The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Tory Britain… December 21, 2017

Here’s an anecdote that reveals so much about Tory Britain. Writing about Frank Field who talks about destitution rather than poverty in his constituency (I’m not a massive fan of Field I should say, but in this instance he’s not wrong) Helen Pidd notes in the Guardian:

A few days later, Field was back in Birkenhead, immaculate in a checked shirt and tank top as he surveyed a scene of organised chaos in a sports hall at the Hive youth centre. Around him, volunteers scurried hither and thither to fill Christmas hampers for Wirral’s most needy.
Four years ago, they delivered 70 hampers. “This year we are doing 3,000,” said Ema Wilkes, who runs the Neo community cafe and social supermarket in Rock Ferry, one of the most deprived wards in Wirral. “People look at this and say: ‘Isn’t it brilliant what you’re doing?’ But I get really upset: this project should be getting smaller, not bigger.”

That’s a truly shocking set of numbers. And points to the reality that matters can significantly worsen if the political will and approach is not just missing but actively hostile to state intervention and assistances. Field says:

“We’ve had over 10 years of cuts to benefits and then along comes universal credit sweeping along on this economic desert and the results are destitution, not poverty. Some of these things are really personal toiletries and people actually need them.”

I’m unsurprised that for many in contemporary economies things simply buckle at this point. Almost impossible throughout the year – and so much poverty and lack hidden, not least because the media is uninterested in it. And then Christmas arrives with the expectations and so forth. But add to that a state that seems almost wilfully hostile to those who it should see as central to its project:

Back at Neo social supermarket, where they had just received a few turkeys they planned to sell for 50p, Wilkes received a typical text. “Hi sorry to bother you,” it began. It was from a mother whose income support had stopped without warning. She had received a letter ordering her to apply for universal credit. “I have literally sat sobbing since 3 this afternoon as I have been told that I will not receive a payment until 27 January and I can’t apply for the advance loan until I get an appointment and I have to wait for an appointment which will take 3-5 working days which means I will not get any money until after Xmas. I literally have nothing and have two very beautiful kids who I have basically failed, don’t have a clue where to turn to as I have tried everything I can think of.”

Or what of this? I’ve friends – former printers – who have suffered the same issue described below in terms of medical problems.

At the food bank Peter, 55, was also desperate. He had worked as a printer until he collapsed at work eight years ago with obstructive pulmonary disease, a lung disorder which makes it hard to breathe. He had been surviving on toast and was struggling to wash his clothes after the bearings in his washing machine went. He was dreading being transferred to universal credit and couldn’t believe how his life had panned out.

And this too rings true:

“If you had told me 10 years ago I’d be in a food bank, I’d have said you were having a laugh. Never in a million years did I think this would happen. Then, my only fear was being out of work, not going hungry,” he said.

Printing was an industry that simply disintegrated in the past two decades under pressure from increasing automation and outsourcing to points various geographically. And it wasn’t the first, the last or the only one. Flexible economies? Flexible for everyone but the workers.

Shameful.

Conduct December 21, 2017

Do people think that those most staunchly advocating no repeal of the 8th on the Oireachtas Committee overplayed their hand and provided too antagonistic a stance? Talking to lifers of a more moderate variety (and interesting to see how some of them have been swayed to supporting abortion in relation to what some call the ‘hard cases’ of rape, incest, fatal foetal abnormality etc) their perception was that those on the Committee didn’t do their own cause any good.

But does that have ramifications further down the line in regard to how the issues are contested? For example, do people think they are able to engage in damage limitation i.e. allowing some propositions to go forward in order to stymie others or will they always hold an all or nothing line?

As someone who doesn’t share their stance I’ve been puzzled in some respects by the inability of some of them to function tactically and strategically.

Signs of Hope – A continuing series December 21, 2017

Gewerkschaftler suggested this recently:

I suggest this blog should have a regular (weekly) slot where people can post happenings at the personal or political level that gives them hope that we’re perhaps not going to hell in a handbasket as quickly as we thought. Or as the phlegmatic Germans put it “hope dies last”.

A brilliant question on Fianna Fáil and Northern Ireland December 21, 2017

From letters in the Irish Times:
 

Sir, – Micheál Martin has recently spoken of his plans to extend the Fianna Fáil party into Northern Ireland and to contest elections there.
Can he give an assurance that if any Fianna Fáil candidates are elected to the Westminster parliament, they will take their seats in the House of Commons? – Yours, etc,

Union man December 20, 2017

Uh-huh?

New mistakes for old… December 20, 2017

Haven’t we been here before?

Talking of private provision of social services… December 20, 2017

This is beyond depressing: 

More than €400 million has been paid to private companies for operating the network of direct provision centres for asylum seekers across the State over the last seven years.
Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan said these “direct provision” firms had been paid more than €57.7 million for the 11 months to the end of November, an average of some €1.2 million a week.
But this is worse, worse again:
The profits a number of the companies are making from direct provision have been put beyond public scrutiny as a number of the firms have re-registered as unlimited companies where they are not required to file annual accounts.

Behold the glory of the private sector: Private probation firms… December 20, 2017

This is remarkable, and yet another example of how the private sector is unable to usefully engage in social areas:

The part-privatisation of the probation service has led to tens of thousands of offenders – up to 40% of the total – being supervised by telephone calls every six weeks instead of face-to-face meetings, the chief inspector of probation has revealed.
In the first authoritative assessment of the probation reforms introduced in 2014 by Chris Grayling when he was justice secretary, Dame Glenys Stacey said they had created a “two-tier and fragmented” probation system with most private rehabilitation companies struggling to deliver.

And the interesting aspect of this is that we have in miniature a good working example of public/private to compare and contrast. Take it away!

The coruscating verdict based on 29 separate inspections over the last 18 months shows that while the performance of the publicly run national probation service (NPS) is rated “good”, that of the 21 private community rehabilitation companies (CRCs), which supervise the majority of the 260,000 offenders on probation every year, is “much more troubling”.

Some of it is comical, or would be if it was not so very serious:

…serious concerns [were voiced] that the one-to-one relationship between probation officer and offender had been broken by the introduction of new models by the private sector that involve up to 40% of offenders being supervised remotely by telephone or in meetings in open booths that lack privacy. Under the model, offenders have an initial face-to-face meeting with a probation worker but then are not seen again while contact is maintained by a junior staff member through a phone call once every six weeks.

Open booths that lack privacy. No follow up meetings. Yeah, sounds like the private sector alright.

Private sector failure in relation to public sector provision.

What you want to say – 20th December, 2017 December 20, 2017

As always, following on Dr. X’s suggestion, it’s all yours, “announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose”, feel free.

Great Northern Land: 3 December 19, 2017

Matthew O’Toole, once chief press officer for Europe and economic affairs in the British PM’s office over the last couple of years makes an intriguing point in the IT this week in relation to Brexit and T. May:

She too is bound by the terms of an Anglo-Irish treaty which she did not sign but which limits her freedom of action.
In her case it is the Belfast Agreement. This document was commonly understood in Britain as a means of pacifying Northern Ireland’s warring tribes. In 2008, 10 years after the agreement, then shadow Northern Ireland secretary and now Brexit-ultra Owen Paterson said it “served a vital purpose in getting bitter opponents to work together”.

And he continues:

Lots of people understand why the Belfast Agreement is important. What is less understood, particularly on the right of British politics, is how it works.
For a start it binds Britain to something bigger than simply refereeing the Sharks and the Jets in the North. It was the culmination of an approach to conflict resolution which deliberately, but subtly, smudged the boundaries of nation states. In that way it was European in nature.
It created treaty obligations on both Britain and Ireland to uphold, for example, Northern Ireland’s have-cake-eat-cake citizenship rules and, most distressingly for harder Brexiteers, it codified areas of North-South co-operation that cannot plausibly continue with entirely alien economic and regulatory models on different parts of the island.

This is the key point. As it stands the mechanisms while flexble are not quite flexible enough to accommodate that. And yet, all this was predictable. There was no ambiguity about the simple fact that EU membership was a part of this process, that that entailed certain convergences. Yet we were told loftily that all would be well. The half-fudge of the latest agreement appears to be melting fairly fast, and only the most optimistic would feel entirely comfortable that all will indeed be well. Indeed just on that the sheer animosity of the rhetoric after the agreement is striking when compared to that before it. If this is what agreement is like Christ knows what a difference of opinion would look like.
Anyhow he notes that:

Many parliamentary sovereigntists disliked the Belfast Agreement, but they could console themselves that Jesuitical formulations about the “totality of relationships in these islands” were cover for the blunt truth that Ireland was still partitioned, and would remain so until the majority in Northern Ireland wished it to be otherwise.
But that consolation must now feel cold. Because in the cruellest of ironies, those Jesuitical curlicues, and that European hint of smudged sovereignty, form part of the institution that Brexit was supposed to restore to glorious primacy: Britain’s diffuse and uncodified constitution.
And what is more the Irish Government has made clear that it will use the Brexit process as an enforcement mechanism for the terms of the 1998 agreement.

And why shouldn’t it? For all the talk of new-found sovereignty by the British and cheerleaders for Brexit the reality that there is no absolute sovereignty in this contemporary era (or before) appears to escape them. Dublin and this island has rights and obligations and interests too, and while we are – perhaps by dint of history and circumstance – more likely to accept flexibility and compromise the reasons for flexibility and compromise are fundamental.

In this sense what we see in regard to Brexit is the true imperial mindset – the idea that an individual state can act entirely as it sees fit without any interference of constraints imposed by others. That that even at the height of empire was a delusion is neither here nor there, that is what we see and hear in much of the rhetoric emanating from London. It hardly need to be stated how reactionary all this is. And how that reaction will further inflect UK politics.

And so he asks some very pointed questions:

In order to agree on the parts that need to be assembled, you need to agree on what the whole looks like.
Is it a settlement aimed at containing Northern Ireland’s perennial feud within the UK but with a consultative role for the Republic and a few statutory rights for the minority?
Or is it a text which expands and contracts to fit the necessary space in the mind of whoever is reading it, allowing both the United Kingdom and the “Irish nation” to exist in the territory of Northern Ireland?
The clear implication of last week’s agreement is that it is the latter – and that any regulatory or economic divergence that disrupts that spirit will be a problem.

Which as he says strikes at the heart of the Brexit programme, as promoted by many Tories both inside and outside the British cabinet.

Everything was hunky dory while both the UK and ROI were in the EU. All the contradictions, evasions, and problems could be ignored or bypassed – isn’t it curious how some of them now seem almost absurdly unimportant at this remove, when faced with the dangers of a ‘hard’ border – or rather the inconceivability of a hard border?