Police Commissioners

It has been announced yesterday by the Police Minister, Nick Herbert, that the UK is to get American style Police Commissioners to whom Chief Constables will be responsible. Herbert has also hinted that the first action of a newly elected Police Commissioner will almost certainly be to appoint his / her own political advisor. Hiring a political adviser for every new Police and Crime Commissioner for all 43 forces in England and Wales on around £40,000 a year could be cost up to £2million. This would be added to the cost of £50million that the Home Office has set aside for the process of electing these new Police chiefs. However, given the redundancy costs of the entire staff at the current Police Authorities that figure could well rise to nearer £150million. This sounds inordinately expensive at a time when we are being told that public expenditure is to be cut back to reduce the budgetary deficit.

The ethos behind the concept of the new Police Commissioners is that they will bring transparency, local accountability and a democratic element to policing. This, as we all know is utter baloney. We currently have a sophisticated and transparent system of full local accountability in the form of the Police Authorities. Typically, a Police Authority is made up of seventeen members - nine elected members (who are drawn from the local Authority or authorities for the force area, and should be reflective of the political makeup of those authorities). The remaining eight members are called independent members, and are appointed from the local community for fixed terms of four years by the Police Authority itself. At least one of the Police Authority's independent members must be a magistrate. There is no difference in power or responsibility between the different types of member - there are examples of elected, independent and magistrate members chairing Police Authorities throughout England and Wales. This gives the Police Authority inbuilt checks and balances against political cronyism.

The new Police Commissioners will replace these authorities and lead to a number of inherent risks of corruption, populist political machination, and downright, straightforward dishonesty. Chief Constables will owe their jobs and livelihoods to a single elected Commissioner. This may, (almost probably will), impact on their decision-making capacity, bringing political expediency into policing. This is incompatible with a society founded on the rule of law. Police Commissioners themselves will, in seeking election or re-election each four years, be tempted to put forward a populist platform that may not necessarily be conducive to efficient and effective policing. At its very worst it could lead to corruption of the Police Commissioners by elements of organised crime. We must not pretend that organised crime will not be able and willing to effect the election or re-election of specific candidates for Police Commissioner. It has happened in the USA; it could happen here.

The Coalition Government is bringing these proposals forward, knowing that they are expensive, yet ‘spinning’ them as being ‘progressive’. Their real purpose, however, is crystal clear. It articulates closely with increased powers to head teachers, ‘free’ schools, freeing up the universities to set their own fees etc etc. It is one more aspect of the ‘New Thatcher’ project of the coalition government to take power away from communities and invest it in individuals, as they wholeheartedly beaver away at destroying the infrastructure of the public sector.  

Spoken English

A small article has appeared today on the BBC News and the BBC website. This article refers to ongoing changes in the way we pronounce certain words.

The British Library, as part of its ‘Evolving English’ exhibition has recently begun to record the ways in which Britons pronounce a number of common words. To do this they are asking as many people as possible to read aloud the opening paragraph of the Mr Men book, Mr Tickle. The socio-linguist at the British Library, Jonnie Robinson picked the passage because it's well known, easy to read and will probably be read with as "normal a voice as possible". He does not want people to put on a "posh" speaking voice. The purpose of the project is not to record the numbers of people pronouncing words ‘correctly’ or ‘incorrectly’, but to record variations in pronunciation.

Thus far, a number of basic variations have been found, and the BBC report highlighted seven words in common usage with at least two distinct variations in pronunciation. These words are says, ate, mischievous, garage, schedule and aitch. The traditional pronunciation of ‘says’ as sez (i.e. to rhyme with fez) is often now pronounced phonetically as it is spelled (i.e to rhyme with ways). Many people now pronounce ‘ate’ as it is spelled, as opposed to the traditional pronunciation ETT. Mischievous is increasingly acquiring an extra syllable and being pronounced miss-CHEEVY-us rather than the traditional MISS-chiv-us, although surprisingly the traditional northern variant miss-CHEEV-us was not mentioned in the report. The report went on to state that a significant number of people appear to stress the first syllable of ‘harass’ rather than the more traditional stressing of the second syllable, that ‘garage’ is increasingly being pronounced as ‘garridge’ and that the ‘ch’ in ‘schedule’ is increasingly being pronounced as a ‘k’. Further, the report also pointed out that the word ‘aitch’ that represents the letter ‘h’ is increasingly being pronounced ‘haitch’.

These are just the headline bits and pieces that the BBC decided to concentrate on, culminating in a ludicrous and unscientific ‘vox pop’.  Over the work as a whole the British Library has begun to map out variations in pronunciation that are determined to a great extent by age, with people under 35 being more likely than older people to use the ‘new’ pronunciations.

The reasons for many of the changes in pronunciation are not necessarily clear, although early analysis has come up with some putative suggestions. The ‘aitch’ issue, which seems to lead to the most controversy (another word with at least two basic pronunciation variants) may relate to an over-compensation by young people following repeated instructions to schoolchildren over the years not to drop their ‘aitches’. This would certainly tie in with other changes in pronunciation regarding the use if the letter ‘h’ over the past century or so. We routinely now pronounce the originally silent ‘h’ in words derived from French, such as hospital, hotel and herb (although these 'h's are generally 'dropped' by many working-class speakers) . In the nineteenth century these words were generally pronounced as ospital, otel, and erb. [The French equivalents of two of these words are hôpital and hôtel, the circumflex accent demonstrating that once they included an ‘s’ after the ‘o’. This indicates that the original French words were hospital and hostel. One notes that the ‘dropping of the ‘h’ at the beginning of a word actually predates (in Norman French) pronouncing the ‘h’] One also note that there may be an element of class fear in the over use of the pronounced ‘h’ in the UK that means that as well as pronouncing the ‘h’ when it is present many people feel the need to add it to the beginning of the word that represents the letter almost to stress that they pronounce their aitches. In a country where class is less determined by speech, such as the USA, the ‘h’ tends to remain silent in hotel and herb (though not in hospital) and the letter ‘h’ is almost universally pronounced ‘aitch’.

Early analysis also suggests that the replacement of the ‘ch’ with a ‘k’ in the pronunciation of ‘schedule’ is probably due in large part to the influence of American films on British speakers, as that is the general American pronunciation. No suggestions have yet been made as to why ‘garage’ has begun to transmute into ‘garridge’, although it must be noted that ‘garridge’ has been a northern working-class pronunciation for over fifty years, and is entirely in line with the pronunciation of another borrowed French word ‘village’, which is almost universally in English pronounced as ‘ villidge’.

The overall British Library study into the changes in pronunciation will almost certainly prove to be fascinating. Sadly, the BBC television report treated the whole thing as a humorous story.  It is anything but. Changes in pronunciation of common words, just as changes in regional and local dialects and accents tell us something about cultural shifts within our own country. During the first World War, many English prisoners of war in Germany were interviewed and recorded on phonograph records. As part of their interviews they gave their place of birth and place of domicile. Their accents were in general much more ‘rural’ than those of their counterparts today, suggesting an urbanisation of the language in general. They also used as ‘normal’ speech dialect terms that have since been completely lost or remain only in small numbers amongst older speakers. This suggests that local and regional dialects are becoming more homogenised, possibly reflecting an increased level of geographical mobility (at least within the UK) and the growth of mass media that tend to narrow the range of spoken voices as one needs to be understood by persons further away than one’s own next-door neighbour.

Further, at all times in history, new words have developed or at least new meanings for existing words, and one of the key linguistic stories of the 20^th Century has been the development and passing of successive youth argots, and the speech patterns of specific social groups. Two words illustrate this concept of changing meaning very well. They are ‘gay’ and ‘wicked’. In the 1930s ‘gay’ retained its traditional meaning of light-hearted or cheerful. Through the 1940s and 1950s it fell out of favour as a word at all and almost became archaic. Its resurrection took place during the 1960s and 1970s as a slang word for ‘homosexual, becoming by the 1990s a standard accepted word both as a noun and an adjective for homosexual. This standard meaning remains, but, perhaps due to a cultural element of homophobia in the UK, it has recently acquired a further slang meaning, roughly akin to ‘bad’. A strong word for bad was, and to some extent still is, ‘wicked’. However, for twenty years it has also had exactly the opposite meaning. Coming from pop culture ‘wicked’ as ‘very good’ has become more or less mainstream, at least for most people under the age of sixty. There are other examples, such as the American use of the word ‘good’ as a synonym for ‘well’, as in “I am good, thank you”, and the growth of a number of abbreviations, shorthand words, and smileys in written conversational English.

Many pedants seem to get very hot under the collar about the changes in our language, and to some extent I can sympathise. To lose our regional and local dialects is perhaps a little sad, but, for a small island nation we have a rich variation in accent, to the point that it is still possible to identify the place of birth of a working-class person by their accent to within about seven miles. Clearly as geographical mobility increases this becomes less accurate, although it needs to be born in mind that almost 80 per cent of the British population still die within five miles of their place of birth.   

There may even be some concern at the transmutation of the meanings of words or the loss of some words and replacement by others, yet this must be seen in context. Of all the major European languages English has far and away the largest vocabulary (ignoring the portmanteau words of Dutch and German) so it is not going to collapse on itself any time soon.

Going back to the original point, the BBC report into pronunciation, much as I personally get a bit fed up with the addition of the superfluous ‘aitch’, it needs to be born in mind that the very robustness that makes English a brilliant world-wide Lingua Franca is its capacity to continually change. There is no equivalent in the UK to l'Académie Française, seeking continually to maintain the purity of the language. We will beg, borrow or steal anyone’s words if they fit the bill or fit into our Weltanschauung. And if we feel the need to change the way we pronounce words then we will do that as well. In the end it is the tool we use for communicating and we will do it as we see fit. My only concern is that specific pronunciations may act to diminish our capacity to communicate if they are not understood by the speaker’s audience, and, lets be fair, to pronounce aitch as haitch does make someone sound just a bit silly.

Finally, I was very disappointed in the BBC for not considering the televised piece on pronunciation as anything other than trivial. We really need an in-depth, analytical television programme, of the sort that only the BBC could possibly do, perhaps in association with the Open University, looking at English as it is spoken and written in the UK.

Why 1931?

I have commented a number of times on the current cuts being put in place by the coalition government as ‘taking us back to 1931’, with the implication that the economy could contract so much that we would go beyond recession into a full-blown long-term depression. Let me take a little time to explain what I mean by such a remark, and offer a warning to the coalition government and its European partners on the dangers of fetishising sovereign debt and systemic deficits. The actions of the UK and other governments in the early 1930s led to a depression that was only ended by the outbreak of global conflict.

One of the first comparisons we can draw between economic interventions taken by the UK government in 1931 and 2010 is that each can be seen as reacting to global economic crises in the preceding two or three years. The second comparison is that in both 1931 and in 2010 the economic austerity measures have been taken by coalition governments purporting to act in the national interest with a clear implication that it is the only possible strategy. The third comparison is the centrality of the role of the United States of America in the creation of the initial economic crisis whilst ironically the United States appears more open to alternative remedies than do the UK and the countries of Western Europe [Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Obama administration’s attempts to maintain public spending].

As well as a number of comparisons between 1931 and 2010 there are significant differences. The global financial world of 1929 to1931 was both more dependent on the American economy than that of 2007 to 2010, and complicated, at least from a European perspective by the consequences of the First World War. The economies of France, the UK, Germany, and to a lesser extent, the USA, were distorted by the impact of heavy German reparations to the allies in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles, and the huge amount of debt built up by the European countries simply through paying for the war. The destabilising effect of this distorted economy had varying impacts in different countries. One of the major impacts on the UK was a year on year decline in economic output in the years immediately following the First World War, amounting to a decline of almost 25% by as early as 1921. The cost of the war to the UK both in terms of collateral losses and the divestment of foreign investments was catastrophic; leading to a 20% loss in foreign investments by 1918. The upshot was an increasing dependence throughout the 1920s on exports, but traditional markets for coal, steel and textiles had been lost. Attempts to shore up the economy by production in new technologies such as electrical goods and motor vehicles for the domestic market were successful to a point but foreign imports in these goods grew throughout the 1920s. British agriculture was also in terminal decline with around 80% of food being imported by 1930.

A slow economic recovery had begun in 1921, but the restoration of the £ sterling to the Gold Standard in 1925 brought this to a shuddering halt as the price of what remained of British exports rocketed due to the fixed Gold Standard Exchange Rate of £1 sterling : $4.86 US. To offset the high exchange rate the exporters cut workers wages precipitating the General Strike of 1926, and an ongoing unemployment rate of around 1million concentrated primarily in the industrial areas of Scotland and the North of England throughout the 1920s. Then came October 1929 and the Wall Street Crash; a real ‘game-changer’. The Wall Street Crash was provoked by the aggressive overselling of listed stocks on credit to a far wider range of people than could legitimately afford them. When the credit became due it was unaffordable and people attempted to sell their stocks; but of course there were no buyers. The ensuing American economic collapse shook the world: World trade contracted, prices fell and governments faced financial crisis as the supply of American credit dried up. Many countries adopted an emergency response to the crisis by erecting trade barriers and tariffs, which worsened the crisis by further hindering global trade. In the UK the effects on the industrial heartlands were devastating. Demand for British products collapsed, unemployment rose to 2/5 million by 1930, government Tax Revenues fell and benefits costs rose. In some parts of Scotland and North East England as many as 30% of men of working age became unemployed.

Since May 1929 a Labour Government had been in place, wedded like all parties to the pre-Keynsian notion of balanced budgets come what may.  All party consensus in the July 1931 May Report into the Public Finances recommended public sector wage cuts and large cuts to benefits and other public spending to avoid a deficit. This was accepted by Philip Snowden, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but threatened to split the Labour Party. [The only ministerial opposition, however, came from Oswald Mosley who proposed the nationalisation of the banks and increased pensions to boost spending. After being turned down Mosley resigned from the Government and the Labour Party and went on eventually to found the British Union of Fascists.] The split in the Labour ranks and the resulting deadlock led to the resignation of the government and the forming of the National Government un Ramsey MacDonald; comprising some senior Labour members but primarily a Conservative government with a Labour leader. [MacDonald and his coterie were expelled from Labour for this action].

In an effort to balance the budget and restore confidence in the pound, on the 10 September 1931 the national government issued an emergency budget, which immediately instituted a round of draconian cuts in public spending and wages. Public sector wages and unemployment pay were cut by 10%, and income tax was raised from 22.5% to 25%. The pay cuts did not go down well however and resulted in a Mutiny in the Royal Navy.

These measures were deflationary and merely reduced purchasing power in the economy, worsening the situation, and by the end of 1931 unemployment had reached nearly 3 million. The measures were also unsuccessful at defending the gold standard, which the National Government had ostensibly been created to defend.

The effects were felt worst in Scotland, Wales and Northern England. The north was the home to most of Britain's traditional heavy industries such as coal mining in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, shipbuilding on Tyneside, steel in Sheffield and textiles in Lancashire which were heavily export orientated. The north bore the brunt of the depression, and the '30s were the most difficult time in living memory for people in these areas. Millions of unemployed and their families were left destitute, and queuing at soup kitchens became a way of life. A government report in the mid-1930s estimated that around 25% of the UK's population existed on a subsistence diet, often with signs of child malnutrition such as scurvy, rickets and tuberculosis.

From 1936 onwards, the National Government followed a policy of mass rearmament in the face of the rise of Nazi Germany. This provided an economic stimulus that helped end the depression. By 1937 unemployment had fallen to 1.5 million, from where it fell even further. The mobilisation of manpower following the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 reduced unemployment considerably.

Clearly only so many parallels can be drawn from that time to this. For the toxic stock dealings leading to the Wall Street Crash in 1929 substitute the toxic sub-prime mortgage dealings of 2007 and 2008. For the collapse of credit between 1929 and 1931 substitute the credit crunch of 2008 to 2009. For the balanced budget fetishism of 1931 substitute the obsession with deficit reduction in 2010. For tuberculosis and malnutrition and the Second World War substitute …………????

This week in politics

It has been a strange old week in politics.

Those of us in the Labour Party are eagerly awaiting the result of the leadership ballot and wondering if our agonising over which of the earnestly fraternal candidates to support has had the impact we desired.  The entire contest was variously billed as ‘historic’, ‘vital’, and ‘an opportunity for renewal’, at which point the candidates differentiated themselves by placing different emphases on their degree of support for the New Labour project, with little substantive debate on any meaningful restructuring of the party. Lip service was paid to democratic processes yet none of the candidates felt able to even hint that the complete emasculation of Party Conference that paved the way for the metropolitan dominance of the Party needed to be reversed. In a broader political sense the candidates line up from all perspectives within the party from just right of centre to just a teensy weensy but left of centre.

First, there is the bookies, arms dealers and media moguls favourite, David Miliband, whom I had the misfortune to hear speak at an event last month. A more anodyne and meaningless political performance I have yet to witness. His speech was notable for lasting around thirty minutes and in that time the word ‘socialism’ was never mentioned, neither was the phrase ‘social democracy’. In stark contrast the nebulous word ‘progressive’ seemed to pop up in every second sentence, as did the phrase ‘responsible opposition’; not exactly rousing and banally prosaic. This is not to single out the older Miliband, rather it is to recount my experience of the only candidate I heard without the mediation of radio or television.

The second favourite is his younger brother, Ed. Now Ed wrote the Labour election manifesto so one would assume he took some pride in it. He seems, however, to have taken more pride in distancing himself from its contents the longer the campaign has gone on. He has, however made lots of new friends in the Trades Unions, and one wonders if any deals have been struck to secure some key votes. If they have it will interesting to see if Ed sticks to his side of the bargain should he be successful. He also seems to delight in not being an MP when we went to war with Iraq, so it isn’t his fault. Though differing in their emphases it does seem that filial affection outweighs sibling rivalry with the Miliband brothers; they are essentially Blairites with Ed leaning a tiny bit more towards a slightly more traditional Labour position.

Next we have the pugnacious yet disarmingly domestic Ed Balls. Ed aligns himself more closely with the Brown government than any of the other candidates and has made a much greater point of re-stating Labour’s achievements in office, associating himself extremely closely with Labour’s flagship achievement; Sure Start. In many ways he has appeared the most honest of the candidates and possibly the best equipped to creatively oppose the government. He is, nonetheless, like the Miliband brothers trapped in the past and is not critical enough of New Labour.

Then comes Andy Burnham. He is the most earnest of the lot, yet he has run a lacklustre campaign with no real coherent theme other than constant reference to his localness to his constituency and the need to ‘get back to core values’ without ever spelling out exactly what they are and how we should get back to them. He also, in agreement with the other male candidates has bought ‘hook, line and sinker’ into the concept of the need for the cuts, demonstrating the one really worrying aspect of the whole leadership election; the candidates lack of understanding of macro-economics.

Finally we have Diane Abbot, who is distinguished from the other candidates in several areas; notably in that she is a woman, she is black, and she was a constant opponent of the War in Iraq from the very beginning. Her campaign held the promise of a genuine voice from the Left that in the end failed to materialise. She has consistently showed a great deal more solidarity with the Trades Unions and a greater understanding of the problems that will face families in the wake of the coalition cuts than any of the other candidates, but has not made any viable proposals as an alternative. She has also been dogged in her attempt to represent Left thinking within the Party by the fact that she sent her child to a private school. Right or wrong her rationale that she was doing as all parents do, ‘her best for her child’, betrays her middle-class reality. A genuine person of the Left, especially a working-class single parent of the Left would NEVER use private education.

So, there we have it and our choices have been made. Make no mistake, any of them would make an infinitely better Prime Minister than David Cameron, but the Labour Party has missed a huge opportunity to revive itself. The Labour Party as a real voice for ordinary people is now but a distant memory. We will continue to work and support them but not with the enthusiasm and hope of decades gone by.

On the wider political front the Liberal Democrats have apparently been having a Party Conference. For the life of me I can’t see why. Head Boy Nick Clegg arrived with his trouser legs tucked into his socks for no apparent reason, gave a keynote speech in which he talked forever and said absolutely nothing, and then changed his suit and left. Vince Cable later talked of bankers as ‘spivs’ but was only allowed by George Osborne to do so by ‘balancing’ it by referring to some Trades Union officials as ‘Trotskyites’. He had been introduced to the gathering of the ‘radical centre’ as ‘our own economic guru’. As Alistair Darling noted in May “Vince has predicted ten of the last two recessions”. If Dr Cable is an economic guru, then I am fried egg. It transpires that any motions passed at Liberal Democrat conference become Party policy (Labour Party take note), but prior to the conference the leadership had said that the coalition agreement takes precedence over Party policy. Given this fact and the fact that they are the Liberal Democrats and therefore utterly meaningless, I took no further interest and have no idea what motions were passed and care not a jot.

Finally, and this for me has been the burning political issue since the election and Alistair Campbell’s hilarious wind-up of the execrable Adam Boulton, is what is to become of New Labour’s feuding superegos, Campbell and Mandelson. They appear to have competing memoirs or diaries out at the moment making excessive claims to being the power behind the throne in the Blair years. Quite why they would want to ‘cough’ for crimes against the Labour Party I am not sure, but so be it. Campbell seems to be of a mind to run for Parliament, but one would think he is already yesterday’s man, whilst Lord Mandelson has no need of voter approval, unless and until we get a democratically elected second chamber. If and when that point is reached I feel eventually his star will wane; and not before time. He does, however intrigue me. How does he always mange to keep his hair in place, and how does he manage to simply ‘glide’ over the ground without ever appearing to move any of his limbs? He even glides up and down stairs and in and out of scandal with never a blot on his character.

Continuing Inequalities

Over the past few days I have been thinking about how far we have travelled since the 1960s and how far we still have to go, so I have put together a quick snapshot of some of the areas that still need to be confronted.

If we look at the classical areas of inequality we could at first glance feel we have made great strides in this country and beyond in terms of the great inequalities of gender, ethnicity and disability. After all, along with other western democracies we have had equal opportunities legislation and it would be a rare thing indeed to see words like ‘Paki’, ‘Nigger’ and ‘Yid’ be used in even the most gutter of journalism. Nor would any woman anticipate being called ‘Dear’ at a job interview or a person in a wheelchair be patted on the head in a similar situation. However, if we dig a little beneath the surface less has changed than we might wish.

Let us look first at the position of women in our society. The latest NOMIS (July 2010) figures show that 7.8% of people aged 16 to 65 are unemployed and seeking work. Broken down by gender the figures are 8% of men unemployed and 7.5% of women unemployed. This seems to indicate equality, but it only includes those registered for work and claiming benefit. If one looks deeper at actual economic activity a very different picture emerges. Once one takes into account those people on sickness and disability benefits, full-time carers and those people running a household full-time and not seeking paid employment it reveals that 23.2% of people aged 16 to 65 are economically inactive. This breaks down to 17% of men and 29.3% of women. Those who are economically inactive are financially dependent upon either the state or on other individuals. In other words they are in receipt of non-JSA state benefits (e.g. disability, DLA etc) or are dependent on another individual (such as a husband or partner).

A picture begins to emerge of continuing female dependence and lower earning capacity. The July 2010 NOMIS figures also show s that women that work are significantly more likely than men to be employees. Whilst 12.7% of working men are self-employed, the self-employment rate for women is only 5.2%. A BBC report of 8^th March 2010 also highlights the dearth of women in senior positions, with less than 5% of CEO level positions in the UK being held by women.

In the wider community the inequality persists. Annually 2% of men are subject to domestic violence, compared with 4% of women. (British Crime Survey 2007), whilst the lifetime figures show that 7% of women had suffered a rape or sexual assault between the ages of 16 and 45, as opposed to only 1.5% of men (British Crime Survey 2007). These figures are disputed by some academics, who put the lifetime figure of sexual assault against women as high as 50%., highlighting the problem of underreported violent crime. Further the British Crime Survey (2007) indicates that 54% of rapes of women by men are perpetrated by someone well known to the victim (28% being the husband or partner of the woman).

All in all, we can see that there remains a significant variation in economic and other expected life experiences for men and women, with women routinely faring worse than men.

The latest ONS figures (2004) show an ethnic divide in unemployment and economic activity.

Unemployment rates for people from non-White ethnic groups were generally higher than those from White ethnic groups. However, Indian men had a similar level of unemployment to Other White men, at 7 per cent and 6 per cent respectively.

In 2004 Pakistani women had the highest unemployment rates in Great Britain, at 20 per cent. The next highest female rates were among women from the Black African or Mixed ethnic groups (each 12 per cent). These rates were around three times the rates for White British and White Irish women (4 per cent each). The unemployment rates for Black Caribbean (9 per cent), Indian (8 per cent) and Chinese (7 per cent) women were around twice the rates for White British and White Irish women.

Among men, those from Black Caribbean, Black African, Bangladeshi and Mixed ethnic groups had the highest unemployment rates (between 13 and 14 per cent). These rates were around three times the rates for White British and White Irish men (5 per cent in each case). The unemployment rates for Pakistani and Chinese men, 11 and 10 per cent, were around twice the rates for White British men or White Irish men.

The unemployment rate for Indian men (7 per cent) was similar to those for White British or White Irish men.

Working-age men and women from non-White ethnic groups were generally more likely than those from White groups to be economically inactive, that is, not available for work and/or not actively seeking work. Reasons include being a student, being disabled or looking after the family and home. Within each ethnic group, women were more likely than men to be economically inactive.

In 2004 Bangladeshi and Pakistani women had the highest working-age economic inactivity rates in Great Britain (75 per cent and 69 per cent respectively). These rates were up to three times the rates for White British, White Irish and Black Caribbean women (between 25 per cent and 26 per cent). The majority were looking after their family or home.
Chinese men had the highest male economic inactivity rate, at 37 per cent, more than twice the rate for White British men (16 per cent). The vast majority of economically inactive Chinese men were students.

Further around 8% of the population of the UK are people from Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) Backgrounds, yet of senior positions in the public and private sectors only just over 3% are from BME backgrounds.

A report by RADAR, published on 31 March 2010, has found that non-disabled people are three times more likely than disabled people to earn £80,000 or above and twice as likely to be Board-level directors.

So in terms of ethnicity and disability there is still a long way to go to reach anything like equality of life opportunity.

Perhaps the great classical area of inequality is that related to wealth, earning capacity and the family one is born into. Marxists and other socialists may refer to it as ‘Class’, Weberian sociologists as ‘Status’ and there are various other names that are given. Classical capitalist political economy makes such divisions invisible and constantly cites social mobility based upon talent and capacity. The reality is somewhat different. Firstly, the comparative economic capacity of individuals remains the same throughout their lives of over 95% of people, In other words those born wealthy are very likely to remain wealthy, whilst those born poor are likely to remain poor. Social mobility is a myth, made all the more powerful by a media that lionises the handful of ‘working-class boys made good’ such as Lord Sugar and Duncan Bannatyne.

The importance of this is made clear when one looks at that most misused statistic of all; average income.

The mean income in the UK in 2008 was £24,769 per annum. This is the average income of ALL persons in the UK. The modal (or most common) income earned in the UK was £10000 to £15000 per, annum, with 50% of the population earning £20000 per annum or less.

To some extent the income disparity is rectified through the benefits system.

 In 2008/09, original income, before taxes and benefits, of the top fifth of households in the UK was approximately 15 times greater than that for the bottom fifth (£73,800 per household per year compared with £5,000). After redistribution through taxes and benefits, the ratio between the top and bottom fifths is reduced to four-to-one (average final income of £53,900 compared to £13,600).

Some types of households gain more than others from this redistribution. Retired households pay less in tax than they receive in benefits and so gain overall. Among non-retired households, single adult households with children also gain. Most other non-retired households pay more in tax than they receive in benefits. However, households with children do relatively better than households without children due to the cash benefits and benefits in kind (including health and education services) which are received by these households.

Cash benefits such as Pension Credit, Income Support, Incapacity Benefit, and the State Retirement Pension play the largest part in reducing income inequality. The majority of these go to households in the lower part of the income distribution. Cash benefits make up 56 per cent of gross income for the poorest fifth of households, 39 per cent for the second quintile, falling to 2 per cent for the top fifth of all households.

With the exception of Council Tax and Northern Ireland rates, all direct taxes are progressive; that is they take a larger proportion of income from those households with higher gross incomes. In 2008/09, the top fifth of households paid 24 per cent of their gross income in direct tax while the bottom fifth paid 11 per cent.

Indirect taxes are regressive, taking a higher proportion of income from households with smaller incomes. Since direct and indirect taxes have opposite effects on the level of inequality, the tax system as a whole has a much smaller effect on inequality than cash benefits.

Final income includes an adjustment for the receipt of benefits in kind from the state, such as health and education services. Households with lower incomes tend to receive more benefits in kind from the state (£6,300 for the bottom fifth compared with £3,900 for the top fifth). Retired households are the biggest users of health services provided by the state, while households with children are the biggest users of education services. These two groups are more likely to be in the lower income groups.

This clearly shows that beyond the issues of ethnicity, gender and disability there are also significant issues of inequality of class continuing in the UK, with the UK having one of the highest GINI (income inequality) ratios in the European Union.

All in all this paints a fairly depressing picture, and one that would appear is set to get worse as the coalition government policies take root. Income inequality will surely grow with increased unemployment and benefit reductions, women’s safety will surely be compromised by reductions in funding to the police and social services and local authority grants to Rape Crisis Centres and Women’s Refuges, and unless proactive measures are taken to combat the increasing ethnic tension in some of our communities, income inequality will be the least of the problems experienced by our BME communities.

Issues with the Coalition Government

The general election was held on 6^th May 2010, producing a mixed result; a so-called ‘hung Parliament’. The Tories gained 36.1% of the popular vote, Labour 29% and the Lib Democrats 23%. The remaining 11.9% comprised various nationalist parties, two flavours of Ulster Unionism, and a single set each of the Alliance Party and the Greens.

The Tories ended up with 307 seats, Labour with 258, Lib Democrats with 57 and others with 28, and, after a few days seemingly frenetic negotiation a Tory – Liberal Democrat coalition government was formed.

Several issues arise from this. The first one is that the Liberal Democrats have something of a case (at least superficially) for some form of proportional representation (PR).  It shows the present system as favouring the larger parties. Labour ended up with 8.9 seats for every percentage point in the popular vote, the Tories with 8.5, the Liberal Democrats with 2.48, and others with 2.35. This would appear at first glance to suggest that smaller parties have an almost impossible task to breakthrough under the current system, and that it will forever remain either the Tories or Labour in pole position.

A closer examination of this argument shows it to be completely erroneous. One only needs to take an historical view. Under the same system, by the end of World War I the two dominant parties were the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party, yet by 1924 there was a Labour administration, and the 1945 Labour landslide ushered in the third Labour government. Labour had effectively moved from being a small ‘third’ party to replace the Liberals as the chief competitor to the Tories.

One then needs to look at how people voted in 2010 and why. There has grown up since the dark days of Thatcherism a loose, poorly articulated political ‘wisdom’ that UK politics comprises Tories and anti-Tories and that anti-Tory voters will vote tactically for the party most likely to defeat the Tory candidate in any particular constituency, that party being Labour, Liberal Democrat or Nationalist.

The opinion polls leading up to the election suggested that for the majority of voters tactical voting was a no-no, but a significant minority of voters in marginals expressed the view that they would vote for the most likely candidate to defeat the Tories. In part it appears that tactical voting did take place in that, despite the additional resources the Tories put into key marginals, the best-placed anti-Tory candidate took the seat and they failed to gain an overall majority. This leads to a deeper question; Is Labour’s traditional poor showing in the South-East (with the exception of London) and the South-West the result of deep-seated, long-term tactical voting for the Liberal Democrats, and the almost total absence of apparent Liberal Democrat support outside those areas something of similar vein.? The answer is yes and no. Looking at the composition of local authorities, there is no strong evidence of an undercurrent of significant Liberal Democrat support in the North and the Midlands, whereas there is much evidence to support dormant Labour support in the South-East and the South West

The position of Labour and the Liberal Democrats is very different. When Labour moved from a small third party to a potential party of government through the 1920s and 1930s it had the distinct advantage of being relatively new, having ‘organically’ grown from the bottom up and had rapidly developed a ‘natural’ constituency as the political voice of the Trades Unions and thus, by proxy, the working-class. The current liberal Democrats, in contrast, are the inheritors of both an aging party in decline (the Liberals) and a ‘top-down’ social democratic party with no underlying infrastructure. Thus they not only have no ‘natural’ constituency, but are also riven with internal conflict over their own basic ethos.

If, as suggested above, there is some form of deep-seated tactical voting based on geography, allied to the differences in ‘natural’ constituency, it would suggest that any move towards PR rather than benefit the Liberal Democrats would actually weaken them, as Labour voters in the South-East and the South West would be able to vote Labour with some expectation of significance in their vote.  One would also suggest that given their performance as junior partners in the coalition thus far, the Liberal Democrats would expect their support to disintegrate under whatever electoral process was in operation. Enough of the vexed question of PR; it is a red herring, and the Tories will not let it happen anyway.

A second issue that arose was that the election itself was badly run. Whatever the niceties of electoral law (and it isn’t as clear as it should be) large numbers of people were unable to cast their votes. Our current electoral system is best described as being held together by string and sealing wax. Elections should not be the responsibility of local authorities in their areas, but should be run by a dedicated body. Ironically we already have that body, the Electoral Commission, but it has no powers. The voting process should also be more secure. Surely in the 21^st Century it is not enough to identify an individual as eligible to vote just on their own authority. A country as large and complex as India operates a photo ID system for elections, why can’t we?  

However, the most telling issue of this election is the confidence trick played on the public by the deceit and dishonesty of the Liberal Democrat Party. They campaigned on a ‘progressive’ manifesto (whatever that means) and whether we look in terms of seats or in terms of the popular vote, they came third, and yet took their places in a Conservative government. Our current system allows for minority governments, the country voted for a minority Tory government, and that is exactly what we should have had. Not only have the Liberal Democrats negotiated a deal with the Tories, ditching the one important and significant policy they went into the election with (viz. no cuts for a year until the economy begins to recover) but they are actively working with them to stitch up the current Parliament to ensure that they cannot be unseated for five years (the 55% rule).

Economists have noted that the second phase of the recession has already started with job losses in the private sector (the dreaded double-dip) making plain that their original policy that they shared with Labour was the right one. The Tories knew that a second phase of recession would follow and it suits them. They have taken power with one thing and one thing only in mind; to dismantle the public sector and the deficit and the debt are the ready made excuses they use. The liberal Democrats are supporting them in this, indeed some senior Liberal Democrats would wish to go much further and completely privatise the Welfare State. Without wishing to be cynical, I would suggest that the deal with the Tories was done a long time prior to the election. One notes, for example the significant changes in their press conferences and electoral strategy after the second leaders’ debate.

To summarise, the electoral process in this country needs to be brought up to date, and whether that includes PR or not is an irrelevance, and a deliberate Liberal Democrat red herring to keep their own supporters on board, the Liberal Democrats have subverted the current process by deceitfully lying to the public prior to the election, and the Tories and Liberal Democrats are in the process of undermining the due process of Parliament to remain in office. 

All in all a very sorry tale indeed!

Modernity or Postmodernity

Many historians, social scientists and other cultural commentators have stated that we are now living in an age of ‘postmodernity’, and that this has implications on our capacity for cultural construction, economic activity and the political process. Before we look at some of the empirical examples that support this notion we need to get some idea of what is meant by the term ‘postmodernity’. In popular parlance the state of postmodernity is defined as a society built on ‘sex and shopping’, or, in more sociological terms, people in ‘modern’ societies are defined by class derived from their role in production, whereas in a postmodern society people are defined by their consumption, or their lifestyle. This is very general indeed. Dictionary definitions tend to take us no further than tautological definitions of postmodernity as “the state or condition of being postmodern”. So, in true postmodern style, we need to deconstruct the notion of postmodernity and reconstruct it to give it some kind of generalised, overall meaning. French critical thinkers, notably Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard (and to a lesser extent Michel Foucault), from the 1960s onwards began to refer to postmodernity as a state or condition of society that could be said to exist after modernity, and / or a historical condition that marks the reasons for the end of modernity. The concept of postmodernity is entirely dependent upon an understanding of the notion of ‘modernity’, an historical epoch that coincides (more or less) with the Enlightenment or the Industrial Age. Philosophers, historians and cultural commentators, with varying emphases, generally concur that modernity is characterised by the ever increasing incorporation of rationality and hierarchy into public and artistic life, and some have gone further to say that modernity is a cultural condition characterised by constant change in the pursuit of progress. In this way modernity can be seen as contiguous with the development of capitalism (itself characterised by constant change and innovation) with its associated socio-political and scientific metanarratives of positivism, structuralism, liberalism and Marxism. Critical thinkers such as Lyotard argue that postmodernity represents the culmination of this process where constant change has become the status quo and the concept of progress has dissolved into obsolescence.

Others such as Fredric Jameson and David Harvey go further and identify postmodernity almost entirely with ‘late capitalism’, a stage of capitalism following finance capitalism, and characterised by highly mobile labour and capital and the weakening of geo-political boundaries and regulations to the movement of capital. Harvey specifically identifies late capitalism with the breakdown of the economic order following World War II (the Bretton Woods agreement).

Although there is some agreement in the description of postmodernity, there is no such agreement as to the benefits or drawbacks of postmodernity. There are many historians and philosophers who view the culmination of rationality and progress within modernity as inherently inhumane and flawed, leading to the long 20th Century of warfare, the holocaust and ever repeated explosions of ‘ethnic cleansing’ throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries. For these thinkers, the end of modernity has come none too soon. Equally there are those, particularly from the ‘critical theory’ tradition, such as Jurgen Habermas, that view modernity an unfinished historical epoch of the Enlightenment and view postmodernity and postmodern ideas with suspicion, as a resurgence of counter-enlightenment ideas, a return to a darker, less rational age.

Jameson views a number of phenomena as distinguishing postmodernity from modernity. Firstly, he speaks of "a new kind of superficiality" or "depthlessness" in which models that once explained people and things in terms of an "inside" and an "outside" (such as hermeneutics, the dialectic, Freudian repression, the existentialist distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity and the semiotic distinction of signifier and signified) have been rejected. Secondly he points to a rejection of the modernist "Utopian gesture" and the reductionism in art from the transformative to the decorative. The third feature of the postmodern age that Jameson identifies is the "waning of affect" He notes that "pastiche eclipses parody" as "the increasing unavailability of the personal style" leads to pastiche becoming a universal practice.

Jameson argues that distance has been abolished in postmodernity. The postmodern era has seen a change in the social function of culture. He identifies culture in the modern age as having had a property of "semi-autonomy", with an "existence… above the practical world of the existent" but, in the postmodern age, culture has been deprived of this autonomy, the cultural has expanded to consume the entire social realm so that all becomes "cultural". "Critical distance", the assumption that culture can be positioned outside "the massive Being of capital" upon which left-wing theories of cultural politics are dependent, has become outmoded.

Economic and technological conditions of our age have given rise to a decentralized, media-dominated society in which ideas are only simulacra, inter-referential representations and copies of each other with no real, original, stable or objective source of communication and meaning. Globalization, brought on by innovations in communication, manufacturing and transportation, is often cited as one force which has driven the decentralized modern life, creating a culturally pluralistic and interconnected global society lacking any single dominant centre of political power, communication or intellectual production. The postmodernist view is that inter-subjective, not objective, knowledge will be the dominant form of discourse under such conditions and that ubiquity of dissemination fundamentally alters the relationship between reader and that which is read, between observer and the observed, between those who consume and those who produce.

In terms of information dissemination and political action the basic premise of postmodernity is that the metanarratives of class, race, gender, and the consequent liberationist political movements are obsolete, and that the discourse of political change has become increasingly atomised and decentred.

At this point we need to take stock and determine whether or not we live in a state of (high or late) modernity or postmodernity.

The case for postmodernity would run roughly thus. The great socio-economic metanarratives of Marxism and liberalism with concerted political actions from a coherent philosophical perspective are dead. Communism has had its day, for example with the rapid capitalisation of China, the breakup of the Soviet Union and death of Yugoslavia. The iconic image to support this perspective is the fall of the Berlin Wall. Further, within the UK we have seen a slow but steady disengagement with political parties and the political process over the past twenty years and a consequent rise in single issue politics and personal political practices, such as, for example, 21st Century feminisms, that focus to a dominant extent on personal male behaviour and attitudes towards women, rather than meta-political processes of socio-political change to enhance the position of women power per se in our society. The past fifty years (in particular the past ten years) have seen widespread technological developments that have fundamentally shifted the ways in which we define ourselves and organise our lives. We are all on Facebook and are likely to live as much of our lives in cyber-space as in geographical space, we subscribe to specific single issue causes, and we define ourselves by our tastes and our consumption not by our occupation. In other words we are postmodern.

The case against postmodernity makes roughly the opposite claims. It states that we are living in a different age to that of our parents and grandparents, but we are still living in the modern age. It accepts that communism has failed in that the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia are no more. It accepts that we are much more defined by a decentred consumerism than we used to be, and that national and even supra-national boundaries have less force in the regulation of capital than ever before. However, it would point to the persistence of the one major metanarrative, capitalism, and its capacity to change and reform itself to remain constantly historically contingent. It would also argue that total of the single issues that individual people become involved in tend to articulate to a coherent political position. In other words, from the individual perspective the labels of liberal, conservative, socialist etc, can and do still apply.

The arguments for some form of late modernity are more compelling than those for postmodernity. We do consume cultural artefacts (often ironically) in isolation from their context (think about exactly what is on your iPod); there is a ‘sex and shopping’ feel to our modern western societies, and we are more than inveterate consumers. We also engage more than ever in single issue politics, and are to some extent obsessed with lifestyle.  We also engage in the ultimate of postmodern experiences; using web technologies to interact globally from our own homes. However, we remain attached to our neighbourhoods; indeed our sense of place is as strong as ever, and socio-geographic mobility is no greater than in the 1950s. Class awareness OF itself is little changed in the past century and meta-concepts such as nation and ethnicity are still defining elements of our selves. There has been some decline in the meta-narrative of socialism over the past thirty years in that class awareness FOR itself has declined, but this is much more to do with the relatively recent success of neo-liberal hegemony that it is with a fundamental shift in the shape of our society. The majority of people still hold to the basic Enlightenment principles of rationality and progress, with a general support for science and other rational discourses.

Whether we are living in a state of modernity or postmodernity is important in terms of liberationaist actions, as it will determine the course of our political activity.

A Fairy Story

Hello children everywhere. Let me tell you a little bedtime story.

Once upon a time there was a very naughty man called Mr Hitler. He put lots and lots of people into big prisons, killed lots of people because they were not like him and made a very big war. Lots of people from all over got very cross and fought Mr Hitler and his friends. Lots of these people died but eventually they beat Mr Hitler and told him and his friends to stop it and behave themselves. Most of then did behave themselves but some of them would not so the people had to kill them or put them in prison so everyone would be safe. The people then said this is a ‘New World Order’ and we must not let such naughty people do their wicked things anymore.

As part of this ‘New World Order’ the people in a country called Britain decided to make some new things that would be nice for all the people. This was very new, you see, because before they fought Mr Hitler most of the people in Britain had to live in dark and dingy places with smelly water and dirty clothes. Only a few people had nice things. Those lucky people had motor cars, sea cruises, very big houses and nice comfy beds. The ladies of the lucky people wore long dresses with sequins and the men wore top hats. They were called the plutocrats. Now children, Britain is the name of the country we live in, and yes this story is about us.

Now, you may be wondering exactly what the nice things were that we decided should be for everybody. Well, there were lots of things such as hospitals, schools and houses. There were also other things such as better wages and free medicine. We were very pleased with these things and some of us even called Britain the ‘New Jerusalem’. Now, it was quite difficult to make all these things and it cost lots of money, and the war with Mr Hitler had already cost a lot of money. So, to make all these lovely things we had to do something called ‘raising taxes’ which meant that everybody put a little bit of money in the pot to help pay for things. This still wasn’t enough money though so we had to borrow some money from our best friends in another country called America. To help us do all this we got a man called Mr Atlee to help us. This all went very well and everyone was very happy.

This lasted for many years; sometimes we didn’t want to pay quite so much tax so we had a few less things and at other times we wanted more nice things so we paid a bit more tax.

Then after many years, there came along a very clever lady by the name of Thatcher. She became very powerful and told us that she knew best what we would like and so we told her that she could decide what was best.  She did lots of things that we didn’t fully understand but because she was very clever we let her keep doing them as we knew that she knew best. She started to take away some of our nice things, and told us that we didn’t need to pay as much tax. She told us that we would like to keep our money because money is better than nice things, and we believed her. She even made some of the nice things private so we could buy them with our own money if we wanted to or just not bother if we didn’t. She said this was choice and we it would bring us joy. Then she tried to kill all our children and make quite a lot of us live in cardboard boxes. She told us that this was a good thing and that it would make our country great again. She also told us that we had been much happier when we were fighting Mr Hitler and to make us happy again she would make us another war. How we cheered as our soldiers and sailors went off to the other side of the world to fight a new set of naughty people who were called the ‘Argies’.

But as time went on we started to become unhappy and thought that we would like her to go away. She became very sad at this and let one of her friends, Mr Major, look after us and make our decisions. But Mr Major was not very clever and got cross with his friends. He even called them ’bastards’, which is a very rude word indeed. So we let another person look after us and he was called Mr Blair. He said that he thought we would like to have our nice things back but that we would still like to have all that lovely choice and not have to pay lots of tax. His friend Mr Brown helped him to make this happen in a very clever way. Mr Brown built us his very special thing called a deficit and for a while everything was lovely. To make us even happier Mr Blair made us some new wars along with our best friends, America. But we did not cheer and these wars made us unhappy so Mr Blair left and let Mr Brown look after us by himself. Mr Brown then made his other special thing with a complicated name. He called it ‘light touch regulation of the financial sector’ and it made us very happy and gave us lots of nice things.

But things went wrong. You see, Mr Brown’s new thing was so complicated it led to a very bad new thing called ‘toxic debt trading’ and this new bad thing made an even worse thing called ‘sovereign debt’.

Then Thatcher’s son came along and said he would help us along with his best friend, Nutcase Nick. He has told us that we have to get rid of all our nice things and pay more tax, and that doing this is a very good and noble thing that will make us happy because we will have so many nice things in the future and even more choice than ever before. Her son is called Cameron and he says that we are broken, and to mend us he is going to take all our food away and then we will be very happy, our country will be renamed Airstrip One, and we will return to the ‘Old World Order’.

Now, children, I cannot tell you anymore as the story has not ended, and for all we know may never have an end.

Why Labour must move to the Left

The recent general election in the UK can be viewed as a repudiation of ‘New Labour’ after thirteen years at the helm. What it also showed was no significant surge in support for any viable alternatives. The Liberal Democrat share of the vote nationally increased marginally whilst their number of seats in Parliament fell slightly. Support for David Cameron’s ‘modernised’ Conservatives did not materialise in any real way; their increased number of seats in large part being due to Labour’s loss of support rather than any noticeable Tory surge; and this with a friendly media and after a great deal of Lord Ashcroft’s money was thrown at the campaign. The resulting Conservative – Liberal Democrat coalition is the result of an indeterminate election result.

At this point we need to examine two distinct factors; why did Labour’s vote fall to the point that it lost the election, and, why was there no strong enthusiasm for any alternative. In many ways these two factors coalesce over an apparent much talked about loss of confidence in the political process and the so-called political class, due in the main, although not entirely, to the expenses crisis that saw a number of MPs across the House of Commons being implicated in some form of swindling of the public purse. A great deal of the discussion of the expenses crisis generated much more heat than light. In the final analysis a small but significant number of MPs were shown to be in breach of the expenses rules, an even smaller number to be involved in genuine fraud. Associated with this in the public mind were video images of senior MPs involving themselves in a ‘cash for questions’ scandal. What was not publicised to any great extent was the probity and honesty of the majority of MPs. The issue of MPs expenses is a serious one and the rules have since been simplified, although it is far from clear if the new process is actually fair. We need to see exactly how things work out. What cannot be denied, however, is that confidence in Parliamentarians was severely dented, with Labour suffering a little more than the other parties simply because it happened on their watch.

The second issue to affect Labour and to a lesser extent the Conservative Party was the Iraq war. Although this is not the first election since the Iraq war, it was within the last Parliament that the details of the ‘dossier’ and the reasons for going to war have come into the public domain, leaving a public perception of Tony Blair as lying to Parliament and being supported in this lie by other senior members of the Government. Whether Blair lied or not is immaterial; it is the perception of lying that is enough. Why I say the Conservatives were also harmed by the Iraq war is that they were relatively enthusiastic supporters of it from the outset. Even without the infamous dossier and the issue of did Tony Blair lie or not, it is clear that there was a huge fracture between the political will to war and public opinion. Iraq was not and never could have been a ‘popular’ war. These two issues I feel explain much of why support for Labour dwindled and support for the Conservatives failed to increase. It may also go some way towards explaining the slight increase in overall support for the Liberal Democrats, who were not implicated in the expenses issue (at least until after the election) and who, for the most part, consistently opposed the Iraq war. The failure to turn this slight increase in support into seats owed as much to a very poor election campaign by the Liberal Democrats, who were never certain where or who to target, than it did to the much criticised electoral system.

To look at issues specific to the Labour defeat we need look no further than the global financial crisis. The crisis was not of Labour’s making, at least not entirely. This is not the time to examine the minutiae of the financial crises but to summarise it as a crises of deregulation. It began with a crisis in credit emanating from the unregulated and often disguised trading in toxic loans derived from the unethical sales of sub-prime mortgages in the USA, and it culminated in the near meltdown of worldwide banking and financial systems, with almost all the economies of the liberal democracies going into recession. The actions of Gordon Brown in the early phases of the crisis were rightly praised internationally and shoring up the banks and other corporate financial institutions was the only ‘sticking plaster’ in the first aid box. Without it things would have been much, much worse. However, both as Chancellor of the Exchequer and as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown had championed ‘light touch’ regulation in part to prioritise the City of London as a world financial centre, and develop a ‘business friendly’ economic environment. What is slightly unfair is that this approach was enthusiastically supported by all parties.

As the crisis deepened issues of public deficit (the gap between receipts and expenditure for any one year) and of sovereign debt (the money borrowed by governments from banks, pension fund portfolios and other institutions) became the critical issue, with a number of EU countries having their creditworthiness downgraded. Both government deficit and government or sovereign debt are expressed as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as this best expresses the capacity of a country to budget and service its financial obligations.

The figures for 2009, the last full year for which there are figures shows the UK with a budget deficit of 11.4% GDP (£159.2billion) and a debt of 68.1% GDP (£950.4 billion). To put it into perspective, this compares favourably with Greece, for example, which had a budget deficit of 12.5% GDP and a debt of 113% GDP. Further, the UK debt, despite a rise in 2008 and 2009 is still much lower than it was in the 1950s and 1960s, when it averaged around 100% GDP.

However, the world in 2010 is very different to that in 1955; new geo-political entities have come into being and there have been periodic crises in both financial and economic systems since that time.

Two key issues were overlooked then and remain overlooked now, and much is revealed in the language of crisis. According to received economic wisdom recession is dirty word, and a healthy economy will be achieving (or seeking to achieve) an annual growth rate of 3%. This was all pretty hunky dory way back in say, 1750, when the individual capitalist took one days profit and then invested them in production for the next day. This is all well and good as long as there is somewhere for the profits to flow. When European countries became fully capitalist and the process of capital-labour we now understand had fully come into being, they began to look for other places to invest, and other ways to bring down costs; the result was colonisation in its various forms, opening up new markets for goods and sourcing cheaper labour for production. This has continued in various forms to this day, to the point that worldwide markets are more or less saturated and there is little left in terms of a reserve pool of labour.

As capitalism developed especially in terms of technological change, it become apparent that the educational levels of the labour force needed to be enhanced, leading to the educational reforms across the developed world that form our modern educational systems. An unintended consequence of education, however, is the development of the power to critique and question. Thus a number of labour rights and elements of welfare-statism developed independently in various countries.

This creates a serious problem for capital. If markets are already saturated where does capital go if it cannot go back into production? In recent years two things have happened. Surplus profits have not been reinvested in production but in gambling schemes such as derivatives and in property (sub-prime mortgages) and serious problems have ensued.

The other, more long-lasting solution has been privatisation of existing publically funded entities. This forms the core of the neo-liberal solution. For capital to have somewhere to go it has to go into new areas such as health and education. Hence in the UK we have had a variety private finance initiatives, ranging from the privatisation of the public utilities in the 1980s right through to proposals to partially privatise schools from the current government. However, such solutions can at best only be temporary; where does capital go when all publically funded entities have been privatised and there are no more markets left to penetrate? The answer is catastrophe!

We are at a very serious juncture in world history. It will solve little to simply blame the banks and seek tighter national and international regulation. Little will be achieved by a new ‘Bretton Woods’ agreement on financial systems and processes. All these things can ever do is buy a little time before almighty meltdown. The entire process needs to be overhauled and economic processes rescued from the fetishism of finances. The Labour Party can play a significant part in this process

Firstly, the Labour Party needs to develop a systematic economic policy that looks at a serious permanent reduction in the level of private financial activity, and a wholesale growth of the public sector. This needs to also inform foreign policy that will work towards enhancing the worldwide development of public financial structures as opposed to private ones. Secondly, the concept of growth as an absolute necessity needs to be dropped. It is not growth that is required but stability. A fruitful by-product of an enhanced public sector would be greater democratic control of the economy through the ballot box rather then via the corporate financial institutions, and the level of governmental control would enhance all governments’ capacities to deal more effectively with climate change.

Much of what is required will not be achieved quickly, but, in the first instance it is absolutely crucial that a British government takes complete control of those elements of the banking and financial services sector that are located in the UK. If that means banks and others upping and jumping ship so be it; other countries will follow the example and then they will have nowhere to go. In the 1970s we used to idealistically talk about nationalising the ‘commanding heights of the economy’. Then it was a preference; now it is a necessity. If the Labour Party has any meaning at all, it is to fulfil its historic destiny. Now is the time, for all our sakes.

Israel attacks aid ships

Yesterday Israel attacked a small flotilla of six ships carrying food, medicine and other aid to Gaza; the ships had on board six hundred humanitarian activists from many nations and sailed from Turkey. Amongst the humanitarian activists on board the ships were Northern Ireland’s Maraid Corrigan, the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Hedy Epstein, holocaust survivor and peace activist, and a number of European legislators.

At the time of the attack the ships were in international waters. As a result of the attack at least ten people were killed and thirty injured; some reports give the figures as high as nineteen dead and sixty injured. No Israeli soldiers were killed; two suffered injury.

The Israeli Defense Force and latterly spokesmen for the Israeli Government, including Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Alyon, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have variously claimed that the Israeli soldiers fought only defend themselves after being attacked on board the ships, and that the convoy itself was a provocation to Israel, and that it may have been carrying arms for the Palestinians. On the first point, counter claims have been made from individuals on board the ships that the Israeli soldiers landed on the ships already firing their weapons, whilst one also needs to note that the boarding of those ships in international waters was illegal and can be construed at best as piracy; at worst as an act of aggression against Turkey. On the second point the convoy was carrying a fully manifested cargo of 10,000 tonnes of humanitarian aid. This comprised primarily food, medicines, cement, other building materials, and water purifiers, materials which Israel has consistently refused to let through to Gaza as part of the ongoing blockade (since 2007).

That blockade has had a severe impact on the lives of the people of Gaza. There are continual breakdowns of the electricity system and sanitation system in Gaza through a lack of spare parts needed for ongoing maintenance and repair; there is a lack of food and medicine, to the point that the infrastructure of Gaza and the health of the inhabitants of Gaza have significantly deteriorated over the past two years. Indeed, the blockade has ensured that the collateral damage instituted by Israel in 2008 in its twenty-two day attack on Gaza has never been made good.

Some figures from the United Nations and the Aid agencies make clear the dire situation for Gazans.

• since the intensification of the siege in June 2007, “the formal economy in Gaza has collapsed”
• ”61% of people in the Gaza Strip are …food insecure,” of which “65% are children under 18 years”
• since June 2007, “the number of Palestine refugees unable to access food and lacking the means to purchase even the most basic items, such as soap, school stationery and safe drinking water, has tripled”
• ”in February 2009, the level of anaemia in babies (9-12 months) was as high as 65.5%”

Dov Weisglass, an adviser to Ehud Olmert, the then Israeli Prime Minister, said when the blockade was first imposed: "The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger"; a comment that is as racist, heartless and cruel as it is crass.

The attack in 2008, precipitated by Hamas rocket attacks of northern Israel, provides another example of Israeli aggression. The Hamas rocket attacks killed thirteen Israelis; the Israeli response led to the deaths of 1,400 Palestinians, trapped in the homes and neighbourhoods and then brutally bombarded.

The 2008 attack, the blockade / siege, and now the illegal assault on foreign ships are but the latest events in a long line of Israeli atrocities and international crimes against humanity. Other examples are:

• The Sabra and Shatilla massacres in 1982: They took place in the refugee camps in Lebanon.
• The crushing of the 1987 Palestinian intifada resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children, with many more injured or maimed for life.

There are in reality hundreds of examples of Israeli atrocities meted out to Palestinians; Amnesty International published a full condemnation of Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank as long ago as 2004. At some point the world needs to take action. The community of nations must take the strongest possible action against Israel. A UN resolution is being put forward by Turkey; the acid test is if this will be supported by the USA. If it is not, then everything that Barak Obama promised to be is a lie, a simulacrum. American Zionism can no longer legitimately prop up the rogue nation of Israel. Until the Israel question is resolved there will be no peace or stability in the middle-east. How many more Palestinians have to die?

What this blog is about

I won't be posting on this blog every day. Rather I intend to use the blog to post items of various length discussing a range of social, cultural,and political issues that will be of interest to those on the Left.

We are currently living through one of the many crises of late capitalism, the full effects of which are not yet clear. What is clear is that the standard of living of millions of people in the UK and beyond is set to fall over the next decade, a decade that will also see the first significant effects of climate change. Through this blog I hope to develop themes and engage people in debate over new and more equitable ways we can organise ourselves to mitigate the worst of climate change and develop more just and sustainable economies and social structures.

As well as these 'meta-narrative' types of post, I will also be making short posts regarding current political issues and events in the UK and beyond.

The posts will be in the form of short articles inviting comment, and all comment is invited. To ensure that the blog has a wide a circulation as possible the posts will be replicated as notes on Facebook and all possible social networking links will be developed. I hope that you will find the discussions intersting and stimulating.