Tories are trashing their core supporters too

On the eve of the Tory Party conference, the anger among their opponents is very much – and rightly – focussed on the impact the coalition is having on the most vulnerable in society.  Unemployment, cuts in jobs and services, privatisation of the NHS, the bullying of the sick and disabled by Atos.  Single mothers are set to lose 20% of their overall income; of course the Left (an ambiguous term, I know) is bound to focus on what looks like a systematic attack on the old, the poor, the sick, women and children.  Tory populists respond by measures to allow faster driving, more bin collections, easier sacking – no Tory prejudice is left unstroked.

In the face of all this, it’s easy to overlook that the poor and vulnerable are not the only victims.  One of the most interesting outcomes is the way in which Tory policies are having a really devastating effect on some of the party’s most loyal supporters; older, hitherto affluent people, living in comfortable suburbia or in the nicer bits of the countryside, often on fixed incomes from private pensions, or from savings.  They’re people who have all the accoutrements of financial comfort, but are increasingly finding life very difficult.

Income from their savings has fallen drastically – and many of them are living off the sort of pension provision that was gambled away by speculating bankers before 2008 (there’s a trope about Gordon Brown’s raids on pension funds, but the total cost of Brown’s dividend tax is about £5bn per year. The cost of the bankers’ crash of 2008 to pension funds is likely to be around £500bn, and that’s before you consider the costs of the contributions holidays that companies regularly awarded themselves).  Many of them are people who were economically active in the Thatcher years, and heeded the calls to privatise their pension provision.  Now they’re facing huge increases in costs of living – double-digit increases in fuel costs – while their income stagnates and falls.  Ironically enough, these people are the backbone of charitable giving, the authentic heroes of the Big Society – but not for long as their income falls and they need to cut back to pay for their daily necessities, or prepare for an uncertain future of NHS cuts and private sector provision.  Some will still have children at university, or who cannot afford a home and are still living with them.

And even their environment is being threatened, as Tories eschew the obvious answer to Britain’s housing crisis – a massive social housing programme focussed on brownfield sites – to allow their friends and donors in the property business to build developments unhindered by considerations of sustainability or local impact on sensitive environments.

In other words, these stalwarts of Tory middle England are being trashed.  No, it’s not the same as the daily struggle faced by the low-paid, or those dependent on benefits as a result of disability, or single mothers. After all, we’re talking about people who own their homes outright and still enjoy a quality of life that is beyond the dreams of the poorest in society.  But the fact that people in their later years are having to count the pennies for the first time does not make their worries any less real.  It’s a telling comment on contemporary Conservatism that the Tory party no longer speaks for these people – in Cameron’s Britain, it’s the financiers and bankers who trashed the economy in 2008 who matter.  It emphasises that for all its attempts at populism, the Tory Party really only speaks for a tiny, financially-empowered minority.

Will these scions of middle England rise up against the party that has deserted them? It remains to be seen.

The money trick revisited

Today marks the centenary of the death of Robert Tressell, whose book The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists has for decades been an inspiration for the Left.  One of the very few authentic working-class voices from an era that is now more likely to be associated with costume dramas and the perceived opulence of the pre-war wealthy, it contains a classic passage in which the principal character, Owen, describes what has become known as The Great Money Trick, a passage worth quoting at length:

“Money is the real cause of poverty,” said Owen.

“Prove it,” repeated Crass.

“Money is the cause of poverty because it is the device by which those who are too lazy to work are enabled to rob the workers of the fruits of their labour.”

“Prove it,” said Crass.

Owen slowly folded up the piece of newspaper he had been reading and put it in his pocket.

“All right,” he replied. “I’ll show you how the Great Money Trick is worked.”

Owen opened his dinner basket and took from it two slices of bread, but as these where not sufficient, he requested that anyone who had some bread left should give it to him. They gave him several pieces, which he placed in a heap on a clean piece of paper, and, having borrowed the pocket knives of Easton, Harlow and Philpot, he addressed them as follows:

“These pieces of bread represent the raw materials which exist naturally in and on the earth for the use of mankind; they were not made by any human being, but were created for the benefit and sustenance of all, the same as were the air and the light of the sun.”

“Now,” continued Owen, “I am a capitalist; or rather I represent the landlord and capitalist class. That is to say, all these raw materials belong to me. It does not matter for our present argument how I obtained possession of them, the only thing that matters now is the admitted fact that all the raw materials which are necessary for the production of the necessaries of life are now the property of the landlord and capitalist class. I am that class; all these raw materials belong to me.”

“Now you three represent the working class. You have nothing, and, for my part, although I have these raw materials, they are of no use to me. What I need is the things that can be made out of these raw materials by work; but I am too lazy to work for me. But first I must explain that I possess something else beside the raw materials. These three knives represent all the machinery of production; the factories, tools, railways, and so forth, without which the necessaries of life cannot be produced in abundance. And these three coins” – taking three half pennies from his pocket – “represent my money, capital.”

“But before we go any further,” said Owen, interrupting himself, “it is important to remember that I am not supposed to be merely a capitalist. I represent the whole capitalist class. You are not supposed to be just three workers, you represent the whole working class.”

Owen proceeded to cut up one of the slices of bread into a number of little square blocks.

“These represent the things which are produced by labor, aided by machinery, from the raw materials. We will suppose that three of these blocks represent a week’s work. We will suppose that a week’s work is worth one pound.”

Owen now addressed himself to the working class as represented by Philpot, Harlow and Easton.

“You say that you are all in need of employment, and as I am the kind-hearted capitalist class I am going to invest all my money in various industries, so as to give you plenty of work. I shall pay each of you one pound per week, and a week’s work is that you must each produce three of these square blocks. For doing this work you will each receive your wages; the money will be your own, to do as you like with, and the things you produce will of course be mine to do as I like with. You will each take one of these machines and as soon as you have done a week’s work, you shall have your money.”

The working classes accordingly set to work, and the capitalist class sat down and watched them. As soon as they had finished, they passed the nine little blocks to Owen, who placed them on a piece of paper by his side and paid the workers their wages.

“These blocks represent the necessaries of life. You can’t live without some of these things, but as they belong to me, you will have to buy them from me: my price for these blocks is one pound each.”

As the working classes were in need of the necessaries of life and as they could not eat, drink or wear the useless money, they were compelled to agree to the capitalist’s terms. They each bought back, and at once consumed, one-third of the produce of their labour. The capitalist class also devoured two of the square blocks, and so the net result of the week’s work was that the kind capitalist had consumed two pounds worth of things produced by the labor of others, and reckoning the squares at their market value of one pound each, he had more than doubled his capital, for he still possessed the three pounds in money and in addition four pounds worth of goods. As for the working classes, Philpot, Harlow and Easton, having each consumed the pound’s worth of necessaries they had bought with their wages, they were again in precisely the same condition as when they had started work – they had nothing.

This process was repeated several times; for each weeks work the producers were paid their wages. They kept on working and spending all their earnings. The kind-hearted capitalist consumed twice as much as any one of them and his pool of wealth continually increased. In a little while, reckoning the little squares at their market value of one pound each, he was worth about one hundred pounds, and the working classes were still in the same condition as when they began, and were still tearing into their work as if their lives depended on it.

After a while the rest of the crowd began to laugh, and their merriment increased when the kind-hearted capitalist, just after having sold a pound’s worth of necessaries to each of his workers, suddenly took their tools, the machinery of production, the knives, away from them, and informed them that as owing to over production all his store-houses were
glutted with the necessaries of life, he had decided to close down the works.

“Well, and wot the bloody ‘ell are we to do now ?” demanded Philpot.

“That’s not my business,” replied the kind-hearted capitalist. “I’ve paid your wages, and provided you with plenty of work for a long time past. I have no more work for you to do at the present. Come round again in a few months time and I’ll see what I can do.”

“But what about the necessaries of life?” Demanded Harlow. “we must have something to eat.”

“Of course you must,” replied the capitalist, affably; “and I shall be very pleased to sell  you some.” “But we ain’t got no bloody money!”

“Well, you cant expect me to give you my goods for nothing! You didn’t work for nothing, you know. I paid you for your work and you should have saved something: you should have been thrifty like me. Look how I have got on by being thrifty!”

The unemployed looked blankly at each other, but the rest of the crowd only laughed; and then the three unemployed began to abuse the kind-hearted capitalist, demanding that he should give them some of the necessaries of life that he had piled up in his warehouses, or to be allowed to work and produce some more for their own needs; and even threatened to take some of the things by force if he did not comply with their demands. But the kind-hearted capitalist told them not to be insolent, and spoke to them about honesty, and said if they were not careful he would have their faces battered in for them by the police, or if necessary he would call out the military and have them shot down like dogs, the same as he had done before at Featherstone and Belfast.

It’s in some respects a crude analogy, but it has a power and truth that resonate down the ages.

The Great Banker Trick

Today things have moved on.  Our modern Owen – let’s say, a librarian or a health-care worker faced with redundancy thanks to the Con Dem coalition – would describe something very difficult.  For a start, the capitalist would be a manipulator of debt too.  He’d happily lend the money to buy the essentials of life, because he has learned that the illusion of affluence built on credit and debt is a powerful tool to compel economic compliance. But since the workers are poor he would do so at usurious rates of interest against their next payday.

And, more significantly, he’d be explaining how he increased his wealth, not by investing in productive capacity but by speculating and gambling on the markets in which market was exhanged, or by buying raw materials and stockpiling them, creating shortages and therefore bidding up prices; or by developing huge, elaborate edifices of debt and lending.  And, once the fact that they were built on air was exposed, and the edifice collapsed around them, they would convince governments that they needed to be bailed out, with the taxes of the people who worked productively.  And then he would show how he would require that to pay for this bailout the decencies of life provided by taxes were unaffordable, and the people delivering them were doing non-jobs.  But he’d continue to pay himself, and just as Tressell’s Mugsborough had its comic pompous mayor, Londoners would have their own ponderous comedian saying that we had to grant even more tax privileges to the failed bankers to avoid their running away and failing to make their great contribution to their city’s wealth, even though that contribution is illusory.

And, just as in Tressell’s day, the power of capital was maintained by churchmen, brewers, and rentiers donating to charity while deciding who was deserving, the bankers’ friends in Government would reinvent themselves as makers of popular culture, advocates of the big society, floppy-haired Etonians with a sense of entitlement that they knew best.

And a future generation might, just might, realise the abject irrationality of what was being done, the damage and the waste.

Alarm clock Britain – a wake-up call

Just when you thought Nick Clegg had reached the limits of absurdity, out comes more idiocy. The Guardian today reports that Clegg intends to speak up for what he calls “alarm-clock Britain” – people on low to middle incomes who are anxious about their standard of living. The patronising phrase “alarm clock” Britain is supposed to describe shift workers going to work in the dark – an overtone of Sarkozy’s election phrase about the France that likes to get up early, and surely only a Liberal Democrat wonk would be so lacking in self-awareness as to parrot Sarkozy’s election phrases.

It’s absolute nonsense, of course. The serious political point that Clegg is apparently trying to make is that the Coalition cares about people on middle incomes and he is reported as being concerned that the Lib Dem proposal to raise tax thresholds has been drowned out by noise about cuts.

If that has happened, it is for a very good reason; cuts in services and public sector jobs – will hit those around the average UK household income – about £25,000 – much harder than the tax thresholds will benefit them. Changes in National Insurance contributions will hit those paying the basic rate of tax; the cost of childcare is soaring as nurseries close; VAT and fuel price rises will hit the middle hard. Cuts in front line health and education will mean the end of services like out-of-hours GP surgeries and school breakfast clubs. Millions of middle-income earners work in the public sector, where no job is safe. And proposals to roll back employee rights will reduce the security of low and middle paid workers further.

As so often with Clegg, it’s difficult to know where the ignorance ends and the mendacity starts.

But there’s a longer-term trend here too.

One unintended effect of this may be that an important truth will emerge – that in many ways in the past two decades people on average incomes have got poorer and poorer. Much of that is due to speculation-fuelled increases in house prices and rents, but it also comes from the removal of key public services like free higher education and the fact that essentials like prescriptions and dental care, and public transport, have become hugely more expensive in real terms. Most of all the way in which free-market capitalism has undermined the family – ensuring that in most of Britain it is almost impossible to afford a house without two full-time incomes, in stark contrast to the pre-Thatcher years – will be increasingly apparent.

And it comes the day after the Coalition announces that it will do nothing to rein in the bonuses paid out by banks partly owned by the taxpayer, and bailed out with taxpayers’ money.

It’s the contrast between the ostentatious wealth of the few and the steady impoverishment of the middle that has been a key factor in the rise of the Tea Party movement in America, where claims of economic might mask a growing crisis as millions of middle Americans downshift into poverty. The coalition’s policies mean it will happen here.

Is Clegg prepared to take the consequences?

It’s not about fees, it’s about democracy

Now that things are settling down after this week’s massive student demonstration in London – and the events at the Conservative HQ building that followed it, it’s worth reflecting a little on what was really happened, and what it tells us about the temper of Con Dem Britain.

The media reactions have been predictable. It’s either a case of privileged youth after a free ride, or a riot by the usual suspects who disgraced the 50,000 students who had marched earlier. Of course, it’s neither – one of the most interesting things about what happened on 10 November is the complete inability of most of the mainstream media to “get” it, to ask whether there might be something going on here that’s a bit more profound or interesting.

Small riot, not many hurt

The riot angle is of course what the tabloids led on. Actually, stand back from it, and it’s not much – a few minor injuries (more to protesters than to police), a few arrests, a bit of criminal damage. Always excepting the moron who threw the fire extinguisher, not much more than a Bullingdon Club night out, really. Nothing quite gets a lazy journalist going more than a picture of a youth putting an object through a plate glass window. And it allows them to retreat behind all the usual tropes about political motivation, hard-core anarchists, Class War and all the rest of it.

A much more interesting account of the events at Millbank – from an eye-witness – is here. It makes a convincing case that what we saw here was not the “usual suspects” at all, but a group of angry people in a confused and confusing situation:

The majority were just plain old students, but angry. The kind of students who go to their lectures, go to parties, play sport at the weekends and sometimes get a bit drunk and lairy. And there were a lot of very young students there. Maybe they were first years, but many of them looked like school students. They weren’t all middle class, they weren’t all white, they hadn’t all come in on the student union buses. They were never looking at the Russell group education that private and grammar school educated kids could, until now, take for granted. These are the people who made up the majority of the people at Millbank – ordinary young people, working class and middle class, from school age up to university age, who hadn’t been on many demos before, whose only encounter with the police, or with agitated crowds, had been Saturday night lairiness or sports matches.

And that set the mood. It felt like a rowdy night in a busy town. People were angry and frustrated, and they hadn’t had the training or the experience to deal with the situation. If it was true that a militant anarchist faction had led the violence at Millbank then here’s what it would have looked like:

Everybody facing the police line would have had a mask on. Nobody wouldplan to feature prominently in national newspapers with their face clearly exposed, throwing a stick at a police officer or smashing a window. But what did we actually see? A few make-shift bandannas slipping down people’s faces and a huge number of students who hadn’t even tried to hide their identity.

The police line would have been stormed. There was a large plate glass window missing, right in front of the crowd. There were hundreds of protestors, there were a laughably small number of police. Very little organisation would have been required for everybody to link up and just walk through the police line, with little damage done to either side. Instead there a mass of people hanging back, and a handful of angry people launching themselves one by one at the police with fists or sticks to be beaten back with batons.

When the snatch squad was sent in their targets would have been surrounded and protected by fellow protestors. Instead the crowd allowed the police to get to their targets and then to carry them back out, right through the bulk of the protestors. The reaction was angry, and violent, but completely ineffective. It was clear that people didn’t understand what was happening until it was over.

There would have been a sense of purpose. I did quite a bit of chatting and eavesdropping. People didn’t know what was going on. Not just the people milling around near the back. Students in university hoodies who were right up near the front, the ones who were launching sticks as if they were javelins, were confused. They asked each other if anyone was in charge, they wondered if they were going to miss their bus back, they talked about ‘kettling’ as something that they’d heard of but never experienced. They had a slightly dazed look, part exhilaration, part anger, but partly just the look of someone trying to cope with a situation that they’ve never been in before. There was no one in charge, so they made it up. And a number of them got it wrong.

Degree to go with fries, please

The other misunderstanding is that this protest was about privileged kids looking after number one. But this was actually about far more than that. It was about tuition fees, yes, but also about massive cuts in funding especially to arts courses, with the increase in fees being part of a strategy that looks horribly like the privatisation of higher education.

Behind that assumption is an insidious and dangerous interpretation of what higher education is about. The mainstream trope runs, you get a degree, you earn more, you pay. Education is a commodity like a Big Mac or an iPhone, something that students consume.

But it isn’t, and as soon as the Left falls into that trap it’s lost the argument. The pioneers of education in Britain, who were largely on the left, didn’t do it so that their kids could get a well-paid job in a multi-national. They did it because education is at the root of what a decent society should be, and because of a belief that it should be freely available to all who wanted it. It wasn’t a commodity, it was the mark of a decent society. It was a collective good, something we all benefitted from, not a badge to be bought by the affluent, to, as Ivan Illich caustically put it, to rationalise the head start as achievement.

So when did we vote for this?

I think to understand the anger, we have to think about democracy. Anybody who was there at the march would have been in no doubt that the most virulent anger was reserved for Clegg and the Liberal Democrats. Tories are Tories; people expect nothing better of Cameron and Osborne.

But these were people to whom Clegg made a pledge that he would fight against tuition fees. Many of those students would have voted Liberal Democrat in May on that basis – voting, of course, for the first time. Some of them would have worked for Lib Dem candidates. And they’ve been shafted.

It is difficult to think of more pathetic examples of dishonesty turned to excuse-making than some of the attempts by Liberal Democrats to rationalise their sell-out. This extraordinary piece by John Hemming MP is fairly typical, its desperation of tone more illuminating than any of its content. (I should mention as an aside that I first met Hemming thirty years ago when he and I were at Oxford, and he was organising a rent strike at Magdalen College – something that makes me wonder just what sort of self-loathing and moral delinquency it takes for people who once believed in something to sit in Parliament meekly cheering as Osborne and Duncan Smith go to work on the most vulnerable in society).

I think this betrayal is part of a wider crisis in democracy. We now have three parties wedded to neo-liberal economics, whos political aim is not to serve the electorate but to get their aims past them. I think the electorate is beginning to wake up to it. The use of deficit scaremongering to override democratic accountability seems to me to be at the heart of the Con Dem agenda, and people realise this and are getting angrier. The spectacle of a handful of the extremely wealthy telling the rest of society to make sacrifices for the common good, while their chums in the banks continue to get their bonuses, is wearing thin. Is it any surprise that people are getting impatient with Westminster?

And in any case, given everything that’s happened, the broken pledges, the privatisation that the electorate never had their say on – given all that, who the hell are Clegg – not to mention people like Cameron and the ludicrous Boris Johnson, who as members of the Bulllingdon Club took a rather less rigid view of criminal damage in their student days – to lecture the students at Millbank about democracy? Who are they to tell students that they should channel their anger in establishment-approved ways?

The four big lies of Osborneomics

1.   The deficit is so big that we are in an economic emergency and we must take immediate action to reduce it – but the current deficit is, by the standards of the last two hundred years, not particularly large and is actually rather smaller than that run by the British economy for most of the nineteenth century.  Because Britain’s public debt matures later than that of most other Western economies – certainly than that of the oft-quoted Greece – the comparison with other economies is not valid; ironically enough it is the much-maligned Gordon Brown’s management of debt repayment as Chancellor that has put us in this beneficial position.  The deficit is a problem if it is allowed to continue, but as Keynes explained, the best way out of it is stimulus to create employment, not to take £80bn out of the economy.  Comparisons with the family housekeeping are, as Keynes pointed out, economically illiterate. Government funding doesn’t work like that. And Cameron gave the game away when he said that even when the deficit had been dealt with (fat chance) public expenditure would remain constrained.  There are plenty of eminent economists – from Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman on the centre-left to the doyen of British monetarism and one of Margaret Thatcher’s favourite economists, Samuel Brittan, on the right -  who claim that the current policy is madness. This is about ideology, not economics.

2.   Labour’s profligate spending took us to the edge of bankruptcy – complete nonsense. The problem we face is not a spending crisis, but a tax revenue problem.  Within the parameters of market capitalism (which I don’t really accept, but that’s another story) Labour actually did a rather good job, but the endemic failures of the system are bigger than the attempts of competent individuals to manage it. The basic problem arises from the more than £40bn that was sunk into bailing out the banks, brought low by speculators, and the economic shock that followed it, which , according to many economists, has resulted in a hit of between 10% and 15% to GDP – and as a result of which tax revenues have fallen of a cliff. Not only do cuts mean that the poor and vulnerable are made to pay for the bankers’ delinquency – while the bankers continue to pay themselves large bonuses (£7bn this year, or the equivalent of the cuts to the welfare budget announced yesterday), but the economic fact is that Osborne has got it the wrong way round – public expenditure cuts, which take demand out of the economy, will reduce the tax base further while increasing welfare spending.  A Tobin Tax on international financial transactions – most of which are speculative – would slash the deficit overnight.  There is an international appetite for it.  But the bankers would howl, and they’re in charge.  Which brings us on to …

3.   The newly liberated private sector will create the hundreds of thousands of jobs needed to offset those lost in the cuts – which is even more ludicrous than the last one.  The historical evidence is obvious and overwhelming – every time a Government has indulged in cuts of this magnitiude, it has tipped the economy into depression.  While the much-maligned Brown and Darling were trying desperately to manage the crisis in the least painful manner possible, with a deftness that was lauded around the world, Ireland embarked on precisely the course that Osborne is following now.  Four emergency budgets later, the Irish economy is on its knees.  And it’s the same whenever slash and burn economics is tried.  It happened in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, in New Zealand in the 1980s, in Ireland now.  No economy in the world, even in boom times, has succeeded in creating jobs at the rate that Osborne is forecasting in the UK in the next few years, least of all one that has taken £80bn of demand out of the economy.  It’s sheer economic illiteracy.

4.   We’re all in this together – the most pernicious lie of all.  As the institute of Fiscal Studies has demonstrated, the effect of Gideon’s budget is deeply, profoundly regressive – the poorest and most vulnerable people on benefits will lose 10 per cent of their income.  Women, who represent the majority of workers in the public sector, will be hit particularly hard, as will families with children.  And yesterday’s announcements are only the start – the 30% cuts in local government funding will mean the evisceration of front line services like care for the elderly, home helps, children’s services, social work – areas which have not exactly boomed on New Labour’s watch. (The idea that New Labour promoted a benefits culture is frankly risible – the evidence base shows overwhelmingly shows that inequality widened dramatically after 1997, not least due to benefit cuts). Meanwhile, tax breaks for private schools are untouched.  Corporate taxation is reduced, and the Coalition – while referring to benefit cheats as “muggers” – does nothing to deal with big tax avoidance.  Vodafone owes £6bn tax from asset deals – Osborne looks the other way and it gets written off.  Most of all, the cuts in housing benefits will effectively mean an economic cleansing of parts of London in particular.  The return of Shirley Porter’s housing policy – with Liberal Democrats cheering on from the sidelines – is one of the most obnoxious pieces of social engineering even the British Conservative Party has ever proposed.  It takes us into territory normally associated with the rantings of Geert Wilders.

In other words – dishonest, wrong and economically illiterate, based on the belief that you can soften up the electorate with tabloid prejudice and the sonorous repetition of the claim that there is no alternative.

Cruelty, ignorance and George Osborne’s useful idiots

There’s plenty of virtual ink being used across the blogosphere to describe the enormity of what the Coalition announced in yesterday’s Spending Review, and I’m a bit loath to add to it. None of it is likely to match the eloquence of this superb piece by Johann Hari in the Independent.

He gets to the heart of the matter here:

It can’t be coincidental that this is being done to us by three men – Cameron, Osborne, and Nick Clegg – who have never worried about a bill in their lives. On a basic level, they do not understand the effects of these decisions on real people. Remember, Cameron said before the election: “The papers keep writing that [my wife, Samantha] comes from a very blue-blooded background”, but “she is actually very unconventional. She went to a day school.” Osborne is a beneficiary of a £4m trust fund he did nothing whatsoever to earn and which is stashed offshore to avoid tax. Clegg actually thought the state pension was £30 a week, a level that would kill pensioners.

These attitudes have real consequences. We’re not in this together. Who isn’t in it with us? Them, their friends, and their families. They were asked to pay nothing more in this CSR. On the contrary: they are being let off left, right and centre. To pluck a random example, one of the richest corporations in Britain, Vodafone, had an outstanding tax bill of £6bn – but Osborne simply cancelled it this year. If he had made them pay, he could have prevented nearly all the cuts to all the welfare recipients in Britain. You try refusing to pay your taxes next time, and see if George Osborne shows the same generosity to you as he does to the super-rich.

There is one stark symbol of how unjust the response to this economic disaster caused by bankers is. They have just paid themselves £7bn in bonuses – much of it our money – to reward themselves for failure. That’s the same sum Osborne took from the benefits of the British poor yesterday, who did nothing to cause this crash. And he has the chutzpah to brag about “fairness.”

Britain just became a colder and crueller country. And for what? To pantingly follow a disproven ideology over a cliff. On the eve of the general election, Cameron told us: “There’ll be no cuts to frontline services,” “we’re not talking about swingeing cuts,” and “all cuts will be fair”. Is it possible to call him anything but a liar and an ideologue today?

You can enjoy a long rest, Baroness Thatcher – your successors have embarked on a mephedrone-charged imitation that exceeds your most fantastical dreams.

And of course there’s a whole second wave of cuts – the ones that will really hit the vulnerable – when the huge cuts to local government funding take effect.

But there is a hugely important secondary issue here about the role of the Liberal Democrats. It’s not just that they’ve acquiesced fully and totally in this – Nick Clegg has described them as “fair”. Because there is a coalition, it’s that much easier for the Tories to make sonorous statements about the national interest. It’s pure ideology, of course, but the coalition gives the cover needed to promulgate the lie that we’re all in this together. Can anyone imagine Osborne being so brazen, so aggressive, so cruel without a cadre of middle-aged empty-headed men in yellow ties nodding like the dog in the Churchill car commercials?

The CSR is the Tories’ triumph. This is what Tories are in politics for, and it’s what they do. It’s also the Liberal Democrats’ moment of abject shame.

Are the England football team a load of bankers?

Well, leaving aside the obvious answer, the similarities are obvious.

• Both earn vast, inflated salaries wholly detached from the real world, and apparently unrelated to their performance or their ability to deliver;
• Both appear to exist in a parallel world whose ethics and values are unrelated to those of the rest of the world;
• Both have objectively a track record of failure
• Both appear to be endowed with a massive sense of entitlement, combined with a wholly dismissive attitude towards the rest of the world (witness Rooney’s condemnation of those who, having devoted so much time, effort and money to following the team in South Africa, booed England’s uncommitted performance on the pitch;
• Both apparently enjoy a dispensation from any form of criticism in the media, until the wheel finally comes off – but deep down they know that even when the media and the public have rumbled them, the cash will still roll in.
• Both whine like toddlers when they are rumbled.

The England team promised much and delivered the opposite.  So perhaps they’re not just bankers, but Liberal Democrats as well.

Broken bankers

This fascinating piece in the Independent discusses the forthcoming trial of Jerome Kerviel, the alleged rogue trader who is accused of making unauthorised deals that nearly brought his employer, Societe Generale, to its knees.

What makes it interesting is not so much what Jerome Kerviel is claimed to have done, but the environment in which he was working. It appears that his defence will be that he was working against a background of endemic rule-breaking and greed on an almost imaginable scale, gambling with extraordinary sums of money. As described here it is an environment of what can only be described as testosterone-filled moral depravity.

It is interesting because it comes at a time when the fallout from the banking crisis is being visited – or about to be visited – on the public sector throughout Europe. At the same time, it appears that we are losing sight of why we are here; a world economic system laid low by speculative greed, which will be paid for by the poorest and most vulnerable who will find their services taken away, and the decent public sector employees whose behaviour is a beacon of rectitute compared with these bankers.

Easy moralising

None of this is new, of course. What I want to focus on is the moralising. We will be faced with governments of rich white men – many of whom have close personal links with the banking class – lecturing the poor and the honest on how we’ve all got to pull together, while making cuts that will hit the poorest and most vulnerable hardest. Even in the case of Kerviel there is that hint that the smooth men from the Grandes Ecoles are dumping on the junior provincial to take the hit for their behaviour.

If we’re going to talk about broken Britain – or broken societies anywhere for that matter – shouldn’t we start with the bankers?

In all the talk about deficits it’s imperative we don’t forget why we are here, and whose system has failed.