Clegg needs a pre-school education
Nick Clegg has announced the extension of free pre-school education to two year olds eligible for Free School Meals.
I’ll pass quickly over the fact that it was Clegg who made the announcement, not Gove. The Labour party should be seizing on that not just as evidence that Gove’s reputation is now beyond repair following his working over by Ed Balls, but also as evidence that the Coalition is rattled enough by the negative press of the last week or two to be bounced into, if you look at it carefully, quite a hurried announcement, in order to bolster the Lib Dems’ ‘fairness’ stock.
Any announcement of additional free provision is welcome, and I do recognise that there are still traces of real commitment to equality within the Lib Dem party, though most of that commitment has been washed away by the tide of needless devotion to austerity.
Unfortunately, though, this announcement only gets one cheer, because of the significant flaws in what is being planned.
The new plans for extension of provision are themselves an extension of the Labour government’s free provision for 20,000 two year olds, but with one important difference.
While the previous government’s additional funding was focused geographically on ‘disadvantaged communities’ in 63 pilot local authorities (see pages 11 &25/26), the new announcement ties free provision to Free School Meals eligibility.
This creates immediate problems, beyond the obvious one that Osborne has already announced that he’s scrapping Labour’s plan to extend Free School Meal eligibility to 500,000 low income families not in receipt of the benefits which currently provide such eligibility (and in so doing Osborne actually increases the ‘benefit trap’ by “£600 a year, equivalent to a penny rise in their income tax for each child”).
Even leaving this aside, and focusing on current Free School Meal eligible children, there are problems.
First, not ever family eligible for Free School Meals claim them, either because the bureaucratic process puts them off, or because of the well-established stigma associated with their receipt. The Child Poverty Action Group estimates that 20% of children eligible for free meals do not actually get them. The massive surge in unemployment and sudden deprivation we are now due, as a result of the government’s macroeconomic stupidity, will only increase this percentages, as families who have hitherto had no need to claim this area of entitlement remain either unaware of it or reluctant to take it up.
Second, there is the rather simple fact that two year olds have never been to school, and are not yet eligible for Free School Meals.
The government will therefore need to set up a new mechanism to draw forward the eligibility testing process (at least for children without older siblings) and to integrate this with a system of pre-school education provision which crosses the state, private and voluntary sectors, creating problems both for local authorities administering the scheme and for providers now expected to disaggregate claims to the local authority from fee payments from other families of two year olds.
The administrative problems the tax authorities may have had in deciding which higher rates taxpayers remained eligible for child benefit, had their been a semblance of fairness in Osborne’s announcement last week, would be small in comparison, and at least taken up by people used to dealing with such complexities, rather than by childcare providers who, frankly, have better things to do in already difficult times.
Third, and perhaps most pernicious of all, is that childcare providers will be asked to add to their capacity to cater for only a percentage of the possible additional number of children.
This might be ok, if it were not for the fact that current legislation requires very different staff to child ratios for two year old and three/four year olds (open pdf for details).
Two year olds need one staff member for every children, while three/four year olds need one for either every 8 or every 13 (depending on staff qualifications). Perhaps crazy, but true.
As a result, many childcare providers, including many that currently focus wholly on 3-4 year old pre-school education in morning only settings, will face a major problem. They may not be able to afford the additional staffing for a relatively small number of children, but may be required to do so by the administering local authority as part of their overall Nursery Edcuation Grant package, or feel that they have to in order to ensure the flow of two year olds into the three/four year old provision a year later (generally parents stick with provision they know and habve learned to trust).
At its most extreme, these new, perhaps well-intentioned plans may end up squeezing many childcare providers out of business, especially the smaller ones who relay heavily on the current Nursery Education Grant (insufficient though that is to cover costs for a proper high quality service).
The resources may then move towards the bigger ‘economy of scale’ providers (the big providers will generally not look commercially at a setting of less than 50 places), who frankly are often offer much lower quality of provision than the smaller schemes, and are often located near major workplaces, and not near where families on Free School Meals actually live (by definition, these families often have no workplace).
All in all then, I think the Coalition could well do to think through its proposals, perhaps discussing them first with people who actually understand the dynamics and detail of pre-school and childcare provision (declaration of interest: I run pre-school provision).
Perhaps the Coalition might even think about living up to its own rhetoric about localism for once, and devolve budgets to local authorities with no strings attached, and let them get on with delivering stuff that works.
But, let’s finish on a positive note. At least, whether through opposition pressure or because deep down the Lib Dems are actually serious about early years education, this is a start.
When Labour are back in power, we need – as Don Paskini said - to do it properly.
Choice cuts and consultation
Sometimes, you know, I think Tories fail to act logically.
The Tories at Lancashire County Council are planning to charge parents £380 per year for transport to and from faith schools, for children living two (under 8 years) or three (over 8 years) miles from that school. Currently this transport is free, as it is for children attending non-faith schools.
This is the defence by the Cabinet Member for Children and Schools:
Asking parents to contribute to the cost of travel to a faith school which is not their nearest school will enable us to save a significant amount of money, while still subsidising the service by more than half.
So let’s get this right, if parents CHOOSE to send their children somewhere other than their nearest school, they’ll be financially penalised for that choice.
Now what was it Michael Gove said? Oh yes:
We want to do everything possible where we can extend the choice that parents have – but we’re not talking about placing a burden on individual parents.
To be fair to Lancashire County Council, though, they did consult on the new policy of totally discriminatory charging.
A full 71 of the 4,472 people responding were in favour of the charge.
In Toryland, that’s a mandate.
Or maybe not………..Great work by our local MP Rosie Cooper, who has already wrung this out of Michael Gove in parliament:
Rosie Cooper (West Lancashire) (Lab): Will the Secretary of State please indicate the Government’s position on supporting parents in choosing denominational schools for their children? Would he oppose any measure that would reduce that choice-that is, local authorities charging a flat rate of £2 a day per child, which amounts to £180 that parents believe is a tax on faith? Lancashire county council is charging parents £2 a day per child for transport to go to a denominational school; does he approve of that sort of attitude?
Michael Gove: I am very interested in the case that the hon. Lady brings to my attention. In her constituency, in Skelmersdale and elsewhere, a great many people are benefiting from a Roman Catholic education. I would hate to see anyone unduly penalised for wanting their child to be educated in accordance with their faith, so I will look at the case she mentions.
I’m not too sure why Gove appears to think faith schools are exclusively Roman Catholic, but it’s still a welcome intervention forced by Rosie.
Voice and loyalty in the Labour party: a personal reflection
I’m quite attracted to the ‘middle-range theory’ of ‘Exit, Voice and Loyalty’ developed in the late 1960s by Albert O Hirschmann, not least because it provides an effective response in psycho-social terms to the unfounded ‘certainties’ of Hayek and all who came self-interestedly after him.
I think the essential dilemma that faces people in the context of an organisation about which they have concerns – whether to leave it or whether to have one’s say about those concerns, and how organisational loyalty plays its part – crystallises well the choices many rank and file political activists feel.
And the model sprang to mind when I received an email from my local paper, asking whether I ‘stand by’ the fairly colourful comments I made about Ed Miliband during the Labour leadership campaign.
The comments are now more than a month old, and it is mildly amusing that my local press has only just become aware of them, especially if they now sniff a story. I suspect they’ve only been noticed now because a well-read Tory blog has, I understand, linked to the post in question. But of course I recognise better than most that local papers are run on an absolute shoestring, and the journalists do not have time to read all my wise words, much as I’m sure they’d love to.
Below is my reply to the journalist’s enquiry, which I hope sums up some of inevitable tensions between the loyalty and voice elements of the model. It acts in part a response to a question put to me a while back by Carl Raincoat (which I never got round to answering), about how someone like me – an insignificance in party politics nationally but with some level of authority/responsiblity to the party at local level – judges when it is time to be loyal, and when it time to find my voice. (Oh, and there’s always time for a quick book plug. My editor will be pleased).
“Well, I am a bit surprised why this might be considered a story at this stage, to be honest. As you say, it’s been loud and clear on my blog for a month or so, as has the further comment from myself that the words were perhaps a bit strong in retrospect.
Conversely, I supported Ed Balls because he came closest to this genuine dialogue, and proper challenge to dominant vested interests, including the media.
Certainly I used some fairly colourful language in the context of the then ongoing leadership contest, but then I am not a political ‘yes man’; I often comment on Labour policy and its senior politicians when I think they are wrong; my blog is full of examples of this, and my forthcoming book focuses a lot on why and how the rank and file of the Labour party should seek to influence its leadership as it sees fit.
That is healthy for the Labour party, and I think Ed Miliband, if he were at all interested in how I described him a month ago, would appreciate that the language I used was simply reflective of that healthy internal debate, which went on within the party throughout the leadership campaign, and which will continue as we develop in opposition.
Ed Miliband won the contest, and he is now Labour leader. I have no problem with that; I argued my case, and I lost. While Ed Miliband was not my choice, I respect the democratic decision of the labour movement, and I will continue to do my best in my own small way to ensure that he becomes Prime Minister.
My attempt to protest Sheikh Ibraheem Zakzaky
An anti-Semite by the name of Sheikh Ibraheem Zakzaky will be addressing an otherwise very respectable Mosque tonight in my local area of Kilburn.
He is the head of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN), the website of which has an article clearly demonstrating the extent to which he views Jews as plotters. An article on that website details a recent seminar given by a deeply dubious character Sheikh Yusuf Ali who talks about the Zionist plot against Muslims; then clearly details Zakzaky noting “the Jewish plot against Islam is manifested in Iraq as they sent Bush to capture Iraq for them”. There is of course the obligatory reference to the “protocols”.
According to his biography on the official website of the IMN:
The goal of the Islamic movement is to enlighten the Muslims as to their duties as individuals and as a community. The movement owns more than three hundred primary/secondary schools located in different places mainly in the northern part of the country. They are known by the name of Fudiyyah Schools. This is in addition to many Islamic centers and other institutions. The movement also owns the Nigeria’s most widely circulated newspaper, Al Mizan, in the Hausa language.
It also details Zakzaky’s arrests, which the site claims were “for his ideas”.
The Jerusalem Post – one of the few publications with details of Zakzaky’s visit – mentions details of the host of the conference, the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC). They say:
The IHRC is a Hezbollah and Islamic Republic supporting organization. At an anti-Israel rally in Hyde Park during the Second Lebanon War, its chair Massoud Shadjareh wore a Hezbollah flag as did research director Reza Kazim, who was seen chanting phrases like “We are all Hezbollah” and “Bomb, bomb Tel Aviv.” At a pro- Israel rally in London’s Trafalgar Square in 2008, Kazim was ejected by the police for filming within the roped off area.
According to an article written by the Middle East Strategic Information written in 2009:
- Zakzaky’s IMN is growing popular among impoverished Nigerian Muslims
- He believes Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden do not exist, acts of terrorism in the west are organised by western intelligence services, and that Tony Blair was behind the 7/7 bombings
- He claims Nigeria’s secularist leaders perform ritual sacrifices removing unborn babies from their Mother’s wombs by ripping them out
- He believes Jews are “”dastardly infidels” and draws inspiration from Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and the deceased Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin
He has been and gone now, but came almost unnoticed.
I hate to come across all Eustonite or “decent” but if Geert Wilders or Le Pen or someone dreadful like that came to our town, we’d be all over them like a rash, but with figures such as Zakzaky – who is not small beer by the way, he is the head of Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN) – we give it a miss.
Some may say that Zakzaky has never committed terror himself, which is why it is not important, but this does not disprove his threat. Some may say, in his words, he does not cause terror. This is questionable, but I’m careful not to make claims I cannot substantiate. During the conference season, the Quilliam Foundation held an event on how non-violent extremism can be just as dangerous as violent extremism. Whether directly or indirectly, Zakzaky has sounded off to the tune of racial discrimination and religious violence, and this should not be sniffed at.
Some will perhaps accuse me, and have done before, of making straw man of whom to knock down. The point here is that I’m not accusing anyone of supporting Zakzaky – though there obviously are some who do - and I’m certainly not saying that in the absence of an anti-fascist picket of him, that I should therefore deduce the anti-fascists in fact support Islamic fascists. It is not true. But I have difficulty understanding why people like Zakzaky don’t wind them up to the point of protest, whereas smaller targets like David Irving, do.
Now let me quickly qualifiy this before I get myself into trouble. Of course Irving is bad news, and has dangerous ideas, but at least he is an army of one; him and maybe some idiots in the National Front or Combat 18. His words are largely ignored by the vast amount of thinking human beings, and are taken on board by a small group of twits that if they express their counterfactual opinions, land themselves in court. Zakzaky, on the other hand, is the head of a church, has many followers and is fiercely anti-Semitic – context, here, is all.
In my quest to get more airplay on Zakzaky, I wrote to three individuals/organisations that I thought could maybe help; Peter Tatchell, Hope not Hate and Unite Against Fascism.
I requested their help in numbers to picket the arrival of Zakzaky and ask questions of the mosque why they felt it responsible to invite someone with a evident history of anti-Semitism and crime.
I saw something on him at the Jerusalem Post and some bits on Harry’s Place blog here and here, as well as a cross-post on the Spittoon website, but when I read next to nothing about him in the mainstream press I wrote to the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Jewish Chronicle – as well as tweeting Martin Bright and Stephen Pollard – Hampstead and Highgate Express and the Kilburn Times.
The only response I got from any of these places was Peter Tatchell to tell me he was ill and had no campaign funds. Tatchell in his email recommended I contact the Board of Deputies of British Jews and contact local news sources – which I had done. It is a great credit to the man for at least writing back to me and taking my email seriously; there indeed is someone who will not allow sentimentalities affect his principles, and I can’t talk highly of him for doing so.
Tatchell’s first line said it all: “I share your anger about Mosques hosting extremist clerics and preachers. It is no better than having a right wing white racist speaking.”
There is no such thing as a “decent” left. There are leftwingers and rightwingers, with some mixing in the middle, and there are hypocrites and those who allow confused politics affect principles. I do not level this charge at anyone in particular, but in the fight against fascism in all its forms, we can’t just sit on our hands, we should be pulling our fingers out.
In the end I went down to the mosque by myself, and I was ineffective and nervous about getting on the wrong side of anyone. But were I backed up with the same level of energy certain organisations reserve for other far rightwingers, we could have told a number of people what we think about foul ideas infiltrating vulnerable communities.
Don’t panic
I quite like this chart showing UK debt interest payments over the last 100 years, showing amongst other things that debt interest payments were higher in the mid 1990s as a percentage ogf GDP.
No need to panic then.
I also quite like this FT article about what the head of bond markets and public debt management the OECD:
The markets are creating a situation where countries could be forced to retrench too far and introduce austere fiscal policies that are not good for their economies as it risks stifling growth.
The tea party movement and black conservatism
Recently Paul (Mr Cotterill to you), in the comments thread to a post of mine on conservatism and epistemic closure, said that I’d probably at some stage detail some of my thoughts on the tea party movement. That’s what I am going to do now, albeit exploring another narrative simultaneously; that of black conservatism.
Unsurprisingly, some of the sentiments and placards that stand out from the tea party movement concern Obama’s race, nationality, religious background and myths about socialistic politics – all very low politics.
Some of the intellectual backbone of the movement is provided by such media personalities as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh – who the charge “epistemic closure” had originally been levelled at by Julian Sanchez. It remains almost impossible to separate the politics of conservative epistemic closure from the tea party movement therefore.
Another thing that springs to mind is Pastor Jones and the Koran burning, and the protests over Ground Zero Mosque, which drew support from that most disturbing blogger and tea partier Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs.
There are 61 posts on the above blog which are categorised as Obama’s Birth Certificate Forgery – which should tell you something about the content which appears there. Indeed, the tea party has become inseparable from ad hominem attack of Obama’s nationality, evoking criticisms that at the heart of the movement is racism. Further still, reports have emerged that the English Defence League are forging links with the tea party movement, which will add much fuel to the fire of such criticisms.
But it is of little surprise to me that certain black commentators have come out to deny the movement as ultimately a racist one. The Telegraph had an article on Saturday profiling Tom Scott – who will be the first black Republican congressman from the deep south in more than a century. In it, they quote him as saying, of the tea party movement, “this whole race issue is a diversion away from the real basic platform of the Tea Party”.
The Guardian has started to host a blog by a man called Lloyd Marcus, who is referred to on his homepage as a “Tea Party singer/songwriter, entertainer and speaker” as well as being a “black conservative”.
In a blog entry published last Friday entitled “Why I am a black tea party patriot opposed to Barack Obama” – a really terrible piece – he ends by saying:
…when I hear politicians, such as Barack Obama, pandering to the so-called poor of America, it turns my stomach. I’ve witnessed the deterioration of the human spirit, wasted lives and suffering that happens when government becomes “daddy”.
What is common to both commentators, and common to what Tom Scott called “the real basic platform of the Tea Party” is a dissatisfaction of high taxes and big state. Some of the patent crap about Obamacare having a death panel, uttered in lieu of research by Sarah Palin, was piss in the wind, but the movements’ opposition to universal healthcare was predicated on the idea that universal care is somehow un-American and at odds with the principle of low spending and less government.
In fact listening to some of the members of the movement who are dubious even of the Republican’s spending, views of whom Ed Pilkinton of the Guardian recently had the privilege of interacting with (see video here), one gets the sense that at heart of the movement is a kind of socially conservative, economically fiscal conservative/libertarianism exploiting a low politics platform to reach the hearts and minds of Obama-sceptics.
Therefore I should just clarify, that simply because the movement has black members, this in itself does not prove critics wrong about race – I’m not that stupid – but that there is a little more to the tea party than that – and in fact it hasn’t phased me at all that the movement appeals to black people.
In fact, it rather reminds me of an analysis of black conservatism by the US philosopher and academic Cornel West – whose voice rose once again in light of Obama’s presidency, after saying he wanted him to be a “progressive Lincoln” so that West can be the “Frederick Douglass to put pressure on him.”
It was the opinion of West, in his 1994 book Race Matters, that black conservatism gained much traction, among other things, as a response to a crisis in black liberalism. Black conservatives, for West, seemed inclined to support freedom movements abroad – Europe, Latin America, East Asia – but were disinclined to support the freedom movement in America.
Black conservatives according to West were rather scornful of affirmative action measures, but it is his contention that the well-heeled, middle class black American conservatives were actually biting the hand which fed them. 40 years ago, he stated, 50% of black teenagers in the US had agricultural jobs, 70% of those lived in the South, many jobs disappeared due to measures curbing industrialisation, and in 1980 15% of all black men reported no yearly earnings at all to the Census Bureau while the US army at the time was almost a third black.
In the same breath as questioning why black conservatives couldn’t see the obvious racial disparity in equality of opportunity, West also pours scorn on black liberalism limiting itself to in-fighting and petite squabbling, taking its eye off of the real crisis.
West contends that many viewed black liberalism as inadequate and black conservativism unacceptable, that is until black conservatism began to appeal to a classical liberalism in what West defines as a “post-liberal society and post-modern culture”.
Such a move is not alien to us in the UK; indeed listen to any Tory cabinet minister admit at the moment how the Conservatives are more radically liberal and supportive of the poor than Labour were.
The parallels in what West is saying and the sentiments of contemporary black conservatives and members of the tea party are that not only does Obama purposefully play down his white heritage, but that he is setting back the plight of blacks in society because of it; he represents a failure in black liberal leadership (or, in the words of Timothy Johnson, co-founder of the Frederick Douglass Foundation, a group that helps promote black Republican candidates, “His mother was white, his father was a person of colour but every time there’s a racial issue he plays the race card just the same as everyone else.”)
I don’t share this sentiment, but all it takes is the perception that Obama is setting black politics back, and thus arises the crisis of black leadership similar to one diagnosed by Cornel West.
In conclusion to this blog entry, which admittedly took many deviations, I will say that the tea party is marred by a pretty low level of epistemically closed politics, but that stripped down it is a PR-savvy version of the Taxpayers’ Alliance. In the process of its becoming in US politics, it will be a haven for many black people who feel, as Timothy Johnson does, that Obama is doing a disservice to black politics; this may well see a resurgence of black conservatism similar to that assessed by Cornel West – and through the same conditions too. It is incumbent upon Obama to take heed of this possibility, and counter the tactics of the tea party, not because it is racist, but precisely because it is opening itself to Obamasceptics of all stripes.
The Johnson narrative?
I’m not going to pretend either that I expected Alan Johnson to become Shadow Chancellor today, or that I think Ed Miliband is doing anything other than bowing to media pressure/following his fiscally conservative instincts in appointing him. I have said previously what I think of Ed Miliband. I hope I don’t mind myself keeping on saying it, but this is not an auspicious start for someone in whom the Labour left bestowed at least some hope just 10 days ago.
But Alan Johnson is who we have, and it’s time to start making the best of it.
In this spirit, I think Johnson’s first comments on the new job are interesting, and just possibly give some cause for hope amongst those of us who want to see Labour establish a real alternative vision of political economy for when it next takes power.
Johnson playfully accepts his lack of background in economics saying he will
pick up a primer in economics for beginners.
While the Tories will no doubt gloat about this, and sell Johnson’s (as Tory Nick Robinson has already done) as evidence of Miliband’s “relative weakness in the party”, maybe – just maybe – Johnson can turn that self-confessed ignorance of the profession of economics to his advantage.
Maybe – just maybe – he can use it to bring to the public arena a popular narrative which can compete with the currently overpoweringly popular narrative of the Tories around ‘Labour’s debt crisis’ and, even more pertinently, the ‘household budget’/'maxing out on the credit card analogy.
These analogies may be wrong in terms of proper economics - even David Miliband got the hang of that – but that hasn’t stopped it being extremely persuasive, and pretty ubiquitous. Of course Liam Byrne’s little joke didn’t help.
Tanweer Ali condenses the argument:
The problem is that the government’s rationale is simple and makes intuitive sense. Any family heavily in debt sees only one way out – cutting their expenses. George Osborne’s case is clear. And he tells a simple story – Labour messed up the economy, leaving us heavily indebted, and now the mess must be cleared up, otherwise we will leave future generations a terrible burden.
Tanweer goes on to pose the key challenge that Labour, and now Alan Johnson, face:
The challenge is not only to present a robust policy, but to reframe the debate in our terms, using our language, redefining common sense. Ed Balls’ ‘growth deniers’ charge is a start. Creating a frame around growth enables us to focus on the impact of Tory policy on families and businesses, struggling in a harsh economic climate, and on the irresponsibility of leaving future generations with a smaller economy. But the coalition can evoke a simple image of good housekeeping – a family in debt taking the obvious step of cutting back. The left doesn’t have anything like as simple a frame that can be so easily evoked – we badly need one.
Well, we don’t have Ed Balls now to create that simple frame; we have Alan Johnson, and maybe this is a cloud with a big silver lining.
Because while Balls’ economics background enables him to talk fluently of Keynesian policy, and how cutting demand from the economy risks creating a Blanchfloweresque death spiral, there is no real evidence that this message was getting through to anyone other than the already converted, or that ‘deficit denier’ was starting to compete with phrases like ‘you can’t spend more than you earn’.
Balls is stuck in his skin as orthodox economist. Johnson gets to start from another place; he gets to do his economics intuitively, and in so doing, he may create the ‘simple frame’ we need, simply because his economics is simple.
In the end, it may depend on what ‘primer in economics’ his advisers set before him.
If he’s given ‘Neoliberal Economics for Dummies’, then he’ll start spouting neoliberal catch phrases like ‘credible plans for deficit reduction’.
If however, he can be persuaded to go back to basics and question the neoliberal assumptions that now dominate, he might just start spouting catch phrases which question them, and in a way which gets the wider public to question them.
In an ideal world, I’d be Alan Johnson’s Special Adviser. In that ideal world, I’d be giving him the following three pieces of homework:
a) The first few chapters of Mary Mellor’s The Future of Money, a modern and accessible run through what money really is, how it relates to sovereign state authority, and how its creation and supply has been privatised. This would help him question the very fundamentals, and perhaps help him towards catchphrases which capture the essential inequity of that system (‘Whose money is it anyway?’);
b) Chapter one of Warren Mosler’s Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy, a more detailed assessment of the leeway sovereign states with fiat currencies actually enjoy if they empower themselves to confront the ‘bond trader’ myth that the country will be beset by unaffordable borrowing if it doesn’t do as the Tories now do. (Note, you don’t have to accept all the prescriptions set out my Mosler to find the debunking of right-wing austerity peddling both convincing and refreshing, in a catchphrase-creating kind of way.)
c) Anything, like this, written by me on political economy in the last eighteen months, because I am (mostly) right on the need to develop a clear political economy narrative which goes beyond the usually accepted boundaries of economics, and addresses the basics of how vested interests wield their power to create the dominant economic narrative in the first place.
But let’s face it.
I’m not that likely to get a call from London asking me to become Alan’s SpAd. Alan Johnson is not going to see my reading list when I send it to him (though I will, with a copy of this post with the Ed M-bashing bits taken out).
There may even be other bits of reading beyond the three bits I suggest, which would help him develop a distinct understanding, and then a distinct set of terms to describe that new understanding.
But there are people out there in the political economic blogosphere, who have impeccable Labour party mainstream credentials, and who might just have a shot at getting in there with the reading list before Anthony Painter manages it.
We’re all relying on you, Duncan.
In defence of Wagner’s Israeli enthusiasts
Imagine a history rewritten: would it be a victory for the Nazis if they were forced to live side by side with the Jews they most vehemently disliked? Of course it wouldn’t be, and though it upsets and astounds me that today I have to share oxygen with people who hold views so unpalatable it makes me wince, part of my support for multiculturalism is heightened in the knowledge that we live in a society where to be law abiding means respecting people of cultures and sharing experiences together; and there is not a thing racists of any colour can do about it.
I think about this today, as I see news of outrage that an Israeli orchestra should be able to play a festival in Bayreuth, Southern Germany, dedicated to the music of Wagner.
The great granddaughter of Wagner, Katharina, who was to visit Israel to formally invite the orchestra, will now have to cancel her visit – which she said was an opportunity to “heal wounds”.
According to a report in The Guardian, Holocaust survivor groups are saying “it was inexplicable that the orchestra would break a decades’ old unofficial boycott to perform music by Hitler’s favourite composer, who also held antisemitic views”.
Furthermore, Israeli historian and Holocaust survivor Noah Klieger, on the topic of the boycott, told the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle: “It’s a sentimental ban. As long as some of us are still alive, people should refrain from imposing Wagner on us.”
Far be it for me to disagree with holocaust survivors; so I’ll quote from two of our most loved media figures: Stephen Fry and Slavoj Zizek.
Fry recently gave a question and answer session at the Wagner Society following the showing of his film Wagner and Me where he said: “You can’t allow the perverted views of pseudo-intellectual Nazis to define how the world should look at Wagner. He’s bigger than that, and we’re not going to give them the credit, the joy of stealing him from us.”
My point about the Nazis living side by side with the Jews relates very closely to Fry’s point; that Hitler appreciated Wagner should not stop Jews from appreciating Wagner too – and certainly not at the order of certain Israelis – as this only serves to divide those able to enjoy good art. But further still, as Wagner was an anti-Semite himself, nothing should please us more that orchestral representatives of the Jewish state make steps to end the taboo which allows Nazis to define how the world looks at Wagner.
In a piece called Why is Wagner worth saving? Zizek vents his criticism on what he calls the “historicist commonplace” that says “in order to understand a work of art, one needs to know its historical context”. To this end, Zizek notes “too much of a historical context can blur the proper contact with a work of art”.
Zizek claims that there is the temptation when listening to Wagner to imagine that every sub-text is anti-Semitic, but, using the examples of Parsifal and the Ring, tries to prove this isn’t always correct. In the Ring according to Zizek, it is not Alberich’s renunciation of love for power that is the source of all evil, but rather Wotan’s disruption of the natural balance, “succumbing to the lure of power, giving preference to power over love”, which spells doom, meaning also that evil does not come from the outside, but is complicit with Wotan’s own guilt. With Parsifal, the elitist circle of the pure-blooded is not jeopardised by external contaminators such as copulation by the Jewess Kundry, but rather from inside; “it is Titurel’s excessive fixation of enjoying the Grail which is at the origins of the misfortune”.
The point being is Wagner “undermines the anti-Semitic perspective according to which the disturbance always ultimately comes from outside, in the guise of a foreign body which throws out of joint the balance of the social organism”.
The overarching thesis of Zizek is that the anti-Semitic sub-text is not always appropriate when engaging with Wagner, and if this art is separate from the evil of the early twentieth century, then there is reason to save Wagner.
The Wagner boycott is one example of denying the world a great artist, and allowing the Nazis a small victory. The point is Wagner can, and must, be enjoyed by anyone who wishes to, regardless of race, if not for the reason that he would’ve disliked this himself.
The shadow cabinet
Leader of the Opposition Rt. Hon. Ed Miliband MP
Deputy Leader and Shadow Secretary of State for International Development Rt Hon Harriet Harman MP
Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer Rt Hon Alan Johnson MP
Shadow Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Minister for Women and Equalities Rt Hon Yvette Cooper MP
Shadow Secretary of State for the Home Department Rt Hon Ed Balls MP
Chief Whip Rt Hon Rosie Winterton MP
Shadow Secretary of State for Education and Election Coordinator Rt Hon Andy Burnham MP
Shadow Lord Chancellor, Secretary of State for Justice (with responsibility for political and constitutional reform) Rt Hon Sadiq Khan MP
Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Rt Hon Douglas Alexander MP
Shadow Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills Rt Hon John Denham MP
Shadow Secretary of State for Health Rt Hon John Healey MP
Shadow Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government Rt Hon Caroline Flint MP
Shadow Secretary of State for Defence Rt Hon Jim Murphy
Shadow Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Meg Hillier MP
Shadow Leader of the House of Commons Rt Hon Hilary Benn MP
Shadow Secretary of State for Transport Maria Eagle MP
Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Mary Creagh MP
Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury Angela Eagle MP
Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Rt Hon Shaun Woodward MP
Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland Ann McKechin MP
Shadow Secretary of State for Wales Rt Hon Peter Hain MP
Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Ivan Lewis MP
Shadow Leader of the House of Lords Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
Shadow Minister for the Olympics Rt Hon Tessa Jowell MP
Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office Rt Hon Liam Byrne MP
Lords Chief Whip Lord Bassam of Brighton
Shadow Attorney-General Baroness Scotland
Shadow Minister of State – Cabinet Office Jon Trickett MP
Being a prostitute
This is a guest article by Kate of the Hangbitch blog.
A few people have asked for links to the article I published in the late 1990s about my time as a prostitute.
I don’t think the magazine (Auckland’s Metro) has an archive online, so have reproduced the article below.
A couple of thoughts first:
I thought the article might be useful, because it isn’t particularly dramatic. It’s prostitution from the perspective of someone who wasn’t forced into the work. I wasn’t trafficked, or there to finance a drug habit (although I was a very heavy drinker, which meant I was depressed and unwilling to focus on other earning options for any length of time). I was there for the money.
In much of the modern socialist narrative, all prostitutes are pressed into trade – by traffickers, by drug and alcohol addiction and/or by personal experiences of sexual abuse. In this narrative, all johns are brutes and all brothelkeepers are bloodsuckers.
There are many truths in this narrative, but it is my feeling that the negativity of it skews the point. It is unfair to sex workers as a result. Prostitution in itself is not synonymous with debasement.
Stories of trafficked, bullied and beaten women are stories of abuse, not of prostitution per se.
Away from the abuse – and prostitution does exist away from abuse – prostitution is retail. Describing it a trade would probably be overplaying the romance – you need looks and/or a gift for indifference, rather than genuine skill – but it is certainly enterprise.
More than that – it’s enterprise in which many women have an unusual – for us – advantage. It’s lucrative. It’s one of the few occupations where women can expect a good fiscal return. That doesn’t go for everyone in the field, but it certainly goes for some. Men shell out for sex. When I was working, girls got about NZ$80 to $100 an hour (the spending equivalent today of about £100), with more for extras if you were in those markets. Five or six clients a shift earned you a consultant’s wage.
Prostitution buys you time. Even now that I’m past it, I sometimes think about making a glorious return to the field – when money is tight, and/or I get sick of having to sacrifice large chunks of the day to the day job. In the end, if you’re not among the abused, prostitution is no more or less dispiriting than the middle-tier jobs and lives we’re supposed to aspire to.
As I say, I drank very heavily in those days.
—
1998
The one question you ask yourself when you’re working as a hooker is
‘Do I care that I am doing this? Do I care?’
You never settle on an answer, but your mind seems to want to. You’re standing in a warm, dark (curtains drawn), fusty little room, listening to people outside trotting home from work, and listening to the dolt you’re with whispering that he wants you sitting on the bed with your legs parted so that he can see, and your mind is trying to pinpoint your response. Do I care?
It’s not a question of feeling despondent about the work. It’s a question of feeling endlessly ambivalent about it – of being perpetually unable to tap into your own responses, but being doomed to keep trying. Some aged Benny Hill clone will be giggling like a twit, trying to smack the sides of his face with your tits, and you’ll be leaning back, watching him closely and trying to work out whether or not you mind. (The way men feel about it depends on the way they feel about women generally. Men who want to protect women want to protect prostitutes. Men who dislike women dislike prostitutes. I remember a group of privately-schooled male friends bragging to me once that they’d celebrated their inaugural visit to a Christchurch whorehouse by shitting on its floor).
The only time that you feel no uncertainty at all about becoming a prostitute is during the split second that you decided to become one. Your mind is very clear in that second. It is the second that you finally acknowledge the money that hookers earn. It was the second that I finally got sick of the hard bitches at Credit Union, the second that I could no longer live with the thought of the loan sharks I’d visited when I was a depressed drama queen in my early 20s and drinking two or three bottles of wine a day.
Anyway – it’s in this second that ambiguity takes its little flight.
Bugger it, you think. I am sick of this money shit.
Also, you believe that a spell as a prostitute will make you the neighbourhood champion of Truth or Dare. Seems a big prize at the time.
Joining up
The average middle-class, 20-something girl launches herself upon this career the same way she begins most enterprises: she tells herself fibs about it. For some time.
She looks through the newspaper for about a fortnight and slowly begins to understand that she will shortly find herself at a local massage parlour applying for a receptionist’s job. The idea she has at this stage is that the money as a brothel receptionist will be better than it is as a perpetually pissed, partially-employed journalist, and that working as a brothel receptionist will take her close to the fire without actually lobbing her in it.
“The receptionist’s position is gone,” the large, dark, hard-eyed, 40-ish, ever-smiling madam told me, “but there is work in the rooms.” She smiled with teeth and skill. She ran her gaze up and down my body. I knew then that I would do it. So did she, I think. It was fairly obvious that I had drinking and money problems, and that I had run out of bailout options. I began, of course, to dream. I suddenly saw my whore-self sitting in this very chair, in front of a queue of blokes fighting it out for first.
The parlour was warm and dark, flushed through in that heavy shade of breathy scarlet most of us find exciting. Outside, only feet from my seat, corporate Wellington was walking home. I could hear people’s conversations and shoes.
That clinched it. I have never been particularly rational about corporate New Zealand, or corporate anywhere. Corporate New Zealanders were the people I liked to think of as the real slaves of the time, the thousands of educated but unimaginative drudges who’d swapped their souls to follow the New Right all the way to the brink and then over it, and who were now irrevocably chained to Brierley’s or Telecom and the desperate office politicking and the endless fear of redundancy and all the other white-collar traps.
I loathed them. I was one of them in many ways, (I was writing part-time for the Herald at the time) but felt that I was uniquely unblinkered – creative where they were stagnant, and all that other crap. I’m not sure why I thought that. The truth was that I was isolated and estranged, a drinker down to her last few cents. On that day, though, I could hear those suits trudging past the brothel window, heading home having wrapped up another day of restructuring, or privatisation: eight or ten hours of office nothingness.
Erin was wise to all of this.
“I’ll get you to talk to Emma,” she said as she watched me. “Emma’s been working here for a while.”
—–
In came Emma. She looked straight at me and smiled so warmly that I was her friends in seconds. I so much liked the happy, smiling self that her friendliness brought out in me that I wanted to stay round her and use it.
Emma was in her late 20s, with a strong Kiwi accent. She was smiling, rosy and prettily round in that milk-fed, provincial New Zealand way, like Waverley, or The Chicks. She was a rube with an excellent grasp of sales dynamics. Smiles, cuddles, a touch of fanaticism – Christian camp leader meets Moonie recruiter.
She certainly sold the life well. “Like, if you suddenly feel you just can’t stand your smelly customer touching you any more,” she laughed, plonking herself into Erin’s chair, “make an excuse, pop into the toilet and count your cash.” She laughed, giggled, and leaned forward to pat my knee. “You’ll be just fine,” she said. She giggled until I started to. She held both my hands. I wanted to start right away.
“Believe me,” she said, nodding, “I’ve been doing this for years. It’s perfect. I work six months and then I can have six months off.” She made both lots of six months sound like first prize. At one point, she leaned back in her chair and parted her legs so widely that I could see the entire gusset of her white underwear. She made a Victory sign out of two fingers and then she pressed them hard against her vulva, to show me how to keep a condom in place. I heard a tiny sticky sound, like a kiss.
—-
The realities of the job itself are exactly like any other job – office politics, office Hitlers, competition, fears of redundancy – it’s all there.
“Hello,” I say – far too tremulously – every day to the fair-haired woman sitting behind the till in the dark, much-polished, central front office.
There is nothing warm or amusing about the start of my shifts. Every single day, I am about as far from being able to present the assured whore-self Emma helped me envisage as I could be.
Brothel work is not for the deluded. You’re surrounded by people who, understandably, see life as a grouping of cold, hard facts – women who’ve had to decide that they need money more than people. They act like it, too. Dreamers don’t do well here. It’s not a good place to be if you can’t shake the chill.
The fair-haired woman before me is extremely pretty with large brown eyes set in a clear, smooth, face around which her blonde hair waves. Her name is Janine. She is not, as you assume when you see her pretty face, a prostitute. She’s a receptionist. She has the job we all applied for before we landed the ultimate employment prize.
She’s also a complete bitch to new and newish girls, which is oddly upsetting when you’re a new or newish girl. I discover later that her behaviour is about testing girls, making sure that they’re up to this way of life. She wants to know if girls are of a type that is likely to make emotional demands on customers as they might a new boyfriend, instead of keeping those customers firmly in their place.
Which isn’t much comfort at the time. Janine is sadistic.
“Hello,” I say. Janine looks up at stares at me through the beautiful eyes.
“I thought that you were going to be here at one,” she says eventually.
“I’m sorry,” I say, immediately far too rattled to deliver a single part of the Emma-self I’d spent the morning practising. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
“There was a guy here at one. I had to send him away because you weren’t here,” she says. She stares at me. “I had to send him away,” she says. I apologise again. There is a $60 penalty for girls who lose customers this way, which doesn’t leave a lot of change out of $80. Janine turns back to her work.
I walk to the locker room to change, already snivelling a bit. I get changed and try to get it together. It’s the moment when a kind of desolation goes through me – ie, the start of a shift. I’ve felt the same in most jobs.
I go to sit with the other girls – Karen, Michelle, Selina, Cory and Rose – out the back for a smoke and a chat. Inevitably, I giggle too much and talk too loudly but we all do that: we all bring a slightly overbearing persona to work.
Most women here have been through a lot. They’re supporting kids alone and have a hardness of eye that does not encourage intimacy.
The variety of personalities is significant.
Michelle, for instance, is a very pretty, very young, smiling, confident blonde who has been supporting herself since she was about 14 and describes the work as “such easy money.” She has absolutely no problem with it.
“I was in Christchurch and I was down to my last $20. I just went into this parlour one night and I came out that night with about $600. It just totally set me up, just one night.” She genuinely can’t understand why all women don’t do it. “It’s such easy money,” she says.
Others have less confidence. Karen, 29, is pretty, short and very overweight. She talks nonstop about her weight and her partner’s dislike of her. He tells her she’s fat and useless. Occasionally, she says she’d like to run a cafe or a restaurant, but you know she won’t. She’s only ever worked as a prostitute.
She brings an enormous collection of clothes to work and changes her dress every time a client fails to choose her. If a girl in a red dress gets a client, Karen changes into a red dress. If a girl in a green dress gets a client, Karen changes into a green dress. If a girl in a pink dress gets a client, Karen changes into a pink dress. On and on it goes, every shift.
Rose is tall, dark, handsome and hairy in a clean, compelling, gender-neutral way. She has high, pale cheekbones, along which ringletted black sideburns curl. The beautiful pale skin on her arms shines pearl beneath the soft, coalblack hair. She is a mother and always wears red. She smirks a lot, knows a lot and has a good base of regulars. She’s been working for about five years.
So. We smoke and laugh hard, and then we smoke more and watch the smoke head towards the clean sheets that last night’s girls washed and left billowing on the line. We’re waiting for Janine to call us. We smoke more. I can hear homeward-bound Wellington buzzing off to the suburbs outside our walls.
—-
“Introduction!” Janine shouts down the hall whenever a man comes through the front door.
We girls file into to the guest lounge to meet him. He’ll shakes hands with us all and choose whichever one of us he likes. It can be highly competitive stuff. You don’t get paid if you don’t get chosen, which is difficult when you start out and you’re shy.
Erin says that the truly motivated whore charges into the guest lounge, grabs the customer’s hand and says “choose me, sweetheart. I’m the best fuck in the house,” but I have yet to visualise myself delivering this line. I sometimes wonder whether anyone other than Erin has tried it (as it happens, I did as my confidence improved).
The bloke in the guest lounge is short, overweight, sweaty-skinned and in his mid-50s, with small, brown, clever little eyes. He wears a suit – he probably worked late and came straight from the office. There isn’t a rush to grab his hand. He’s a regular whom nobody likes, because of the mean glint in his tiny eyes.
Everyone is also aware that the older ones who come in after a long day are sweaty, foul-smelling and sticky. Later at night, they’re often very drunk as well, but I don’t mind that so much. I like the smell of alcohol. It overpowers a lot of other smells and reminds me of my dad.
I give him the eye anyway. The revolting ones generally like an overture – they want to play the flirting game. I tend to like them better than the smart-assed, good-looking, med-student types who stand with their arms crossed and want to see you crawl around, or shit.
We leave the room. Erin joins us after a few minutes. “Becky,” she says, pointing at me. I stand quickly and walk to the small office. Janine silently hands me a couple of towels.
The little fat man waits for me at the bottom of the stairs. His bald head gleams with the day’s grease. He’s grinning at me with his little piggy eyes.
“Now, how about I follow you, Becky?” he says in the jokey voice he always uses. I already want to hit him. Behind his back, I roll my eyes.
He knows what to do. He heads straight upstairs to the guest bathroom, and strips off and goes to stand in the shower. All clients must shower first. It’s supposed to be about helping them relax, but it’s for us. It’s about getting rid of the smell.
When he’s washed, I lean forward to wrap a towel around him. He takes this opportunity to put his arm around my waist. We walk, like a couple, to our room. Then he sits on the bed and watches me winch my tight dress over my head. Someone is playing Bic Runga outside.
“Ah,” he says, as I am revealed. “A suspender girl.” I nod at him and bend down to unfasten the snaps. “No, leave them on,” he says. This means I have to get my knickers off while leaving the belt on, which is quite a trial. As time goes on, and I get more experienced, I dispense with the knickers from the start.
Now he’s lying in front of me, resting his head on his round, rather hairless arms. I sit on his back, as he asks. I stroke his neck, up and down, with the balls of my thumbs.
And so it is that I begin again to try to decide whether or not I care about this work. I look at my hands on his sticky skin and try to gauge my reaction to the stickiness. I look at him. He’s terribly short. His hairless little feet come nowhere near the end of the bed.
His suit pants, when he had them on, looked as though they’d been cut off at the knees.
But it is a lovely suit – beautifully sleek and expensive-looking, much in the Winston Peters style. It is only a pity that this attention to appearance doesn’t extend to the far reaches of his physical person. He stinks. In the shower, he ran the soap down his barrel chest once. He stood under the water for a bit and then he got out.
I notice that between his buttock runs a deep, yellow-brown line which seems to be set under his skin. He has the same odd colouring between his toes and in the corners of his mouth. It’s odd – it’s set under his skin, like a tattoo. It’s mould, shit, or hereditary – I can’t work it out.
“Touch my bum,” he says suddenly. The pillow muffles his voice, so he speaks again. “Please touch it.” I watch my hands as they move towards his backside. I touch him. Straightaway, he moans and starts jerking his backside around. He strikes me as rather theatrical. I try to remain seated on his legs. He’ll roll over onto his back soon.
Then suddenly, he asks me a ridiculous question – ridiculous because it’s utterly unnatural, theatrical. He’s been rehearsing it. He’s lifted it from some movie or other that he’s seen about relationships, or women, or whores.
“How does it feel having all the power?” he asks.
“Sorry?” I say. I’m surprised and disgusted. I hate the ones who think they’re in a movie. I’m almost in a trance, watching my hands on his behind.
“How does it feel having all the power?”
“Say again?” I say.
He lifts his head from the pillow. “How does it feel having the power?” he yells. He stops writhing, rolls over and stares at me. I am at the height of my indifference. He watches me but eventually rolls over and buries his face in his pillow again. I’m glad he does that. I know now that he’s impotent.
“Forget it,” he says. “Who cares?”
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