Social democracy unravelling

For many years we took it for granted that the public was to the left of the government, not any more. Since the beginning of the depression the British Social Attitudes survey has shown a clear right-ward shift in public opinion. According to this piece it has been driven by Labour supporters. 

According to the survey there has been a particular breakdown in social solidarity. In 2011 47% of Labour supporters agree with the statement “if benefits were not as generous people would learn to stand on their own feet”, up from 11% in 1987. Thirty-one percent of Labour supporters now think welfare recipients are “undeserving”. Twenty-seven percent of supporters think poverty is primarily about social injustice, down 14% from 1986, while 22% think it’s a matter of individual weakness, up 9%.

There is no one else to blame except the last Labour government. This is the end result of twenty plus years of triangulation, of the Labour party pointedly neglecting its base, but also trying to square the circle of achieving social democratic results through neo-liberal means.

The most concerning statistic is the one about the source of poverty. It means not only have people shifted to the right but they have lost the ability to rationally calculate their material interests. A majority of people support action to relieve child poverty yet a majority of children in poverty live in households that have work and poverty is supposed to be a personal failing. How does that make sense? 

Unemployment  figures have been well over two million for several years now. This is not a problem of strivers versus skivers (the recession was not caused by 2.5 million people suddenly deciding they couldn't be bothered). Long term unemployment (and underemployment) is a problem for everybody, the entire working class. It creates insecurity, helps suppress wages and overall effective demand.

The way out is not more sado-monetarism but ample jobs at a living wage. The recession is precisely notthe responsibility of the unemployed but the capitalist class.

This breakdown in class consciousness is why it’s not kicking off everywhere. Social struggles in Britainnow start from an even weaker basis than existed pre-2007. It will take years to turn political questions such as the above around, after all it took the Labour Party leadership nearly thirty years to convince the Labour voters they were more right wing than they realised.

On a much smaller level, I think this is why Left Unity is right to try to stop the 57 Varieties of Socialism from overwhelming the party before it’s even properly constituted. British politics has an excess of revolutionary socialist groups. They have sheltered for years under a giant social democracy. That social democracy is no more. If sectarianism could be indulged before it can be no longer.

Endless Brainless

It's hard not to get sucked into the Olympic fervour. It's relentless and all pervasive. Londoners have been advised to get ahead of the games. It's difficult to see how, they're everywhere. The actual sport is great, well, mostly great; gymnastics, swimming, canoeing, road-racing etc, though I'm not sure of the spectator value of sailing or pistol shooting. The silly, silly nationalism is unbearable. It feels like the death of any radical alternative in Britain for goodness knows how long. Large swathes of people are being made to feel happy despite having no objective basis for feeling so.

I can just see the Tories using Team GB as an all purpose metaphor. Boris Johnson upfront going on about years of hard work and sacrifice etc. If Team GB can do it then public sector workers can work for half-wages/unemployed people beg for scraps/disabled people can die in a ditch. It's all about pulling together to make Boris and co very, very, very... rich.

We will have to see how things look in two weeks when we have literally nothing to talk about anymore.

Cameron to country: "chop-chop Jeeves"

David Cameron reckons Britain must “do more” to recover from the recession it’s in. He blames the Eurozone crisis and the “damage done in the boom and bust years”, although which years he’s talking about are a minor mystery.

“We were the ones with the most over-indebted banks, the most over-indebted households and we had the biggest budget deficit of virtually any country, anywhere in the world.

"It takes time to recover from that but we've got to do more. We're going to roll up our sleeves and do everything possible to get business going in Britain, to get housing going, to get jobs going."

Well, jobs have been ‘going’, cheap housing has been ‘going’, and it’s been his government that has sent them on their way. Also, “roll up our sleeves”? Oh yes, let’s all get busy, says a man whose only real job was working as a TV executive. If it is a matter of doing more then there’s bad news ahead. The only workers who “do more” in the EU in terms of hours are the Austrians and the Greeks (those lazy, lazy Greeks working longer hours than everyone else).

It’s a shame these things need to be stated and restated over and over again but needs must: the recession was not caused by 2.5 million working people suddenly deciding to take it easy, they were thrown out of work.

In David Cameron’s world everything is everybody else’s fault, the EU, the Greeks, the Labour Government, but above all you. So get cracking, little prole, and make Cameron and chums very, very, very… rich.

The economy sinks but shit floats

Britain is back in recession. It hardly feels like we've ever been out of it, but our society is back in the doldrums... and that's OFFICIAL (to borrow a tabloid phrase). Who would have thought cutting services, cutting benefits, destroying jobs and lowering the general standard of living, would have been bad for the economy? This week's most egregious example, social cleansing of the poor from London has been kicking in... There's a solution to unemployment (and underemployment), banish the poor to areas with even fewer jobs. But manufacturing and services were supposed to lift the economy? For some occult reason the private sector is heading in reverse, construction -3%, manufacturing -0.4%. It's almost like there's some broader context to all this.

Who's responsible, where does the buck stop? Why it's supposed to stop with Gideon Osborne. I'm not normally one to place much emphasis on expertise, but look at this:

Osborne's first job was entering the names of people who had died in London into a National Health Service computer. He also briefly worked for Selfridges, re-folding towels. He originally intended to pursue a career in journalism, but instead got a job at Conservative Central Office.

That's his entire career... and he's in charge. Oh dear. The economy sinks but Mr Osborne floats.

By its own standards austerity is failing. Something has to change. We have to change it.

In related news there are a set of elections coming up, including the election for Mayor of London. I'm not going to vote for Ken Livingstone 1) because I'm not registered and 2) because he's a tax dodger and a scab, and that can't just be forgiven and forgotten. As a candidate he is a liability, however, if he returns to office on May 4th and carries out his programme, including fare reductions, rent caps, restoring the EMA and providing cheaper gas and electricity through bulk-buying, he will have done more for working-class Londoners than the whole of parliament put together.

That's the kind of change we need to effect. We needed to start yesterday, last month, last year. Let's not wait for Livingstone.

Idiots, zealots, insult after insult...

The rich just aren't just tax dodgers, they're wage dodgers, but one thing's certain, they aren't rich enough. Let's nail something right away. Income tax, tax on personal income, is nothing to do with investment (given that the people, though what's supposed to be their government, have majority control of all the major banks, investment should not be an issue). The rich have bilked our society for too much and too long. It's time they paid up in full. Close the tax loopholes.

Gideon Osborne's £5bn gamble to stave off recession

Really...? £5 billion to halt further economic recession...? It makes you wonder if Gideon Osborne realises the seriousness of the situation, the damage his government has been inflicting, on top of the damage caused by the banking system and stock market. What's he going to do, put it all on black? No, it seems:

Some of the £5bn extra capital investment over the next three years will go to a £600m schools programme to fund an extra 40,000 places by 2014.

Well, that's nice of him, but is this money going to Michael Gove's 'free' schools, or will comprehensives get some of the money? What else is there?

In what is rapidly turning into a full scale "game-changer" budget to stave off the impact of collapsing European economies, Osborne will also announce plans to:

• Help energy-intensive industries.

• Increase the bank levy to maintain an annual income from banks of £2.5bn.

• Place a cap on announced rail fare rises.

• Defer a 3p rise in fuel duty which was due to be introduced in January

• Remove health and safety bureaucracy from 1 million self-employed people as the next stage of labour market deregulation.

Does any of this apply to you? I suppose it would if you were a commuter or a small businessman/woman, i.e. Tory voting fodder. Also:

The chancellor may also be able to garner funds for the investment from overseas. China Investment Corporation is considering investing in the infrastructure of the UK, according to Lou Jiwei, the fund's chairman. The $410bn Chinese fund "is keen to team up with fund managers or participate through a public-private partnership in the UK infrastructure sector as an equity investor," Lou writes in today's Financial Times.

Britain's public works will be further tied up with private capital, the same kind of private capital New Labour used to fund projects that were late, badly made and expensive.

In other news, fewer and fewer people are satisfied with Tory shit served up as ice cream. There will be a public sector strike on Wednesday, not in France or Greece or Egypt but in Britain of all places, phew! What's more it has majority support: 61% of all polled, 67% of women and 79% of young people.

Jim Crows again...

The state of Alabama has passed a law making immigration all but a crime in itself. The same law also allows private prisons to use prisoners far more extensively for work. A Guardian writer wonders where this is going?

The difference between Alabama and adjoining states is that it is willing to go further down this track. Recently, John McMillan, agriculture commissioner, proposed that the farm work left behind by immigrant workers be supplied with inmate labor. Decatur, a private detention center about 50 miles to the north-west of Alabama, which had been unable to find jobs for inmates, has now witnessed record numbers of requests for labor (for an estimated 150 detainees a day).

So, here is how it goes. First, the state passes a harsh immigration law. Then, it detains large numbers of immigrants. Third, private prisons (LCS, CCA, GEO) receive fresh inmates. And finally, the artificially created labor shortage is supplied by the new inmates. Does this sound like modern-day slavery to anyone?

It has been well observed that the American prison industry is huge. The justice system is a racist system, the cutting edge of a racist society, disproportionately punishing ethnic minorities. Work is effectively forced. Slavery has effectively been restored.

But the relation of work to compulsion and control. We are all wage slaves. We don't need a whip, merely an alarm clock to make us fall into line. We don't have to work for anyone in particular, but we have to work for someone. What the capitalist class wants is, in effect, labour like water. It can turn the tap off and on as and when it needs to.

The capitalist class's plan, it's only plan, for dealing with the current depression is to hold down costs, especially wages, and export. Individually this makes sense, as a collective this is madness, but competitive accumulation drives this system, the first point of view must dominate. Racist laws such as the one passed in Alabama are not just an attack on a people but a class, an experiment in setting a new, lower baseline in working class life. A portion of the working class will go from working for next to nothing to all but nothing, a further downward pressure on all working people, at least in Alabama. It is another illustration why the working class, if it is to be a class for itself, for its own interests, must be staunchly anti-racist.

Banks given until 2019 to take what they can and run

But THEN they have to stop. Until then Britain wants as much Russian gangster cash as possible. Of course, by 2019 we'll all be fighting 8ft tall radioactive scorpions (probably stamped with the Barclays logo) for the last drops of potable water:

According to the IFS, the squeeze on living standards will be the result of earnings failing to keep pace with prices, as well as the tax and benefit changes announced by the government to tackle the UK's record peacetime budget deficit.

"Welfare cuts and tax rises will act to reduce household incomes, and those with the lowest incomes are clearly set to lose the most from these reforms as a percentage of income (with the important exception of those with the very highest incomes). This is likely to increase poverty, other things being equal, offsetting some of the falls in poverty over the past decade."

Of course it isn't a record peacetime deficit (there are high levels of government borrowing, but that's another matter). The national debt was many times greater in 1948, when the NHS was founded (see picture). What's interesting in the IFS report is the line highlighted:

The IFS analysis is included in The Great Recession and the Distribution of Income, published on Monday by the London School of Economics. Professor Stephen Jenkins of the LSE said: "We were surprised at how little household incomes changed in the years immediately after the Great Recession began. This has been the worst macroeconomic downturn in most OECD countries since the Great Depression of the 1930s when there were substantial increases in poverty rates and other significant changes to the income distribution."

A pay freeze relative to inflation is a pay cut. This has been the strategy for several decades; hold down wages to raise profits. With inflation at 4-5% that's a big cut. Of course, it only half-worked, all those years. The previous mini long-boom was driven by speculation. Low effective demand combined with large amounts surplus capital, encouraged a culture of widespread borrowing and lending (borrowing to lend sometimes). It was fitting then this global pyramid scheme foundered on subprime mortgages.

Warning that pain had been delayed but not avoided, the IFS said families with children would be hit harder by Osborne's tax and benefit changes than other family types on average, with the poorest 10th of households suffering income losses of more than 8% over the next three years. "Recent IFS modelling predicted that child poverty will rise in each of the three years between 2010-11 and 2013-14, and that it will be about two percentage points higher in 2013-14 as a result of the tax and benefit reforms planned by the current government."

If you can't forsake the god of capital accumulation you will have to sacrifice your children to appease him.

Ruled by loonies pt 2

David Cameron wants to make it even harder for unemployed people claiming benefits to refuse work. Now you may be thinking, with 2.5 million registered unemployed and some areas of the country where an average of 50 or so people apply for each vacant position, you may be thinking that work is refusing people, not the other way round.



But what kind of ideas are they actually weighing up...?

Ideas pushed by No 10 included measures that would force the unemployed and those claiming jobseeker's allowance to spend an entire working week in the pursuit of finding a job. But on Friday lunchtime the Department for Work and Pensions said that particular idea had been ruled out as "not workable". By Friday evening the department was instructed that the idea could be a possible candidate for tightening the welfare regime.

You hear that? You need to spend 36 hours a week, every week, looking for work and, presumably, be able to prove it as well. If you run out of jobs to apply for why not stand on a street corner with a sandwich board: "will vote Tory for food"?

Treasury officials had also been keen on a suggestion that would see those people without a history of national insurance contributions unable to turn down suggested employment opportunities.

So thats what young people are called these days!







But they're right folks. It's time to take on the workshy, make the feckless and decadent classes pay, egregious, idle, thieving, born with a grotesque sense of entitlement... after all they caused the recession.



Meanwhile, in totally unconnected, separate piece of news this is David (son of an investment banker) Cameron hanging out with the royal family (distant relatives) in Scotland on Saturday.

Irony reels under further blows...

The UK riots...

were product of consumerism...

and..?

and will hit economy...

Whoah, profound stuff. Who worked this out?

says City broker...

ROLLINGONTHEFLOORLAUGHINGOUTLOUD... metaphorically speaking anyway, perhaps rollingonthefloorlaughingyetsomehowmanagestocontinuetyping would be more appropriate. But, it gets better/worse:

Analyst's report points to 'deeply flawed social ethos' and calls for a shift of emphasis 'from material to non-material values'.

In a time of economic crisis and growing inequality we should concentrate on immaterial posessions, enlightened activities. Why not find a quiet spot and meditate, read a book, drink plenty of water, eat plenty of fruit (hang on a minute, aren't these material things?)...? Whatever you do don't think about economic crisis and growing inequality, nor how these things came to be and for goodness sake DON'T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT!

Sow austerity, reap recession

Back in the day world financial institutions would use debt as a lever. A country, second or third world country, would get into economic difficulty. The instruments of global finance would then basically send the economy into deliberate shock, and use the precipitous economic and social decline to raid said country.

This method is fine, if you happen to be a financier and not a citizen. The only trouble is there is a global economic crisis. The Markets, aka the ruling class, are trying to perform this trick over the entire planet. If every country is suppressing wages, driving up unemployment, privatising public assets and aiming to become an export economy (as if you can turn a whole economic set-up around just like that) the only problem is... who are they going to export to?

The ruling class is clinging to a global policy that reduces effective demand during recession and, lo and behold, we are on the brink of recession, again. There have been bigger debt 'crises' than this one. After World War Two there was a greater public debt across Europe as well as Britain. This crisis, the actual crisis, is being deliberately precipitated.

We don't just need Greek-style resistance, soon that won't be enough. It's getting to that stage now in Greece, popular resistance will need to go beyond strikes, into occupations, beyond demonstrations into armed mutinies. It's popular democracy or a new dictatorship.

Interesting times ahead, perhaps...? Oh dear...

The dog ate my growth figures

Recent quarterly economic reports have been described as disappointing. But Gideon Osborne's programme of mass unemployment has not been to blame, no, it's all down to 'special factors'. The most recent ones have been the Royal wedding and the Japanese earthquake, but we've also had things like heat, snow and the Olympics affecting figtures. Here at TtSD we like to be useful, proactive and soforth. Here's some other useful suggestions, see if they crop up in the next ONS report:

The unions
The onions
The bunions
The Martians
Gordon Brown
The wrong type of leafs
The wrong type of snow
The wrong type of tsunami
The Royal divorce
Gordon Brown
Them lot comin’ over here an’ takin’ our jobs ‘n’ our women
Forgetting to sack everybody
Forgetting to carry the one
Too many nurses tending to the sick
Too many sweepers keeping the streets clean
Too many teachers teaching children
Too many children, not enough child labour
Foreigners
Foreigner
Toto
Mike and the Mechanics
Too many soft rock references
Everything that needs to be made has already been made
Gordon Brown
The Olympics starting
The Olympics finishing
Usain Bolt getting stuck in traffic
The doomsday virus
The invasion of Libya
The invasion of China
Invasion by China
Invasion of the body snatchers
Scotland declares independence
News International declares independence
Ireland declares dependence
Gordon Brown