The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Immigration and that referendum December 16, 2016

Interesting, and depressing, to read this. I can’t help but feel that five years of Tory rule did nothing to make people feel, let alone actually be, in a better position in relation to their circumstance, but the Rowntree Foundation survey does point to immigration driving the vote for Brexit in the UK particularly for those on lower incomes.

The vote for Brexit was fuelled by poorer voters feeling they had very little control over immigration, coupled with a more general mistrust of politicians and officials, according to new research into attitudes before the referendum.

And:

When people were asked how in control they felt over political issues such as crime, housing and health, the proportion who said “I can make no difference” ranged from 10% to 28%.

However, with immigration this shot up to 72% saying they had no control, with an even higher 76% of those on lower incomes saying this. Only 6% of people felt they had any real control over immigration.

This feeling came to the fore during the EU referendum, Kelley argued: “You’re presented with a binary choice that is framed as a choice between less and more immigration – at that point that feeling of total inability to control becomes relevant.”

And here’s some more particularly troubling aspects:

Other factors tied closely to voting leave included people’s belief they had lost out economically compared with others – 76% of those who believed this supported Brexit – and thinking Britain had changed significantly for the worse, 73% of whom opted for leave.

And one can see in the following how a toxic media discourse impacted on perceptions – particularly of those in more problematic economic circumstances.

The new research also included in-depth, qualitative studies of the views of low-income voters in one outer London borough.

Here, the study said, people “talked about migrants, refugees and asylum seekers interchangeably”, and felt that immigration created pressure on public services, in which they and their family were likely to lose out.

Of course the contradictions abound. Who are the personal in many public services? Who picks food crops, etc, etc. And what means are there of combatting misperceptions? Got to say the quoted remarks at the release of the report aren’t exactly heartening with a sort of musing like the following:

Matthew Goodwin, a professor of politics at Kent University and an expert on populist parties, said this new narrative left the Labour party at risk of “getting hammered” if it continued to advocate free movement of people post-Brexit.

Politicians on the centre-left were still discussing immigration in “a very transactional, rational language”, Goodwin said.

And:

“Everything we know from 20 years of research on social science suggests that issues of culture and identity are just as important, if not more important, than questions of economic scarcity and perceived economic threat.

“Unless mainstream politicians, society, elites – whatever you want to call them – start to look beyond questions of economic distribution, the populist right will always be able to outflank those parties,” he told the event.

I’ve got to be honest. I’m not entirely convinced. It seems to me, and this is actually although linked to the Brexit result something that is separate in itself – that part of the problem is that toxic media and political narrative. That a populist politics that has hinged on immigration – using it very deliberately through the media initially to speed the way to Brexit, is more to blame. And perhaps, just perhaps, when the actual impacts of Brexit become clear demonstrating that immigration and other supposed woes aren’t the problem (including membership of the EU) perhaps there’ll be some space for a progressive message to make some headway. But that’s an argument of despair in a sense, given the strength of those currently in power in the UK. I don’t know if this latest Evening Standard Ipsos MORI poll would give some hope or not. Not a lot I suppose as it suggests that one way or another, and particularly if there is a snap election, the Tories are cruising back to another overall majority.

Scandal in the North December 16, 2016

Alibaba has a long comment here raising questions on the current – ahem – issues engulfing the DUP leadership and the power-sharing administration. Certainly this seems to be more than usually problematic in a context where problematic is essentially standard operating procedure, and I recall that in the last month or so The Phoenix had an excellent article on this very matter at a time when other media seemed curiously uninterested in such things.

There’s a certain amount of entertainment to be had in some of the details of this, but it is without question a serious topic and one that seems to have a potential for much wider ramifications.

Interview with Gino Kenny December 16, 2016

…from Hot Press, conducted by Jason O’Toole. And a lot in there. Gino Kenny, People Before Profit TD has, as the piece notes introduced the Bill on medicinal cannabis in the Dáil and saw it progress to the point where it will get to committee stage. As the interview notes gaining the support of Government TDs:

… was doubtless influenced by the fact that some members of the wider cabinet had publicly backed the idea of making cannabis available for medicinal purposes during recent Hot Press interviews, including John Halligan, Finian McGrath and junior finance minister Eoghan Murphy.

A lot in the interview,

Do you think it was right that Joan Burton was held hostage inside her car by anti-water charge protestors?
The whole thing was overblown. People have a right to protest. Some of it did get out of hand. But the thing was exaggerated. Nobody wants to see things thrown at people because it’s counterproductive. But people were terribly angry about the water charges and particularly the role of the Labour Party.

And:

Will you support the ASTI strike if it goes ahead?
Of course.
Can a strike like that ever be wrong?
I don’t think so, Jay. People don’t go out and strike for the sake of it. They strike for a reason. I will always stand shoulder-to-shoulder with people that go on strike, because they’re going out for pay and conditions or a wrong-doing by their employer.

And:

So, would you like to see Ireland leave the EU?
Europe is good, and co-operating is good, and working together for the greater good is good. But the European Union has taken a new façade of corporate structures and dictating to people – and that’s not the European Union that most people signed up to. It’s becoming less friendly towards nation states. But if you had a referendum in this country I don’t think it would pass to leave the union.
But what’s your own view?
My personal view? I think in the future we’ll probably have to leave.

And:

What are you thoughts about Fidel Castro?
I would’ve grown up very inspired by the Cuban revolution, by Che Guevara and Castro. I know there’s a romantic notion of the revolution – and it was a good revolution. But the reality of the Cuban revolution was afterwards the Cuban people were quite isolated. We look towards the Cuban system for their health care system and education system. They did punch above their weight. But Castro wasn’t ultimately a socialist: he was more of a radical. He wasn’t my hero. Che Guevara was my hero. He was a good man.
Was Castro right to hold onto power in the way that he did, and not to have free elections?
No. The essence of socialism is democracy. If you don’t have democracy you don’t have socialism. There would’ve been oppression of other political parties in Cuba and that’s wrong. You

A lot more than that too. A good read.

Well I never! December 15, 2016

University rankings flawed?

The report by the UK’s Higher Education Policy Institute urges governments and third level institutions to ignore the tables, which claim to identify the “best” universities in the world.

The publication of some of these global league tables has become a major event in the Irish education calendar.

When individual Irish universities see their position in the rankings rise they seize upon this as evidence of their excellence. When their rankings fall the widely acknowledged funding crisis in the sector is blamed.

And:

But this report says reliance on these league tables can actually be damaging to institutions.

It says the tables measure research activity to the exclusion of almost everything else, including what this report says is, arguably, a university’s most important function – the education of students.

The report says the only way for a university to improve its ranking is to focus on research at the expense of other vital activities.

Incredible. Who would have thought it?

Mainstream… December 15, 2016

Great quote CL pointed to from Julian Barnes here:

“Back when I was young, Jeremy Corbyn’s views would have seemed mainstream Labour.”-Julian Barnes

Isn’t that a perfect example of how far the pendulum has swung to the right in the past forty or fifty years? I mentioned before. In 1976 I travelled from Dublin to London by ferry and train, stayed in a hotel in London, then across the Channel to Paris, then to Marseille. Everything was state owned. There was nothing odd about that, no sense that that was wrong. And it jibes with a point Angela Nagel made on the Zero Books podcast about state intervention in the economy in relation to Trump. That prior to Trump the idea of Republicans pouring monies into infrastructure (even at the detached PPP approach Trump appears to be taking) was anathema to the neo-liberals across the last twenty years, and she noted that she herself had to some degree, despite being left-wing, internalised that idea, that it wouldn’t ‘work’. Of course a lot of this is overstated, even today the state, and not just in Ireland or Europe, but also in the US, still has considerable investment in some sectors. Certain sections of the right in Europe, and not just the nationalist/populist right, have a more open attitude to state endeavour. But obviously to lesser extent than, say, the 1970s. The point being that neo-liberalism had an almost hegemonic hold on Republicanism, and further afield in terms of shaping perceptions. And now, that has changed.

It will be very telling if that has a spill over both right and left.

Whose Brexit? December 15, 2016

William Keegan makes a basic point in relation to the broad process, that for all the delusions amongst Tories and UKIP cheerleaders:

The last thing that the Europeans we are supposed to be “negotiating with” are prepared to do is let Britain off lightly: they are rightly terrified about a domino effect. It is “Brexit or nothing”. Yet in the fantasy land of current British politics, Brexiters and others are kidding themselves into believing that the others do not mean what they say. All this stuff about “soft Brexits” and “medium Brexits” is pie in the sky. I can hear Paul Whitehouse, in a revival of The Fast Show, asking: “How do you like your Brexit, madam? Rare or medium – or perhaps well done?”

In other words, as the headline notes, this is going to be ‘a Brexit that suits Europe, not one that suits us [i.e. the UK]’.

I still fundamentally disagree with him that Brexit, in the broad sense, is open to being blocked. I’m sure it’s not, and I’m pretty sure that would be a bad idea. But I do agree that the nature of Brexit was never sufficiently determined in advance and therefore any situation short of membership of the EU would accord with the intent of the vote.

Pay story December 15, 2016

Jim O’Leary, writing in the IT comes to the conclusion that:

…the grounds for such [public sector wage] increases need to be clearly identified and their opportunity cost (the concomitant changes in other spending or in taxes) needs to be carefully considered. In terms of a general increase, a rise in the cost of living could provide the basis for some adjustment, although the prospects for inflation suggest that any adjustment that might be justified here is likely to be very small.
Grounds for increases might also be provided by measures that boost productivity or by compelling evidence that pay is the cause of recruitment or retention problems. However, grounds such as these might form the basis for increases in pay for individual grades or clusters of grades, but not for across-the-board increases. In addition, there may be a case for unwinding measures that unduly penalise certain groups, such as new recruits.

But while he writes:

Interestingly, the European Commission has published a set of estimates, also for 2010, that puts the Irish premium at 21.2 per cent, compared with an EU average of 3.6 per cent.

He has to note that:

Given the trends in average pay in the two sectors since 2010, it seems likely that the public sector premium has declined further. Still, it is almost certainly the case that public sector workers continue to be paid significantly more than their private sector counterparts, on a like-for-like basis. Therefore, insofar as this type of analysis might be expected to provide an argument for a public sector pay increase, it is likely to disappoint.

But if he is correct in his assumption that the premium has declined, shouldn’t he at a minimum offer us some figures on what that premium might now be. Then he sort of pivots:

In any event, summary measures of the public-private pay differential are much too crude to provide a robust basis for assessing equity between the two sectors. There are many reasons for this, but among the most important is that such measures do not take into account critical aspects of employment conditions, such as tenure and pensions.
In general, public sector workers enjoy guaranteed, defined benefit pension entitlements and relative security of tenure. The value of both has surely increased appreciably in recent years.

And that’s that!
Not a word about why private sector wages or conditions are so comparatively poor. Why is it that only 40% of private sector workers have occupational pensions? Why is it that wages are so depressed in the private sector? And it’s curious because reading Paul Mason, also in the IT, he addresses the supposed issue of automation and notes that in a UK context:

If Theresa May’s government was actually listening to Carney ( instead of trying to undermine him as in reality ), they should scrap Philip Hammond’s austerity targets, raise tax revenues, shut down tax havens and take decisive measures to end the creation of low-wage, low-productive jobs. To do that you would have to re-regulate the economy and hard.

And:

At the same time, you would have to redistribute wealth aggressively. Not all of that needs to be done through taxation. If, instead of privatising public services, you ran them as non-profit corporations, providing rail, broadband and energy at prices below the cost of production, the redistributive effect would be significant. People on rock-bottom wages would suddenly have a lot more to live on.

And:

On top of that you need to actively raise wages. That needs more than a worker on the board: it needs a recognised union rep in every workplace. If Amazon, Pret a Manger, the courier industry and the construction firms were obliged by law to negotiate with unions, and to cease repressing them, there would be upward pressure on wages across the whole economy. Another way of creating that pressure would be for local and national government to hike public sector pay.

Oh really? Could that be because of the exemplary effect of higher PS wages? Or making conditions there normative? Could be! Because O’Leary is no fool. He knows that whittling away conditions in the PS isn’t going to assist private sector workers one bit. That as conditions bend and break in the PS it’s not that private sector employers will attempt to achieve parity but rather that wages in the broader economy will further fall. He knows that, we know that, and yet he continues as if none of these dynamics exist.
And that’s well before we get to the potential threats of automation.

Signs of Hope – A continuing series December 15, 2016

Any contributions this week?

Gunboat diplomacy? December 14, 2016

There are already ominous rumblings about the near future. Britain did not support Ireland at the talks in defending the “Hague Preferences”, which recognise the particular case of coastal communities in allocating quotas.Also, British Secretary of State James Brokenshire recently reasserted London’s claim over Lough Foyle in response to a parliamentary question in the House of Commons last month. After the Belfast Agreement peace deal, a cross-border body known as the Loughs Agency took responsibility for the Foyle, which was a key strategic naval base during the second world war.The Department of Foreign Affairs immediately rejected Mr Brokenshire’s assertion that “the whole of Lough Foyle is within the UK.”