Thursday, July 07, 2016 

Leadsom balloon.

It would just about sum it all up if after a referendum fought on post-fact, post-truth lines, our next prime minister turned out to be someone whose CV is a work of fiction, and unlike our out-going premier, really is a tax avoider. 

Would about sum it up, but still not cover quite how ghastly the choice of Theresa May versus Andrea Leadsom is.  Slightly less ghastly than if Michael Gove had made it through to the last two admittedly, mainly as Ken Clarke couldn't have nailed Gove better than in his comment about Gove's potential for getting us into three wars at once. 

One or two good things about May's time as home secretary can at least be said: she has stared down the police, forcing them to face up to their terrible record on stop and search.  She also fought Gove to a standstill over his attempt to make things even worse in the aftermath of the Trojan Horse panic in Birmingham, refusing to let Mr Drain the Swamp impose his views on extremism on the Home Office.

Otherwise, May's only claim to being a safe pair of hands is thanks to lasting six years in a job where so many others have failed.  This is less down to May's stewardship and more due to Labour when in power hiving off many of the home secretary's previous responsibilities to the always Orwellian sounding Ministry of Justice.  Presto, the appalling state of prisons, not to forget many of the other disasters of Chris Grayling's time as justice secretary, since reversed by err, Gove, are nothing to do with May.  Happily, Grayling has been rewarded for this unwitting protection of the home secretary by being made her campaign manager.

She can though be judged by the other policy stands she's made.  It was she that had no problem with the sending round of the "go home" vans.  She has been the principle force behind the pushing for the security services to be able to effectively do whatever the hell they like in terms of surveillance.  The remarkable stupidity of the psychoactive substances act is her own extremely illiberal work.  The victory she often trumps in sending Abu Qatada back to Jordan was nothing of the sort: he left of his own accord, prepared to take his chances rather than remain locked up here indefinitely.   The "Prevent" programme inherited from Labour has been expanded to the point where we have nurseries required to ensure those under 5 are not showing "signs" of radicalisation.  Rather than practically every other politician barring the Conservative front bench, she has also refused to guarantee that EU citizens will be allowed to stay in the UK after (or if) we leave, claiming she will only do so once the rights of our own citizens are guaranteed elsewhere in Europe.  It would be easier to accept this line of argument if May's team hadn't already taken to attacking Leadsom for claiming her stance would allow foreign criminals to stay too.

All this, and yet May is the equivalent of FDR in comparison to Leadsom.  Boris Johnson's support for her can only be put down to as previously stated, either nihilism or the belief a Leadsom victory would open the door for him almost as soon as it had been shut.  She is a laughably archetypal Tory of the old school: God-bothering, worried about the impact of sex education on children rather than the impact of the lack of it, has strange views on what political correctness is or isn't, and convinced leaving the EU only opens up new opportunities rather than shuts them down.  Not that she has been consistent on the EU mind, which means there has to be some other reason why so many other Leavers have jumped on her bandwagon.

Yep, a Leadsom victory would just about us up as a nation.  Unafraid to embrace decline, so long as we can indulge ourselves in nostalgia for a past that never existed.  We can also heartily look forward to thinkpiece after thinkpiece on the misogyny of the left for criticising whoever wins in the exact same terms as we have Cameron and pals.  What a time to be alive.

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7/07/2016 08:06:00 pm | |

Tuesday, July 05, 2016 

The monster always ends up killing its creator.

You can practically stop reading Rafael Behr's account of how Remain lost the referendum at the part where you learn Stronger In's head of strategy was Ryan Coetzee, aka the Lib Dems' 2015 campaign manager.  For those who have forgotten, the wizard wheeze of the Lib Dems last year was to equally protect us from the austerity monomaniacs of the Tories and the spendthrift ways of Labour.  Coetzee and Clegg decided 2015 was the time to tack to the centre at the precise moment as the centrist consensus was breaking down.  It won them 8 seats.

Not that they were the only ones.  David Cameron and George Osborne it seems were convinced their election campaign and manifesto were also of the centre.  They weren't.   The Tory manifesto was the most right-wing in a generation.  The Tory campaign, as well as predicated on making Ed Miliband out to be weak, was based around portraying Labour as a soft touch on immigrants, benefits, the deficit and so on.  Labour was trapped (and still is) as no one believed the "controls on immigration" ploy and it outraged its core metropolitan support.  As argued here passim ad nauseum, the Tory dedication to soaking the boomers while letting Labour have the youth vote worked because their sympathisers vote in blocs and are much more likely to turn out.  All the factors that were in their favour at a general election were against them in the referendum.

Indeed, essentially it was the Tories' tactics against Labour at the election that came back and did for our membership of the EU.  That mild-mannered weirdo Ed Miliband would happily stab the country in the back if it meant power, said Michael Fallon.  Labour would consign the recovery George Osborne's policies had delayed to oblivion.  Labour's incredibly mild manifesto was dangerous radicalism.  Had we ended up with another hung parliament rather than a small Tory majority, it's extremely unlikely a referendum would have been called.

No one on the remain side it seems looked at how the Tories won and saw the warning signs.  Hubris, arrogance, stupidity, and the same old reliance on focus groups and modelling blinded them to what some of us saw: that Britain has become a nastier, ever more divided and atomised nation, where anger and hate have started counting for more than muddling through.  The Tories rode the tiger without realising they wouldn't be able to control it forever, blasé about how they were bringing politics ever closer to the gutter.  Just two months ago they were describing the campaign against Sadiq Khan as just the rough and tumble of politics, happy to poison the well, as they knew Zac Goldsmith had no chance of winning.

They somehow didn't imagine those same tactics of mendacity and character assassination coupled with fanatical levels of bias from the right-wing press would end up being used against them.  Or at least, this is if we're to believe Behr's account.  Could the entire Remain campaign have been been so naive, so unprepared for what was always going to be an incredibly dirty and nasty few months of political infighting?  Or is Behr's article an attempt after the fact by the Remainers to excuse their lamentable failure, only one executed so cackhandedly that it makes them all seem like complete fools?

Because it is as the Rodent says unintentionally hilarious, such is the level of apparent disbelief that it could have turned out this way.  Best of all is the complaint from a "Cameron aide" that if someone on the left had rubbished the Bank of England as corrupt and part of the biased establishment, they would have been flayed alive by the BBC.  As they would have been.  Leave however got away with it barely being questioned.  Proving what?  That the BBC should call out bullshit regardless of its source?  Let's not get carried away here, right?

This is the real story of the Leave win: that every ploy of the media managers, spin doctors and ad agencies was turned against the previous winners and users, either Labour or Conservative, in the aid of a cause that none of those in charge of the Leave campaign truly, unequivocally believed in.  It's turned out to be the final victory of the art of political warfare over the substance.  The exact same people who previously lapped it up did so again, only rather than plump for one section of the political class over the other, they voted to screw those they were told were the establishment by the establishment.  And lo, did everyone get screwed.

The Leave vote wasn't then in any real sense a revolution, as Behr says, albeit a revolution where the Tory party continues to govern.  It was rather the logical conclusion of where politics as practised has been leading us for some time.  The post-truth, post-fact world talked of, the remarkable irony being that it has arrived at a time when it has never been easier to find objective takes on who is and isn't talking bollocks.  Most people just aren't interested enough, whatever they tell pollsters or focus groups.  What they do know is what's in the tabloids, on their Facebook timeline, on the TV, and talked about by friends and relatives.  It sure isn't politics of the kinder and gentler variety.  It's the politics of seething anger, spite, jealousy, xenophobia and often outright despair.  The referendum gave them a great big mug to pour all these grievances into.  We're meant to believe the very architects of this didn't see it coming.  The reality is the monster always ends up killing its creator.

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7/05/2016 11:53:00 pm | |

Tuesday, June 28, 2016 

The cluster and the fucks.

I go away for one fucking week...

I should then start with an apology.  In the last major post I posited that most politicians were not all the same, that they had principles and deserved more respect, even if general contempt aimed at politicians was only a part of the poison behind the murder of Jo Cox.

Having spent the past four days in near disbelief at the unutterable inadequacies of almost the entire political class, I could not have been more wrong.  Contempt breeds contempt.  Despicable selfishness, self-regard and self-importance inspires the same.  When our supposed leaders have no back-up plan, no idea of what to do when the shit hits the fan, why should anyone have the slightest respect for them?  I didn't expect Leave to have a plan, as they never began to articulate one and would never have been able to agree on one.  For the government as a whole not to have one, for the civil service also to have not done much in the way of work on it beggars belief.  At a general election the civil service prepare in case they need to implement the opposition's policies; in this instance it really does seem as though no one saw it coming.

Sitting up watching the results come in early Friday morning, I was angry, but not in the slightest bit shocked.  My gut feeling since the election, having seen how the Tories won their majority by feather-bedding the boomers and effectively giving two fingers to the young, was it would take something special to convince those same people to vote remain.  As it turned out, the young on the whole voted remain, or at least those that again bothered to turn out.  Those same boomers meanwhile overwhelmingly voted leave (Lord Ashcroft poll health warning) and again, why wouldn't they?  They had little to lose by doing so: their pensions are triple-locked; inheritance tax is being raised as in the words of Cameron there is nothing more natural than wanting to pass on your home; and all their other perks have been protected too.  Given an opportunity to kick out against change, against immigrants, against an other they've been told is the root of so many problems, what made Cameron and pals think for a second they would win them over?

Their obvious reference points were the Scottish referendum, where Project Fear was deemed to have worked, and much the same tactics as used against Labour last year.  The entire Tory campaign was built around the supposed economic chaos that would descend if Ed Miliband became prime minister at the head of a coalition.  A recovering economy, went one poster.  Don't let Labour wreck it.  You can understand the logic; if voters thought it was better the devil you know twice before, why not for the third year on the trot?

Except each vote and referendum is always different, just as each campaign is different.  We saw the hatred and intolerance that was being whipped up; we saw how the economic argument was failing to cut through.  We witnessed the absolute shamelessness of Leave; we noticed how the "scaremongering", which in large part has already been shown to be nothing of the sort, was this time being decried.  We ought to have noticed how instead of being mocked, Michael Gove's denunciation of experts was cheered, how Boris Johnson's bullshit about an independence day led to a near standing ovation.  Voters decided that things would more or less stay the same, or even get better in the years after a Leave vote.

You could if you like extrapolate from the map of the areas that voted leave and remain that the main distinguishing feature is the varying strength of the local economy: areas that have recovered or are recovering from the crash voted remain; areas that haven't or have never fully recovered from the turmoil of the 80s, the recession of the 90s, voted leave.  And while this does help us to understand to an extent, it doesn't explain why Liverpool voted remain while my home town, supposedly one of the boom areas, voted to leave.  It doesn't explain why places like Sunderland and Port Talbot, areas that have everything to lose from an EU exit, voted to leave.  The same is the case for those areas that have benefited massively from EU funding, almost all of which voted out.  It doesn't explain why areas like Peterborough and Boston, both changed markedly by immigration over the last ten years voted out, while places like Hartlepool, with barely any net migration, did the same.

The polls, the same ones that (mostly) got the result wrong for a second time in a year, claim the main grievance of out voters other than immigration was sovereignty.  Except sovereignty and opposition to immigration on the basis of the lack of control obviously go hand in hand.  Sovereignty is such a nebulous concept that it can mean everything and nothing; even if we accept these polls as accurate, it's hard to believe perceived anger over giving some of our law-making and regulation powers to Brussels was that much of a rallying cry.

Indeed, what has happened since is difficult to minimise.  For some, Leave meant far more than just exiting the EU; it meant leaving Europe. It meant telling not just the eastern European migrants of the past ten years to leave, but all immigrants.  How could they have possibly reached such a conclusion, been so misled?  Surely not by the constant invoking of taking back control, by the claims from Leave that Turkey joining the EU was a certainty, with their leaflets suggesting Syria and Iraq would either be next or that refugees from those two countries currently in Turkey would be able to come also.

It comes back yet again to how politicians have ridden the immigration monster over the past half decade.  It comes back yet again to how the media has connived in encouraging the myth of the grasping, service burdening migrant to the point where Cameron based his "renegotiation" around it.  It comes back yet again to how neither Labour nor the Tories succeeded in rebuilding broken, despairing towns and communities.  Labour at least tried, while the Tories' austerity has reduced so many of our high streets to the picture painted last Friday.  It comes back yet again to how in the face of change, even if not in their own neighbourhoods, many cling on to what they know all the harder while blaming the newcomers.  It comes back to an atavistic sense of what England is, and therefore always should be.

If the result then was not a shock, that it has so emboldened racists is.  A broadcast media that in the face of threats from Leave tied itself in knots, despite their lies being so obvious, betrayed the very public that look to it as a better guide than than the press.  That the new sport now seems to be to find someone outrageously racist and then not so much as challenge them on their views is not journalism, but rather a shaming indictment of their failure.

The most brickbats must though be directed at the government.  David Cameron gambled and lost.  To them it really does seem this was all a game: Cameron has supposedly taken responsibility by resigning, and yet going down in history as the prime minister who likely broke up the United Kingdom doesn't seem punishment enough.  The blame if the economy is permanently damaged will not be placed firmly on the shoulders of the man who screamed and screamed about Labour's crash to the point where everyone starting believing it, but on those who voted Leave also.  That it was Cameron who decided putting our prosperity at risk was worth it if it won him a couple more years as prime minister, as it certainly wouldn't have decided our place in Europe, will likely be forgotten.  His stature in comparison to even that of Gordon Brown, hated by the right despite his genuine claim to having helped steady the entire economic system back in 2008, should be permanently diminished.  The accolade of worst post-war prime minister is surely his now to lose.

Unless of course we do end up with PM Boris.  Another egomaniac encouraged by an adoring media ignoring his every deficiency, never has someone with leadership ambitions appeared so out of his depth.  Their Leave victory press conference might as well have been a wake, so flummoxed and so embarrassed were they at having won by mistake.  The plan had been for Dave/Remain to win by a narrow margin with Boris having firmly established himself in the affections of the Tory Leavers.  They didn't for a moment believe any of the nonsense they said, nor did they expect Mr and Mrs Average Punter to do so either.  Bit of a rum do that they did, isn't it?  That Boris's fumblings in his Telegraph column yesterday were so feeble and so lacking in credibility that he has already disowned them is indicative of the amount of attention and care he gives to everything he touches.  Meanwhile, George Osborne, the other chief architect of this absolute clusterfuck, says it was their responsibility to have a plan, not his.

Labour's response to all this?  To put in motion a coup that was coming remain or leave.  It deserves a post of its own, but even after the past few days, the rank hypocrisy and martyr complexes of MPs who have never so much as tried to make Corbyn as leader work has been astounding.  No seat is safe north of Islington, apparently, and so that fabled putting of the country, people and constituents first has gone for a Burton in favour of ousting the leader at a moment of political and economic crisis.  And just like the government and Leave, they have absolutely no fucking idea of who should be leader instead of Corbyn, no idea of how to respond to the vote, except it seems to somehow make a "progressive" case for limiting free movement, and no idea if their coup will be accepted by the membership.

Which leaves us with the only party with any seeming nous, any seeming plan and any seeming leadership, and it's the SNP and Nicola Sturgeon.  Who can begrudge her and Scotland a second referendum after this shit show?  Who can argue that Scotland won't be taken out of the EU against its will?  Who can say what will happen in Northern Ireland, which also voted Remain and where it seems even less thinking was done on how a vote to leave would impact almost everything there?

Like many, I've spent the last few days ashamed of my country, ashamed of my countrymen, and ashamed of our politicians.  This is what referendums on nationhood wrought: they rend and tear, they break down friendships and divide families, all to a far greater extent than general elections ever do.  They are designed to polarise, and that's just what it's achieved.  It will take years, if not decades before the wounds from this result so much as start to heal.  And while we will all pay, some must pay more than others.

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6/28/2016 08:31:00 pm | |

Saturday, September 12, 2015 

Life becoming a landslide.

Harriet Harman, worst interim leader of any organisation since Roger Biscuitbarrel managed in the space of 3 months to destroy his father's vodka empire, mainly by spending £2bn on a gigantic frozen alcohol castle as a marketing ploy?   Yeah, pretty much.

Also, I can finally label myself with a percentage.  I am the 4.5%.  Feel me.

Good luck Jeremy.  We're all going to need it.

P.S. All those saying kind things about Liz Kendall now (and I don't mean Corbyn).  Where were you before?

P.P.S. "I, Nicola Sturgeon, welcome Jeremy Corbyn so long as he agrees entirely with SNP policy on everything.  If he doesn't, then obviously the Labour party is just as bad as it has always been and the only possible alternative to the Tories is independence, which will truly help England just as much as it will Scotland."

P.P.P.S. As Tom Clark says, humility from everyone ought to be the immediate response to Corbyn's crushing victory.  The best possible way for Corbyn himself to contribute to that, as it's already apparent that the same people with much in the way of responsibility for the scale of the win have no intention of being so, would be to appoint someone as shadow chancellor who is not from within his circle.  Considering quite how many are already saying they're going to the backbenches that might be getting more difficult by the minute, but John McDonnell cannot credibly be George Osborne's opposite.

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9/12/2015 12:24:00 pm | |

Tuesday, May 26, 2015 

A return to May the 7th (and everything that's happened since).

Shallow like a line of piss / You're just a motherfucker

(Hello readers!  This is rather long, as in 3,000 words long, but after two weeks of feeling sorry for myself you're hopefully ready to be bored stupid once again, right?)

Shall we, if we dare, return to May the 7th?  Now, of course, we know that Labour's campaign was a disaster, Ed Miliband had spent 5 years making the party unelectable and that not a single member of the shadow cabinet believed in so much as a solitary policy in the manifesto.  All these are now Facts, and cannot be disagreed with unless you are in Denial and clearly not on the side of the Modernisers blazing a trail towards a majority government in just another 5 short years.

Still, let's forget all that for a second while I relate two personal anecdotes that should have tipped me off that Labour was about to get fucked harder than a dead duck by a deranged and randy mallard.  First, where I work the polling station is next door.  When I got in someone had taken it upon themselves to stick up a laminated A4 sheet on the fence next to the building that said something along the lines of "All the main political parties have conspired to cover up child abuse in their ranks.  Are you really going to vote for people who have connived in the rape of children?"  Believer in free speech that I am, I swiftly binned it.  Second, previously the polling station had been in the community centre opposite rather than in the sports club slightly up the road, confusing plenty of people.  Thinking one young couple, the bloke expensively tatted up, were similarly perplexed, I advised them where the station was.  "Oh, we're not voting", he scoffed, as though the idea was only slightly less ridiculous than if I'd suggested they perform a Manumission-style sex show right there in the street.

Except I put such bad omens out of my mind.  If there was hope, it lay in the polls.  How could they possibly be wrong? "It couldn't be closer" was the Graun's front page.  "All the final polls so far seem to be showing a shift towards Labour", tweeted new king of psephology Lord Ashcroft, whose constituency polls implied Labour should romp home in the Tory marginals.  Why, even Finchley and Golders Green looked possible for Labour.  Everyone was preparing not for the unthinkable, a Tory majority, but the kind of result that could take weeks to unpick.  Clearly it was serious if not just the Mail and Sun were descending into paroxysms of fear at how a Labour minority government might abolish non-dom status and tax mansions, but the editor of the Telegraph no less was making impassioned pleas in the middle of the night to readers signed up to receive marketing emails.  The Tories were poised to declare Miliband illegitimate, Cameron was going to stay ensconced in Downing Street if the result was even remotely questionable, and saving Nick Clegg was deemed more important than some Tory target seats.  More than anything I was cautiously optimistic.  I'm never optimistic.  Something was horrifically, spectacularly, cataclysmically wrong, and yet I failed to see the signs.

The clocks struck ten, David Dimbleby revealed the exit poll projection and Big Ben rang out death knells.  Contrary to much that has been written since, the polls were only fantastically wrong on a single score.  The 37% Tory share was just about within the 3% margin of error of most of them.  They got the Lib Dem, UKIP and SNP shares more or less on the nose too.  Only on Labour's dismal, catastrophic 31% (or 30.4%, if we're being precise) did they not manage to get close to just how short Ed Miliband's party was going to fall.  Everything had been predicated on the polls being right; the parties since have claimed they either had an inkling or knew the Labour vote was being hideously overstated, but if that's really true they didn't share their insight with anyone, not least the same journalists they spend much of their time leaking to.  The failure was pretty much total, even if at their most pessimistic/optimistic the leaders had imagined just such a scenario.

How were the polls so wrong?  At this stage, you can still take your pick.  Probably the best indication so far nonetheless is the breakdown by ICM of their final poll for the Graun, which shows that rather than it being down to a late swing or "shy" Tories, both two of the most immediately popular explanations, including from myself, it's more likely the problem is the sampling.  The raw data for the poll, before the weighting was applied designed to counteract the shy Tory phenomenon blamed for 92's debacle, had Labour and the Tories neck and neck on 35%.  Indeed, it was the demographic weighting that did the most damage, boosting Labour up to 38% and the Tories down to 32%, before the subsequent weighting for past vote, turnout and adjustment for those who refuse to say who they're going to vote for now but will say who they did last time brought the figures back to 35% for Labour and 34% for the Tories.

In other words, the best explanation we have thus far is polling, whether on the internet or by telephone, isn't able to reach the people necessary to produce a representative sample, and that unrepresentative sample is then made even worse by weighting that either needs fundamentally reconfiguring or ripping up and starting again.  This doesn't mean there wasn't something of a late swing, or still some shy Tories, as the exit poll also underestimated the number of seats the Tories would win, but neither can plausibly explain just how massively out of whack the Tory and Labour share of the votes were.

We must then return to my personal anecdotes, as frankly we have little else.  First, there's an awful lot of people out there who aren't apathetic so much as apoplectic at a political elite that doesn't in fact exist.  Yes, it probably was just a lone nutbar who stuck that sign up, and yet that person spoke for a lot of others who believe the absolute worst of what they read in the papers.  There has yet to be the slightest evidence presented there was anything like a cover-up of child abuse at Westminster, as opposed to the possibility there was a lot of looking in the opposite direction, as we've seen in places like Rotherham for varying reasons, and already people are convinced of the depravity of those in high places.

Second, and much more fundamentally, is the failure of Labour and the left in general to get out the youth vote.  Estimates vary as to how many 18-24 year-olds did turn out: a poll with a 9,000 strong sample for Ipsos-Mori suggests it could have been as low as 43%, which sounds far more realistic than the British Election Society's estimate of 60%, which was still below YouGov's "certain to vote" 69%.  When less than half of those with arguably the most at stake couldn't be motivated enough to do something that only needs doing once every 5 years, there encapsulated is why we now have the Conservatives with a majority.  Yes, you can blame wannabe messiahs, the vacuous stupidity of youth culture, if not the young themselves, the failure to counteract the they're all the same fatuity, which among the older saw the UKIP vote skyrocket, the fatheaded selfishness of a distinct minority and all the rest of it, but if you can't convince 18-24-year-olds to vote for something better than the whitest, most middle class bloke on the face of the planet, then frankly you deserve what you get.

Finally, and interconnectedly, we have the Tory everything we do must be for the retiring boomers philosophy.  So much of the talk since the election has been about how the Tories won because of how they were on the side of the aspirational, weren't going to tar and feather entrepreneurs in town centres or tax the rabbit hutches of children in central London, most of which has been from the Labour leadership challengers and other assorted "modernisers".  Bullshit.  The Tories won because they dedicated so much time and energy to keeping their core vote on side, with every ploy and bung going.  Hate inheritance tax?  We're abolishing it.  Want to be certain we won't do anything to your benefits, although we certainly will to those of the low-paid and in-work?  Triple locked.  Want to blow your pension all in one go if you so wish, or buy a flat or two and then rent them out to the brats you spawned to replace yourselves?  Already done.  Want to generally fuck over everyone younger than you, which is funny because you don't know them?  Hey, that was the entire point of our manifesto.  Welcome aboard.  We, or at least I said this is going to be no country for young men, and lo, so it did come to pass.

Labour did not lose on the basis of the manifesto.  The manifesto lacked passion, anger and failed to radiate strength, but it didn't want for policies which were popular, or at least the polls at the time said they were.  Labour lost because of the above, and a few other distinct reasons.  Ed Miliband, much as I came to love the rubber faced goon as only another sad, lonely weirdo can, just wasn't seen as prime ministerial.  He faced a mountain and only began to scale it when it was too late to reach the summit.  I thought the Paxman interview, when he replied with his defiant and yet sympathetic "who cares?" to how he was presented in the media, along with his refusal to play the referendum game in the Question Time debate were the kind of answers that won people over, not necessarily because they liked or agreed with what he said but because they could respect him for doing so.  Almost certainly more damaging and what everyone else saw was the battering he received on the same show for "overspending", even if those assailing him were Tory stooges, as at least two were.  Labour lost because it wasn't trusted on the economy.  The party that brought the economy back from the brink, only for George Osborne to push it over the edge with his austerity programme, took the blame over and over for something it didn't do.

By the same token, the Conservatives did not win on the basis of their dismal, hate-filled manifesto.  They won because David Cameron, as essentially David Cameron was the Conservative campaign, was seen as more plausible.  He spent one half of it going through the motions and then the second half trying to convince everyone just how "up 4 it" he was, talking to empty cowsheds and specially chosen farmers about where milk comes from, and yet it was enough.  George Osborne meanwhile was kept as far away from voters as possible, doing work experience at various businesses presumably as part of community payback for stalling the recovery, while all the other favourites who have since returned to our screens and newspapers like Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Gove and Theresa May were locked away entirely lest they scare the horses.

And you know why else?  Because let's face it, there are a substantial minority of people in this country who aren't just ignorant cunts, they are proud and positively revel in being horrible, ignorant cunts.  I don't mean in the oh, people who don't vote Labour are ignorant sense, as that itself is completely ignorant.  What is ignorant is the increasing tendency on the part of very intelligent people to do themselves down on the basis that they don't talk what the common people do like.  Oh, they're not like us, they don't talk like us goes the wail from people who are in fact mostly very well represented, they don't understand the life of the everyday man, when they very much do and most politicians spend far too much time if anything trying to understand exactly what Mr and Mrs Average Voter want at any precise moment in time.

We seem to have reached a point where it's increasingly seen as snobbish to use words longer than three syllables, or indeed any word that your average 8-year-old doesn't use everyday, as ordinary people don't talk like that any more.  No, perhaps they don't.  Then again, to a lot of ordinary people it's perfectly normal to use a variation on fuck in every sentence, and excuse me if I'd rather our politicians didn't emulate that trait.  This ignorance doesn't always but often does go hand in hand with the they're all the same cuntery, and rather than fight against this bigotry of low expectations, low aspirations (yes, because that's what this is) and low everything, we in fact have everyone wanting a bit of it.

Something else some otherwise very intelligent people took from the election results was, well, at least the BNP got about ten votes.  Why was that?  It couldn't be down to how we now have a party that says yes, it's perfectly OK to be ignorant, insular and proud of it, could it?  The fascist vote collapsed precisely because in UKIP there's a home for them where they don't quite feel the same level of self-hatred, nor is the media as visceral in its distaste; if anything, quite the opposite, such is the hard-on they've had for Nigel Farage if not his party as a whole.  Not every UKIP voter fits this depiction, of course; many of those who voted UKIP in Labour's heartlands in the north for instance did so as a protest, out of a sense of being ignored and abandoned.  All the same, many of those who did vote UKIP are hateful pricks, and if anything considering just how much of popular culture is currently dedicated to uncovering "the other" and then wiping their faces in their own vomit, it's a surprise "only" 4 million joined the Farage bandwagon.

Lastly, *gasp*, we have to consider the sheer horror that has been the Labour leadership contest thus far.  Within 24 hours the manifesto had been abandoned, disowned, insulted, shat upon, as had Ed.  Looking at Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham, and all the other wastes of flesh that frankly don't deserve to be referred to by name, I cannot see a single thing that I should care about or ever want to believe in.  Who knows exactly what it was that caused Chuka Umunna to drop out before the contest had even begun, whether it really was he wasn't ready for his friends and relatives to be dropped into the media maelstrom, or if he was about to be exposed as a dog botherer, as it doesn't really matter which.  That he couldn't face up to it just shows what a bottler party Labour now is, and the lack of empathy it has for those who do take on the worst that can be thrown at them.

Ed Miliband spent 5 years having every little bit of shit that could be found directed straight back into his face.  The surprise if anything was that by the election campaign, everything had been used already.  There was nothing left.  Ed's reward for having chosen to do things the difficult way?  For his entire leadership to be treated as something that couldn't be repudiated fast enough.  I know it's not just about his electoral failure but also how his leadership was long viewed within the party, with no one prepared to stand against him for fear it would make things worse, and yet he still deserved, deserves far better.  Indeed, I challenge anyone to seriously tell me how any of the current line up will be a better leader, or any more capable of winning the next election.  Rather than take a good hard look at where Labour has gone wrong across the UK, from Scotland where it certainly didn't lose because it was too left-wing, as John Curtice among many others have argued, to the north where the threat to the party is not the Conservatives but UKIP, to the cities were the problem the party faces is defectors to the left, the party is still, still, obsessed with how the right-wing media depicts it rather than how real people in the marginals weren't convinced.

Labour is haunted by the spectre of Tony Blair, despite the bastard being very much alive.  The party doesn't seem to have realised we aren't in the 90s/early 00s any longer, where triangulation worked so long as the media was kept (somewhat) on side and the economy grew.  We're in the 2010s, wages are still barely growing, only the luckiest among the young can afford to "aspire", and the previously dominant centre-left parties of Europe are in crisis.  And yet all we're being offered is reheated, regurgitated, reconstituted processed mechanical bullshit of the most shameful quality from meatheads who have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.  John Harris said it best: most of the Labour elite simply don't have the wit or humility to involve themselves in the debates that are necessary at the margins, that are outside of the comfort zone of consoling themselves with it's all down to how the party wasn't on the side of hard-working people and hard-working families and hard-working wealth creators and hard-working businesses.

It wasn't just despair over the election result and other things that led me to take a two-week break, and I apologise sincerely if anyone was truly worried for my wellbeing.  I was for a while too, but the worst has passed, thankfully.  It was despair over where I, we go from here: I've never been a Labour party member and I very much doubt I ever will be.  And yet Ed Miliband's Labour had convinced me we were getting somewhere; yes, it was barely anywhere, but for once Polly Toynbee has it right in how different a Labour Queen's speech tomorrow would have been to the Tory one we'll get.  Labour at this moment in time looks finished, and Labour in the UK is the only leftish party that has ever won, may ever win power.  How do we begin to build a movement that can replace it, that can have that wide-ranging appeal, that can offer the despondent hope and the hopeful a better alternative?  How can I change anything when I can't even change myself?

I see the parts but not the whole / I study saints and scholars both / No perfect plan unfurls

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5/26/2015 08:02:00 pm | |

Friday, May 08, 2015 

Acedia's blackest hole.

Where do we even begin?

Perhaps it's best to start with what I and so many others got spectacularly wrong.  First, the Lynton Crosby "crossover" happened.  It happened at the very last minute, but it happened.  Second, the mainstream, overwhelmingly right-wing media has far more influence than anyone on the left or on the internet as a whole has given it credit for in years.  Their screeching appeals to their readers not to vote Labour over the past couple of days are almost certainly not the reason the Conservatives have a slender majority, but the months, years of attacks on Labour and their depiction of Ed Miliband as a mixture of Stalin and Mr Bean, to borrow from Vince Cable, have exacted a heavy toll.  If you want a reason why UKIP won just shy of 4 million votes, almost as many as the SNP and the Lib Dems combined, you need only look as far as a media that depicts Britain as a country where the power lies not with the white, upper middle classes but with immigrants, benefit claimants, the EU, and a constantly being bent over and sodomised BBC.  The real metropolitan elite has succeeded in creating an image of a phony metropolitan elite, where politically correct limp-wristed Guardianistas allow children to be raped and everything that's wrong with the country is down to their smug, sneering attitude of knowing best.  You can't support England!  You can't talk about immigration!  You can't say anything anymore without someone jumping down your throat!

Where I would maintain I wasn't wrong is in that no one won this election.  Now, plainly, the Conservatives did.  They didn't however win on the basis of anything in the Conservative manifesto or almost anything that David Cameron said the whole campaign.  The Tories have increased their share of the vote yes, something not achieved since 1900, but the swing is a miniscule 0.5%.  The Conservatives won because at the last minute more decided to stick with what they know than risk a Labour minority "held to ransom" by the SNP.  Apart from a few exceptional results, like the defenestration of Ed Balls, the Tories have their majority thanks to winning the seats they needed to from their former coalition partner.  Nick Clegg's message of dead centrism, which even to me looked as if it might in the end pay dividends failed catastrophically.  Why have a Lib Dem MP supporting Tory policies when you can have the real thing?

The Labour result is though throat-slittingly, jumping into a gaping chasm, blowing your own head off with a howitzer bad.  It represents everything the party must have feared in its darkest moments combined with the very worst of its most gleeful enemies' fantasies.  To gain an overall swing of just 1.5% after 5 years of austerity, real terms losses in earnings and hacking away at the public services as only a Tory led government can is not just nightmarish, it suggests Labour as a party is in terminal decline.  As we've seen on the continent, it isn't the centre-right parties that have been most squeezed post-crash, it's been those on the centre-left.  Unlike in Spain and Greece where parties of the radical left have been the beneficiaries of the collapse, we're seeing a refracted image of the situation in France, where the Front National looks set to become the unofficial opposition.  Clearly UKIP aren't going to play that role here, but what has happened is that as all the main parties have moved to the right on immigration and the economy, it's the establishment parties of the left that suffer most.  As the Greens will never be a working class alternative to Labour for a whole myriad of reasons, the major shift has been to UKIP, but there has been a much smaller if still significant shift to the left also.

How is Labour meant to win those voters back?  The more hawkish it is on the deficit and the harsher on immigration the more it loses voters like me to the alternatives on the left.  Meanwhile those on the right aren't satisfied as Labour won't go further than merely copying Tory policies.  It's utterly stuck, and has next to no room to manoeuvre.

For the left to win, it seems the only hope is to have a charismatic leader.  They can be an utter bastard, like a certain Mr Blair, or they can be a sign of change rather than stand for anything, like a certain Mr Obama.  If you look slightly nerdy, decide that you'd rather than country was just a little bit more equal please sir, and that it's not the best idea in the world to chuck bombs at countries without thinking it through first, or to spend the whole of your life brown nosing some of the most despicable cunts on the face of the planet, then boy are you fucked.

Ed Miliband's gambit was that the country had on a few really quite slight measures shifted all but imperceptibly to the left.  In their heart of hearts, perhaps most people do feel that way: they do want a higher minimum wage if not a living one, they do want a job that provides a way out of poverty, which is secure, they do want the corporate behemoths that now run so much of our public services to be just that, rather than service only their shareholders.  When it came down to it though, they held onto nurse in case of something worse, the worse being an inconclusive result where a nationalist party set on breaking the country up would hold the balance of power.  Yes, the failure to correct or challenge the media/Tory narrative that Labour was responsible for the crash did have an impact, but then on so many other fronts Labour and indeed all the parties have failed to do the same.  For far too long the main three have been too scared to confront voters' prejudices and instead have given in to them.  You celebrate the way the country has become diverse and yet you tell us you want an end to immigration right now; you tell us you hate scroungers and yet the welfare bill is increasing because benefits are topping up low wages and subsidising landlords, not to pay for layabouts; you complain about the wait to see a doctor and the threat to the NHS, and yet you're not prepared to pay the taxes to fund it to the same level as health services elsewhere.

Who Labour should choose to replace Miliband seems almost moot.  It clearly can't be someone else from the Blair/Brown era, which rules out Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham at a stroke.  Chuka Umuuna would, should be a frontrunner but while he has steel he lacks said charisma and passion.  I'd like to think it's time the party chose a woman, and on that front Liz Kendall would probably be the best bet, only yet again there's no reason whatsoever to believe she would make the needed difference when there is so little scope for policy change without losing more voters to UKIP or the Greens.  If there is the tiniest, most minute squib of brightness, it's that nothing can possibly get worse for the party in Scotland.  It needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, but it can't get any worse.  Whether Scotland will still be part of the UK by the time it's ready to challenge again could be the real question.

Finally then we must turn to our new overlords.  The Conservatives have won a majority, regardless of how, on the back of the most right-wing manifesto since the days of Thatcher.  They promise to rip up the Human Rights Act, if only to replace it with a British Bill of Rights codifying the same things, to slash social security to the absolute bone in ways they refused to let us in on, to further ramp up the housing market, to all but abolish inheritance tax, and to run a surplus from which tax cuts in time for the next election will be handed out.  Let's surmise that in fact it won't be that bad: Osborne will now look at the books, realise that cutting as much as they say they will is complete lunacy, and that a further delay to reducing the deficit is sensible.  We still though will be facing cuts that look unachievable, if that is the party doesn't now renege on its promise to not raise VAT, to posit just one thing it could do instead.

As promised by Cameron, the starting gun on the EU referendum has sounded.  Let's assume the best: that Cameron gets something from Angela Merkel and the rest that allows him to claim he has successfully renegotiated our membership.  Regardless of that, his backbenchers, looking over their shoulders at UKIP once again will be campaigning for the exit.  The poll will not be about the benefits of the EU so much as what are seen as the negatives: the open borders, the loss of power, the amount we pay for barmy EU bureaucrats, and so forth.  Even if the vote is a yes to stay in, the Scottish referendum has proved that once you've asked the question you will sooner or later have to ask it again, as it's guaranteed the result will be as close as the 55%-45% share north of the border.

Then we have the issue of Cameron himself.  We know he's not going to serve a third term, so the party leadership battle begins here.  At the same time as the EU referendum we're going to have Osborne, May and Boris battling it out, with all that implies for infighting in the party in and around the referendum.  When you've won a majority on the back of being right-wing shitbags and those whose support you're trying to get are right-wing shitbags, why on earth would you then head back to the centre?

I could go on but that's probably enough and I'm sleep deprived as it is.  To be slightly optimistic again, the Tories are still going to have trouble governing: their majority is smaller than it was in 1992, their backbenchers will be just as fractious as in the last parliament, and by-elections will dwindle it further.

Let's not lie to ourselves, all the same.  Today's result is a disaster for those at the margins of society.  It's a disaster for those who believe in internationalism, rather than nationalism.  And it's the evidence we should have seen before that the left in England is fucked, probably irrevocably.

Have a good weekend.

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5/08/2015 07:57:00 pm | |

Monday, October 28, 2013 

Thoughts on the end of the liberal conspiracy.

Liberal Conspiracy is gone.  It's something that's clearly been approaching for a while, such has been the dwindling number of posts, but it's still rather sad.  My thanks go out to Sunny for considering my witterings to be worthy of occasionally featuring there, and I wish him luck in his future ventures.  This also seems as good a time as any for a brief interlude of introspection, so here we go.

Sunny pulling the plug on LC is indicative of where blogging has gone over the last couple of years, which is pretty much down the toilet.  Perhaps I just haven't kept up, but away from the group blogs it seems moribund.  A few are still going fairly strong, others aren't updated as regularly as before, while plenty have thrown in the towel.  Clearly, individual blogs can still grow exponentially, for which see Wings Over Scotland, it's just they need a well-defined niche.

I would say this, but for me the real explanation for the decline isn't the mainstream media coming late to the party and overtaking the amateurs, it's that most writers now spend their time on Twitter rather than blogging.  Each to their own and everything, I just don't like the format and way it inevitably leads to circle jerks, as well as the tendency it inspires in trying to one up those you disagree with, which leads absolutely nowhere.  It also seems to lead some to believe that Twitter, or rather their followers and those they follow are the internet, the culmination of which seemed to be the "boycott" of August.  I'd like to think blogging broadens rather than limits horizons, while social networking in general does the opposite.  Might just be me.

It may also be somewhat to do with how ghastly politics is and has been for the last couple of years.  People seem to have tuned out to the point where Russell Brand being his normal, half-berk half-idiot savant self inspires more comment than anything in months.  You can focus when the government of the day is doing one or two things that are spectacularly ill-advised and wrong; when the coalition seems determined to bugger things up on so many different levels, it tends to inspire apathy rather than opposition.  With so many struggling to make ends meet it also leaves you determined to make the most of the leisure time you have, and while I might be the kind of sad bastard who likes smashing out hundreds of words every day, plenty of others who might have started out before think better of it now.

All this said, I for one am still fairly happy to keep going on.  I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought of putting an end to Obsolete/septicisle or whatever stupid name this site has quite a few times down the years, but for one reason or another I've continued.  Why stop now that the "competition" is dwindling?  Let's give it till Christmas, at least.

(Thanks to everyone who does humour me.  And if you're still reading, thank you especially.)

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10/28/2013 06:09:00 pm | |

Saturday, June 26, 2010 

They never learn.


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6/26/2010 01:14:00 pm | |

Friday, June 25, 2010 

The budget's effect on "real" people.

Brilliant post by deeplyflawedbuttrying on how the budget will affect her. Also a interjection by David Marquand, by no means one of my favourites, on how it betrays the liberal tradition.

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6/25/2010 06:11:00 pm | |

Wednesday, June 23, 2010 

"A budget we can be proud of".

As noted before, most budgets tend to start falling apart the next day. There is almost always something hiding in the details that isn't noticed at first. Not widely realised yesterday was that public sector pensions were also being linked to the consumer prices index rather than the retail prices index, along with most other benefits. Also hidden was that it isn't just those earning more than £40,000 a year who will no longer be eligible for tax credits, but from 2012 those with one child earning more than £30,000 will also no longer be getting money back from the exchequer. Families with one child earning more than £25,000, or just £1,000 over the average will also have their entitlement cut. As Next Left points out, this is contrary to a promise made by Theresa May back in February in which she lambasted Labour "lies" about the Tories' plans.

Compared to the whopping porkies told by George Osborne yesterday, May is a veritable bastion of honesty. He told us this was a progressive budget that protected the most vulnerable. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has crunched the numbers (PDF) and come up with this as the most stinging of ripostes for the impact of yesterday's budget come 2014-15. The government's own distributional analysis model in the red book only went up to 2012-13, which is before most of the changes on welfare take effect. The IFS's model also doesn't take into consideration the reforms to housing benefit, which are going to be brutal, the disability living allowance assessment changes or the in-year changes to tax credits. Nonetheless, this is still the result:

The pre-announced were Labour's plans, which are the model of progression, based on the ability to contribute. Osborne hasn't just soaked the poor, as the Guardian described it, he's brutally anally raped them. The IFS, even though it minces its words in the usual fashion, concludes "[S]o likely that overall impact of yesterday's measures was regressive".

We were always going to get this from the Tories. How though can the Liberal Democrats possibly continue to defend a budget which has such a impact on the very poorest? How can Vince Cable possibly call this a "budget we can be proud of"? Not a single one of their contributions to the overall package makes up for what the end result will be. This was not the "unavoidable" budget. This was the relaunching of the most vicious of class wars, and the Liberal Democrats are doing the equivalent of delivering the kick to the head once the victim is already on the floor.

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6/23/2010 08:57:00 pm | |

Tuesday, June 22, 2010 

The politics of resentment and the budget.

Of all the figures which emerged today, the most instructive flashed across the screen while George Osborne was still delivering his first budget. By the BBC's calculation, the Liberal Democrats had ensured that the ratio between spending cuts and tax rises, instead of being 80% to 20%, as the Tories had originally planned, had instead been altered to a 77%-23% share. There, laid bare, was the sum of Liberal Democrat influence on their coalition partner: a massive 3%.

To say that the vast majority of the Liberal Democrats sitting alongside their new brothers in arms desperately didn't want to be there, and looked more morose than a crying violin player, would be something of an understatement. Apparently just the one Liberal Democrat MP waved his order paper as Osborne sat down, and only Danny Alexander and Nick Clegg seemed to be agreeing with the Tory brethren as he spoke. Vince Cable looked especially grim, even if later he was forcing himself to defend a budget which presumably went against much of which he had previously preached. As for Osborne himself, his nose seemed even more bulbous than before, and the tip with the line which so resembles the cheeks of a bottom appeared even more pronounced. Whether this had anything to with his repeated insistence that this budget was "unavoidable", that it was "progressive" and he was protecting the "vulnerable" is impossible to know. David Cameron however will have been pleased that Osborne on television at least completely blocked any glimpse of himself, giving the impression he wasn't there. These "Macavity"-like tendencies might yet turn out to be highly useful.

The best that can be said for this most vicious of attacks on the poorest and most vulnerable is that the very worst has been postponed until next year, or at least this autumn, when the general spending review will indicate where the full cuts are going to come, and with only the promise that health and international aid will be protected, these cuts are going to be beyond savage: slashes of 25% in expenditure will almost certainly mean the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs. Even so, for those currently on benefits, this signals the beginning of the politics of resentment for those currently on the princely sum of £65 a week. Osborne at the weekend, appearing on the Andrew Marr programme, made clear what his intentions were:

I want to support the person who leaves their house at six or seven in the morning, goes out and does perhaps a low paid job in order to provide for their family and is incredibly frustrated when they see on the other side of the street the blinds pulled down and someone sitting there and living on a life of out of work benefits.

It doesn't of course matter that this hypothetical person on the other side of the street might be one of those currently either being turned down or not even getting a response to every single application they make, and that they might very closely be nearing the end of their entitlement to Jobseeker's Allowance, while the person doing the low paid job may be one of the lucky ones, this is exactly the sort of resentment that this government from the off wants to breed for those on benefits. This, it must be pointed out, is before the review of the welfare system is also due to be completed this autumn, and where the omens are to say the least not good. £65 a week is what someone on the minimum wage would receive for 11 hours work, or for some people, not even a day's pay. One of Osborne's biggest savings is through linking the yearly rise in benefits to the consumer prices index rather than the retail prices index, which as you can see from the graph on this post, is almost always lower. Quick calculations suggest that if this had been the case since 2001, benefits in cash terms would have risen by 20% rather than 31%, or to child benefit being £2 less a week than it is currently or £5 less a week for those on carers' allowance. These, as can be appreciated, are huge differences for those receiving such relatively paltry amounts.

If the pain from that move wasn't enough, then Osborne seemed determined to spread it evenly amongst all those receiving any kind of benefits. Admittedly, that those earning more than £40,000 a year had ever received tax credits in the first place was perverse, and a pure example of Labour's belief that you needed to ensure the middle classes were on side to justify anything other than the most basic of safety nets. Few earning below that figure will shed any tears for those better off than themselves being denied any money back from the exchequer. Far more alarming is the freezing of child benefit for three years, supposedly done because means testing would have made it far too complicated and taxing it would have made the non-working wives of millionaires better off than working mothers. Alongside this was the potentially even more damaging capping of housing benefit, or local housing allowance, at 30% of local rents rather than the current median. For those living in the south east, and especially London, this will at a stroke mean that many will instantly be having to look for a smaller property, regardless of the size of their family. The cut is meant to target the few cases that have featured in the tabloids, often involving large families of asylum seekers living in what have been described as "mansions" but what are in reality large houses, which are more cases of landlords cleaning up at the expense of the taxpayer rather than scroungers living in the lap of luxury. It's no exaggeration to suggest that some families will be evicted and made homeless as a result.

As for the introduction of a medical assessment for those on disability living allowance, this ought to be a perfect example of where the government could cut out duplication. Almost all of those in receipt of it will also be on either income support, incapacity benefit or employment and support allowance, all of which now require exactly the sort of medical assessments for eligibility to be introduced here. Those assessments should clearly show whether someone needs the kind of care which the DLA covers. Is it possible that George Osborne is confused over what DLA is actually for? Removing it is not going to increase the "incentive" to work, except perhaps for the carer who might no longer be able to look after the person claiming the benefit. Is this the sort of thing Osborne is really proposing in order to cut the deficit harder and faster than even they originally suggested?

All this is exacerbated by the rise in VAT to 20%, which although never imposed on food or children's clothes will inevitably have a knock on effect on exactly those things when the additional costs, especially on fuel, are factored in. The supermarkets and larger retailers might well be able to carry the burden themselves, helped along as they will be by the corresponding cuts in corporation tax, or at least those that don't already avoid it as much as they can will be, but even with the cut in the small companies tax to 20% many small businesses will have to raise prices exponentially. Add in the freezing of council tax, which will lead to cuts in local services which will also hit the poorest hardest, and you have a vision of austerity the likes of which those of us born in the 80s and after will have never experienced.

Some of this, undoubtedly, would have had to take place if either the Liberal Democrats or Labour had won the election single-handedly. Even if the Liberal Democrat influence on the Tories is just 3% when it comes to the ratio of cuts to tax rises, that's 3% which would have otherwise been cuts. The Tories with a workable majority probably wouldn't have touched capital gains tax, for example, or raised the income tax threshold by £1,000. For those two small mercies we should still be grateful, flippant as I am in the first paragraph.

The point remains however that despite Osborne's repeated use of "unavoidable", much of this budget was exactly the opposite. Even if we accept the premise that Labour, had it won the election, would have had to cut slightly faster and harder than it planned for in the March budget, say by another £20bn on top of the £73bn they had already accounted for, that would have still left another £20bn which Osborne has decided needs to be tightened to play with, or either the entirety of the extra spending cuts, or the entirety of the extra tax rises and welfare cuts announced today combined. Even if they had gone exactly with Osborne's additional cuts and spending, it could have raised the basic rate of income tax rather than VAT, a progressive tax rise rather than a regressive one. It could have introduced the so-called "robin hood" tax instead of the feeble banking levy which will raise £2bn, which is really sticking it to those who caused this crisis in the first place, as even Osborne admitted they did. Most of all though, as everyone else is making clear, this is a huge gamble. Osborne's plans are all based around the presumption that the private sector is ready to lead the recovery, when every suggestion is that the opposite is still currently the case. By their own admission, today's budget will lead to lower economic growth in the short-term and higher unemployment. It could well result in a double-dip recession. They, apparently, are prices worth paying for eliminating the structural deficit by the end of this parliament and for keeping the markets from the door. Both of those individuals Osborne identified in his illustration on Andrew Marr, both hit hard, might beg to differ.

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6/22/2010 09:52:00 pm | |

Monday, March 15, 2010 

The political wife as a commodity.

A couple of years back Siôn Simon inadvisedly made a pretty poor spoof of David Cameron's video blogs, offering in his guise as Dave the chance to sleep with his wife, or if you preferred, to take his children. I'm probably one of the few to find it vaguely amusing, both because he thought it was a good idea and due to the bad taste involved, which is always welcome, from MPs especially, as well as just how ridiculous he looks. He also had something of a point, even if it was put across with all the eloquence and subtlety of Carol Vorderman on Question Time.

Looking at it from the vantage point of early 2010, having already been treated to a prime minister almost shedding tears during a "personal" interview with Piers Morgan, with helpful juxtaposed cuts to his wife who most certainly was crying, and now to the "first" casual, cosy talk between Glam Sam Cam, as the Tories seem to wish us to see her, and Trevor McDonald, it doesn't really seem so ludicrous. Admittedly, Cameron isn't exactly offering us the opportunity to go further than just a informative chat with her, and Brown was presumably strong-armed by the spin doctors into the Morgan interview, although Sarah Brown has previously appeared at the party conferences almost as ballast, but it is treating the wives almost as a commodity, as if they are inseparable from their husbands and that they are somehow more important, or even as equally important as the actual policies which they offer.

In one sense, you could say they're being brave by deciding to go public in such a way. After all, Cherie Blair (or Booth) made the mistake to not just be content to be the prime minister's wife; she carried on as a lawyer and then a judge, which was doubtless in a influence in certain sections of the press on how she came to be treated. Up until now Samantha Cameron has mostly been treated as a clothes horse by the media at large, even though she's been far more successful in her own right as a designer than Cameron himself ever was as a PR for Carlton. In none of these interviews or appearances though do we actually learn what their own political views are, only the qualities of their husbands and how they met. Again, this could be an attempt to avoid being the next Cherie, who was always felt to be the left of her husband and made the mistake of working for the human rights lawyers Matrix Chambers, always likely to be seen as a conscious snub. Ed Vaizey attempted to invoke the uncertainty of those wobbling over whether to vote Tory or not by suggesting that Samantha might have voted for Labour in 1997, but we were quickly informed that she had never voted for the party. That the closest we've had to any actual indication of political inclination is a denial of a past vote is a rather sad state of affairs.

Admittedly, the purpose of these interviews is nothing to do with politics: it's all to do with those self-same publicists who are convinced that the wider public, unable to make their mind up purely on the back of the different policies on offer, also need to know just what kind of a person the man is when he's the one in the kitchen. At the same time though these attempts at showing the "real" person behind the public politician are self-defeating: they are distinctly "unreal", intrusive and spun just as much as any policy is. Hence the biggest revelations from Samantha Cameron's tête-a-tête with McDonald was that Dave likes the Godfather films and tends to channel-hop. At worst, they're not just uninformative, but mawkish, creepy and uncomfortable, as sections of Morgan's session with Brown were. They're also patronising: they imagine that there are voters out there, and you get the feeling they're thinking especially of so-called "Take a Break woman" who are so thick and backward that need to be informed by members of the leader's personal family of just how great they are to earn their support. Always looking for another angle, the media loves it, and it all adds to the soap opera feel which politics increasingly seems to be gaining.

The contradiction inherent of all this is that the more politics becomes like a family affair, or even part of the celebrity culture, where someone cannot be seen out without someone without rumours about splits and worse being whispered around, the more you turn off not just the purists, but also those who don't want their politicians to be like those that fill the scandal sheets and gossip rags, which by my feeble reckoning is just about everyone. Gordon Brown said shortly before becoming prime minister that he felt "the country was turning away from celebrity culture", back in those carefree days prior to the break up of Peter and Katie and before the death of Jade. Instead our politicians haven't just embraced it, it has become them.

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3/15/2010 10:23:00 pm | |

Tuesday, January 20, 2009 

Are we about to become utterly fucked?

It's understandable that a lot of people are getting terribly excited about someone who isn't a Bush ascending to the presidency of the United States of America, but left behind has been a major lack of any real substantive comment on the latest bail out of the banks, or rather, as it's beginning to already look, the further throwing of money at a lost cause.

Even if you opposed the original bail out, few were so dismissive of Brown and Darling to claim that they didn't know what they were doing; quite the opposite in fact. While they may have been authoratitive then, they were left looking anything but yesterday morning. They're not helped by the fact that no one, including them, has any idea of just how much effectively providing insurance to the banks for their losses in exchange for them to return to lending is going to cost, for the simple reason that no one it seems, Brown and Darling included, still has any idea of just how much the banks have lost through the collapse of the sub-prime market. This is part of the reason why the City has took such fright and been getting out of Royal Bank of Scotland as quickly as it can - when a bank that is over 70% owned by the state is still not potentially revealing the true nature of its losses, already estimated at £28bn, the idea that RBS is in fact bankrupt and has only been propped up the taxpayer quickly gains traction.

To give an indication of just how quickly we might be moving from another bail-out to full nationalisation of most, if not all of the banks, John McFall, chairman of the Treasury select committee and regarded as close to Gordon Brown, is already calling for both RBS and Lloyds to be fully nationalised, in what could well be a softening up exercise. The implications of such a move should not be understated - taking RBS alone into the public sector would put more than a year's GDP onto the already massive and continually growing national debt. With this fast becoming an increasingly ominous prospect, there's already talk that this could result, inevitably, in a sovereign debt crisis, where the buyers of the debt refuse to take any more, leaving us to go cap in hand to the IMF and also probably the EU.

For the moment this is not yet a full-blown crisis - undoubtedly Ireland and the United States itself are in far more dire straits than we are - but the underlying cause remains the same. For all the talk from the government that this is an American problem imported here on the back of the collapse in the US housing market, it was the hubris of Brown in imagining that he had abolished bust while instituting a light-touch regulatory system which in fact turned out to be a no-touch regulatory system which allowed our own banks to get involved in the toxic loans in the first place. Undoubtedly, the main share of the blame should fall on the bankers themselves, especially the likes of "Sir" Fred Goodwin, who slashed jobs while devouring the likes of ABN Amaro in a truly disastrous predatory move. They were however encouraged by a government which had fallen completely for the mantra of neo-liberalism in the City whilst expanding the public sector too quickly. As ever, New Labour wanted results and it wanted them fast, and to be fair in certain areas it has shown - the NHS, despite the cynics, has been markedly improved. Less apparent are the advances in education, where the obsession with reform has created a gaggle of schools which to this blogger look nightmarish in their controlling tendencies, whilst failing to boost the results sufficiently to mitigate such policies.

The boast since the original bail out that the government had saved the banks has been accurate. Without the injection of funds, RBS and HBOS may well have gone bust, with all the implications that the letting of Lehman Brothers fail caused, not just here but around the world. The fear now must be that all the original bail out has succeeded in doing is postponing just that, with the state shortly to be forced to fully intervene. The jibes at the Tories that they are a do nothing party will look even hollower if it turns out that doing something was almost as bad as doing nothing. If the bank shares continue to fall tomorrow, things really might be about to get a whole lot worse.

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1/20/2009 11:59:00 pm | |

Wednesday, October 08, 2008 

They say, we pay.


In what is now a multimedia age, it's two newspaper front page headlines that still sum up a day's events: the Telegraph going with back from the brink, while the Guardian has staring into the abyss. If you believe both the politicians and the wider commentariat, all of whom seem to be in basic agreement that today's/yesterday's bailout was both on the whole a good package, and one to which there was, in the age old phrase now so hollow, no alternative, then what would have been considered hyperbole weeks ago is now wholly justified.

That very lack of dissent is what ought to worry us the most. Today's givens, or in Rumsfeldian, known knowns, are tomorrow's deepest regrets. It is even more telling that around the only two people who are objecting to the bailout as set out are on what would be considered the further reaches of both left and right: John McDonnell, who advocates a controlling stake in the banks that will apply for the immediate £50bn of funds being made available, and John Redwood, who appeared to oppose the sort of plan which has emerged on Monday but who now appears to have rowed back somewhat.

Perhaps a better example is in two more well-known economic thinkers. Reading Ruth Lea's whole-hearted welcome was enough for the alarm bells to really start ringing: her past is impeccable having both been chief UK economist at - who else - Lehman Brothers, and also director of the unashamedly Thatcherite Centre for Policy Studies. In much the same vein, Will Hutton, who's had a new lease of life thanks to the "credit crunch", sings the praises so profusely that you'd not be surprised to find he was sporting a huge erection while writing it; apparently the markets were too "shell-shocked" to assimilate the greatness of the Brown and Darling bailout, hence why the FTSE continued to drop like those who threw themselves off buildings in New York in 1929.

It would of course be ludicrous to judge the plan by how the market reacted to it, especially on a day on which the IMF produced a grim as it gets report on how the economy is likely to contract slightly next year, with most even thinking that at the moment is too optimistic. The Dow later plummeted after Paulson made clear that he believed institutions in the US would still fail despite their own bailout being passed and now slowly being put into place.

There are however more than legitimate reasons to be incredibly apprehensive about this plan, not least because unlike in America, our own legislators seem unlikely to even be offered a vote on whether it should be put into action or not. Partly this is because the problem is so urgent that something has to be done now, or so we're told, and it's also true that in the current, almost war-time consensus which has fallen upon both the media and the politicial classes it would be passed with hardly a single vote against, but that is besides the point. This is something far too serious, especially when it involves such vast sums which the taxpayer will be providing collatarel upon, to be decreed simply by a prime minister and his chancellor in agreement with the other very people who brought us into this mess.

This £50bn, or is it £500bn, is itself a hall of mirrors, as we don't have such sums in the coffers to instantly pay out. No, this money itself is to be borrowed, pumped into the banks in the form of the government taking a stake via preference shares. Of the four banks which are in the most relative trouble - HBOS, RBOS, Lloyds TSB and Barclays - three could be bought outright with that £50bn, while you could take a significant stake in the one left out. After all, as we're splashing money around, why not take control, wind down the businesses and put the deposits in one big bank? This is not to say that the government should be in the job of running banks when it can't so much as run its own departments properly, but could they really be any worse at just running them down than the current proprietors that got them into the situation today?

For taking this stake which will, if the plan works, in effect prop failing institutions up, with the eventual promise that there might be a profit in it for the taxpayer if they wait long enough and don't die in the mean time, the deals that the government has supposedly received in return are not worth the paper they aren't even written on. Banks will apparently have to cut to the bone their executive bonuses this year, shareholder dividends will similarly fall under the knife, while small businesses must be offered better rates than currently on their own borrowing. There is perhaps a tendency in such times to call for heads on sticks, as someone has already put it, but whilst there must be stability, surely those responsible at the executive level at these banks must at some point be shown the door, starting as Nils Pratley suggests with Sir Fred Goodwin. Again though, perhaps the reason why there has been far more carping from the Conservative side, with David Cameron demanding, almost Trot-like that no banker receive a bonus this Christmas, is that if the chief executives and others at the banks have to go, then surely also does this country's chief executive for his own role in the crisis. If they are to be treated as Justin suggests, like the benefit scroungers so demonised for their weekly pittance, then Brown and Darling and the rest of them should all be exposed to such penury and shame also.

Fundamentally, the current consensus cannot last, and nor should it. Despite the apparent undoubted Conservative part in the deregulation and the "age of irresponsibility", as well as how if they were in power they would be doing much the same, the resentment that today's payola will breed will likely be easily built on by Cameron and friends, even if they have been so woeful thus far. As we stumble into the recession, the bills will just keep mounting up, with the increases in welfare spending for those newly unemployed already starting to hit the Treasury. Make no mistake, despite everything that has happened, the poorest in society, the sick, the elderly, all will be hit the hardest as those very same bills are aimed to be kept by down by a government that has just bailed out the very richest with our own inheritance. Already the ridiculous one-off cases like the Afghan single mother supposedly living in a "mansion" for which the taxpayer pays out £170,000 a year are being highlighted, with the one direct aim of hitting the welfare state as a whole. How bitterly and cynical typical that it is one of the richest men in the world, with some of the most comparatively better off individuals in the country in tow that are doing such sniping now, and this is only likely to be the start of it.

New Labour could have prevented this. It was always going to win the 97 election, and it could have done so without the support of Rupert Murdoch, of the City, of the CBI, and everyone else that has directly contributed to the current crash. It could have properly regulated the City, rather than ticking boxes and slapping backs; it could have restrained the buy now pay later culture; and it could have condemned the bonuses which are now being criticised far earlier. None of the above though deserve the blame except for Labour themselves. We must not let them forget it, and we must fight to ensure that those blameless in all of this are not the ones held responsible any more than they already are.

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10/08/2008 11:59:00 pm | |

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