My impression of the Woolwich attacks

The killing in Woolwich is horrific because it is an everyday horror, brought to you live by mobile phone cameras. Television brings you close, it constantly puts you inside the action, and it's clear from this that any numpty with a meat cleaver can slaughter somebody in the street and in the process drag the political agenda down to the depths.

There will be a racist backlash. Probably some awful new law will be passed to 'deal' with the problem (there is no dealing, as such, with simple murder). The EDL have already rioted in South East London. The coming lumpen-Kristallnacht has already been prepared by years of Islamophobia. The only thing stopping it from happening is the anti-fascist movement.

So it begins...

It’s the Week of Evil, or Tory Party Conference. And there’s perhaps none more evil than Gideon Osborne. The heir to an Anglo-Irish Baronetcy, whose only day job was folding towels in Selfridges, Osborne described a proposed mansion tax as the politics of envy. We wouldn’t want that when we incite people in work against against sick or unemployed people who, in Gideon’s imagination, are busy growing mushrooms. 

His big plan to save civilisation from endless, relentless doom is a scheme whereby workers swap employment rights for company shares. This is the future, folks. Unless we do something we will have the golden opportunity to give up our workplace protections in return for giving a portion of our wages back to the company to play with. Do you see the problem there? I hope you do because, let’s be realistic, given the 2.5 million unemployed, how many bosses are going to present this option as a fait accompli, take it or leave it?

Osborne has also warned parents on benefits against having more children. In his kind of future some children will be left behind. Does that include people tax credits, the biggest benefit claiming category there is, in which case that also means parents in low paid work? He displays a cavalier understanding of where babies come from. If there is now such a thing as surplus humanity (too many babies!) then what can we expect, workhouses, mass sterilisation, or just children starving to death? 

Words cannot express how truly repellent this man is.

The abyss stares back

The link here is to a short, simple piece on the fundamental deception of American political debate. There is such fundamental agreement between the two mainstream parties, public debate narrows down to secondary, often peripheral issues. Because ‘issues’ like teaching evolution in schools, the veracity of climate change or the authenticity of Obama’s birth certificate can be argued relentlessly to no practical conclusion, they serve to mobilise various political bases (although the Republicans are always more interested in motivating their core support than the Democrats) and sustain the illusion of urgent debate.

You know it. I know it. It’s seems hardly worth pointing out, except the same grim parade rolls out every four years and no one does anything about it. America is politically null, excepting the Occupy movement, which, rather like council communism without councils, is a moot point if it’s not able to occupy anything. It would take an event so colossal one almost dares not imagine it to open space for a radical alternative. If America means anything it serves as a warning, this is what happens when the labour movement is permanently sidelined.

Meanwhile Polly Toynbee ponders the Tory options in the run up to their conference. David Cameron needs a national vote of approximately 42% to take an overall majority in parliament, 6% more than he got at the last election, and support is ebbing away. There are plenty of Tories with a mind to blow up Labour ‘client state’, i.e. its basis in the wider working class. This combined with a set of irresistible populist measures may yet work. And these measures need not cost anything. Imagine if Cameron led the country out of the EU just as it collapsed.

Feeble though our efforts may be even something like the October 20th democan start to head off that kind of future.

For no raisin

As we know TV is an accurate measure of the downward spiral of civilisation, and we are still braced for Monkey Tennis small screen debut (note: It didn't strike me when I first thought about it but Gordon Ramsay has actually brought Cooking In Prison to TV). In that spirit, brace yourself for:

Drunk Horseracing 

It's an Atos Knockout (1st prize - 8 weeks unpaid labour in Poundland) 

Don't Tell The Relatives (stupid men handpicked by BBC3 are given a funeral parlour to run)

Don't Tell The Owners (ditto, but for a dog walking service) 

Don't Tell The Regulatory Authorities (the same, but for banks) 

Whatever Happened to Dad's Army? 

Tightly Scripted American Comedy Import About Twenty-Somethings With Snappy Comebacks (on E4 because there's just not enough) 

Celebrity CAT Scan 

Celebrity Dogging 

Celebrity Exhumations 

Pimp My Wheelie Bin 

Muslamic Eye for the Racist Guy 

Ku Klux Makeover 

EDL Cribs 

Brass Eye - the musical 

Respect MPs Say the Funniest Things 

Republicans vs Science

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.

Bitter, moi?

Utter disaster reigns across the planet. Humanity is all but destroyed. Nuclear fallout is fast approaching. The last three humans are gathered together in an empty street discussing what to do. They are a socialist, an anarchist and a Labour Party hack.

The socialist says:

"We're up against it but we have to fight. We must find food and build some sort of shelter before the fallout begins. The quicker we work the better our chances will be".

But the anarchist disagrees:

"This is nonsense, we need to take direct action against the cloud. I'll stand behind you two and chuck stuff at it".

The Labour Party hack sighs:

"What ultra-left nonsense; the pair of you! How can you consider taking action when we haven't even concluded negotiations with the cloud?"

There is no agreement. The trio repair different parts of street. The socialist goes searching for food in the various bombed out houses, the anarchist meanwhile starts burning piles of newspapers. The Labour Party hack departs altogether but returns an hour later with good news, feeling pleased with himself after booking a suite in a nearby abandoned hotel, ideal for further talks. But, alas, he looks up and sees it's too late, the cloud is about to break... The Labour Party hack then has an idea. He goes up to the anarchist, who's still burning stuff:

"Hey anarchist, I've got an idea".

He explains the idea to the anarchist, whispering, even though there's no one to overhear. Moments later the pair call the socialist out:

"Hey socialist, over here. We've got something to show you".

The socialist is reluctant, the nuclear rain is about to fall, but is eventually persuaded to come over to his comrades. The anarchist and the hack then bludgeon the socialist to death.

As the first drops of scaling, radioactive water fall from the sky, the Labour Party hack, chewing on a piece of the dead socialist, remarks to the anarchist:

"This is it, this is truly the end. Such a shame it had to end this way".

"Yeah" agrees the anarchist, face wet with gore, "but at least we didn't let the SWP hijack our movement".

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.