Certain things are ubiquitous during elections, and often the most evocative of the mood are party slogans. One slogan more than any other has dominated Zambia’s 2011 elections, the PF’s ‘Don’t Kubeba!’, or ‘Don’t Tell!’. It lies at the heart of the PF’s seemingly successful campaign to negate the benefits of incumbency enjoyed by the MMD. It appeared on posters, on the lips of cadres and at rallies. Dandy Krazy’s ‘Donch Kubeba’ [J1] (with appropriate shushing dance move) has been one of the most popular tunes heard out and about during the last two months. In essence, it encouraged voters to take the chitenge, maize meal, oil, or even bribes offered by the government, even attend the rallies, but not feel they couldn’t vote against them anyway. As a way of upholding the secrecy of the ballot, and running a campaign against an opponent with resources far in excess of your own, it is a risky, but clever strategy. Indeed, the EU Observer Mission stated that unequal access to resources meant a “level playing field” was distinctly lacking during campaigning. Despite this, it appears “Dont Kubeba!” paid off.
From one point of view though, it’d work, because an quantifiable increase in the number of abortions would mean the policy wasn’t tough enough and would need to be toughened further. And round and round it goes.
I’m not being particularly cynical: that’s the way in which law ‘n’ order policy had been shaped over the past thirty years or so, in the US even more than the UK, and it shows no signs of failing to work (in the sense of losing votes, or discouraging its adherents) just as it shows no signs of actually working.
Now if we bear in mind that economic policy is increasingly a branch of law ‘n’ order policy – simply a matter of personal fault and personal failure – then we can see how little the question of rationality has to come into it. All you have to do is hit the bad guys. And if it doesn’t get results, then so much the better – hit them harder. Because we know who they are.
Both Labour and the Tories have always imported political ideas from America, but this wholesale adopting of hard right practises, following the GOP playbook of riling up the base and distracting the opposition with social issues while ramming through neoliberal policies is new, isn’t it?
As Justin argues, the beauty of pushing these sort of policies in the current political climate is that they can never fail, only be failed. If your hardline approach doesn’t work, it’s because you weren’t trying hard enough, not because the policy itself was wrong.
It began in December when the prime minister said: “All evidence suggests that it’s no use offering a range of different services to these families – the help they’re offered just falls through the cracks of their chaotic lifestyles. What works is focused, personalised support.” This fits neatly into Cameron’s big society narrative – cut government funding, let amateurs fill the gap, and clap yourself as social deprivation segues into riot. The government has already slashed Connexions, the catch-all advice centre for 13- to 19-year-olds, and abolished the Educational Maintenance Allowance and the Future Jobs Fund, which existed to find jobs for the young. The careers advice service for school-leavers, meanwhile, is now only a memory – and a website. But no matter – an army of Emma Harrisons is waiting.
Emma Harrison is the founder of Action for Employment (A4E), and she is establishing Working Families Everywhere on Cameron’s behalf. You may know her from Channel 4’s The Secret Millionaire, where she gave £50,000 away in front of a TV camera in 2007, after the poor had proved their worthiness for her bounty. The scheme is being piloted in Hull, Blackpool and Kensington & Chelsea, and will roll out in the next four years. Volunteers with no prior experience of social work, creepily renamed “family champions” (FCs), will enter “never-worked” families with drug, crime and child protection issues, and turn them into “working” families. Once polished, these families will inspire others, like a game of Social Democratic dominoes, but backwards. “Family champions are going to stalk the streets, they are going to find the jobs,” says Harrison, who is clearly, like Margaret Thatcher, a Nietzschean. They will get a small wage and priority access to all other services the family is using, and they will be handpicked by Harrison. They may also get badges, but this is not confirmed.
As insanely stupid social initiatives go, this is about average for the coalition. It seems tailor made for trousering yet more money from already existing social programmes to dodgy private firms like erm, Emma Harrison’s A4e while making sure the actual worth of the work these firms do is not easily quantifiable. Money for old rope, in other words.
Has A4e bid for the contracts the DWP is putting out, to use European Social Fund money to pay private companies to run the same scheme that you’re promoting? Are you trying to pre-empt these contracts by getting your scheme up and running first?
You have argued in the past for “super-contracts” in which a private company would run all the services in a local authority area. Is this scheme a step on the way to that?
Given your company’s record of missing targets by some distance in previous welfare-to-work contracts, why do you believe you will be any more successful with this?
So you’re a foreign student wanting to come to the United States through a summer visa programme, to both work and travel, get a bit of cultural exchange going? Sounds perfect doesn’t it, until you realise it means you spent your summer packing chocolates in boxes, for less money than it cost you to get there. Well, some of the students fooled this way aren’t taking it anymore:
PALMYRA, Pa. — Hundreds of foreign students, waving their fists and shouting defiantly in many languages, walked off their jobs on Wednesday at a plant here that packs Hershey’s chocolates, saying a summer program that was supposed to be a cultural exchange had instead turned them into underpaid labor.
The students, from countries including China, Nigeria, Romania and Ukraine, came to the United States through a long-established State Department summer visa program that allows them to work for two months and then travel. They said they were expecting to practice their English, make some money and learn what life is like in the United States.
In a way, they did. About 400 foreign students were put to work lifting heavy boxes and packing Reese’s candies, Kit-Kats and Almond Joys on a fast-moving production line, many of them on a night shift. After paycheck deductions for fees associated with the program and for their rent, students said at a rally in front of the huge packing plant that many of them were not earning nearly enough to recover what they had spent in their home countries to obtain their visas.
[...]
Ms. Ozer and other students said they were paid $8.35 an hour. After fees are deducted from her paychecks as well as $400 a month for rent, she said, she often takes home less than $200 a week. “We are supposed to be here for cultural exchange and education, but we are just cheap laborers,” Ms. Ozer said.
Added exploitation bonus: the cheap labour Hershey (and I’m sure other companies too) get through this programme means they don’t need to hire expensive American workers whom you can’t nickel and dime with dodgy fees…
