I suppose it was inevitable. I had expected house prices to begin falling this year, but I had not expected oil prices to rise. I had expected Iraq to stabilise and for more oil to be coming from there, I did not realise that Chinese consumption was going to step up so suddenly, forcing prices higher and higher and in turn both petrol and oil prices. Anyway, consequently with petrol having risen by 30p per litre in the past year and food costs for me by about 20% in the same period, I suddenly found this month that all my salary had been spent by the first week in May. Myself and the woman in the house sat down to see where we could all cut back. Her online business has collapsed as other people not only in the UK (she sells in Europe, USA and to expatriates in China) have stopped buying anything they see as frivolous. This means she will have to go out to work (something she loathes, she feels people despise her and patronise her when she is an employee which is why she always tries to be self-employed). She pointed out I was spending £32 (€40; US$62) per month on coffee at work. I have also stopped doing the lottery at £8 per month and cancelled both house contents and life insurance saving about another £80 (€100; US$156) per month. We also had a cleaner at £64 per month which we are laying off, so altogether we reckon we can save £183 per month which is enough to cover my petrol bill or about three-quarters of the monthly groceries. This means we do not have to sell the house we have been in for just under five months.
We have a fixed rate mortgage for five years, but got it when the interest rates were at their peak. House prices have slid constantly since then and we think we over-paid for this house anyway so if we sell we will have lost probably at least £20,000 (€25,200; US$39,200) on what we paid for it. Also British people dislike quirky decor in their houses so the Victorian style interiors that came with it (and of course we cannot afford to change now) will make it as hard for us to sell as it was for our predecessors here. Also the market is being flooded by people trying to dump houses that like us they can no longer afford to pay for. In addition, many people who bought buy-to-let properties are now dumping these even though they do not live in them. Repossessions by banks of houses on which people are no longer able to pay their mortgage have risen by 17% so far this year and the estimated figure is 45,000 in 2008 compared to 27,000 in 2007. We are not back to the level of the 1990s, the peak was over 80,000 reposessions in 1991, but there seems nothing to stop this climb. In addition, the mass year-on-year repossessions of the early 1990s put cheap property on to the market whereas since the early 2000s bank policies have changed and they keep repossessed property and set a high price and wait until the market rises back up to it so that they get more money back than auctioning off at a low price as they did in the 1990s.
For now, 'tightening our belts' should mean we do not get into danger over the mortgage. It does mean all luxuries have gone, no more meals out, no holidays (those we had, I realise now were foolish), no more DVDs or electrical goods. It is hard to explain to the 6-year old in our house why these things have stopp. My fear is that costs will rise further and that in the future having taken up all the slack in our finances there will be nothing left to economise on. We only need the car to go wrong or one of us to need dental treatment for it to soak up all the meagre savings we have left and us like an increasing number of house owners to begin the path to losing the house and all the money we put into it.
With hindsight we could have done things differently: bought a cheaper house, moved to a cheaper town (certainly one closer to where I work), continued renting, but of course our options were limited with two landlords in a row mistreating us, forcing us to move on as quickly as we could into what have turned out to be bad houses for us. My prediction is that by May 2009 I will have lost this house and with it all the money I saved and invested through the 2000s in that flat in London (where I was also shafted). In the UK of today you do not only have to be clever with money (which I am clearly not) but you have to be very, very lucky. I earn 50% per year more than the national average salary, so I am not losing my house just yet, but my contract expires in August 2009 and with people already being made redundant by my company it is clear I have no future there as they always simply do not renew the contracts of fixed-term staff like me. I have lived through the very nasty unemployment of the 1980s and the house fiasco of 1990-3 during which so many people suffered terribly and yet I managed to escape by being flexible and not investing in anything. As you get older though humans naturally crave stability, but in the UK though we are encouraged very hard to buy houses, doing that just makes you vulnerable to the economic turmoil that seems to buffet us so regularly and then the people who urged you to buy a house are totally unsympathetic when you are kicked out. The bulk of us are simply hard workers, not successful gamblers and yet we are forced by British society and its economy to constantly gamble with our future.
As I told the 6-year old, not getting some things he wants now may help his mother hang on to this house, but I think more likely is the outcome I threatened him with that in a few months he will no longer have a bedroom of his own, not have a garden and many of the electrical goods now in the house will have gone. That is his future and most likely the one of many hundreds of thousands of British families, just because greedy American bankers could not be content with the mortgage market they had.
Saturday, 10 May 2008
Friday, 9 May 2008
What if 'Carmilla' Had Been More Successful than 'Dracula'?
I have previously discussed the modern vampire aesthetic and then when I was doing some research about 'Frankenstein' by Mary Shelley (1818) and reading about the other reasonable novel, 'The Vampyre' written by John William Polidori (1819) which came out of the contest in 1816 (the so-called Year Without Summer) for which Shelley wrote her novel, I was then reminded of 'Carmilla' by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1872). 'Carmilla' preceded Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' (1897) and Stoker took a lot of elements from the earlier story. 'Carmilla' is set in Styria (in what is now southern Austria) and Stoker originally set 'Dracula' there before relocating the story to the borders of Transylvania and Moldavia (now in Romania; with a large Hungarian population). At the time both Styria and Transylvania were regions of the Austria-Hungary, a large multi-national country which in the 1890s covered modern day Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia and some of southern Poland and much of western Romania (it gained Bosnia in 1908). 'Carmilla' features a Dr. Hesselius, whereas 'Dracula' has Dr. Van Helsing with both acting as the rational, analytical force in the face of the fantastical and supernatural. Other characters seem parallel to Le Fanu's.
The main difference is that the main vampire in 'Carmilla' is a female, a kind of embodied spirit of Countess Mircalla Karnstein and she is ultimately defeated by having her body dug up and destroyed. Carmilla can walk through walls and turn herself into a large cat-like creature, something like a panther. She drains blood from female victims, being clearly lesbian in orientation, but she does it by biting their chests rather than their necks.
Given that 'Dracula' has been so influential on all vampire fiction since it is interesting to speculate how different things would have been if 'Carmilla' had remained the dominant novel of the genre (there were numerous vampire novels throughout the 19th century so another may alternatively have come to the fore). The key thing is the sexuality. Lesbianism was a more challenging approach to simple male dominance over women. Aside from a loose adapatation of 'Carmilla' in the 1932 film 'Vampyr', this theme is one reason why movies drawing on the story were not common before the early 1960s and particularly in the early 1970s when there was a search for stories to fill Hammer Horror movies with titilating themes that could feature beautiful actresses. 'Blood and Roses' (1960) draws directly on 'Carmilla' and there were other such themed vampire movies like 'The Brides of Dracula' (1960) (three of these feature in the original 'Dracula' novel), 'The Vampire Lovers' (1970), 'Lust for a Vampire' (1971), 'Vampyros Lesbos' (1971), 'Vampyres' (1974). To some extent these reflect the fact that there has long been an assocation with vampire characters and sexuality, as someone once said 'Dracula is all about foreplay' because of his biting of the neck, taking control over a woman and so on. I have discussed the issue around the two fangs into the neck, and Carmilla's approach of biting the chest would have developed a very different aesthetic which references to suckling blood and a whole range of other rather alarming connotations. In contrast Dracula's seemingly very neat puncture marks in the neck are less challenging.
For me what is intriguing is if the dominant image of a vampire was female rather than male. It is interesting that Carmilla was not a femme fatale in the usually perceived way in that she sought to encapture men, so it would have created a differen stock character in other genres such as detective stories, which occasionally had the 'evil lesbian' but much less so than one who sought to exploit men, and even then usually through beauty rather than power. The other differences would have been the association with big cats rather than bats or dogs which Dracula is associated with. To some extent the cat appearance relates back to traditional stories of witches' familiars and then forwards to 'Catwoman' styles of the 20th century, notably in 'Batman' (from 1939). The other thing is the location. Even today Transylvania is seen as distant, somewhat and backward part of Europe with ethnic problems between the Hungarian population there living in Romania. In contrast, whilst Styria is mountainous it lies much closer to the heart of Europe and to cities in Austria, southern Germany and northern Italy. Even in the late 19th century it was less remote and so what we may have seen earlier was the more urban sophisticated vampire that has really only come to the fore from the 1980s.
If Stoker had felt his novel to be too derivative (and one must not dismiss in fact there are real elements of innovation that he brought to the genre, I do not want to do the book down entirely) of 'Carmilla' or he had never finished it. It would be interesting to have seen if the vampire novel and the following films would have still found a way to move in the direction of the way he portrayed it, i.e. male and in Transylvania, as those things fitted with what society was willing to tolerate rather than female in Styria. To some degree it is probably about market. On average 90% of the population is heterosexual and whilst many heterosexual men enjoy stylised lesbian sexual activity, an author writing a lesbian story is appealing to a much smaller market and one that has only really become open since the feminist era of the 1970s. The issue more broadly is, though, that the dominance of 'Dracula' has possibly closed off other explorations of the vampire aesthetic (despite Anne Rice) which look at it from a female perspective for more than titilating reasons. Though it is noted that 'Carmilla' was written by a man for men, as the Japanese magazine 'Carmilla' has done it is possible to recapture the usage for women. At the time the fact that the baddie is a woman as strong as the men she fights was unusual, so despite the possible intentions of the author it can be seen as including feminist elements that do not seem to have been developed by authors since.
You can access:-
'Carmilla' here: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/10007
An article on how 'Dracula' masculinised vampire stories after 'Carmilla' here: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2220/is_n4_v38/ai_18981386
'Dracula' here: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/345
'The Vampyre' here: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/6087
The main difference is that the main vampire in 'Carmilla' is a female, a kind of embodied spirit of Countess Mircalla Karnstein and she is ultimately defeated by having her body dug up and destroyed. Carmilla can walk through walls and turn herself into a large cat-like creature, something like a panther. She drains blood from female victims, being clearly lesbian in orientation, but she does it by biting their chests rather than their necks.
Given that 'Dracula' has been so influential on all vampire fiction since it is interesting to speculate how different things would have been if 'Carmilla' had remained the dominant novel of the genre (there were numerous vampire novels throughout the 19th century so another may alternatively have come to the fore). The key thing is the sexuality. Lesbianism was a more challenging approach to simple male dominance over women. Aside from a loose adapatation of 'Carmilla' in the 1932 film 'Vampyr', this theme is one reason why movies drawing on the story were not common before the early 1960s and particularly in the early 1970s when there was a search for stories to fill Hammer Horror movies with titilating themes that could feature beautiful actresses. 'Blood and Roses' (1960) draws directly on 'Carmilla' and there were other such themed vampire movies like 'The Brides of Dracula' (1960) (three of these feature in the original 'Dracula' novel), 'The Vampire Lovers' (1970), 'Lust for a Vampire' (1971), 'Vampyros Lesbos' (1971), 'Vampyres' (1974). To some extent these reflect the fact that there has long been an assocation with vampire characters and sexuality, as someone once said 'Dracula is all about foreplay' because of his biting of the neck, taking control over a woman and so on. I have discussed the issue around the two fangs into the neck, and Carmilla's approach of biting the chest would have developed a very different aesthetic which references to suckling blood and a whole range of other rather alarming connotations. In contrast Dracula's seemingly very neat puncture marks in the neck are less challenging.
For me what is intriguing is if the dominant image of a vampire was female rather than male. It is interesting that Carmilla was not a femme fatale in the usually perceived way in that she sought to encapture men, so it would have created a differen stock character in other genres such as detective stories, which occasionally had the 'evil lesbian' but much less so than one who sought to exploit men, and even then usually through beauty rather than power. The other differences would have been the association with big cats rather than bats or dogs which Dracula is associated with. To some extent the cat appearance relates back to traditional stories of witches' familiars and then forwards to 'Catwoman' styles of the 20th century, notably in 'Batman' (from 1939). The other thing is the location. Even today Transylvania is seen as distant, somewhat and backward part of Europe with ethnic problems between the Hungarian population there living in Romania. In contrast, whilst Styria is mountainous it lies much closer to the heart of Europe and to cities in Austria, southern Germany and northern Italy. Even in the late 19th century it was less remote and so what we may have seen earlier was the more urban sophisticated vampire that has really only come to the fore from the 1980s.
If Stoker had felt his novel to be too derivative (and one must not dismiss in fact there are real elements of innovation that he brought to the genre, I do not want to do the book down entirely) of 'Carmilla' or he had never finished it. It would be interesting to have seen if the vampire novel and the following films would have still found a way to move in the direction of the way he portrayed it, i.e. male and in Transylvania, as those things fitted with what society was willing to tolerate rather than female in Styria. To some degree it is probably about market. On average 90% of the population is heterosexual and whilst many heterosexual men enjoy stylised lesbian sexual activity, an author writing a lesbian story is appealing to a much smaller market and one that has only really become open since the feminist era of the 1970s. The issue more broadly is, though, that the dominance of 'Dracula' has possibly closed off other explorations of the vampire aesthetic (despite Anne Rice) which look at it from a female perspective for more than titilating reasons. Though it is noted that 'Carmilla' was written by a man for men, as the Japanese magazine 'Carmilla' has done it is possible to recapture the usage for women. At the time the fact that the baddie is a woman as strong as the men she fights was unusual, so despite the possible intentions of the author it can be seen as including feminist elements that do not seem to have been developed by authors since.
You can access:-
'Carmilla' here: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/10007
An article on how 'Dracula' masculinised vampire stories after 'Carmilla' here: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2220/is_n4_v38/ai_18981386
'Dracula' here: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/345
'The Vampyre' here: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/6087
Monday, 5 May 2008
The British and Bank Holidays
As I have noted on a number of occasions in the past the UK has 5 fewer bank holidays than any other country in the European Union. We get the following (typically they are given on the nearest Monday following the date itself): New Year's Day (1st January), Good Friday and Easter Monday (which move according to when the Easter holiday is), May Day (1st May), Spring Holiday (26th May this year, anyway the last Monday in May), Late Summer Holiday (a.k.a August Bank Holiday, 25th August this year, the last Monday in August), Christmas Day (25th December) and Boxing Day (26th December). Scotland (2nd January, 4th August) and Northern Ireland (17th March, 14th July) get an additional 2 bank holidays compared to England and Wales. Even the USA renowned for not having long holidays does better than the English and Welsh let alone our European neighbours. Those campaigning for us to have St. George's Day (24th April) as a bank holiday do not want an additional bank holiday they want it simply to replace May Day which they see as 'too Red'. Despite us having so few bank holidays you can guarantee that the news will have some employers' spokesman (and it is typically a man) complaining how many billions of pounds have been lost to the economy by workers having a day off. The British worker typically works longer than any other in the European Union in the average week anyway, surely these long hours more than make up for the bank holidays, but no, of course we must feel guilt that we are not working as hard as we can for the wealth of the company owners. The UK is exempt from the EU's working time directive which limits jobs to 48 hours per week and many people work a lot longer in the UK. Rules are tighter than they were in the 1990s but in the UK you can still work more than 48 hours per week if your average is less than 48 hours per week when seen over a 17-week period.
There is a simple way in which you can tell that the British work so hard, and that is how they respond to bank holidays. Today, Monday 5th May, is the UK bank holiday for May Day and despite the poor weather, rainy but humid (certainly in my part of England) the roads are jammed with people either heading to the beach or to DIY stores. In a country where working hours are shorter and they have more holidays there is not this madness to go places. The roads in my district get packed with people pulling caravans so that they can sit in a damp field looking out of their window at a slightly different scene to what they could see at home. The television companies seem obliged to pack the schedules with old blockbusters in the assumption that anyone sat at home will be slumped in front of the television bloated on a roast dinner as if it was Christmas. Certainly no-one at a DIY (Do-It-Yourself, I know it is called 'bricolage' in French, I have no idea in other languages) store would argue the British are lazy. The workforce at such stores are incredibly busy and people are coming in to buy tons of supplies so that they can work in their own houses for free. British people behave on bank holidays literally 'like there's tomorrow' and that they either must see some windswept beach or paint their spare bedroom or watch a certain film again so that everything is right and proper when they come before God on Judgement Day. It is a pity that Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) who painted Biblical scenes as if they had taken place in his home village of Cookham in the 1950s, did not do one of the Judgement Day as a British bank holiday. So UK employers, stop whining. You have a very dilligent workforce who need to have more of a break than you give them. Do not try to make them feel guilty for the few days' break they get. You work a lot less hard than they do, no matter what you may say about long hours, the average British worker never gets mid-week lunchtime golf games.
Another couple of things came to my attention regarding bank holidays. Karl Marx (1818-83) argued that as capitalism developed further the middle classes would be wiped out and push down into the working classes. To some extent the opposite has happened and manual labour from the UK has been sent to China and instead the working class now wear suits, work in call centres and have middle class aspirations that the middle classes are now finding it difficult to live up to, primarily because house prices (and owning a house was always the stamp of being middle class) have kept rising whilst salaries have stagnated as so much of the inflation in the economy is hidden, though I must say that with fuel and food now rising so quickly it is becoming more apparent. What has happened is that the middle classes have adopted (skilled) working class hobbies. In the 1980s caravans were only pulled behind saloon cars of a man who had worked hard maybe as a foreman and saved for months perhaps years. Now they are dragged flapping from side to side behind the huge 4x4s of company executives (who forget that you are not supposed to drive at 70mph with a caravan, the limit is 50mph and that is why they wave around so violently). Similarly twenty, thirty years ago, it was the workers who would do up their own houses, the middle classes would employ a 'man' to do it. Now DIY has effectively become interior design that you do yourself and the products that are sold are not just the old wood and paint but a whole range of things to 'style' your house. Similarly once gardens and especially ones to grow vegetables were the preserve of the working class; the vegetables supplemented the food on the family dinner table. Now gardening is a middle class activity and vegetables are apparently the new flowers. Again the stores have responded to this and half the stuff in a garden store is not plants but sculpture for your garden; I even saw a water butt in the form of a Roman column selling at £199 (€250; US$390) this week. Then you see the TV gardener Carol Klein (a lovely woman, I do not want to disrespect her) walking through a vegetable garden eating stuff straight off the plant. Now in a household where the vegetables are needed for meals that would be seen as being greedy and unfair to the rest of the family.
The other working class 'hobby' now taken over by the middle class (oh, and I have entirely left aside football (soccer for US readers)) is having families. In my youth middle class families had 1-2 children and that was it. The working class would have 3+ children. Now of course children are a luxury and a status item and so the situation has switched. It appears to be de rigeur for middle class families to have at least 3 children, to some extent, I imagine, so they can justify their purchase of a 4x4, but also so that they can keep demonstrating their wealth by buying designer clothes for the children and signing them up to language clubs, sports clubs, drama clubs, etc. which all cost a fortune and now lock you into long-term contracts like a mobile phone company (when the 6-year old in my house wanted to join a karate club it turned out you had to have standing order to pay the club and you had to give 3 months' notice to break it, a sharp contrast to the 'mat fees' or 'subs' we used to pay and the days when kids just lost interest in a club and never showed up again). In contrast people of the working class realise they cannot afford many children and it is they who often only have one child. The fact that family has become a hobby, I realised, was when 'The Guardian' an epitome of a middle class newspaper, introduced its 'Family' section alongside the sport and the travel sections on a Saturday.
The other thing that has come out of these thoughts on bank holidays is how 'dirty' or 'wrong' everything associated with Socialism and/or workers' movements is now perceived. My parents, old Socialists who believed in Harold Wilson's ill-fated 'white heat of technology' modern technocratic Socialism, have gone to Belgium for the May Day celebrations. Over there people still dress in red (dogs too apparently) and march around and celebrate being workers and the honesty of hard work; they have plays, singing, dancing a real party mood. Given what I had noted above about how guilty employers try to make working people feel maybe it needs revival in the UK. I mention this to the woman in my house and she said 'isn't Socialism something bad'. Even though at 35 years old she lived through a period when there were Labour governments, somehow now Socialism and even more simply workers' movements are just tarred with the brush of Communism and the Soviet bloc. This is why the campaigners for St. George's Day are going to win ultimately as in the UK May Day has been turned from a joyful day into something that now seems sordid. Of course even before workers' movements grew up in the mid-19th century, May Day had much older traditions celebrating fertility and the coming of the growing season. Such sentiments still appear in things like a Maypole (I do not know how accurate it is, but people tell me is it a phallic symbol) but of course any reference to Paganism was frowned upon even before things began to be comdemned for being 'Red'. To some extent this sentiment stems from the fact that though we have had a party calling itself 'Labour' in power since 1997, it in fact was the Blair Party with no attachment to the history of the Labour Party and beyond that of the labour movement. This is why Brown is finding it so hard now and why people have written him off long before he even needs to have an election and with an opposition lacking policy and clear direction. Gordon Brown is the leader of the Labour Party, but effectively that party and all the history it, and the bodies around it, stood for, died in the UK in 1994.
My advice on this May Day holiday, is put aside the DIY, have a break from work, but delight in the fact that you do work and you work hard. That is nothing to be ashamed of, it is something to be proud of. It is the leeches of society who suck more than they could ever use off you, who should be humiliated on news reports not the people who work hard for their families and for their countries. Both relax and celebrate.
There is a simple way in which you can tell that the British work so hard, and that is how they respond to bank holidays. Today, Monday 5th May, is the UK bank holiday for May Day and despite the poor weather, rainy but humid (certainly in my part of England) the roads are jammed with people either heading to the beach or to DIY stores. In a country where working hours are shorter and they have more holidays there is not this madness to go places. The roads in my district get packed with people pulling caravans so that they can sit in a damp field looking out of their window at a slightly different scene to what they could see at home. The television companies seem obliged to pack the schedules with old blockbusters in the assumption that anyone sat at home will be slumped in front of the television bloated on a roast dinner as if it was Christmas. Certainly no-one at a DIY (Do-It-Yourself, I know it is called 'bricolage' in French, I have no idea in other languages) store would argue the British are lazy. The workforce at such stores are incredibly busy and people are coming in to buy tons of supplies so that they can work in their own houses for free. British people behave on bank holidays literally 'like there's tomorrow' and that they either must see some windswept beach or paint their spare bedroom or watch a certain film again so that everything is right and proper when they come before God on Judgement Day. It is a pity that Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) who painted Biblical scenes as if they had taken place in his home village of Cookham in the 1950s, did not do one of the Judgement Day as a British bank holiday. So UK employers, stop whining. You have a very dilligent workforce who need to have more of a break than you give them. Do not try to make them feel guilty for the few days' break they get. You work a lot less hard than they do, no matter what you may say about long hours, the average British worker never gets mid-week lunchtime golf games.
Another couple of things came to my attention regarding bank holidays. Karl Marx (1818-83) argued that as capitalism developed further the middle classes would be wiped out and push down into the working classes. To some extent the opposite has happened and manual labour from the UK has been sent to China and instead the working class now wear suits, work in call centres and have middle class aspirations that the middle classes are now finding it difficult to live up to, primarily because house prices (and owning a house was always the stamp of being middle class) have kept rising whilst salaries have stagnated as so much of the inflation in the economy is hidden, though I must say that with fuel and food now rising so quickly it is becoming more apparent. What has happened is that the middle classes have adopted (skilled) working class hobbies. In the 1980s caravans were only pulled behind saloon cars of a man who had worked hard maybe as a foreman and saved for months perhaps years. Now they are dragged flapping from side to side behind the huge 4x4s of company executives (who forget that you are not supposed to drive at 70mph with a caravan, the limit is 50mph and that is why they wave around so violently). Similarly twenty, thirty years ago, it was the workers who would do up their own houses, the middle classes would employ a 'man' to do it. Now DIY has effectively become interior design that you do yourself and the products that are sold are not just the old wood and paint but a whole range of things to 'style' your house. Similarly once gardens and especially ones to grow vegetables were the preserve of the working class; the vegetables supplemented the food on the family dinner table. Now gardening is a middle class activity and vegetables are apparently the new flowers. Again the stores have responded to this and half the stuff in a garden store is not plants but sculpture for your garden; I even saw a water butt in the form of a Roman column selling at £199 (€250; US$390) this week. Then you see the TV gardener Carol Klein (a lovely woman, I do not want to disrespect her) walking through a vegetable garden eating stuff straight off the plant. Now in a household where the vegetables are needed for meals that would be seen as being greedy and unfair to the rest of the family.
The other working class 'hobby' now taken over by the middle class (oh, and I have entirely left aside football (soccer for US readers)) is having families. In my youth middle class families had 1-2 children and that was it. The working class would have 3+ children. Now of course children are a luxury and a status item and so the situation has switched. It appears to be de rigeur for middle class families to have at least 3 children, to some extent, I imagine, so they can justify their purchase of a 4x4, but also so that they can keep demonstrating their wealth by buying designer clothes for the children and signing them up to language clubs, sports clubs, drama clubs, etc. which all cost a fortune and now lock you into long-term contracts like a mobile phone company (when the 6-year old in my house wanted to join a karate club it turned out you had to have standing order to pay the club and you had to give 3 months' notice to break it, a sharp contrast to the 'mat fees' or 'subs' we used to pay and the days when kids just lost interest in a club and never showed up again). In contrast people of the working class realise they cannot afford many children and it is they who often only have one child. The fact that family has become a hobby, I realised, was when 'The Guardian' an epitome of a middle class newspaper, introduced its 'Family' section alongside the sport and the travel sections on a Saturday.
The other thing that has come out of these thoughts on bank holidays is how 'dirty' or 'wrong' everything associated with Socialism and/or workers' movements is now perceived. My parents, old Socialists who believed in Harold Wilson's ill-fated 'white heat of technology' modern technocratic Socialism, have gone to Belgium for the May Day celebrations. Over there people still dress in red (dogs too apparently) and march around and celebrate being workers and the honesty of hard work; they have plays, singing, dancing a real party mood. Given what I had noted above about how guilty employers try to make working people feel maybe it needs revival in the UK. I mention this to the woman in my house and she said 'isn't Socialism something bad'. Even though at 35 years old she lived through a period when there were Labour governments, somehow now Socialism and even more simply workers' movements are just tarred with the brush of Communism and the Soviet bloc. This is why the campaigners for St. George's Day are going to win ultimately as in the UK May Day has been turned from a joyful day into something that now seems sordid. Of course even before workers' movements grew up in the mid-19th century, May Day had much older traditions celebrating fertility and the coming of the growing season. Such sentiments still appear in things like a Maypole (I do not know how accurate it is, but people tell me is it a phallic symbol) but of course any reference to Paganism was frowned upon even before things began to be comdemned for being 'Red'. To some extent this sentiment stems from the fact that though we have had a party calling itself 'Labour' in power since 1997, it in fact was the Blair Party with no attachment to the history of the Labour Party and beyond that of the labour movement. This is why Brown is finding it so hard now and why people have written him off long before he even needs to have an election and with an opposition lacking policy and clear direction. Gordon Brown is the leader of the Labour Party, but effectively that party and all the history it, and the bodies around it, stood for, died in the UK in 1994.
My advice on this May Day holiday, is put aside the DIY, have a break from work, but delight in the fact that you do work and you work hard. That is nothing to be ashamed of, it is something to be proud of. It is the leeches of society who suck more than they could ever use off you, who should be humiliated on news reports not the people who work hard for their families and for their countries. Both relax and celebrate.
Sunday, 4 May 2008
The Crooked Road to UK Dictatorship
As you will know if you read this blog with any regularity, my key fear for the UK at the moment is that it is steadily becoming an authoritarian state in which our civil liberties are stripped from us, supposedly in order to defeat terrorism. However, despite the claims many of the new powers the government and local authorities have are simply to keep the ordinary UK population in line. I was interested to read that next Tuesday (6th May 2008) there is a programme showing on BBC4 in their 'True Stories' series called 'True Stories: Taking Liberties' and it looks at the reduction of civil liberties in the UK during Tony Blair's premiership. It is presented by a man called Chris Atkins. It is always heartening to learn that your analysis of developments is shared by others and obviously I recommend you watch it if you can.
One thing that irritated me in the preview of the programme in 'The Guardian' was that they feel that Atkins 'overstates' his case when relating the developments in the UK to those that led to Nazi Germany. Now, this is always something that annoys me. For some reason people seem to think that the Nazi state appeared fully formed when Hitler came to power on 30th January 1933 with death camps, the Waffen SS, the fully system in place. Of course that is nonsense. It always takes time to develop a dictatorship. In fact democracy had ended in Germany in 1930 when President Hindenburg began ruling through presidential decree. Elections continued but they had little bearing on who became Chancellor of Germany and Hitler was effectively invited to become Chancellor. So, an authoritarian system had been three years in the making when the Nazis came to power.
The Nazis moved fast with legislation especially after the Reichstag Fire at the end of February 1933. However, it was not until 1935 that the Nuremburg Laws were introduced making Jews no longer Germans. It was not until 1936 that the German police force was centralised and rearmament began in full. It was not until 1942 that death camps for the industrial killing of Jews, Roma, Soviets, homosexuals, et al were established. This was nine years after Hitler had come to power. This is not to say the Nazi regime was not horrific, it is to say that even with its rush to carry out its terrible acts it took time. It is essential that we remember the ultimate activities of the Nazis, but often this leads people to overlook each step which took the country closer and closer to the Holocaust. In 1970 Karl A. Schleunes wrote 'The Twisted Road to Auschwitz' which explained how erratic the individual Nazi steps were, even if they did have an overall goal of reaching the most extreme.
Now, what it is vital to note for people living in a democracy is to be able to recognise those early steps that allowed the more extreme ones of the 1940s. We need to be able to tell when laws are being introduced like those of 1930-35. These laws in themselves were unacceptable though there severity is now overshadowed with what came later. I am glad to say that I do not anticipate the UK ever carrying out a genocide, but what may happen is that we end up with a form of state like Germany 1930-2 or even slightly later on. Thus, it is wrong to say that Atkins is misguided when talking about the crumbling of British civil liberties to refer to Germany in the 1930s. Germany was an industrialised state in western Europe which had a democratic system, so similar to the UK. Every element of the destruction of civil liberties in Germany after 1930 is to be abhorred just as every reduction in UK civil liberties now needs to be noted and opposed.
One thing that irritated me in the preview of the programme in 'The Guardian' was that they feel that Atkins 'overstates' his case when relating the developments in the UK to those that led to Nazi Germany. Now, this is always something that annoys me. For some reason people seem to think that the Nazi state appeared fully formed when Hitler came to power on 30th January 1933 with death camps, the Waffen SS, the fully system in place. Of course that is nonsense. It always takes time to develop a dictatorship. In fact democracy had ended in Germany in 1930 when President Hindenburg began ruling through presidential decree. Elections continued but they had little bearing on who became Chancellor of Germany and Hitler was effectively invited to become Chancellor. So, an authoritarian system had been three years in the making when the Nazis came to power.
The Nazis moved fast with legislation especially after the Reichstag Fire at the end of February 1933. However, it was not until 1935 that the Nuremburg Laws were introduced making Jews no longer Germans. It was not until 1936 that the German police force was centralised and rearmament began in full. It was not until 1942 that death camps for the industrial killing of Jews, Roma, Soviets, homosexuals, et al were established. This was nine years after Hitler had come to power. This is not to say the Nazi regime was not horrific, it is to say that even with its rush to carry out its terrible acts it took time. It is essential that we remember the ultimate activities of the Nazis, but often this leads people to overlook each step which took the country closer and closer to the Holocaust. In 1970 Karl A. Schleunes wrote 'The Twisted Road to Auschwitz' which explained how erratic the individual Nazi steps were, even if they did have an overall goal of reaching the most extreme.
Now, what it is vital to note for people living in a democracy is to be able to recognise those early steps that allowed the more extreme ones of the 1940s. We need to be able to tell when laws are being introduced like those of 1930-35. These laws in themselves were unacceptable though there severity is now overshadowed with what came later. I am glad to say that I do not anticipate the UK ever carrying out a genocide, but what may happen is that we end up with a form of state like Germany 1930-2 or even slightly later on. Thus, it is wrong to say that Atkins is misguided when talking about the crumbling of British civil liberties to refer to Germany in the 1930s. Germany was an industrialised state in western Europe which had a democratic system, so similar to the UK. Every element of the destruction of civil liberties in Germany after 1930 is to be abhorred just as every reduction in UK civil liberties now needs to be noted and opposed.
The Time, The Place 2 - the Difficulty of Scheduled Postings
I usually welcome the new facilities that Blogger adds, but now I have encountered a difficulty with the ability to schedule postings. The time shown on my blog when I am writing postings seems to be 8 hours behind the time in the UK, so West coast of the USA. Before I publish a posting I generally go into Post Options and amend the time to UK time. I did that today with the posting about pushing Gordon Brown out, and then rather than the posting appearing immediately on the blog as usually happens it said it was 'scheduled'. At first I did not understand why it did this, then I realised it was because the time I labelled it with was 8 hours into the blog's future. To get it published I have had to amend the timing, though that was not a sound step with that particular posting as it mentioned information I could not have had yesterday, so I have had to bring it forward again now.
I hope that we are going to be able to disable the seheduling if we choose otherwise it is going to be like communicating with someone on Mars (or maybe even farther away, I cannot find the timings except for communicating with the Moon which has a delay of almost 3 seconds) with an 8-hour delay on what I write and then it appearing on the blog. All rather strange. The alternative is that we can set our blog clocks to our local time (useful if you are blogging as you travel around the world). Strangely the autosave notification works on UK time even if the posting clock is on Californian time.
P.P. I have found a way around it. When you first post you put on a time which has already passed in California. Then when the posting is on the blog, you go back and amend it to UK time and it stays still posted but still showing the correct time even though it is actually in the future for the blog clock.
I hope that we are going to be able to disable the seheduling if we choose otherwise it is going to be like communicating with someone on Mars (or maybe even farther away, I cannot find the timings except for communicating with the Moon which has a delay of almost 3 seconds) with an 8-hour delay on what I write and then it appearing on the blog. All rather strange. The alternative is that we can set our blog clocks to our local time (useful if you are blogging as you travel around the world). Strangely the autosave notification works on UK time even if the posting clock is on Californian time.
P.P. I have found a way around it. When you first post you put on a time which has already passed in California. Then when the posting is on the blog, you go back and amend it to UK time and it stays still posted but still showing the correct time even though it is actually in the future for the blog clock.
Saturday, 3 May 2008
Why they are Trying to Drive Brown Out
As readers of this blog will know, I am not a big fan of Gordon Brown, I think he is more honest and far less egotistical than Tony Blair was and whilst he still seems to be following New Labour's policy of moving to a semi-authoritarian state he is doing it with far less speed than his predecessor. However, it is clear that Brown is not acceptable to the super-rich and others in the so-called Establishment who actually run the UK. This seems to be the only reason for why there has been such massive fuss about the local elections. So, Labour lost seats and a handful of councils, but show me a mid-term party in government who does not. Local elections are never a good indication of national flows anyway, especially, as Thatcher demonstrated you can rule for years only attracting a minority of the general votes. Another issue is why replicate Labour on 26% and not Ken Livingstone on 47% which would mean a far closer election. The reason is, because those who want Brown removed are using any stick they can find to beat him with. 'The Guardian' is supposed to be a liberal paper which you would imagine would be sympathetic to the Brown government, but no it is talking about the 'dusk' of Labour on its front page even though the general election is not until 2010.
The super-rich could cope with Blair. For a start he did not head the Labour Party, he headed a personal party, which as I have noted before was tied to its head as tightly as the Peronists were to Peron and probably even more than the Gaullists were to De Gaulle. Blair could always control Blair by flattery. In addition, his desire to manipulate the media and to make the public feel somehow guilty when they disagreed with him, fitted with these influential people's desires. Blair would go to war when the USA commanded it and he totally toed the line over the threat of terrorism which is the first piece in threatening the populous to accept the authoritarian laws the super-rich seem so keen to have imposed in the UK.
It is clear that those with real influence dislike Brown because he is too cautious, too curious, too much his own man. They want the 90-day detention without charge in place, they want Brown involving himself in more wars they can profit from, they want him selling off Northern Rock cheap so they can buy it up, repossess houses and make more money. They do not want a prime minister who actually nationalises things and raises income tax even if it is on a sector of society they despise (loss of the 10p tax band upsets their servants, don't you know?). They tried it last year when they called Brown a coward for not having a general election and they are now going to hound him until he finally goes. The trouble for the UK is what is the alternative? The Conservatives should be snatching the initiative and drawing up vote winning policies. No, they are sitting back even smug than before. They have allowed a clown, Boris Johnson, a man who regularly parades how many people he has offended and how silly he is, to become London mayor. What are those coming to work on the 2012 London Olympics going to think of this buffoon. Even the Conservatives had better candidates than him. In fact I cannot believe he will even serve his full term of office, some major gaffe will force him to resign. Yet, the fact that he was the candidate indicates the contempt that the Conservatives have for the electorate.
The Conservative lead David Cameron is amenable, but like Johnson is another old boy from Eton, one of the public schools which admits such a small slice of British society. He is of a social category of the kind that we saw with Lord Douglas-Home and Sir Anthony Eden back in the 1950s and 1960s. His social class is so far removed from that of 93% of the UK population, but then again, he is like George Bush in the USA, the elite are their core constituency. I could even forgive Cameron all of that if he actually had some policies. Though I despise Thatcher you could never say she lacked a clear vision of what she wanted to do and the policies to achieve it. Cameron, in contrast, is content to assume that the premiership will be gifted to him in 2010 and he will just keep the country steady in order to benefit the wealthiest. He will adopt a reactive policy with the limited economic tools the Treasury seems willing to consider. What I envisage in the 2010s is very similar to the UK of the 1930s under the National Government, just encourage the public to keep their chin up while they are crushed beneath the pressure of the global economy. Unlike 1939 there will be no move in 2019 when China goes to war, because the uber-wealthy are more than happy to let the Chinese government to kill and torture millions of people if they choose, just so long as China keeps exporting the cheap goods and provides the cheap labour the wealthy like to use.
As happened in the 1980s when the media brought Thatcher in and kept her in despite the bulk of the population abhoring her and voting against her, Brown will be removed by the campaign against him which started in full force this week. He will probably be the last politician to be in charge of the UK. After him it will be figureheads of the rich just as Bush is in the USA, so Cameron will be here, a man without any political impact or any sense of direction beyond what his wealthy masters command. What we are seeing the dusk of is not so much Brown's premiership, but of the last dose of democracy the UK will have.
The super-rich could cope with Blair. For a start he did not head the Labour Party, he headed a personal party, which as I have noted before was tied to its head as tightly as the Peronists were to Peron and probably even more than the Gaullists were to De Gaulle. Blair could always control Blair by flattery. In addition, his desire to manipulate the media and to make the public feel somehow guilty when they disagreed with him, fitted with these influential people's desires. Blair would go to war when the USA commanded it and he totally toed the line over the threat of terrorism which is the first piece in threatening the populous to accept the authoritarian laws the super-rich seem so keen to have imposed in the UK.
It is clear that those with real influence dislike Brown because he is too cautious, too curious, too much his own man. They want the 90-day detention without charge in place, they want Brown involving himself in more wars they can profit from, they want him selling off Northern Rock cheap so they can buy it up, repossess houses and make more money. They do not want a prime minister who actually nationalises things and raises income tax even if it is on a sector of society they despise (loss of the 10p tax band upsets their servants, don't you know?). They tried it last year when they called Brown a coward for not having a general election and they are now going to hound him until he finally goes. The trouble for the UK is what is the alternative? The Conservatives should be snatching the initiative and drawing up vote winning policies. No, they are sitting back even smug than before. They have allowed a clown, Boris Johnson, a man who regularly parades how many people he has offended and how silly he is, to become London mayor. What are those coming to work on the 2012 London Olympics going to think of this buffoon. Even the Conservatives had better candidates than him. In fact I cannot believe he will even serve his full term of office, some major gaffe will force him to resign. Yet, the fact that he was the candidate indicates the contempt that the Conservatives have for the electorate.
The Conservative lead David Cameron is amenable, but like Johnson is another old boy from Eton, one of the public schools which admits such a small slice of British society. He is of a social category of the kind that we saw with Lord Douglas-Home and Sir Anthony Eden back in the 1950s and 1960s. His social class is so far removed from that of 93% of the UK population, but then again, he is like George Bush in the USA, the elite are their core constituency. I could even forgive Cameron all of that if he actually had some policies. Though I despise Thatcher you could never say she lacked a clear vision of what she wanted to do and the policies to achieve it. Cameron, in contrast, is content to assume that the premiership will be gifted to him in 2010 and he will just keep the country steady in order to benefit the wealthiest. He will adopt a reactive policy with the limited economic tools the Treasury seems willing to consider. What I envisage in the 2010s is very similar to the UK of the 1930s under the National Government, just encourage the public to keep their chin up while they are crushed beneath the pressure of the global economy. Unlike 1939 there will be no move in 2019 when China goes to war, because the uber-wealthy are more than happy to let the Chinese government to kill and torture millions of people if they choose, just so long as China keeps exporting the cheap goods and provides the cheap labour the wealthy like to use.
As happened in the 1980s when the media brought Thatcher in and kept her in despite the bulk of the population abhoring her and voting against her, Brown will be removed by the campaign against him which started in full force this week. He will probably be the last politician to be in charge of the UK. After him it will be figureheads of the rich just as Bush is in the USA, so Cameron will be here, a man without any political impact or any sense of direction beyond what his wealthy masters command. What we are seeing the dusk of is not so much Brown's premiership, but of the last dose of democracy the UK will have.
Friday, 2 May 2008
People Wrong to Think Labour Will Lose the Next General Election
I was quite astounded at the weekend to read that Labour MPs are going around assuming that their party is going to lose the next election which has to be held by 2010. Labour has been in power since 1997 and it seems typical in Britain that we tire of the same politicians after a decade. This is why Tony Blair left office after that time, that and the fact he was exhausted by the job. Owing to the fact that in the 1970s Labour and the Conservatives came in and out of power almost in turn, there is some kind of assumption that long periods of rule by one party are not acceptable in the UK. However, in fact, it was the 1970s that were the anomaly. The National Government was in power 1931-45 (14 years), the Conservatives 1951-64 (13 years), 1979-97 (18 years) and Labour 1964-70 (6 years) and 1997-2008 (11 years, so far). Of course within those governments there have been elections and changes of leader and ministers, but it has been the same party in power. Why should not Labour have at least another 7 years following Blair's period, and Brown still be in power in, say, 2014 in the same way that John Major was Conservative Prime Minister 1991-1997 after the years of Conservative Margaret Thatcher (1979-1991)?
The government is facing many challenges, primarily economic, but ones which are predominantly out of its control and stem for the global jostling for resources that I have regularly noted on this blog and which seem to resemble a real-life game of 'Risk'. In fact Brown's economic stringency of the past decade has probably protected the UK from experiencing even worse problem. The UK is always going to be vulnerable because of its obsession with buying houses which are huge items of capital expenditure for most families that are hard to sell on and have so many elements feeding into them that people cannot modify their expenditure on them the way they can even with consumer items like food. In addition, the privatisation of the UK utility companies means that the government is powerless to rein in the huge profits they make at the expense of ordinary consumer. The fact that BP and Shell the UK and part-UK owned oil companies announced quarterly (i.e. just in 3 months) profits of £7 billion (€8.82 billion; US13.7 billion) suggests that actually big business is not suffering at all from the 'credit crunch'.
A Conservative government would be as impotent in the face of global demand and multinational companies as a Labour one is. In fact given their aversion to regulation and control they would probably handle it worse. The only thing that is going to stop the average person suffering even worse than they are now with consumer-goods inflation, is through greater regulation and intervention. Petrol has risen from £0.87 (€1.09; US$ 1.71) per litre last year to £1.10 per litre now and it is predicted to reach £1.50 per litre by mid-2009 almost a doubling in 20 months; diesel is even higher so affecting the freight industry so raising the price of food and consumer items. Clearly given the vast profits of the oil companies such price rises are not needed to compensate for their increased costs. With the Conservatives in power, the bank Northern Rock would still be floating around with no-one willing to take charge of it and with its risky financial products and need to secure more business it would be continuing to unsettle the jittery bank sector. Labour currently intervenes too late. The UK economy would be better if Northern Rock had been nationalised in 2006 not 2008. Fear of being labelled 'Socialist' is hindering the current government from acting in good time. The Conservatives, in contrast, would not act at all and simply blame workers for trying for higher salaries and would probably engineer a house price collapse as they did in 1990-3, knowing that British people do not riot or revolt they simply blame foreigners for their problems and the Conservatives can tolerate a few race riots.
Why would anyone then vote for the Conservatives? Okay, so most people dislike greater state control, but what different can the Conservatives offer compared to Labour anyway? The policies of Labour and the Conservatives are very close, centred around the Thatcher Consensus though Labour is only achieving things by stepping away from that consensus, but they are not straying far. The Conservatives do not even have that kind of distinctive economic alternative to offer. David Cameron is 41; Gordon Brown is 57 so an age difference seems to be the key thing between them. Neither is particularly charismatic. Cameron cannot shake off the silly public schoolboy image and Brown seems too dour for the British public.
I can accept the point that people may simply select the Conservatives because they have not been in office for a while and Cameron is a bit younger, but is there nothing else to motivate them to switch? I suppose given the level of voter apathy in the UK it will only come down to the votes of a few individuals. Then, again, I would suggest to anyone who is confident that Labour will fall at the next election to look back to 1992 when everyone was assured that Labour would win when put up against boring John Major and yet he was victorious and remained in power until 1992. Being in office so long, Labour has become the 'conservative' party if not actually the Conservative Party and I feel that the lethargy will bring a victory for Labour as it did for the Conservatives. By 2014 hopefully things will be totally different. For now, though, whether you are a Labour MP or just an ordinary member of the public I would not anticipate Labour leaving office at the next election at all, no matter if they lose council seats today.
P.P. Maybe I am deluding myself, with Labour down to 14 councils compared to 45 for the Conservatives and Labour only getting 26% of the vote maybe there will be a landslide for the Conservatives. Pundits always scale up local election results to give pictures of potential UK wide election which is always more distorted than usual assumptions. They suggest Labour would go down to 176 seats and the Conservatives would have a 138-seat majority. As I have commented before things are always distorted by the UK's first-past-the-post system and even if you get just one less vote than the candidate who beats you, you get nothing even though almost as many people have voted for you. I think why I find it incredible that Cameron could become prime minister is due to something Simon Hughes, President (not leader) of the Liberal Democrat party said about the Conservatives being 'policy light'. Labour as the incumbent government may be following 'steady as it goes', but the Conservatives have come through with no policies that are at all memorable. They are not even putting up a strong opposition to Labour on anything much.
The points of contest are not an issue at present such as the UK's role in the European Union. With the two parties so close on the various wars we are involved in, tax, education and the National Health Service, it seems unlikely we would get anything different if the Conservatives win next time. So, as I commented yesterday, it almost comes down to which person you prefer. An election on this basis would be a real step back for British politics. Even though I despise Tony Blair I could never argue that he did not come forward with distinctive policies in 1997 (whether he carried any of them out is another issue). What is Cameron offering but a smile?
P.P. 16/08/2010: I suppose some people could come back to me now and say 'ha, ha, you got it wrong' and yet I would argue that my judgement was not badly out given how incomplete the Conservative victory was and that the fact that we could have had a Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition government instead. The aspect in which I made my biggest mistake was in assuming that because Cameron was not outlining policies it indicated that he was close to Labour in his thinking on these issues. What I realise now is that he had an alarmingly virulent New Right agenda in mind which was going to smash the public sector and hamstring the British economy for years to come for the benefit of the already wealthy. I think in my worst nightmares I never foresaw the immense damage that the Conservatives would inflict on the UK. Using the cost of bailing out the banks as their 'September 11th' excuse (i.e. the way that President Bush used the terrorist attacks on the New York World Trade Centre and The Pentagon to justify harsh domestic policy), they have imposed such a swingeing attack on every facet on life in the UK. Their incredible arrogance is shown by the ending of support for speed cameras which were in fact self-funding and reduced road deaths, not for any financial reason, but simply because 'their people' love to drive recklessly with impunity.
The government is facing many challenges, primarily economic, but ones which are predominantly out of its control and stem for the global jostling for resources that I have regularly noted on this blog and which seem to resemble a real-life game of 'Risk'. In fact Brown's economic stringency of the past decade has probably protected the UK from experiencing even worse problem. The UK is always going to be vulnerable because of its obsession with buying houses which are huge items of capital expenditure for most families that are hard to sell on and have so many elements feeding into them that people cannot modify their expenditure on them the way they can even with consumer items like food. In addition, the privatisation of the UK utility companies means that the government is powerless to rein in the huge profits they make at the expense of ordinary consumer. The fact that BP and Shell the UK and part-UK owned oil companies announced quarterly (i.e. just in 3 months) profits of £7 billion (€8.82 billion; US13.7 billion) suggests that actually big business is not suffering at all from the 'credit crunch'.
A Conservative government would be as impotent in the face of global demand and multinational companies as a Labour one is. In fact given their aversion to regulation and control they would probably handle it worse. The only thing that is going to stop the average person suffering even worse than they are now with consumer-goods inflation, is through greater regulation and intervention. Petrol has risen from £0.87 (€1.09; US$ 1.71) per litre last year to £1.10 per litre now and it is predicted to reach £1.50 per litre by mid-2009 almost a doubling in 20 months; diesel is even higher so affecting the freight industry so raising the price of food and consumer items. Clearly given the vast profits of the oil companies such price rises are not needed to compensate for their increased costs. With the Conservatives in power, the bank Northern Rock would still be floating around with no-one willing to take charge of it and with its risky financial products and need to secure more business it would be continuing to unsettle the jittery bank sector. Labour currently intervenes too late. The UK economy would be better if Northern Rock had been nationalised in 2006 not 2008. Fear of being labelled 'Socialist' is hindering the current government from acting in good time. The Conservatives, in contrast, would not act at all and simply blame workers for trying for higher salaries and would probably engineer a house price collapse as they did in 1990-3, knowing that British people do not riot or revolt they simply blame foreigners for their problems and the Conservatives can tolerate a few race riots.
Why would anyone then vote for the Conservatives? Okay, so most people dislike greater state control, but what different can the Conservatives offer compared to Labour anyway? The policies of Labour and the Conservatives are very close, centred around the Thatcher Consensus though Labour is only achieving things by stepping away from that consensus, but they are not straying far. The Conservatives do not even have that kind of distinctive economic alternative to offer. David Cameron is 41; Gordon Brown is 57 so an age difference seems to be the key thing between them. Neither is particularly charismatic. Cameron cannot shake off the silly public schoolboy image and Brown seems too dour for the British public.
I can accept the point that people may simply select the Conservatives because they have not been in office for a while and Cameron is a bit younger, but is there nothing else to motivate them to switch? I suppose given the level of voter apathy in the UK it will only come down to the votes of a few individuals. Then, again, I would suggest to anyone who is confident that Labour will fall at the next election to look back to 1992 when everyone was assured that Labour would win when put up against boring John Major and yet he was victorious and remained in power until 1992. Being in office so long, Labour has become the 'conservative' party if not actually the Conservative Party and I feel that the lethargy will bring a victory for Labour as it did for the Conservatives. By 2014 hopefully things will be totally different. For now, though, whether you are a Labour MP or just an ordinary member of the public I would not anticipate Labour leaving office at the next election at all, no matter if they lose council seats today.
P.P. Maybe I am deluding myself, with Labour down to 14 councils compared to 45 for the Conservatives and Labour only getting 26% of the vote maybe there will be a landslide for the Conservatives. Pundits always scale up local election results to give pictures of potential UK wide election which is always more distorted than usual assumptions. They suggest Labour would go down to 176 seats and the Conservatives would have a 138-seat majority. As I have commented before things are always distorted by the UK's first-past-the-post system and even if you get just one less vote than the candidate who beats you, you get nothing even though almost as many people have voted for you. I think why I find it incredible that Cameron could become prime minister is due to something Simon Hughes, President (not leader) of the Liberal Democrat party said about the Conservatives being 'policy light'. Labour as the incumbent government may be following 'steady as it goes', but the Conservatives have come through with no policies that are at all memorable. They are not even putting up a strong opposition to Labour on anything much.
The points of contest are not an issue at present such as the UK's role in the European Union. With the two parties so close on the various wars we are involved in, tax, education and the National Health Service, it seems unlikely we would get anything different if the Conservatives win next time. So, as I commented yesterday, it almost comes down to which person you prefer. An election on this basis would be a real step back for British politics. Even though I despise Tony Blair I could never argue that he did not come forward with distinctive policies in 1997 (whether he carried any of them out is another issue). What is Cameron offering but a smile?
P.P. 16/08/2010: I suppose some people could come back to me now and say 'ha, ha, you got it wrong' and yet I would argue that my judgement was not badly out given how incomplete the Conservative victory was and that the fact that we could have had a Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition government instead. The aspect in which I made my biggest mistake was in assuming that because Cameron was not outlining policies it indicated that he was close to Labour in his thinking on these issues. What I realise now is that he had an alarmingly virulent New Right agenda in mind which was going to smash the public sector and hamstring the British economy for years to come for the benefit of the already wealthy. I think in my worst nightmares I never foresaw the immense damage that the Conservatives would inflict on the UK. Using the cost of bailing out the banks as their 'September 11th' excuse (i.e. the way that President Bush used the terrorist attacks on the New York World Trade Centre and The Pentagon to justify harsh domestic policy), they have imposed such a swingeing attack on every facet on life in the UK. Their incredible arrogance is shown by the ending of support for speed cameras which were in fact self-funding and reduced road deaths, not for any financial reason, but simply because 'their people' love to drive recklessly with impunity.
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