With all the gloom happening in my life at present, another job rejection on Friday; further steps in disposing of my house before it is repossessed and simply having a cold, I actually got quite excited this weekend when it was announced that Ed Miliband has been elected leader of the Labour Party. I have labelled myself a democratic Socialist and certainly adhered to Labour Party policies in the 1980s, but was very much turned off by New Labour and have not voted for the party since 1992. Of course, to the 'mainstream' of British society with a centre ground in politics far to the right of anything I (like most people) would have considered acceptable in the 1970s, I must appear like some revolutionary. Though I have lost my faith in the particular electoral system the UK uses I certainly support democracy and in fact feel in all its aspects it was damaged by both Thatcher and Blair. Ed Miliband was an unexpected winner. Since Tony Blair succeeded so well at the 1997 election it seems that no political party can accept a leader who does not look incredibly like him. David Cameron, Nick Clegg and David Miliband look like clones created from cells of Blair with a little different input. Ed Miliband, in contrast, reminds me of the US actor, Ray Romano, though more cheerful in demeanour. David Miliband seemed to adhered to the politics of what Labour was in 1994-2008, the Blairite Party. Blair and Mandelson are hovering in the wings trying to keep Labour as the Blairite Party and not go back to anything resembling the Labour Party before 1994 or, in fact, anything more modern. Blair was very much a Thatcherite and was unwilling to at all address the immense power the wealthy were continuing to accrue through his terms of office. This left a basis on which Cameron could come in with the smokescreen of the national debt, to implement a harsh New Right monetarist policy of a severity which would have even made Margaret Thatcher hesitate if it had been proposed in 1979 or even 1983.
The Conservatives believed that they could not have won against a Labour Party led by David Miliband and to some degree are probably a little relieved by the unexpected outcome of Ed coming to the role. However, if David had been chosen, then the Labour Party would have received another nail in the coffin and the Blairite Party would have been reinvigorated after the brief interlude of Brown. Of course, the Conservatives and their allies in the media will present Ed as a tool of the trade unions and as dangerously 'red'. However, as he has noted very vigorously in his first interview as leader, wanting social justice and for the bulk of the population not being compelled to serve the interests of the ultra-wealthy is not left-wing policy. So many commentators forget that the current Labour Party including Ed Miliband is far less Socialist in its outlook than the Conservative governments of Winston Churchill or Harold Macmillan; they oversaw and economy which was 20% nationalised, had a large, robust and growing welfare state and civil service, oversaw social house building and limited the removal of capital from the UK, all things that would seem radical if proposed these days.
What gave me some hope seeing Ed Miliband being interviewed yesterday is that he is willing to challenge the inequalities of British society. Of course, he is going to emphasise that he is his own man, every party leader does that, but I think no matter what support he got, he can bring not only the Labour Party but its broader support in the country together. He seemed far less unafraid than either his brother and certainly Blair, of saying things which sound hard. We know he would take on the banks. I thought it was utterly disgraceful of Baroness Warsi to come on the BBC and say that Ed Miliband had been disgraceful in not using his first speech to apologise to the nation for the economic mess that she believed Labour had got the country into when in office. Would any political leader have started their career that way? It shows how much contempt she holds for the Opposition that she patronises then that way as if they are not fit to be considered a proper political party. The other thing, of course, is would the Conservatives have done anything different if they had been in office? Would they have allowed banks to have collapsed? No. It would have caused immense hardship to millions of ordinary voters. The fact is that Blair, adhering to the Thatcherite creed of deregulation, had allowed merchant banks and speculators to gamble with the UK's money. They knew that if they lost the state would be compelled to bail them out or risk a wider crisis. They take such aid for granted and have won triply: they had their banks saved, they now have a government following the monetarist line they love and they are back to paying obscene bonuses and salaries backed once more by the state.
Ed Miliband certainly seems to be a leader for which policy is more important than how it is represented in the media. For Blair the portrayal of things was always more important than the policies themselves. This is why so much of his time in office saw the government paralysed, not only concerned about how the policy would work, but even more focused on how it would appear; hence the terribly slow progress on constitutional reform. Of course, he is shifting more to the 'centre' as to win the next election Labour must not only secure the votes of the unemployed, but also of the 'squeezed' middle class. Reference to housing and tuition fees plays well to this set of society who thought, from the vague policy statements that Cameron put out before and during the election they were going to get another Blair, but have found instead someone who makes Sir Keith Joseph appear to have been caring. Unlike the ultra-wealthy, the middle classes, however, they may struggle against it, are in fact dependent on a robust state, and, in fact, because they statistically engage more with things like higher education and will live longer than working class people, they often need its support in a wider variety of aspects in their lives. Miliband is personable, but from the outset, what has won me over to him, is that he has presented simple messages that are about making the UK a more fair society, not classless, but reducing what we have seen in the past two years, people being rewarded for being reckless out of the pockets of hardworking people. Even the daily headlines about 'dole cheats' will not convince most of us, that the bulk of the people around us, are like us, wanting to simply house themselves, feed their families and work in a reasonable job.
I suppose I like Ed Miliband because from the start he is talking about things that I get upset about on this blog, primarily the inequality, in terms of opportunity in particular, which is being sharpened in our society. While I would probably still be considered middle class, as I lose my house and I return to the rental sector and the income in my house is now so low the child living in it is entitled to free school meals, I am sliding into not even the working class, but the bottom end of that. Of course, I have thrown away the aspirations of a couple of years ago and know I will now never get promoted; never will own property again and, may be jobless for years to come, but, it would be nice if I could still believe the boy in my house does not face the same fate, and, perhaps, even go to university one day. Naturally, if the destruction of the UK economy continues at the pace it is at the present, then he will not even get the opportunities currently available to teenagers and most likely will be in classes of 45+ pupils before he gets to leave school. His only hope would be to emigrate, but given how education is to be slashed in the coming years, he would be so much less skilled than foreign rivals, assuming he has not died of some illness hospitals cannot afford to treat or through contracting a superbug in unhygenic health facilities.
One thing the Conservatives have won on is to get everyone obsessed over the deficit as if this was evil and has to be eliminated immediately. Of course, any Conservative MP of the Churchill and Macmillan years would see it differently, knowing that in crisis the state borrows, this is basic Keynesianism, the economic policy followed from 1941/8-1972/6. However, monetarism has been so engrained in UK thinking as the only, 'rational' way of viewing the economy that no-one yet can challenge it. However, even in this context Miliband can refer to Alastair Darling's plan for halving it in four years with cuts in public spending but not to the severity the current government is adopting. The illusion that Cameron has created is that his economic policies are necessary for tackling the debt. In fact, he would have pursued them even if he had come to power before the banking crisis. The debt is a smokescreen for the harsh monetarist policies it is clear he always dreamed of implementing. The only use of the Liberal Democrats in the coalition is actually, finally, someone is making a fuss about tax avoidance by the wealthy, seventeen times more damaging to the economy than the estimated level of benefit fraud, but something Blair and even Brown did not tackle.
Commentators are right. Labour is already as popular as the Conservatives and once the cuts really hit, they will become immensely popular. At the time, I disagreed with Polly Toynbee that Brown should have stepped down before the election, but now hold the opposite opinion. If a Miliband had come to lead the party, then the outcome would clearly have been different. Sensibly he is drawing a line under the New Labour era, which he cleverly portrays as being old fashioned. In fact it allows him to recapture good elements from the history of the Labour Party. Doing this in 2009 could have spared the UK from the horrific experience it is now going into. People talk of a 'double dip' recession. This analogy is wrong. To have a second dip, means you have to have had a peak of some recovery in the middle. As yet we have had no such recovery. We are on the 'downward staircase' recession, depression in fact, with some plateaus of things not worsening, and then a further fall as the next batch of government cuts kick in. Labour is the party of hope and I think it is ironic that Ed Balls referred recently to the Attlee Labour governments of 1945-51, because if Labour return to power in 2015 (hopefully it will be sooner), then they will be facing an economy dealing with many of the same difficulties as when the Second World War finished. Hope will be like gold dust in those days and strong policies to revive the country will be necessary.
I know many years of hardship, for me personally, and the bulk of my friends and relations lie ahead, but this week at least I feel there might be someone who understands and is seeking to bring forward policies which will at least ameliorate the worst of it. I know I am putting a lot of store by the new Leader of the Opposition, he may fail, he may be marginalised, but for a small moment, I do feel at least a little ember of hope.
Showing posts with label ultra-rich. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ultra-rich. Show all posts
Monday, 27 September 2010
Monday, 12 January 2009
The Bitter Legacy of Recession
To people of my grandparents' generation (my grandfathers were 17 and 29 in 1929) there was one 'Depression' the economic downturn which affected the World from about 1929-36/9 depending on where you lived; New Zealand and Australia had been facing difficulties as early as 1927. Anyway, it was a period of economic slowdown leading to mass unemployment, peaking somewhere over 6 million people out of work in Germany in 1933 and globally unemployment was around 22% of people of working age in 1932. In the UK my grandfathers generally escaped the severest of the problems because they worked in the modern parts of engineering and were based in the South-East of England, the most prosperous part of the UK. Elsewhere in the UK, notably the heavy industrial regions of South West, North-West and North-East England and Central Scotland there was far worse times leading to hunger and deprivation. In those days the welfare state was minimally developed so there was little protection for those who were unemployed or their families. As always the wealthy saw it as an opportunity to grab back rights over individuals and for example, to compel women to go back into domestic service at low wage rates as in the 1920s it had proven tough to get cheap servants as more employment opportunities had opened up for women in the wake of the First World War.
Looking back in the 1970s, the Depression was something that these men and women never expected to see a repeat of. Anyway, the welfare state that had been constructed since 1945 made it far less harsh on people than had been the case forty years before. Then of course came the Thatcher years when the Conservative government engineered an economic downturn for political gains, primarily to smash the position of the trade unions, lower wage rates and make a workforce that was more compliant than the one they felt their government had inherited after the industrial unrest of the 1970s. Of course in 1974 the UK's industrial base for the first time had a majority of service sector jobs over manufacturing jobs and the decline of manufacturing continued apace across the western World. However, in the UK it was accelerated by hostile government policies. Added to this was an ideological element. In line with the American New Right attitudes, unemployed people were made to feel guilty for not having a job, they were portayed as lazy, unwilling to be flexible in finding work and somehow even 'sleazy' for accepting welfare payments in order to stay housed and feed their families.
Despite the complaints that British workers were unwilling to move to find work (viz Norman Tebbit's cry to 'get on your bike' to find work - though given the sharp differences in house prices the Conservative insistence that you were nothing if you did not own your own house actually reduced labour flexibility) I constantly encountered men who had travelled from other parts of the UK to South-East England where the service sector was prospering and lived in cramped accommodation often with many men to a single bedroom, just the way that foreign immigrants had typically done in the past, so they could earn money to send home. Let alone those Britons who went abroad to find work. Many people refer to the drama series 'Boys from the Black Stuff' (1982) as encapsulating the era, but they should also look at the comedy 'Auf Wiedersehen, Pet' (1983) about British builders in West Germany to show another facet.
To people who had lived through the Depression or knew its history, we seemed to be back in those times once again. Unemployment officially was around 3.4 million in the UK at its peak, but on the way we measure it now it would have been something like 4 million. Certainly given the rise in female employment throughout the 20th century and the need since around 1966 to have two adult incomes to sustain a family of four, made exclusion of married women from the unemployment figures wrong.
Of course, often with hindsight people see the 1980s as an era of 'greed is good' and people able to make millions. Because some people did, this was used to show us that all of us could. However, the fact that much of such sums were derived through asset stripping other industries and forcing down wages shows the lie. Most of us had to be exploited by such conditions in order for those people to make their profits. Sound familiar?
I was growing up in the 1980s, I was 13 in 1980 and 23 in 1990. I managed to avoid most of the problems because I lived in South-East England and went to university and had prosperous parents who did not lose their jobs. Yet even I was aware of the impact that the Recession of the 1980s had on people. The key impact which still lingers today, was fear. Parents in particular were terrified of what would happen to their company. Life became grey, holidays were cancelled, people even complained when people on benefits had a television or wanted hot food. Families were broken up by the unemployment. Even at university, where we were the privileged (only 6% of 18 year olds went to university then compared to over 40% now) we all feared a long period of unemployment ahead of us at graduation. Despite graduating in 1990, I did not earn above £10,000 (€10,000; US$14,800) until 2001. When colleagues at work talk about how long the second recession of 1990-3 actually went on, lingering to 1996 and beyond, I wholeheartedly support them in their statements. In fact between 1981-96, the British economy as the bulk of the population experienced it was in a bad state and unemployment in reality was always far worse than statistics made out.
I find it ironic that there is a current radio advertisement encouraging young people to go to university and 'taste the opportunity' and 'be everything' that they 'could ever be'. Recession as were are experiencing now and will at least until 2015 if not longer clamps down on opportunity. Of course tens of thousands more young people go to university now than they did in 1985 and they have been lied to that for the thousands of pounds of debt they are incurring they will have a chance for a good job. This is utter rubbish. They have little chance of a job let alone a good one. Unemployment is set to return to 3 million and there is no sense it will stop there. This time we do not only have structural readjustment and a consumer downturn but we have vulture funds wrecking established companies for nothing but their own gains. Unemployment among people aged under 25 is at least 40%, i.e. 1.25 million people and unemployment in this age group is rising faster than among other age groups. Unlike their predecessors graduates in this group have massive debts that on a normal basis it would take years to clear, but this will be prolonged by a long period of unemployment.
Of course graduates are those with greatest privileges, they tend still, mainly to come from well off families and by definition to be best educated. So if they are being pushed into unemployment what about those young people with lower qualifications. Even in the mid-1990s you would see graduates hiding their degrees from their CVs so that they could get the low paid jobs that were going. Carl Gilleard, chief executive of Graduate Recruiters has advised graduates to do this, to take the mundane jobs. Of course this simply displaces the less qualified from those posts. For young people at whatever level of education, there is now no opportunity. You fight tooth and nail against everyone just to secure that job in a call centre as you know there is nothing else. When there you make no protest and simply work harder and harder, knowing that simple dislike from your line manager is sufficient to doom you to unemployment.
Everyone seems to forget the terror of the 1980s. Of course it was deliberate, the wealthy felt that workers were not sufficiently obsequious let alone grateful for their jobs and sufficiently subservient in the way they should be. Of course to any employer such things should be part of the natural order, whereas of course, I will contest such things as giving up human dignity. Once again with the years of New Labour, the employers feel we have become too cocky, slack and lazy and certainly not cheap enough employees. Back in July 2008 I talked about how employers felt they had insufficient unemployment to be the necessary 'whip' for their workers and of course now they have it back.
The legacy of the 1980s was enduring and I feel it has damaged British society. For a start people seek scapegoats and there are already warnings of rising tensions, often ethnically focused, on the UK's housing estates. People forget that the 1980s was renowned for rioting right across the UK and only some of it was directed at government policy, the rest of it was directed at people's neighbours. Now we have immigrants again who no doubt will form the focus of such attacks. In return the police gets heavy armament and restricts our civil society even further. The authoritarian state that Tony Blair so loved, ironically will come a step closer through the failure of New Labour's economic plans.
The other thing is that people stop taking risks. This means that they do not travel, they do not learn other languages, they do not set up businesses, they stay at home as a meek pool of labour. The wealthy do not want the masses to travel and to be educated because then they might start challenging their position. The whole thing about expanding university entry, lifelong learning, staying in education until 18, is now being undermined by the whip of unemployment. It smacks down people but it smashes their dreams far more. The reason why immigrants come to the UK, and increasingly from places like Eastern Europe and South Asia where they have been well educated and instilled with an enthusiasm to better themselves, is because so many people born in the UK have had all desire to take risks or get ahead, beaten out of them. It was beaten out of their parents in the 1980s and it is being beaten out of young people today.
Recession sees the redistribution of opportunity back to the wealthy and privileged who have always had the greatest opportunities and yet seem loath to even share them. This week I came across the trend of the 'New Olympians' as outlined by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson in 'The Gods That Failed' (2008). They argue that the current situation is not some error or mishap of the global economy, but is in fact engineered by the powerful who feel that it is right that they should be serviced by the bulk of the population and that any movement away from that is wrong. This suggests that the post-1945 consensus or even the post-1848 perspective, that privilege should be challenged and that those in privilege should accept responsibility for their actions has been overthrown. In its place we have returned to some kind of medieval attitude, shorn of any Victorian philanthropic or even simply Christian elements, back to the anointment by God of certain individuals who it is wrong to even attempt to constrain in the slightest. King Charles I would feel very much at home as a vulture fund head, but people, he was a 17th century monarch, not someone of the 21st century. Are the gains of the past four centuries not worth struggling for.
Recession creates the passive UK society that so many with money and influence have been creating and seeking to maintain for so long. People now talk of 1945-73 as an aberration, instead we should have the hierarchical society in which everyone knows their place. Interestingly privilege is already receiving a boost. Even among universities employers are now only going to Oxford, Cambridge and the three colleges of London University: University College (UCL), Imperial and London School of Economics (which has the worst organised library I have ever seen). Attempts to widen access into the legal profession (only 10% of barristers have gone to a comprehensive school), the civil service, the military, are being attacked openly as 'class war'. People are no longer afraid to protect privilege even though it means that the top people in most of our state arms are from select private schools (and private schools in their entirety only educate 7% of children). Everyone especially in the middle classes, somehow thinks they are exempt, that they and their children will have opportunity. This is a massive delusion. Those who have opportunity are probably less than 7%, probably less than 1% of the population of any country. Yes, you might be able to get your child a job when others are out of work, but in fact they have no more chance of improving themselves and in fact no greater security than an orphan from a poor housing estate. There is the elite and there are the bulk of us, in-fighting in order to get the scraps the ultra-rich toss down. Of course they might not even select to distribute any scraps in your country they might all go to Poland or India or somewhere else. Do not delude yourself it is ever different.
The recession, as in the 1980s is being used in the UK to close down social mobility once again. No-one seems to have learnt the lesson that in the long-run this will damage the UK, because the bulk of successful new businesses in the UK are created not by those in the Establishment (they have no incentive to labour or innovate) but by 'outsiders' whether socially, ethnically or in terms of nationality. The UK is increasingly like China at the end of the 19th century more eager to cling to its out-dated structure than to move with the times to actually help the state to survive. The UK needs a social mobile, educated, confident population not a restricted and fearful one.
The current recession has come about through greed and game playing by the very rich. However, they are far from averse to it and its consequences as they recognise that twenty years on it allows them to jolt the bulk of society back into servile manners. States have found, that in contrast to the mid-20th century (and even then it was tough if you look at how governments were powerless to restrain oil companies) states have found that they cannot even get utility companies to behave in a decent, humane let alone altruistic manner. The ultra-rich are beyond government control and now they are effecting the kinds of society they want, totally unchallenging to them and enabling them to squeeze yet more profit.
I have seen cartoons recently in which Karl Marx is adopting an 'I told you so' manner. What Marx missed entirely is that even hiccoughs in capitalism let alone any steps towards seeming 'collapse' so terrifies the bulk of people, so divides them, so gives the justification to repression that no-one with revolutionary sentiments can come forward. Even in the 1980s I never anticipated that these circumstances of restricted mobility and economic hardship would persist so long, yet, now I know that whenever I die I will feel that I have lived through bad times and any periods when that was not the case were brief aberrations in the sustained period, through economic means, of fear and restriction of the bulk of the population of the UK.
Looking back in the 1970s, the Depression was something that these men and women never expected to see a repeat of. Anyway, the welfare state that had been constructed since 1945 made it far less harsh on people than had been the case forty years before. Then of course came the Thatcher years when the Conservative government engineered an economic downturn for political gains, primarily to smash the position of the trade unions, lower wage rates and make a workforce that was more compliant than the one they felt their government had inherited after the industrial unrest of the 1970s. Of course in 1974 the UK's industrial base for the first time had a majority of service sector jobs over manufacturing jobs and the decline of manufacturing continued apace across the western World. However, in the UK it was accelerated by hostile government policies. Added to this was an ideological element. In line with the American New Right attitudes, unemployed people were made to feel guilty for not having a job, they were portayed as lazy, unwilling to be flexible in finding work and somehow even 'sleazy' for accepting welfare payments in order to stay housed and feed their families.
Despite the complaints that British workers were unwilling to move to find work (viz Norman Tebbit's cry to 'get on your bike' to find work - though given the sharp differences in house prices the Conservative insistence that you were nothing if you did not own your own house actually reduced labour flexibility) I constantly encountered men who had travelled from other parts of the UK to South-East England where the service sector was prospering and lived in cramped accommodation often with many men to a single bedroom, just the way that foreign immigrants had typically done in the past, so they could earn money to send home. Let alone those Britons who went abroad to find work. Many people refer to the drama series 'Boys from the Black Stuff' (1982) as encapsulating the era, but they should also look at the comedy 'Auf Wiedersehen, Pet' (1983) about British builders in West Germany to show another facet.
To people who had lived through the Depression or knew its history, we seemed to be back in those times once again. Unemployment officially was around 3.4 million in the UK at its peak, but on the way we measure it now it would have been something like 4 million. Certainly given the rise in female employment throughout the 20th century and the need since around 1966 to have two adult incomes to sustain a family of four, made exclusion of married women from the unemployment figures wrong.
Of course, often with hindsight people see the 1980s as an era of 'greed is good' and people able to make millions. Because some people did, this was used to show us that all of us could. However, the fact that much of such sums were derived through asset stripping other industries and forcing down wages shows the lie. Most of us had to be exploited by such conditions in order for those people to make their profits. Sound familiar?
I was growing up in the 1980s, I was 13 in 1980 and 23 in 1990. I managed to avoid most of the problems because I lived in South-East England and went to university and had prosperous parents who did not lose their jobs. Yet even I was aware of the impact that the Recession of the 1980s had on people. The key impact which still lingers today, was fear. Parents in particular were terrified of what would happen to their company. Life became grey, holidays were cancelled, people even complained when people on benefits had a television or wanted hot food. Families were broken up by the unemployment. Even at university, where we were the privileged (only 6% of 18 year olds went to university then compared to over 40% now) we all feared a long period of unemployment ahead of us at graduation. Despite graduating in 1990, I did not earn above £10,000 (€10,000; US$14,800) until 2001. When colleagues at work talk about how long the second recession of 1990-3 actually went on, lingering to 1996 and beyond, I wholeheartedly support them in their statements. In fact between 1981-96, the British economy as the bulk of the population experienced it was in a bad state and unemployment in reality was always far worse than statistics made out.
I find it ironic that there is a current radio advertisement encouraging young people to go to university and 'taste the opportunity' and 'be everything' that they 'could ever be'. Recession as were are experiencing now and will at least until 2015 if not longer clamps down on opportunity. Of course tens of thousands more young people go to university now than they did in 1985 and they have been lied to that for the thousands of pounds of debt they are incurring they will have a chance for a good job. This is utter rubbish. They have little chance of a job let alone a good one. Unemployment is set to return to 3 million and there is no sense it will stop there. This time we do not only have structural readjustment and a consumer downturn but we have vulture funds wrecking established companies for nothing but their own gains. Unemployment among people aged under 25 is at least 40%, i.e. 1.25 million people and unemployment in this age group is rising faster than among other age groups. Unlike their predecessors graduates in this group have massive debts that on a normal basis it would take years to clear, but this will be prolonged by a long period of unemployment.
Of course graduates are those with greatest privileges, they tend still, mainly to come from well off families and by definition to be best educated. So if they are being pushed into unemployment what about those young people with lower qualifications. Even in the mid-1990s you would see graduates hiding their degrees from their CVs so that they could get the low paid jobs that were going. Carl Gilleard, chief executive of Graduate Recruiters has advised graduates to do this, to take the mundane jobs. Of course this simply displaces the less qualified from those posts. For young people at whatever level of education, there is now no opportunity. You fight tooth and nail against everyone just to secure that job in a call centre as you know there is nothing else. When there you make no protest and simply work harder and harder, knowing that simple dislike from your line manager is sufficient to doom you to unemployment.
Everyone seems to forget the terror of the 1980s. Of course it was deliberate, the wealthy felt that workers were not sufficiently obsequious let alone grateful for their jobs and sufficiently subservient in the way they should be. Of course to any employer such things should be part of the natural order, whereas of course, I will contest such things as giving up human dignity. Once again with the years of New Labour, the employers feel we have become too cocky, slack and lazy and certainly not cheap enough employees. Back in July 2008 I talked about how employers felt they had insufficient unemployment to be the necessary 'whip' for their workers and of course now they have it back.
The legacy of the 1980s was enduring and I feel it has damaged British society. For a start people seek scapegoats and there are already warnings of rising tensions, often ethnically focused, on the UK's housing estates. People forget that the 1980s was renowned for rioting right across the UK and only some of it was directed at government policy, the rest of it was directed at people's neighbours. Now we have immigrants again who no doubt will form the focus of such attacks. In return the police gets heavy armament and restricts our civil society even further. The authoritarian state that Tony Blair so loved, ironically will come a step closer through the failure of New Labour's economic plans.
The other thing is that people stop taking risks. This means that they do not travel, they do not learn other languages, they do not set up businesses, they stay at home as a meek pool of labour. The wealthy do not want the masses to travel and to be educated because then they might start challenging their position. The whole thing about expanding university entry, lifelong learning, staying in education until 18, is now being undermined by the whip of unemployment. It smacks down people but it smashes their dreams far more. The reason why immigrants come to the UK, and increasingly from places like Eastern Europe and South Asia where they have been well educated and instilled with an enthusiasm to better themselves, is because so many people born in the UK have had all desire to take risks or get ahead, beaten out of them. It was beaten out of their parents in the 1980s and it is being beaten out of young people today.
Recession sees the redistribution of opportunity back to the wealthy and privileged who have always had the greatest opportunities and yet seem loath to even share them. This week I came across the trend of the 'New Olympians' as outlined by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson in 'The Gods That Failed' (2008). They argue that the current situation is not some error or mishap of the global economy, but is in fact engineered by the powerful who feel that it is right that they should be serviced by the bulk of the population and that any movement away from that is wrong. This suggests that the post-1945 consensus or even the post-1848 perspective, that privilege should be challenged and that those in privilege should accept responsibility for their actions has been overthrown. In its place we have returned to some kind of medieval attitude, shorn of any Victorian philanthropic or even simply Christian elements, back to the anointment by God of certain individuals who it is wrong to even attempt to constrain in the slightest. King Charles I would feel very much at home as a vulture fund head, but people, he was a 17th century monarch, not someone of the 21st century. Are the gains of the past four centuries not worth struggling for.
Recession creates the passive UK society that so many with money and influence have been creating and seeking to maintain for so long. People now talk of 1945-73 as an aberration, instead we should have the hierarchical society in which everyone knows their place. Interestingly privilege is already receiving a boost. Even among universities employers are now only going to Oxford, Cambridge and the three colleges of London University: University College (UCL), Imperial and London School of Economics (which has the worst organised library I have ever seen). Attempts to widen access into the legal profession (only 10% of barristers have gone to a comprehensive school), the civil service, the military, are being attacked openly as 'class war'. People are no longer afraid to protect privilege even though it means that the top people in most of our state arms are from select private schools (and private schools in their entirety only educate 7% of children). Everyone especially in the middle classes, somehow thinks they are exempt, that they and their children will have opportunity. This is a massive delusion. Those who have opportunity are probably less than 7%, probably less than 1% of the population of any country. Yes, you might be able to get your child a job when others are out of work, but in fact they have no more chance of improving themselves and in fact no greater security than an orphan from a poor housing estate. There is the elite and there are the bulk of us, in-fighting in order to get the scraps the ultra-rich toss down. Of course they might not even select to distribute any scraps in your country they might all go to Poland or India or somewhere else. Do not delude yourself it is ever different.
The recession, as in the 1980s is being used in the UK to close down social mobility once again. No-one seems to have learnt the lesson that in the long-run this will damage the UK, because the bulk of successful new businesses in the UK are created not by those in the Establishment (they have no incentive to labour or innovate) but by 'outsiders' whether socially, ethnically or in terms of nationality. The UK is increasingly like China at the end of the 19th century more eager to cling to its out-dated structure than to move with the times to actually help the state to survive. The UK needs a social mobile, educated, confident population not a restricted and fearful one.
The current recession has come about through greed and game playing by the very rich. However, they are far from averse to it and its consequences as they recognise that twenty years on it allows them to jolt the bulk of society back into servile manners. States have found, that in contrast to the mid-20th century (and even then it was tough if you look at how governments were powerless to restrain oil companies) states have found that they cannot even get utility companies to behave in a decent, humane let alone altruistic manner. The ultra-rich are beyond government control and now they are effecting the kinds of society they want, totally unchallenging to them and enabling them to squeeze yet more profit.
I have seen cartoons recently in which Karl Marx is adopting an 'I told you so' manner. What Marx missed entirely is that even hiccoughs in capitalism let alone any steps towards seeming 'collapse' so terrifies the bulk of people, so divides them, so gives the justification to repression that no-one with revolutionary sentiments can come forward. Even in the 1980s I never anticipated that these circumstances of restricted mobility and economic hardship would persist so long, yet, now I know that whenever I die I will feel that I have lived through bad times and any periods when that was not the case were brief aberrations in the sustained period, through economic means, of fear and restriction of the bulk of the population of the UK.
Tuesday, 29 July 2008
The Deserving and the Undeserving
The UK is now a country where there seems to be few bounds of morality on the basis that used to exist. People publicly take drugs, commit adultery, have illegitimate children, speed, lie in public, take bribes in monetary or other forms and this is just the politicians let alone 'celebrities'. Sixty-one Conservative MPs were improperly employing members of their families on salaries of around £40,000 paid for by the state; most of these family members did nothing to benefit the MP or the constituency, it was just a sinecure for them. People in the public spotlight seem to face only minimal censure. Possibly this is because so many newspapers and magazines rely on scandal to fill their pages and to press people too much to behave in a respectable way would be to cut off their supply of stories. The only journalist who seems to be raising these issues is Polly Toynbee and I am pleased at that, but she seems like a very lonely voice.
It is interesting that such moral constraints from which the bulk of the population are excused are still applied very heavily to the poor. The sense of the 'deserving' and the 'undeserving' poor dates back to the perceptions of the late Victorian era. These seemed to match social welfare with moral behaviour. More than that though, it was a sense that people could prove they were worthy of being lifted from poverty by adopting the correct frame of mind. They needed to compliant and grateful rather than seeking to challenge the situation they were in or the society that kept them there. Benefactors loved to see the needy bowing in supplication and gratitude for the benefits given to them. Anyone who did not behave that way was improper and so should be penalised by having benefits withheld.
Partly this association was due to the fact that it was felt that anyone could lift themselves from poverty if they just tried, so in fact, it was felt, the bulk of people still in that state were lazy, feckless or corrupt. This stemmed from the fact that having numerous children and drinking alcohol were seen as primary causes of poverty, when in fact they were more often the consequences of the things that people used to blot out the discomfort of living in poverty. In the 1930s when mass unemployment came to the UK, it was noted that consumption of alcohol and tobacco as well as gambling increased. In addition funerals became very elaborate. These are aspects that you can still witness in East London where I lived 1994-2001. Of course drugs have also long been part of the mix, laudanum was bought by the pint in the 18th century. These days that factor is more visible, but stems from the same cause. When you are living in a room in a bed and breakfast with no hope of work and little to do to pass the day, you just want to blot out the world in whatever way you can. I agree that addictions lead to poverty, but you must also recognise that poverty leads to addiction, and if you like, immorality. If you have nothing worthwhile keeping in the world, why bother to stay in the world? This is seen in the funerals. I have never seen so long corteges or as elaborate funeral tributes or horse-drawn hearses as when I lived in East London where people have the least money to afford these things. In more prosperous areas, people make less of a fuss. However, in poor districts it is a sense that at least at their death the person gets something decent in their life. It is a celebration too, that the deceased, unlike the mourners, has finally managed to shake off the burdens of debt and worry that continue to plague the living.
In the 20th century, from the 1910s onwards and especially from 1945, the state took over the role of aiding the poor. It tended to move away from moral judgement to a mechanistic approach. If you fit certain criteria then you receive the benefits, if you do not then the benefits are not paid. There is no question of how you use the money, whether you save it or what foods you buy. There have been some moves in this direction more in terms of health, which in the UK having a state-run health system which is often free at point of use, it can be counted as a 'benefit' though one that most people whether rich or poor, unemployed or in work, will use at some time in their life. There has been discussion whether the obese or the elderly or those who smoke should be refused certain treatments, notably IV fertilisation treatments or transplants. As yet this is still generally undecided, but it fits in with the growing attitude that there are people, who because of the lifestyle they lead, are more 'deserving' of treatment than others. How long is it before that extends to determining who gets treatment on the basis of the person's income or their ethnicity. This is a very slippery path, but one that many people in the UK are keen to progress down.
People in the UK often feel that they are both hard done by and that other people are getting more than they are, and usually without 'deserving' it. This is a natural gripe. It is difficult to comprehend how impersonal global economic forces impact on all of us as individuals. It is much easier to identify distinct individuals and blame them. Of course every single person you or I is going to meet today, tomorrow, next week, probably for the rest of our lives, has absolutely no control over the global economy. The people who do, do not mix with people like us. Even Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling should you meet them somewhere, have only limited power to influence what impacts on our bank accounts or whether we will be in a job this time next year. So, we blame other people and we assume, because we come from a superficially prosperous country, that if we do not have enough, then it must be that someone else is taking it from us. We do not blame the faceless ultra-rich who in fact are the ones squeezing it from us in the petrol we pay for (BP the largest British owned oil company post six-month profits of £6.75 billion [€8.5 billion; US$ 13.5 billion] today, equivalent to £37 million per day. They make enough money in profit in a year to pay the annual salaries of 225,000 school teachers, just under a third of the total) or the food we buy, rather we blame the immigrant family on the corner or that layabout family across the road.
If you ever work in a government department as I have done (the Department of Employment and the Inland Revenue as they were named in the 1990s) you know that every day letters arrive at every single revenue or benefits office from people telling on their neighbours who they are convinced must be defrauding the government. In the bulk of the cases they are wrong as the civil service is pretty efficient at catching people defrauding them, they do not need the public to keep pointing out people, in fact it wastes their time as they have to process these 'reports' from the public when they could actually be chasing down fraudsters. The popular media always talks about 'scroungers' and people (often foreigners) supposedly defrauding the state. It never talks about the billions of pounds of unclaimed benefits. In 2007, 2.1 million retired people were deemed to be below the poverty line, a rise of 200,000 from 2006. However, each year, that is each and every year, £5 billion in benefits targeted specifically at people over 60 years old, are unclaimed. People are either ill-informed about what they can claim, or, and if you know British people of that age group, reluctant to claim because of the stigma attached, that they would rather live in poverty than go for this money. Surely any person who has worked in the UK through this past decades 'deserves' all the help they can get, even if you stick to that criteria which I feel is an unsound one.
All of this is going to get work. David Cameron, from his elite public school background, is reviving the rhetoric of the 'undeserving poor' from the Victorian era and rehashed through the Thatcher years. There is no indication on how you can prove you are 'deserving', but as in the past it seems that you must be willing to enlist your family members as free childcare and then go and take lowly paid jobs with long hours in order to prove that you are deserving, that you have sufficient self-sacrifice for the state to deem to come and help you. As I have noted before, the bulk of the UK population, about 25 million of which are working age, want to work. Around 35,000 of them do not. This still leaves 1.55 million unemployed people in the UK who want to work. Many will work in jobs with poor wages, but of course they have to earn enough to live on and pay the ever increasing fuel and food bills. People forget that in the Victorian era a lot of the worst paid jobs came with food and housing as part of the pay, that is not the case any longer. You cannot move to a Victorian economy unless you go to it wholesale, which is to say, men dying at an average age of 45 so having no need for unemployment, children going into employment from the age of 6 onwards without having education, an infant mortality rate somewhere around 15-20 per 1000, accommodation that could be afforded even on pauper wages from factories, a 12-hour working day; cheap adulterated food, and so on. You cannot expect people in the modern UK to somehow behave as if they were living 120 years ago when the rest of society is enjoying all the benefits and advances of the 21st century and also dangling these things in front of people constantly, telling them they are nothing unless they own them.
Is 'deserving' or 'undeserving' a stamp to be placed on people's foreheads? The father of the UK welfare system, William Beveridge, was aware that all people go through ups and downs in our lives. All of us will be ill, all of us will get old, many of us will have children, many of us will find ourselves without work at sometime or another (even managing directors get laid off at times). So this is why he came up with 'national insurance', to insure us against the mishaps of life. There was no question of morality, we just paid in when we could and then drew out when we needed, that was the approach of the welfare state, not taxes feeding into benefits. Obviously it worked better when there was full employment, but it should be working now as employment is still reasonable. However, as with all insurance claims, there are people who feel that they should check the claims. Their judgements are to be not based on how much you have paid in insurance (nor how much you will pay in the future) but whether you have somehow lived the 'right' way to get the money. This is arbitrary. If this is the basis of judging benefits paid to poor people or those just temporarily without a job or with children, I think we should begin applying it to the rich as well.
How would the wealthy respond if we began taking away their salaries and bonuses if they fail to invest in their companies; if they take drugs, drink and drive dangerously; if they produce children who have not bothered to study for qualifications and are a burden rather than a benefit to the country; if they do not pay their workers a wage that reflects their contribution to company profits (no company makes any profit without workers)? I think it is time to come down hard on the undeserving rich. Make them feel embarrassed and guilty for what they suck out of the UK and waste on things that generally damage the environment - big cars, numerous flights, developments in tropical countries, the drugs they take. They do far more harm both to the UK and the world as a whole than any number of families or individuals below the poverty line. Of course we are going to move even further away from anything of this kind. Wealth in the UK buys you exemption from moral criticism. Poverty, however, thrusts you right into the spotlight and even if you do receive the measly benefits you are obliged to feel guilty and oh-so-grateful for them. That is a perverse state of affairs and riling me so much I am going to have to cease this post.
It is interesting that such moral constraints from which the bulk of the population are excused are still applied very heavily to the poor. The sense of the 'deserving' and the 'undeserving' poor dates back to the perceptions of the late Victorian era. These seemed to match social welfare with moral behaviour. More than that though, it was a sense that people could prove they were worthy of being lifted from poverty by adopting the correct frame of mind. They needed to compliant and grateful rather than seeking to challenge the situation they were in or the society that kept them there. Benefactors loved to see the needy bowing in supplication and gratitude for the benefits given to them. Anyone who did not behave that way was improper and so should be penalised by having benefits withheld.
Partly this association was due to the fact that it was felt that anyone could lift themselves from poverty if they just tried, so in fact, it was felt, the bulk of people still in that state were lazy, feckless or corrupt. This stemmed from the fact that having numerous children and drinking alcohol were seen as primary causes of poverty, when in fact they were more often the consequences of the things that people used to blot out the discomfort of living in poverty. In the 1930s when mass unemployment came to the UK, it was noted that consumption of alcohol and tobacco as well as gambling increased. In addition funerals became very elaborate. These are aspects that you can still witness in East London where I lived 1994-2001. Of course drugs have also long been part of the mix, laudanum was bought by the pint in the 18th century. These days that factor is more visible, but stems from the same cause. When you are living in a room in a bed and breakfast with no hope of work and little to do to pass the day, you just want to blot out the world in whatever way you can. I agree that addictions lead to poverty, but you must also recognise that poverty leads to addiction, and if you like, immorality. If you have nothing worthwhile keeping in the world, why bother to stay in the world? This is seen in the funerals. I have never seen so long corteges or as elaborate funeral tributes or horse-drawn hearses as when I lived in East London where people have the least money to afford these things. In more prosperous areas, people make less of a fuss. However, in poor districts it is a sense that at least at their death the person gets something decent in their life. It is a celebration too, that the deceased, unlike the mourners, has finally managed to shake off the burdens of debt and worry that continue to plague the living.
In the 20th century, from the 1910s onwards and especially from 1945, the state took over the role of aiding the poor. It tended to move away from moral judgement to a mechanistic approach. If you fit certain criteria then you receive the benefits, if you do not then the benefits are not paid. There is no question of how you use the money, whether you save it or what foods you buy. There have been some moves in this direction more in terms of health, which in the UK having a state-run health system which is often free at point of use, it can be counted as a 'benefit' though one that most people whether rich or poor, unemployed or in work, will use at some time in their life. There has been discussion whether the obese or the elderly or those who smoke should be refused certain treatments, notably IV fertilisation treatments or transplants. As yet this is still generally undecided, but it fits in with the growing attitude that there are people, who because of the lifestyle they lead, are more 'deserving' of treatment than others. How long is it before that extends to determining who gets treatment on the basis of the person's income or their ethnicity. This is a very slippery path, but one that many people in the UK are keen to progress down.
People in the UK often feel that they are both hard done by and that other people are getting more than they are, and usually without 'deserving' it. This is a natural gripe. It is difficult to comprehend how impersonal global economic forces impact on all of us as individuals. It is much easier to identify distinct individuals and blame them. Of course every single person you or I is going to meet today, tomorrow, next week, probably for the rest of our lives, has absolutely no control over the global economy. The people who do, do not mix with people like us. Even Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling should you meet them somewhere, have only limited power to influence what impacts on our bank accounts or whether we will be in a job this time next year. So, we blame other people and we assume, because we come from a superficially prosperous country, that if we do not have enough, then it must be that someone else is taking it from us. We do not blame the faceless ultra-rich who in fact are the ones squeezing it from us in the petrol we pay for (BP the largest British owned oil company post six-month profits of £6.75 billion [€8.5 billion; US$ 13.5 billion] today, equivalent to £37 million per day. They make enough money in profit in a year to pay the annual salaries of 225,000 school teachers, just under a third of the total) or the food we buy, rather we blame the immigrant family on the corner or that layabout family across the road.
If you ever work in a government department as I have done (the Department of Employment and the Inland Revenue as they were named in the 1990s) you know that every day letters arrive at every single revenue or benefits office from people telling on their neighbours who they are convinced must be defrauding the government. In the bulk of the cases they are wrong as the civil service is pretty efficient at catching people defrauding them, they do not need the public to keep pointing out people, in fact it wastes their time as they have to process these 'reports' from the public when they could actually be chasing down fraudsters. The popular media always talks about 'scroungers' and people (often foreigners) supposedly defrauding the state. It never talks about the billions of pounds of unclaimed benefits. In 2007, 2.1 million retired people were deemed to be below the poverty line, a rise of 200,000 from 2006. However, each year, that is each and every year, £5 billion in benefits targeted specifically at people over 60 years old, are unclaimed. People are either ill-informed about what they can claim, or, and if you know British people of that age group, reluctant to claim because of the stigma attached, that they would rather live in poverty than go for this money. Surely any person who has worked in the UK through this past decades 'deserves' all the help they can get, even if you stick to that criteria which I feel is an unsound one.
All of this is going to get work. David Cameron, from his elite public school background, is reviving the rhetoric of the 'undeserving poor' from the Victorian era and rehashed through the Thatcher years. There is no indication on how you can prove you are 'deserving', but as in the past it seems that you must be willing to enlist your family members as free childcare and then go and take lowly paid jobs with long hours in order to prove that you are deserving, that you have sufficient self-sacrifice for the state to deem to come and help you. As I have noted before, the bulk of the UK population, about 25 million of which are working age, want to work. Around 35,000 of them do not. This still leaves 1.55 million unemployed people in the UK who want to work. Many will work in jobs with poor wages, but of course they have to earn enough to live on and pay the ever increasing fuel and food bills. People forget that in the Victorian era a lot of the worst paid jobs came with food and housing as part of the pay, that is not the case any longer. You cannot move to a Victorian economy unless you go to it wholesale, which is to say, men dying at an average age of 45 so having no need for unemployment, children going into employment from the age of 6 onwards without having education, an infant mortality rate somewhere around 15-20 per 1000, accommodation that could be afforded even on pauper wages from factories, a 12-hour working day; cheap adulterated food, and so on. You cannot expect people in the modern UK to somehow behave as if they were living 120 years ago when the rest of society is enjoying all the benefits and advances of the 21st century and also dangling these things in front of people constantly, telling them they are nothing unless they own them.
Is 'deserving' or 'undeserving' a stamp to be placed on people's foreheads? The father of the UK welfare system, William Beveridge, was aware that all people go through ups and downs in our lives. All of us will be ill, all of us will get old, many of us will have children, many of us will find ourselves without work at sometime or another (even managing directors get laid off at times). So this is why he came up with 'national insurance', to insure us against the mishaps of life. There was no question of morality, we just paid in when we could and then drew out when we needed, that was the approach of the welfare state, not taxes feeding into benefits. Obviously it worked better when there was full employment, but it should be working now as employment is still reasonable. However, as with all insurance claims, there are people who feel that they should check the claims. Their judgements are to be not based on how much you have paid in insurance (nor how much you will pay in the future) but whether you have somehow lived the 'right' way to get the money. This is arbitrary. If this is the basis of judging benefits paid to poor people or those just temporarily without a job or with children, I think we should begin applying it to the rich as well.
How would the wealthy respond if we began taking away their salaries and bonuses if they fail to invest in their companies; if they take drugs, drink and drive dangerously; if they produce children who have not bothered to study for qualifications and are a burden rather than a benefit to the country; if they do not pay their workers a wage that reflects their contribution to company profits (no company makes any profit without workers)? I think it is time to come down hard on the undeserving rich. Make them feel embarrassed and guilty for what they suck out of the UK and waste on things that generally damage the environment - big cars, numerous flights, developments in tropical countries, the drugs they take. They do far more harm both to the UK and the world as a whole than any number of families or individuals below the poverty line. Of course we are going to move even further away from anything of this kind. Wealth in the UK buys you exemption from moral criticism. Poverty, however, thrusts you right into the spotlight and even if you do receive the measly benefits you are obliged to feel guilty and oh-so-grateful for them. That is a perverse state of affairs and riling me so much I am going to have to cease this post.
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