequer in British history (the UK equivalent of the Minister of Finance).
Blair's departure today (assuming he does not make himself leader for life instead) will also mean the end of these Renaissance politics at the heart of the UK system, and (hopefully) the end of the term of office of the Blairite Party. The curious thing about the Blair regime is that it had such immense power, so much popularity at the start, such a large majority in parliament and yet so much of its efforts from the start seem to have gone into preparing Blair's legacy almost from the first day. He has been the pharoah who has diverted his strong army into building his pyramid rather than pushing back the enemies at the border. These enemies for the UK remain poverty, ill health among the population, a deteriorating environment, increasing racial tension, a lack of engagement with opportunities in Europe, the increasing difficulty of housing and the expense of living in the UK. He could have done so much but rather he prefers to strut on the world stage, causing misery for hundreds of thousands and further dividing the UK population.
There are some good things that the last 10 years have brought. The one I would point to is the minimum wage which was long overdue. British people remain underpaid and overworked, but I knew people whose weekly income doubled the moment the minimum wage came in, people who were on the bottom of society and victims of its capriciousness. So many companies whined that it would drive them out of business. This has proven to be untrue and it is obscene to run a business that depends on paying people so little, especially when the salaries of those who run businesses are so many more times larger than those of their workers. Prove to me that a managing director does 20, 30, 100 times more work than his employees.
Tax credits have also been a good step, helping those people hovering on the fringes of benefit and employment, especially for families as children make up half of all the people in poverty. However, tax credits have been handled and administered so badly. Had no-one learned from the fiasco that was the Child Support Agency? Millions of people have had tax credits overpaid, underpaid, clawed back. You cannot behave like that especially with people for whom £40 per week is a huge difference between whether they eat, pay their rent, heat their homes, can get the bus to work, etc.
The Freedom of Information Act was another overdue step, but one again that has been weakened in the execution. The Data Protection Act, actually supposed to protect us from the 'Big Brother' surveillance culture, is actually used by the Big Brothers, the authorities to bar us from information which we need. FoI is a good policy and yet latterly as the government pushes for expensive identity cards which will carry data we have no knowledge of and wants to bring biometric data and other information together in one huge database, you feel that their heart was not really in giving us access to what is held about us. We lag behind countries such as Sweden and even the USA in what we can find out. Rather the Blair government has preferred to move towards the surveillance approach of every aspect of our lives so common in totalitarian regimes.
It would be nice if someone could remind me of some of the positive things that the Blair regime has done for this country, because I cannot think of any at present. I accept that few others could do much better, but few others could do much worse, and why should I be compelled to accept a leader because he is the least worst option as Blair has long been portrayed to the ranks of the Labour Party. I do not even have to mention the word 'Iraq'. The thing that makes the Blair years so bitter is that you feel he has grabbed you by the back of the head and rubbed your nose in what he has produced saying 'you ungrateful moron, look how good I have been to you, look, look harder; now: love me, worship me'.
The one thing I now dread in the post-Blair rule period is that he will linger on strutting around London with his coterie, undermining anything his successor does, hoping as I imagine he will, that there will be a crisis and he will be called back to save the country, as the King Arthur or the Sir Francis Drake re-awakened from their slumber. Peron and De Gaulle, those two egoists that Blair so resembles, did have this opportunity and I just pray that Blair never gets such a chance. Berlusconi, please offer Blair a nice quiet villa where he can sit in retirement out of our way, somewhere in Tuscany, not Elba!
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