Youth unemployment: ‘guaranteed interviews’ are not enough
Posted on Thursday 13 October, 2011
Filed Under Coalition, Economics, Unemployment |
20 Comments
ALMOST one million young people in Britain are out of work. But never fear, employment minister Chris Grayling is determined to get to grips with the crisis. Why, a full 5% of them are to be guaranteed a job interview. At some point in the next two years, anyway. No rush then, mate.
If it sounds like I am taking this personally, that’s because I am. My experience as a long term unemployed youth in the early Thatcher period is a more important component of my socialism that the bookcase full of heavy duty theoretical works that dominates my living room.
You can still meet people from my generation that lost contact with society in the 1980s – not that the Tories of the period admitted that society existed in the first place, of course – and never managed to reinsert themselves.
What Occupy Wall Street should tell the political right
Posted on Tuesday 11 October, 2011
Filed Under USA |
14 Comments
I GUESS the biggest problem the political right on both sides of the Atlantic has with the Occupy Wall Street movement is the sudden realisation that not everybody in America thinks the way that they do.
Those that habitually refer to liberals as ‘the far left’, and nonsensically insist that Obama is some kind of ‘Marxist’, presumably lack the vocabulary even to describe a layer of the population that advances demands well beyond the confines of mainstream liberalism.
Much of the commentary that emanates from the US – both from bloggers of the more excitable stripe to the sober observers populating mainstream newspaper op-ed pages – works on the assumption that only a limited range of ideas has any traction.
Politicians can place themselves anywhere on a spectrum running from the pro-business wing of the Democrats through to libertarianism, the religious right and the Tea Party. Anything else can, by definition, have no widespread appeal.
Liam Fox: Torn
Posted on Monday 10 October, 2011
Filed Under Conservative Party |
8 Comments
DID Australian angst rock princess Natalie Imbruglia personally broker BAE Systems’ $15.8m contract to upgrade the Chilean army’s howitzer capacity? I only ask because the lucky girl lists Liam Fox among her former squeezes, and as we know, the defence secretary can be extremely accommodating to the commercial interests of old friends.
As a special adviser to Dr Fox myself – well, that’s what it says on my business cards, anyway – I should stress here that no concrete charges of misconduct have at this point been made against him.
Nevertheless, his obvious closeness to defence consultant Adam Werritty does create what Fox called at the weekend ‘an impression of wrongdoing’. Moreover, hard evidence seems to contradict some of Fox’s earlier statements in this affair.
The poor don’t have a party
Posted on Thursday 6 October, 2011
Filed Under Conservative Party, Society |
46 Comments
THE Tories are now the party of the poor, Iain Duncan Smith told a fringe meeting at Conservative Party conference this week. That he can even get away with such a surreal claim without attracting widespread derision underlines just how far the issue of poverty reduction no longer looms large on the political agenda.
I don’t underestimate the sincerity of a quiet man. Ever since he was forced out of the Tory leadership, IDS has devoted much of his political time to the question of welfare reform. He has been widely commended for taking the problem seriously, and for developing a new approach within a centre-right framework.
IDS was also indisputably correct when he observed that under New Labour, income inequality in this country rose to the highest level seen since 1961, the first year for which calculations of the so-called Gini Coefficient are available.
But that is not the full story, of course. Look at the time series shows and you will see that the decisive transition between the relatively egalitarian postwar social democratic arrangements and the shocking degree of inequality we see today took place in the 1980s.
Afghanistan: ten years after
Posted on Wednesday 5 October, 2011
Filed Under Afghanistan |
14 Comments
ALMOST ten years to the day since the launch of Operation Enduring Freedom, the bloodshed in Afghanistan has yet to stop, and shows no signs of stopping any time soon.
One article that has confirmed me in this depressing train of thought is an offering from Lieutenant General David Rodriguez, deputy commander of US Forces in that country from 2009 until earlier this year.
Writing in the current edition of heavyweight international relations journal Foreign Affairs [£], Rodriguez repeatedly insists – with how much heartfelt conviction, I do not know – that the strategy of Afghanisation is working.
Afghanistan now has its own 143,000 strong army and nearly 120,000 police officers. Sometime in the next year or two, Rodriguez believes, the US and its allies will be able to ‘take their hand off the back of the bicycle seat completely’, to use a suitably paternal metaphor.
Eurozone crisis: if Greece goes, Britain may go too
Posted on Monday 3 October, 2011
Filed Under Economics |
31 Comments
THE righteous have their work done for them by others, the old Jewish proverb insists. Now that newspapers from the Daily Mail through to the Financial Times routinely run headlines describing ‘capitalism in crisis’, what purpose can possibly be served by rising at the crack of dawn to sell Socialist Worker to the early shift? It must take all the fun out of being a Trot.
This morning Greece has admitted that it cannot meet deficit reduction targets, something that will surprise few observers. Instantly, the share prices of major European banks with exposure to Greek debt fell sharply. The Footsie was, at the time of writing, back below 5,000.
At least the markets are getting fair warning on this one. Nobody I know realised that Dubai was in trouble in 2009 until its difficulties could no longer be hidden. In the end, the emirate got by with a little help from its friends. But any day now, we could wake up and hear on the Today programme that a country many of us could barely find on a map has gone under.
Why they desecrated Marx’s grave
Posted on Friday 30 September, 2011
Filed Under The left |
55 Comments
I’M NOT quite sure why I find pictures of swastikas crudely sprayed on Jewish or Muslim graves more shocking than the sight of, say, similar racist graffiti on the shutters of ethnic minority-owned corner shops. In our culture, disrespect for the dead remains perhaps the ultimate statement of visceral hatred.
Reports that the tomb of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery was desecrated yesterday do not make the motivation immediately apparent. Although the Evening Standard reveals simply that it was daubed with paint, my presumption is that some sort of sloganeering was involved.
This action will have been undertaken for a reason, and the obvious suspects are the political right. Maybe this was the work of hardcore facists, maybe this was some sort of prank on the part of tipsy Tory student activists. We may never know.
An attack on what is basically an oversized bust of one of the people who shaped the modern world is something that Marx’s admirers – a category in which I include myself – can live with. The paint will scrub off soon enough, I guess.
But just as vandalism perpetrated in Jewish and Muslim graveyards is designed to hurt not the individual families of the deceased but entire communities, there is little doubt that this was meant as a symbolic assault on the left in its entirety.
Whoever is responsible would like to do to us exactly the same things they would like to do with the other human beings that they despise. We should consider it a warning.
Ed Miliband speech: predators, producers and the proletariat
Posted on Wednesday 28 September, 2011
Filed Under New Labour |
10 Comments
I CANNOT remember the last time I was wildly impressed by a leader’s set piece speech to a party conference. These days such perorations are designedly ephemeral affairs, calculated to grab the day’s headlines rather than define any lasting vision.
The words delivered by Ed Miliband yesterday are no exception, and in case, have generated so much attention elsewhere that there is little point in undertaking a forensic dissection 24 hours after the event.
The consensus seems to be that the address marks some sort of break with New Labour. Unsympathetic commentators menacingly declare it to mark ‘a shift to the left’, and say that like it’s a bad thing; friendlier voices welcome it, in strikingly similar terms, as ‘a brave step to the centre-left’.
In truth, it would be difficult for Labour to move any further to the right than the territory it occupied between 1994 and last year. That Miliband has moved on – however partially, however cautiously, with whatever degree of timidity – will be welcome to many Labour Party members.
Ed Balls speech: in denial
Posted on Monday 26 September, 2011
Filed Under Economics, Labour Left |
59 Comments
THIS is the darkest, most dangerous period for the global economy that most of us have ever lived through, Ed Balls correctly insisted in his speech to the Labour conference today. But never mind; a temporary cut in VAT will soon sort things out.
I exaggerate, of course. But only slightly. At a time when the notion that capitalism is in crisis has gone from being a demented Trot cliché to an everyday topic of debate in the Financial Times, the sheer disconnect between reality and Labour’s willingness to think the potential consequences through is immediately striking. We are somewhere close to the territory that psychoanalysts refer to as being ‘in denial’.
The shadow chancellor’s suggestion that Britain could now a Japanese-style lost decade is actually one of the more optimistic scenarios on offer. A full scale slump on the scale of the 1930s is mercifully not the most likely prospect we face, but neither is it out of the question.
Yet the timidity of the left’s intellectual response is shocking. The terms of debate are more or less limited to the desirability of slightly tighter financial regulation and the ringfencing of investment banking activity. There is no recognition that cyclicality is built into the system itself.
Ministerial ‘buddies’ for business: cutting to the chase
Posted on Friday 23 September, 2011
Filed Under Coalition |
33 Comments
I SUPPOSE it is theoretically possible that, at some point in the last few decades, an important chief executive has rung up a government minister, asked to arrange a meeting, and been turned down flat. But my guess would be that this hasn’t happened too often.
All mainstream parties are keen to stress their pro-business credentials, and if the boss of Britain’s biggest widget manufacturing outfit wants personally to plead the case for a reduction in widget tax, all he has to do is pick up the phone.
Now there is talk of putting this set up onto a regularised footing. Under proposals being developed by trade and investment minister Lord Green, the top 50 UK firms will each be allocated ‘a single point of contact in the government’.
Just to stress the open neck shirt informality of the proceedings, the ministers concerned are even being described as ‘buddies’, a colloquialism with connotations of personal friendship. It’s not that this development marks a major change of tack, I guess. But it does, in one small way, confirm a basic Marxist postulate.
