ASBOs, power and local Tories
Some young people having a chat out in the fresh air and not just eating chips and using their computer
So ASBOs are on their way out after 13 years of ’Do they work or don’t they?’ and ‘Is individual civil liberty more important than group well-being?’.
On balance, I’m glad they’re going, because although the latter question is a pertinent enough one in any city, town and village, its reduction to those dichotomous terms loses sight of the power structures that lie behind the execution of at least some ASBOs.
But it is only ‘on balance’ that I’m glad.
ASBOs can, when they become part of the ‘governance structure’ in neighbourhoods, be as much about the power to tell people how to live their lives as about stopping behaviour which really impinges upon other residents’ well-being.
After all, young people standing around in a street late at night talking to each other, using colourful language, is a lauded cultural aspect of Las Ramblas, Barcelona.
And I wonder why the picture above, copied from Alan Johnson’s Comment is Free piece this morning (Matt Cardy/Getty images), is used by the Guardian. The young people seem to be having a chat, just like I do sometimes when I meet people at the playground after school, and I never thought I deserved an ASBO.
That’s not to say that there isn’t real anti-social behaviour which does affect other people’s lives signficantly, and this needs to be dealt with appropriately through the development of generally accepted social boundaries, agreement on which should come from all ‘sides’ in neighbourhoods, such that young people do not become victims of newly legitimized police or civilian vigilante justice under the goverment’s new policing-by-community plans.
In this respect, the idea of the ‘community organiser’ whose job it is to facilitate just such agreements is an attractive one, but one which I suspect is likely to remain an aspiration as these 5,000 community organisers – if they ever do appear – are drawn straight into the existing culture of control that has developed around ASBOs. My fear is that we’ll actually end up in a worse place than before, with informal sanctions against young people backed by the policing authorities and whatever judicial rights there were in the ASBO process lost to the (mostly) young people concerned lost along the way.
Even so, I’m glad ASBOs are going from my area (West Lancashire), not just because of the neighbourhood power structure issues I’ve identified above, or because it removes the ‘badge of honour’ dilemma for young people, but because of the ‘just look how hard we are’ abuse my Tory local authority has made of a process that has legitimately been called into question, but which was not established so that rightwing men in suits could parade in public their power and disdain for those less fortunate than them.
Eighteen months ago, this issue came out at No.1 in my Top Twenty Tory Travesties of 2008 in my local blog:
And at number one, for sheer callousness, for sheer insensitivity for the lives real people have to live, things must take a darker turn, darker even than the catalogue of deliberate betrayal mixed with incompetence set out above.
I’ve not blogged about this yet, because to be honest I felt a bit sick when I first read what I read in the paper, and I’ve left it till I could try and look at it from a small remove. It still makes me feel sick, but here goes…..
I refuse on principle to link to the newspaper article itself, as that would provide personal details again, while I am arguing that they should have never have been splashed all over a paper in the first place.
However, it concerns a child, aged 16, given a long term ASBO. The actual paper carried a big picture of the girl. Some of acts of anti-social behaviour which led to the ASBO were committed in previous years, when she was less than 16. Yet the paper, basing its coverage on a Council press release, gives all her personal details, and carries gloating quotes from a Conservative councillor about how great their actions have been.
An ASBO is a civil matter, brought by the District Council. Had the girl in fact been convicted of criminal offences, my understand of English law is that her identity would have been protected until the point of conviction.
In this case she has not been convicted of any crime. Yet, because it’s an ASBO, the Council is allowed to do what it wants, and it takes great pleasure in doing just that. Now compare this Council reaction to a civil matter disposed of in court to the 100s of actual criminal acts that the Leader of the Council says has been perpetrated in the Tawd Valley (see No. 4 of this list), but over which, and over the consequences of which the Council now has apparently no control!
An ASBO is one thing, and perhaps justified in this case – I don’t know enough to comment – and I am certainly not seeking to belittle the effect her ‘anti-social’ actions may have had on neighbours. But remember again, we are not dealing with criminal act here in the legal sense - no criminal charges were brought, as far as I’m aware.
So is the Council’s reaction commensurate when compared to its shoulder shrug of indifference to 100s of ‘criminal acts’ carried out in its District? I don’ t think so.
Are we in fact dealing with absurdly ’macho’ behaviour by a vile Conservative Council unable to do its proper job properly, towards a girl who may be no angel, but whose life may be ruined by the press attention? Is that pretty sick? Yes, that’s exactly what it is.
And that, therefore, is number one travesty in my book.
Because lives count, because reality counts, because serving residents properly counts. All the rest, West Lancashire District Conservative Council, is froth, and you have much to be ashamed of about your performance in 2008.
I wonder what hypocrisies these local Tory thugs will come out with now.
(See also good contributions from Paul Sagar and Salman at The Third Estate on this matter.
So Clegg’s a liar AND an idiot
Tories, LibDems: They all look the same to me
So Nick Clegg has been lying about what advice he received, or didn’t, from Mervyn King about how to deal with public finances.
Back in June he defended his party’s volte-face on cuts in an interview:
“Our view has shifted,” accepts Clegg. “To be fair to us, it shifted because the world around us changed.” He claims as his alibi “the complete belly-up implosion in Greece”, which made it imperative to demonstrate to the markets that the coalition would make an early start on deficit reduction. Another influence was “a long conversation a day or two after the government was formed” with Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England. “He couldn’t have been more emphatic. He said: ‘If you don’t do this, then because of the deterioration of market conditions it will be even more painful to do it later.’?”
But it’s not just Mervyn King who, it is now revealed, wouldn’t say what Clegg was so desperate for him to say that the Coalition’s fixers begged King to call Clegg on a Saturday morning.
Those very same markets he made such great play of understanding didn’t agree with him either.
Here’s Bill Gross, co-founder of PIMCO and probably the most influential bond trader in the world, just a few days before Clegg’s conversion to keeping the markets happy at all costs.
Fiscal tightening, while conservative in intent, leads to lower and lower growth in the short run. Tougher sovereign budgets produce government worker layoffs, pay cuts, reduced pension benefits and a drag on consumption and the ability of the private sectorto accept an attempted hand-off from fiscal authorities. Recession becomes the fait accompli, and the deficit/GDP ratio moves ever higher because of skyrocketing risk premiums and a plunging GDP denominator. In many cases therefore, it may not be possible for a country to escape a debt crisis by reducing deficits!
………For sovereigns with debt in their own fiat currency, there is not the operational constraint that you and I face. After all, they can go to the backyard and just pick some bills off their money tree – something we can’t do unless we want to go to jail.Remember, many countries like the U.S. or the U.K. can just print money to meet creditor demands. After all, the only financial obligation of government in a fiat currency system is the payment of more fiat money. This is a confidence game then. Creditors will only accept more fiat money from the debtor if they believe that the money represents good relative future value (i.e. when debt repayment occurs and where value is relative to other currencies or real assets at that time).
So while there is no operational constraint on government because of the electronic printing presses, there is an effective constraint in the form of debt and currency revulsion and price instability (large measures of deflation or inflation). On countries like Greece or Portugal in the Eurozone, the operational constraint is a lot more real than it is on the U.K. because of currency union.
Labour Councils and Cuts: What can be done?
Richard Watts has an interesting piece up on LabourList today, discussing how Labour Councils should respond to the Governments spending cuts. I’m sure that Labour Groups around the country have been discussing this for some time, but I’m glad Richard is discussing a possible approaches more publicly, after all, cuts to local government will be just as much of an issue as cuts to centralised infrastructure, and the Party, and the broader movement needs to contemplate how this will be handled.
It’s interesting to consider the role of Labour councils in this process of savage spending cuts. The Party has a strong presence in Local Government, Labour Councillors possibly have more of an opportunity to limit the effects of cuts, than members of the Parliamentary Labour Party do. Labour MP’s aren’t setting the terms from opposition, and lack any real input on the agenda, whereas Labour Councillors, as Richard points out, are the ones making the final decisions in many areas, and as such can exercise a certain amount of discretion.
Now I know a lot of lefties aren’t going to like this idea, but we must accept that Labour Councils are going to have to make cuts, and we should be ready to contribute to a debate about how we can implement cuts forced on us by central government, whilst attempting to limit the effects on the most vulnerable.
Now of course there are calls from some sections of the left for some kind of “no surrender” policy from local councils, along the lines of that attempted by Militant in Liverpool;
There are some, largely in groups linked to the Socialist Workers Party, calling on councils to ‘resist’ the cuts by setting illegal budgets. But along this road madness lies. Aside from the illegality of setting an unbalanced budget, local authorities doing this would very quickly just run out of money; services would collapse and the losers would be the most vulnerable who depend most on council services. If councils run out of money to pay for meals on wheels, it won’t be middle class Trots that go hungry.
Whilst I’m not keen on the “middle class Trots” jibe, I agree with Richard’s point that setting illegal rates are bound to fail, both financially and politically.
Opposition is all well and good, and I don’t want to give the impression I am discouraging any kind of protest. But we must accept that these cuts are happening, and occupations, marches etc. are only going to help weaken the Government over a period of time, as opposed to actually reversing the initial decisions. Perhaps I’m being pessimistic, I’m sure that’s what more Militant Comrades will say anyway, but it’s what I think.
It will also be the responsibility of local Labour Parties to make sure the people in their areas know who is responsible for these cuts to services that are coming, we can’t let the Tories shift the blame to local government!
So how might Labour Councils protect the most vulnerable as I have said above? How do you decide what is more important when the choice is the local library or funded leisure activities for unhealthy kids?
And obviously the only problem isn’t the loss of services, but loss of jobs too. The economy in some areas completely depends on the Council for employment, either directly or indirectly, and sadly again, Job losses just can’t be completely ruled out!
This reminds me of a story my Grandma told me recently, about her time working for the local Council during the 80′s recession. The local leader of the Labour Council Roy Oldham, (who sadly has just passed away) gathered all the Council’s employees at a local football ground, and discussed the possibility of people taking a pay cut as opposed to redundancy. The staff appreciated his candour, and agreed to lose a small amount of their monthly wages, on the condition it would be repaid to them during better times.
This is an example of the kind of things labour councils could be doing to, and we shouldnt shy away from discussing such things in the interest of the greater good.
But no one approach will be appropriate in every area, and now is the time to start considering what we exactly can be done.
Is John Redwood as stupid as his blog?
I know Sunder Katwala has the theory about Rod Liddle that he simply writes very stupid stuff in order to see what they can get away with.
I think this post by John Redwood, attacking Labour and the sole Green’s parliamentary opposition to the Academies Bill on the basis that socialist dislike the ‘freedom’ that it brings to schools, may fall into the same piss-take bracket. Redwood must be amused to see his trolls pile in e.g.
Socialists dislike freedom because given a choice many, if not most, choose things other than socialism. So as keepers of the ‘one true faith’ they feel entitled to force socialism on people ‘for their own good’. Ultimately with the 4am knock if necessary……………
Pitiful.
But let’s take Redwood at face value, and assume he’s actually being serious.
Is he really trying to claim the coalition is bringing ‘freedom’ to the education system, without bothering to explain or even mention the fact that this ‘freedom’ is only being accorded to those schools which have ‘outstanding’ Ofsted reports?
Does he really think anyone, other than his half-wit readers, will take this ‘enabling’ legislation as anything other than the development of a two tier system?
Has he never heard, intelligent bloke that he’s supposed to be, of the ‘Polya Urn’ path dependency process, whereby ‘each step along a particular path produces consequences that increase the relative attractive of that path for the next round to become ‘a powerful cycle of self-reinforcing activity’ (Paul Pierson (2004) Politics in Time p17-18).
Does he really not understand that, once the ‘outstanding’ schools head down the academy route because they already have the most resources and most sought after teachers, that more resources will start to flow towards them – more children, the best teachers, the parents able to pay through the nose to live in the catchment area, the parents able to pay their way in – and away from those schools left behind at stage one?
Does he really grasp none of that?
Does he really think what’s being proposed is ‘freedom’?
Perhaps he is that special kind of intelligent-stupid only right wingers can be.
But I’m here to help berks like Redwood.
In my next post, I’ll tell Redwood my own experience of what freedom in education really is – the freedom to work together in solidarity in the interests of all children.
Just a little story from my time as Chair of Finance at a primary school, but with more ‘freedom’ in it than Redwood, the narrow-minded tosser that he is, could ever conceive.
Why I’m supporting Ed Balls for Leader
Oops, how did his picture get in there?
This is a post about why I’m supporting Ed Balls for Labour leader.
Well mostly.
It’s also a post about why my ‘Why I’m supporting Ed Balls for Labour leader’ post didn’t get posted at Ed Balls’ Ed Balls for Labour leader website, despite it being specifically requested by the Ed Balls for Labour leader website team, when they saw on twitter that I had gone to my CLP meeting on behalf of the Ed Balls for Labour leader campaign.
The official reason given for the non-posting of what I sent them, and which I now reproduce here, is that it had been ‘manic’, and that there wasn’t time.
Believe that if you will. I am inclined to believe that my post was not put up because it failed to fawn over Ed Balls enough, and argued the case for Ed Balls as Labour leader on the basis that he’d be, erm, the best Labour leader of the shorlisted candidates.
Personally, I think it’s a shame that Ed Balls, like all those other candidates, should have chosen to make up his campaign team with people who are desperate to fawn over him, and shelter him from criticism, however well-meaning.
But, heh, maybe I’m just an idealist, who thinks senior politicians should really engage with grassroots members when they’ve said in their campaign literature that they’re really keen to engage with grassroots members.
That is, I hasten to add, not just a problem with Ed Balls’ campaign.
Overall, despite the fact that his campaign is as disappointing as all the others’ in respect of openness to ordinary members’ views and contributions, I continue to think Ed Balls would be the best opposition leader (note, Tom Harris the smartarse, how I choose my words carefully).
I also think Ed Balls is unlikely to win, and my support is also geared to encouraging him as best I can to develop a model of political economy which induces more likely winners to think this aspect of their campaign through, as well as encouraging more open debate about economic alternatives if, as I hope as a second best, Ed Balls becomes Shadow Chancellor.
Anyway, here’s what I wrote for Ed Balls’ site. His webteam have said they’ll link to it when I post it. Yeah, right………………
Why I’m supporting Ed Balls for leader
I’m one of the awkward squad. Determinedly leftwing, suspicious of all leader types, difficult to please, I know what I want from the Labour party, and I want it yesterday.
So why am I here on Ed Balls site, talking up a bloke from who was at the heart of New Labour experiment in neoliberalism, kowtowing to the City, ignoring the needs of the working class, stripping its party bare?
Well, I’m here because I know a battler when I see one. I’m a battler too, and I respect battlers, even the ones I don’t agree with. Except Tories.
Just like I’ll never forget the look on my local Tories’ faces when I took their safest West Lancashire seat off them, I know Ed Balls will never forget looking Gove in the eye and making him quiver. Ed Balls clearly loathes Tories as much as I do.
So I’m backing Ed Balls now because he’s the best candidate for the job in hand at the moment.
That job is not being Prime Minister; it’s being leader of Her Majesty’s utterly bolshie opposition.
If Ed Balls proves later on he’s up to the PM job, then that’s fine, but it’s not the job he’s applying for now.
The election may be five years away. I don’t want a leader who’s very good at pulling things together to win a distant election, but rubbish at working with the wider labour movement to resist what the Tories and their mates have in hand for us right now.
Five years is a long time, and we need a leader of the party who’ll lead the fight. Choosing one who doesn’t fight, who doesn’t help co-ordinate the resistance, would be a betrayal of the people we’re supposed to represent.
The gainsayers tell me that Ed Balls has only looked like a ‘fighter’ because he’s had the Academies Bill and BSF to get his teeth into.
I don’t buy that.
Yes, the opportunities have been there for him to show his mettle, but he’s shown it. His rivals have simply not done as well on the Tories’ outrageous health plans, foreign policy gaffes, or wider plans for economic vandalism.
Ed Balls has also shown the best understanding of where we should be on the deficit. He knows his stuff about how cutting spending now will take demand out of the economy at the worst possible time, and he’s prepared to stick it to the Tories straight on this.
He knows, I think, that we have to make it clear where we stand on cuts, and that half-baked approaches which accept the cuts are necessary at all doesn’t make us ‘credible’; they make us look like would-be Tories who aren’t quite up to the job of being Tories.
Frankly, he’s got some way to go to clarify his vision of political economy, but he’s further ahead than the rest.
Finally, Ed Balls has committed himself to a proper review of party and labour movement democracy, and to listening to lowly comrades like me. While the details of his thinking are yet to emerge, this commitment to a root and branch review goes much further than some of the tokenism or patronizing sentiment offered up by his rivals. Again, he’s got a distance to go, but he’s going in the right direction.
I’m a hard man to please, and Ed Balls has got a way to go still before his redemption from the sins of his association with some of the worst of New Labour is gained.
But I believe in second chances, and Ed Balls has earned it.
Ed Miliband: Dangerous Revolutionary?
I’ve just read this post over at Max Atkinson’s blog, which admittedly I would have never encountered were it not for an eye-catching tweet containing the link, which insinuated that if elected, Ed Miliband would take the Labour Party back to the dark days of 80′s class warfare.The main point being made in the post is best summed up in the following paragraph;
Now that Ed Miliband has won the backing of the big unions, whose support Ed Balls had been hoping for, the question is: can Labour afford to back Ed Miliband on his journey back to 1979 and the wonderful world of old Labour?
The implication, that Ed Miliband is some sort of militant figure one might expect to find on the hard left, wo is comparable to the likes of Michael Foot or Tony Benn, is simply laughable, and is something I’ve heard repeated several times recently.
After showing a 5 second long clip of Ed in which he says, “I’m standing because of my values, values my parents taught me” Max go’s on to say;
Although I know nothing at all about his mother’s values, I do know that his father, the late Ralph Miliband, was a militant Marxist and a highly influential member of a generation of sociological theorists who (in my opinion) contributed towards undermining the credibility of a once respectable discipline
Well Max, his mother said Jon Cruddas would be her preferred candidate in the contest if that helps at all…
Quality of Ralph Miliband’s work aside (which I would recommend by the way), there is nothing about Ed Miliband’s ideas on the practical approach to politics, which would lead one to believe he is following in his fathers ideological footsteps. Indeed quite the opposite is true. One of Ralph’s key works, Parliamentary Socialism: A study of the politics of Labour, he questioned the possibility of advancing the Socialist cause through parliamentary politics, as opposed to more militant mobilisation of the working class favoured by his father. So we can safely assume that in this regard Ed isn’t following in his fathers footsteps. Perhaps his mothers more centric, Crudassite tendencies balanced him out a bit!
This kind of lazy, sensationalist analysis bores me. The fact that anyone to the Left of Tony Blair is instantly labelled as deluded, unelectable etc. is a common knee jerk response from anyone who views center ground politics as the Holy Grail of modern political thought, the expression of which sometimes borders on McCarthyism.
So besides the fact that at least one half of his moral inspiration was a Marxist academic, is there any other evidence that Ed is the Revolutionary Class warrior some seem to view him as?
The main philosophical points of Ed’s campaign, that there is more to society than the market, that the state has a responsibility to protect the most vulnerable from the excesses this market produces, and that greater social equality leads to a more cohesive society. All pretty common amongst the left of center, Social Democratic lexicon. As Comrade Doran quite eloquently articulated it recently he is a ”Moderate Radical“.
Indeed, when the leadership candidates were asked at a recent hustings event, “are you a Socialist – and what does the word mean to you?”, Ed’s answer certainly seemed to confirm his commitment to Social Democratic Reformism;
“Being a socialist for me is about being willing to criticise capitalism – and saying capitalism produces many injustices, which politics must tackle. It is not about abolishing capitalism but it is about changing it”
It often annoys me how people who claim to want to see “change” in British politics are so wiling to denounce anything that appears to step even slightly outside the current status quo, and to do it with such half-baked observations as this is even worse.
The whole debate about center ground politics in Britain, and more specifically the urgent need to hold on to it, is often distorted by highly opinionated, stubborn points of view, that essentially end up with two sides who disagree shouting long-held, fiercely rigid dogmas at one another, bringing into question its right to even be called a debate anymore.
That in mind, I don’t have any desire to get into the “center ground debate” today, which Carl decided to start some discussion on last night. I just wanted to point out how bloody stupid it was to try to imply Ed Miliband might be the next Tony Benn.
Wikileaks’ war logs and the true extent of our disempowerment
The leaking of some 90,000 military files, detailing US and coalition prosecution of the war in Afghanistan, presents a stark lesson in the extent to which our government is not accountable for its actions.
Reading the Guardian this morning, there were several key points that contributed to this. The capricious treatment of the relatives of civilians killed by coalition forces is high on my list.
The war logs document that occasionally relatives would be paid some sort of compensation for the death of a family member; in other cases they were ignored or bullied into silence.
Assassination as a tactic employed by our government should also concern us. The matter of its legality to one side, it puts an enormous amount of power into the hands of people who aren’t accountable. It’s done in secret. The only reason we’re finding out about it – or finding out about the number of spectacularly botched attempts at it, often with the cost of many civilian lives – is because someone broke the law to bring us this information.
How can we talk about democracy and accountability when we’re killing people in secret?
Exposé after exposé has documented how the intelligence and PR arms of the military have tried to control the flow of information. The clear evidence of misinformation provided by the activities of US Task Force 373 (and a lesser UK equivalent) surely raises questions about how the people of this country can make an informed decision on the war, which is (according to the democratic theory) supposed to filter out through elections.
It is my firm belief that we cannot trust our government to wage any war – and that therefore we should never go to war so long as government and its executive arms are the preserve of a narrow clique, hedged around with secrecy.
As Duncan points out yesterday, as regards the death of Ian Tomlinson at the hands of the police (and as is the case in deaths-in-custody or deaths during police restraints too), our media and politicians are all too ready to offer justification and explain away official mistakes, to dismiss the idea of blame and accountability. It’s no different in war abroad than in the policing of political dissent at home.
One of the Trotskyist reasons for opposing an endorsement of Chamberlain’s government and its participation in World War II was that Trotsky and others believed that the British ruling class would capitulate if they could get terms favourable to British imperialism and capitalism. The bottom line was that, despite all the rhetoric about ‘national unity’, the ruling class was out for its own interests and would interpret the national interest however it liked.
We haven’t moved on terribly far from that position.
There’s no doubt that our armed forces are propping up an oppressive, dictatorial, nepotistic regime in Afghanistan; talk of peace with the Taliban surely provides the last kick in the teeth to anyone who genuinely believed the US-UK coalition were invading for truth, justice and the American way. They’re ignoring civilian deaths, condoning assassination and deliberately misinforming domestic media.
Faced with a gap between reality and rhetoric, our governments (whether Democratic or Republican in the US, Labour or Conservative in the UK) have chosen to interpret their original mission statement to suit their immediate needs. Bugger democracy, or women’s rights; a puppet government of whatever political orientation will do nicely. Never mind not moving on from World War II, we haven’t moved on from Lord Auckland.
Whether one thinks in terms of class, cliques, power elites or another system of sociological division, the government is self-interested. Labour quite happily sat on most of these secrets and the Conservatives have, in a stunning display of political cowardice, refused to comment. William Hague simply stayed on message: “We are working hard with our allies in Afghanistan on improving security on the ground, in increasing the capacity of the Afghan government.”
This makes sense. Answering questions about these problems highlights that actually the Tories have been behind the invasions from day one, and might open the door to more serious questions about what the hell we’re doing in Afghanistan at all. Apart from letting Pakistan’s intelligence service try and play the Taliban off against India, or destabilising northern Pakistan and extending the reach of Islamic extremism in Central Asia.
And what can we do about any of this? The answer is not a lot – and that enrages me.
Foreign policy news stories – whether about the use of chemical weapons at Fallujah in Iraq, about the assassination of trades unionists by groups supplied by the coalition, the oppression of women by the same groups or the brazen incompetence of the armed wings of the pro-coalition Afghan government – arrive, have an effect on opinion polls and then leave. Their practical effect is essentially zero.
NGOs like Human Rights Watch will appear in the newspapers to denounce the behaviour of the coalition armed forces. Opinion pieces will be fielded by the political Right to the effect that we’re fighting against an enemy that’s much worse (as though moral relativism is any justification). The majority of people will quietly be disgusted, David Cameron will make some platitudinous remark about troops coming home and the status quo will continue.
Disempowerment doesn’t get much more complete than that.
Justice for Ian Tomlinson
Here’s a quick thought experiment.
As expected, the counter-demo to the English Defence League march in Bradford on August 28th turns ugly as Asian youths and anti-fascist protestors attack police officers trying to kettle them.
Protestors break through police lines and a masked demonstrator shoves a retreating police officer hard. The officer hits the ground heavily and is later pronounced dead in hospital.
This same demonstrator has been caught on film hitting the officer with a wooden banner by a police Forward Intelligence Team moments earlier.
A spokesperson for the protestors then releases a statement blaming undercover police for instigating the violence and attacking the officer in question and also falsely claiming that other demonstrators were hit by tear gas as they tried to resuscitate him.
Careful examination of the footage taken of the build up to the demo quickly reveals the identity of the masked demonstrator.
What do you think the police and the Crown Prosecution Service would have done in this case?
Can you imagine any outcome other than the swift arrest, prosecution and conviction of the demonstrator for murder or manslaughter?
That’s enough of the thought experiment, it’s pretty obvious what I’m getting at. It wasn’t a police officer who was killed, it was just a bloke on his way back from work and apparently no-one was responsible for his death.
The whole shameful episode is documented succinctly here. To add to that, Deborah Coles, Co-Director of INQUEST, says:
The eyes of the world will be looking on with incredulity as yet again a police officer is not facing any criminal charges after what is one of the most clear-cut and graphic examples of police violence that has led to death.
Some people may have been surprised by this outcome but presumably not anyone familiar with the history of such cases in this country. No police officer has ever been convicted of manslaughter committed whilst on duty. However, this case does stand out because the offence committed is so blatant and, if the police had their way, there would have been no investigation of the incident at all.
This outcome is a signal to the police that they can do anything they want while in uniform (unless they harm animals) and there will no consequences.
What’s equally depressing is the lack of response to this anticipated outcome other than resignation.
Ian Bone reports a dismal turnout of 30 people at a demonstration outside Scotland Yard following the announcement that no charges will be brought. There’s a picket of the Department of Public Prosecutions planned for Friday as well.
Beyond poorly attended, easily-ignored demos involving the victims family plus the usual suspects what else will a campaign against them involve? An open letter to The Guardian perhaps (perhaps Tony Benn could sign it?) that’s a certainty, what else?
Paul Stott has some excellent suggestions for a different kind of campaign:
Ian Tomlinson was a Millwall fan – and was wearing a t shirt of the club’s greatest ever play – Neil Harris when was killed. He died trying to leave his place of work to watch the England versus Ukraine match on TV. I have little interest in the usual miscarriage of justice campaign, based on angry letters to the Guardian and small, ever decreasing numbers of the usual suspects protesting about the police’s actions. Such a campaign will lose.
I would like to see a campaign for justice for Ian Tomlinson run by his family and supported staunchly by Millwall supporters, and by England supporters. Lets make it clear to police officers who attend the New Den or Wembley that Ian has not been forgotten, and that they are not welcome in the area because of their past actions. Only when an officer is in court charged with killing Ian should that campaign end.
Is that possible?
Ian Tomlinson’s family aren’t giving up. Details for the Campaigning Fighting Fund can be found here.
BBC loses the plot on the deficit argument
Five Live Drive presenters
I do not quite believe what I’m hearing on Radio 5 Live this afternoon, and what accompanies it on the BBC’s Have your Say website.
Here’s a taster from the Have Your Say website:
MPs will be breaking up for the summer tomorrow, 27 July, but when they return they will still have to deal with the £156 billion deficit which looms over Britain.
This week, BBC Radio 5 live Drive is looking for your big ideas to drive down the deficit. Today the focus is on home savings, including on health, education and local services.
And here is my Mr Bloody Angry of Skelmersdale email fired from the hip on hearing the radio prattle about, including constant reference to the ‘overdraft’, and a totally uncontested interview with Matthew Sinclair of the TaxPayers Alliance.
I am frankly astonished that the BBC, supposedly a politically balanced organisation, is starting a ‘competition’ on Five Live and on its ‘Have your Say’ website about how to ‘deal with the £156 billion deficit which looms over Britain’.
Is this an attempt to save your licence fee by doing whatever the Coalition government wants you to do, and even pre-empting it?
There is a perfectly valid argument that there the deficit is not ‘looming’ at all, and that we do not need to ‘deal with’ the deficit with either spending cuts or tax rises. There is indeed a very strong argument that making these cuts and increasing taxes now will widen the deficit.
I recommend strongly that you desist from this childish nonsense, which equates the UK economy with a piggy bank, and get on with reporting economics and business properly, and with due balance.
As I write, this shite is still going on, and is due to take place all week. I simply do not remember a time when the BBC showed such astonishing bias and lack of editorial judgment.
This is the email I’m about to send to the Labour leader candidates:
Dear Ed/Ed/David/Diane/Andy
You may not be aware yet of the outrageously biased coverage taking place all this week on Radio 5 Live (Drive) about ‘dealing with the ‘£156 billion deficit which looms over Britain’.
My blog on the matter is here [link to be added], where you will find my immediate email response to this outrageous bias from the BBC.
I do not know if my email will get air time, but I do know that what is needed is a response from Labour leadership candidates to challenge what the BBC is doing here, and to ask relevant questions about whether this series is nothing more than an attempt to bribe the government into maintaining the BBC licence fee.
Update 1830 hrs: The BBC interviewer just interviewed Matthew Sinclair of the TPA again! Uncontested, again! I continue to be astonished.
Bill and Warren’s excellent adventure
Clever Australian Bloke
As patient TCF readers will know, I’ve become quite interested in recent months about what Modern Monetary Theory might offer the British Left, and the Labour party, in the way of a different ‘narrative’ for our political economy, one which can challenge the foolish but absolutely dominant narrative of the Coalition about the need for the deficit to be tackled as soon as possible.
Gary, from If You Tolerate This mputs this well:
Knowing very little about the economic theories being discussed, I would just like to make some comments about the ‘Household economics’ narrative the Tories have adopted, because it is something that hugely pisses me off.
Like a lot of right-wing arguments, it is short, snappy and sounds as though it makes sense (but really doesn’t). These are the main reasons that it has caught on – it is something that people can relate to very easily because it ties in with their own experiences, and it is very easy to remember and parrot.
The Left needs to learn from this, and we need to find ways to make our economic arguments resonate with ordinary people.
I cover similar ground here in reponse to Barney’s criticism’s of us alway droning on about MMT.
So yes, I’ll probably be blogging a bit more about the political narrative aspects of all this, because to date comments on everything I’ve written has tended to get dragged towards the key, but for my not that key, question of whether MMT can deal satisfactorily with the ‘inflation question’.
If you want that kind of detailed question explored, this is probably not the place to do it best, as this is a political economy blog with the emphasis on the political, not the other way round.
You’re better off going over to Duncan’s Economic Blog, especially has he has promised us (me?) his sceptical thoughts on MMT over there, and to blogs like Credit Write Down, run by a US finance analyst who is a self-confessed ’Austrian’ but also declares an interest in the logics of MMT.
There’s also John Authers’ (Lex from the FT) new book ‘The Fearful Rise of the Markets’, which talks briefly of the rise of the ‘oil standard’ as a replacement to the gold standard, which is worthy of investigation.
The ‘MMT community’ is very active in the blogopshere and is likely to respond to the detailed analysis and criticism coming from sceptical but economically literate blogs like these.
This kind of engagement will be more helpful to people interested in the detail of MMT/post-Keynesian theory than has been say, the contribution of people like Tom Hickey has been at TCF; while it’s been welcome, it has tended to be a bald re-iteration of MMT analysis rather than a detailed engagement on the contested areas.
However, my (and Adam’s) focus is likely to remain on the way in which MMT’s focus on a) deficit spending as an economically healthy phenomenon in fiat currencies; b) full employment as the ‘hook’ for economic management, might be developed as a a popular leftwing alternative to the current ‘deficit fetishism’ and all the cuts that come from that.
We are likely to be less concerned with the differences between MMT and Krugmanesque Keynesian approaches because, to a large extent, they end up at the same place as regards fiscal policy in the current environment. As Krugman himself says in his debate with MMT academic James Galbraith:
Now, Jamie and I are, I think, in complete agreement about what we should be doing now. So we’re talking theory, not practice.
So while I’m not overly concerned with (or capable of arguing) the finer detail of contested economic theory, I’m more than happy to promote MMT as a very good counter to the current narrative spilling out of the Coalition – that we have no choice but to cut, that cutting is just commonsense etc. etc..
My abiding concern is that the British Left, without a credible alternative to hook its campaign to, is being easily divided and ruled by the Right.
On the one hand, there are those in Labour, like David Milband, who say we must cut the deficit, just slower and when growth is embedded. This, frankly, is a rubbish strategy of opposition; it simply makes Labour look ‘Tory-lite’ – would be deficit hawks who just haven’t got the courage of the real deficit hawks.
On the other hand, there are those on the Left, of the type criticised by Paul S recently, who feel morally bound to oppose all cuts, but in terms of the macro-economics find that stance hard to justify, and then fall back on into an all-too-vague and unconvincing narrative of ‘their crisis, not ours’.
That may resonate well enough within the committed Left, but to outsiders it can look like an avoidance of all responsibility; the Right is very happy to portray the Left as a bunch of irresponsible idealists and wasters, and they’ve become pretty good at it.
I’m happy enough, therefore, whatever my ongoing doubts about the operationality of MMT, and my sense that it’s not yet politicised enough to give it real credibility, to do my bit promoting it as an alternative narrative in the UK.
It was interesting therefore to get an email the other day from Professor Bill Mitchell, one of the main advocates and academic forces behind MMT (based in New South Wales), offering to drop into the UK on a coming tour of Europe. He proposes to do both a ‘teach-in’ for interested economists and politicians, and to meet with any of the Labour leadership candidates who want to see him.
Warren Mosler, a principal US advocate of MMT and a close colleague of Bill’s, has also emailed to say he’d be up for it.
The email is copied in below, and I wonder what readers’ initial take is on this. Would they be keen to hear what Bill/Warren have to say about MMT in relation to the UK economy/Eurozone?
I’ll be putting the idea via the New Political Economy Network to see if they could host such a ‘teach-in’.
Here’s the email.
Dear Paul
I refer to engagement over the potential for the development of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as an ‘alternative model’ of economic management for the UK, focused on full employment, and its role in combatting the deficit fetishism and economic vandalism now being engineered by the incumbent UK government.
I can confirm that I will be happy to come over to the UK at a mutually convenient time to discuss the matter with any of the Labour leadership candidates who choose to do so, and to participate at any event you and Labour colleagues can set up to promote MMT concepts and economic policy in the UK.
As a matter of practicality, I will be in London from September 18-21 (inclusive) but could also do a day trip anytime before the September 29 (I will be in Maastricht in that period).
Warren Mosler and I can prepare an excellent joint workshop – 2 presentations with questions and answer if that would be of interest.
I think it would be excellent if you could organise a workshop on the weekend of September 18-19 – or perhaps the following weekend (I could come back to London via train). Perhaps a one-day Teach-In of the type we have been running in the US recently. We had a very successful event in Washington in April and more recently in Boston in late June.
Looking forward to receiving a positive response.
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