Back when labour pushed through top up fees, Ken Clarke and his fellow Tories voted en masse against the move. Ken Clarke made the following intervention in the parliamentary debate:
It is the ordinary student from the ordinary family who just fails to qualify for that help who will carry the burden of tens of thousands of pounds-worth of debt in the first years after they graduate. Does he seriously expect that that will have no effect at all on the willingness of such people to go in for the more expensive courses in higher education?
So Ken, do you now believe that raising fees to 3 times the current level would not deter people from going to university?
Please do email us with your answer.
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Sometimes you can see why the Conservative Party runs such a tight and authoritarian PR machine. Quite simply some Tory MPs are off the wall. During Wednesday’s parliamentary debate on the student protests, the Conservative member for Harlow, Robert Halfon, made the following intervention:
“Does my hon. Friend agree that yesterday’s mob fires of placards and papers had echoes of 1930s book burning? Does he agree that mob rule is no substitute for democratic rule? Will he also pay tribute to the thousands of students who were not in Westminster yesterday, but were continuing their studies up and down the country?”
What on earth can you say to that????
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As you will know, Iain Duncan Smith recently revealed plans to force the unemployed to clean the streets for no more than their £65 per week in benefits. In response, the Guardian’s Jackie Ashley told us that labour was correct not to “howl with outrage” at the snowman-impersonating minister’s plans. Though she questioned some of the details, she told us that welfare reform could not be avoided:
If money cannot be shaved off the welfare system, and politicians are determined to protect the NHS and schools, then there is no credible plan for dealing with the deficit. Had Alexander promised outright opposition to coalition proposals then, in short order, Labour would have been pinned into much, much higher taxes (and not only for the rich) to make the books add up.
This, I am afraid, is kitchen sink accounting. Jackie’s mistake is to assume that welfare reform can and will cut the welfare bill. It won’t. Yes we could make it even more difficult and uncomfortable for people to stay on benefits. But then what? Will they go and get themselves a job and stop claiming benefits? Only if they can conjure that job out of thin air. The 2.5 million people currently chasing 400k vacancies will soon be competing with 500k axed civil servants, along with 1m people that the Secretary of State for looking like a snowman claims he will force off incapacity benefit. That makes 4 million. And with our biggest export partners – the United States and German – heading for fiscal austerity, the private sector is even less likely to come in and save the day through mass job creation.
In reality, the only thing that can cut the welfare bill right now is a strategy for creating jobs, supporting viable industries, and rebuilding consumer confidence. The two per cent grow achieved over the past 6 months demonstrates that the labour government’s deficit spending was having a substantial impact (the existence of time lags with fiscal policy has long been recognised) – and one capable of increasing tax revenue without major increases in the tax rate.
Considering the statistics, and considering the government’s plans, Clegg, Cameron and Gideon will surely know that workfare is unlikely to get people into work any time soon. Yet by scapegoating the unemployed with such powerful punitive symbolism as enforced street cleaning, they hope to divest themselves of responsibility for the long term joblessness over which they will surely preside.
In recognition of how little welfare reform actually matters to the welfare bill or to cutting the overall deficit, former WWE wrestler The Rock has released the following statement.
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The views of many of the demonstrators were anathema not only to incoming government policy but to the NUS. Within the confines of yesterdays organised demonstration there was no means of expression of this heterodox viewpoint. To go along with the demonstration as it was planned, would be to submit to a world of politics we have no time for. The action at Tory HQ was a fuller expression of views of students than the demonstration could ever have been.
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To us, desecration, destruction in the symbolic realm, is nothing compared to real destruction. To them it is everything, and destruction of the real is a mere parlour game.
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Politics is gritty, like glass under your shoes. When it’s shiny and slippery it is almost always not politics, but self-congratulation. The Soviet Union demonstrated this in its highest form. Even something as shiny and slippery as Aaron Porter’s face is likely to feel a bit gritty under your shoes.
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Some of us do a lot of activism. We are jaded. We are cynical. We don’t see the necessity of going on a demonstration as an opportunity to pat ourselves on the back, but rather a necessity to express ideas that would otherwise be systematically suppressed by the state. We achieve very little. We have no choice, with our Weltanschauungen, but to go on fighting. La lutte continue!
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Do you know what NUS President Aaron Porter says should happen after we lose the vote in the commons on the 24th November that brings in the new fees structure? He wants to start a campaign whereby we can “re-call” MPs, particularly lib dems because they lied in their election campaigns. Seriously.
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Some protesters did not act sensibly. For this there is no defense, but in many ways it is countered by the extreme sense with which people attacked Tory HQ.
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When we mourn violence done against buildings more than violence done against people, we have totally internalised capitalist rationality. Perhaps attacking buildings is the only way to reassert the importance of being human.
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Much as it pains me to admit it, some of the stories in the rightwing press about people on the social housing list being placed in mansions in Hampstead or being paid six-figure sums in benefits are probably true. I haven’t investigated any of the stories in detail, and I’m well aware of the propensity of the Mail et al to be economical with the truth at times, but in spite of all that it seems perfectly believable that something as huge and complex as the benefits system occasionally throws up odd anomalies of this kind.
Image: jar0d/flickr
But that, of course, is precisely the point; they’re anomalies, not average cases. Millions of people receive benefits of one kind or another, and the means by which the state decides whether or not you qualify for them are intricate and bureaucratic. And mistakes will, inevitably, be made – humans are fallible, and as such so are the things they create, whether those things are bicycles or benefits systems. Some people will get more benefits than they should, and some will get less (I’m aware that the benefits a person ‘should’ get is itself a difficult and controversial issue, but this is true regardless of where you personally think the line should be drawn). It will be possible, up to a point, to improve the system and minimise errors of this kind, but in practice things are never going to be anywhere close to perfect – errors and anomalies will always exist. Some of those errors will be the kind the tabloids are constantly going on about, but some will be like my friend Lucy.
Lucy suffers from clinical depression and ME, and over the past couple of years has also had rather more than her fair share of other deeply unpleasant diseases, including meningitis and chronic migraines. As with a lot of ME sufferers, performing even a few simple everyday tasks like preparing a meal or going to the shop can be exhausting for her. As such, the travel and long waits in council offices which are required to claim the benefits she’s entitled to are something of an ordeal themselves, yet the doctor who assessed her judged that she was fit to work. This means that she was denied Disability Living Allowance, and has to attend work focused interviews (again, extremely difficult with ME) in order to claim Employment Support Allowance, though thanks to the CSR, the contributory element of that is going to be stopped after a year. Not that it matters, because the DWP haven’t actually paid her the contributory ESA for six months anyway, thanks to an admin screw-up…as a result of which her local authority have stopped her Housing Benefit, so she doesn’t have the money to pay her rent.
There’s no doubt that even within the current system, Lucy’s been unlucky. Her experience isn’t solely attributable to Osborne’s cuts, or to bureaucratic incompetence. The question, though, is whether it’s better to have a benefits system where as many people as possible get the help they need, but where the odd tabloid folk devil gets more than they should, or to have tough safeguards to minimise money being wasted, but risk denying benefits to people like Lucy, who really need them? Put like that, I don’t think it’s any question at all. It seems the government disagrees.
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The good folks at BBC iPlayer have made me well happy this Autumn, by showing repeats of the 1990s US show Due South, and I think it’s worth remembering what a true hero the protagonist, Benton Fraiser, is.
For those unfamiliar with the show, the premise is that Canadian mountie Frasier works at the Canadian consulate in Chicago, but in his (generous) time off, he teams up with cynical policeman Ray, and together they fight crime on the mean streets of inner city Illinois.
While Ray provides the wise-cracks and street-wise roguishness, Frasier is the paramount good mountie. More like a 6ft boy scout, Frasier is consistently perfectly dressed, always polite, and with a iron-strong sense of moral duty. He lives a frugal life, amid the worst projects in the city.
His relationship with authority is, however, strained. The local station chief is confused by his presence, and his near super-human abilities of hearing, smell, memory. And of course then there’s the near-human intelligence of his canine side-kick. All this mean that though he wants to stick to the rules, Frasier is thoroughly against the bureacracy which would get him in the way of helping out ordinary people, especially those less well off. There’s also a lot of poking fun at the incompetency of the police, and the FBI, leaving Frasier a lone-wolf in the city, protecting the poor despite the rules and regulations that seem to be trying to prevent him from doing so.
All in all, Fraiser is a hero we can look up to. Though a policeman of sorts, he resorts to violence only when faced with it, and always tries to allow the criminals to turn themselves in. There’s no realism in the show, of course, and the indivdualism isn’t exactly a peon to solidarity. But we could have worse heros. Thankyou BBC, and good luck in your strike.
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Last week the Fire Brigades Union called off their planned strike action on 5th November. Amongst those of us who believe a) that the firefighters have a legitimate grievance and b) they have the right to strike, there are two possible responses to this: We can think it was a good idea or a bad idea. Those who think it was a good idea to call the action off might cite the knife-edge state of public opinion. Those who think it was a bad idea might cite the concessions already wrung from management, and suggest that having called such action it was important to carry it through. Whilst I am more sympathetic to the latter, I will try to affect a philosopher’s neutrality here. Both of these are coherent positions, for which there exist reasonable arguments.
Two such reasonable arguments can be found here, from Richard Seymour, and here from Andy Newman. Both of these make opposing cases by reference to the dynamics of the dispute, and the wider economic and political situation. But then, something funny happens. Andy says the following about Richard’s piece:
I see that that experienced trade union activist, Richard Seymour, thinks that the FBU would have been better off with a vainglorious charge into the path of the enemy machine guns.
When it comes to strikes the left is always full of armchair managers, always insistent that a bit more militancy will win the day (and sometimes it does), and desperate to tell us that the union bureaucrats – i.e. the elected leaders of the organised working class – are selling out (and yes sometimes they do). But bravado is no substitute for serious analysis of the balance of forces and the means by which striking workers may win.
Now, what’s striking is how little these seriously engage with the arguments Richard offers. Reuben is absolutely right about the need for a serious analysis of the balance of forces. Richard precisely tries to make an argument that the balance of forces was more favourable than the FBU leadership thought. He does not scream sell out (and explicitly argues against doing so). He certainly does not argue they should go down to glorious defeat, as Andy tries to imply. What is really happening is that different people’s ’serious analysis’ of the balance of forces have come up with different results. This is to be expected, such judgements are always to some degree a wager, based on imperfect information. I know that Richard and Reuben went to picket lines, Andy probably could not, but no doubt has contacts who can give him useful info. So they’re all entitled to make such judgements, and entitled to disagree.
What they are not entitled to do is ridicule judgements by caricature or pretending their opponents are not serious. This is where such talk of ‘machine guns’, ‘armchair generals’ and ‘bravado’ becomes deeply unhelpful. It feeds a bias which says that arguing for more action is always hot-headed and tactically naïve, and arguing for less is always hard-headed and sensible. Richard’s argument may be wrong, but if it is wrong it is because it is based on a false assessment of the balance of forces, not the absence of one. This is an important distinction to make. If the pessimistic assessments are always the more serious then we might as well all pack up and go home. This is, I suppose, an appeal for more caution in the language we use in debate. I know full well that Andy and Reuben do not believe that more radical action is never a serious option. But this kind of rhetoric can imply precisely that. This would be a dangerous assumption to make in such a volatile period.
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Marx has a wonderful term for the role that unemployment plays in capitalism. He calls it “the reserve army of labour.” The point of this concept is that whilst employing people allows a capitalist to accumulate value, having unemployed people allows you to drive down the price of labour. It’s a simple supply and demand issue: when many people want jobs, then they will have to lower their price more and more.
It’s not the sort of thing that you’d think would really affect countries with a minimum wage. The guarantee of a certain minimum return on a certain amount of work stops the price of labour falling too low, and guarantees a certain (albeit low) standard of living for workers. So, in a recession such as ours, rather than seeing the price of labour falling rapidly, what you’d expect to happen would be just an increase of jobs paying minimum wage.
£2.17 an hour?
Unfortunately, our lovely government looks to be doing away with all that. In a speech made today, Iain Duncan-Smith has outlined plans to force jobseekers’ into working positions for no more than their benefits. This means that people will be working 30 hour weeks for £65. That’s £2.17 an hour, or 36% of the minimum wage.
He has said that if people refuse this option, they will have their benefits cut off for three months. So that’s it, work for a third of the minimum wage, or starve, lose your house, perhaps even lose your children. That’s a pleasant thought.
But above and beyond this coercion, the new system will put added pressure on all people employed in similar positions to those that will be taken on by benefit claimants. Why would a local council pay someone minimum wage to sweep streets when they can get the work done cheaper? And of course this new labour would undercut all the laws that secure workers’ rights. Being on placements without employment contracts will undermine all labour law. If you go on strike from your position you can effectively be immediately sacked by having all pay cut off. You can’t unionise either, because for all intents and purposes while working 30 hours a week the government won’t recognize you as having a job.
It is time to fight for workers rights, to demand that all benefit claimants in this position have a right to join a trade union, and to receive at the very least a minimum wage if not a living wage for any work they do. We must also ask the question of what the government expects of people who have their benefits cut off. How are they expected to live, without turning to crime? Who can live on £0 a week?
Even with the protection from massively low wages on paper, this government is returning to the economics of the reserve army of labour, side-stepping laws in order to save money by targeting the poorest of the poor.
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There is not much to say about Phil Woolas that hasn’t already been said. That said, the suggestion by one of my friends on facebook that he be “dragged away by armed police at 2am, and deported to somewhere he said was safe” is perhaps worth repeating.
Equally amusing is that the Tories have wheeled out Baroness Warsi to condemn Woolas’ “despicable and inflammatory campaign”. I must admit that I was a little surprised to hear that Warsi is so annoyed with a fellow politician for telling lies and inflaming tensions. Back in August Five Chinese Crackers picked up on Ms Warsi spreading the tired old “government bans christmas” myth. In an interview with the Guardian she said:
I think there’s a difference between multiculturalism per se, and state multiculturalism, where the state intervenes and says, ‘You will do this, you will do that.’” For example, she offers, “When the state says ‘We’ll have winterfest instead of Christmas, so everyone feels included.’ That’s wrong.”
Except the state never has said “we will have winterfest instead of christmas. At least not in this dimension. Yet the myth does does exist within – and give energy to – the “natives under siege” fantasies spread by the tabloid press.
So I am glad that Warsi is now keen to remoralise politics. We might even be spared her telling tales about councils banning black rubbish bags.
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Am I about to go through a momentary lapse of patriotism? No, don’t fear – no heartfelt conversions to the EDL yet. But there are things that are being said and happening in Britain which make it more likely to see revolt than in many other European countries.
1) We’re Not Taken To Revolting
Time and again, people say ‘if only we were like France.’ Well, they’re still going over there, and Sarkozy doesn’t seem to be easing up. The streets are blockaded, the unions are fervent – but they’re still negotiating about the pension age. The problem is, the French electorate and the French government are both so used to thousands of people marching with placards, to cars set on fire in the Banlieue, to unions beating their chests in revolutionary tirades, that it all seems a bit like a rerun. Oh, here’s 1848 again, the papers say – and we know how that ended up.
In Britain however, there’s no such problem. The TUC have gently called for a march on March 2011, scuppering any idea that we can get complacent about rebellion. Similarly, I keep reading articles saying ‘the British don’t revolt, we just get on with it.’ Well, isn’t it going to seem that much more rebellious when we finally do all take to the streets?
2) We Have a comparatively free press
Note the word comparatively; if you don’t believe me, check out Italy. Berlusconi and the mafia have the whole thing tied up – and it shows. The papers proclaim the latest TV sensations without a reference to the plummeting economy, and any information on the riots in the South is almost impossible to come by. At least we have the BBC and the Guardian which, for all their faults (which are many), are reporting what the Coalition government is up to.
3) We Don’t Praise Our Politicians For Saving the Country
In Germany, there’s a wave of praise for Angela Merkel, the woman who has single handedly reversed the German economy out of the slump. The German government is being praised for a deft handling of the situation, and also the national German spirit which is more prone to saving than borrowing. There’s also an idea that small businesses have saved the German economy, exporting high tech goods and patents. No asking about, say, the actual wealth creation by millions of Polish, Turkish and Central European citizens who actually do all the shitty jobs in Germany. So while Deutschland rejoices in a reversed economy saved by politicians and businessmen, we’re quite aware over here that those same groups are currently running the country into the ground.
So there we have it. Marx said that the revolution was most likely to come in the most industrialised countries: England and Germany. We’ve struck Germany off the list for its insistence on Merkel’s abilities at the wheel of the economy, so that leaves us: let’s hope our passion for hopelessness sees us through.
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