Olympics: Cameron and Johnson show their class

If nations won Olympic medals for the stupidity of their leaders, Team GB would be a prime contender.  It’s difficult to conclude anything different following the comments of David Cameron – a Prime Minister whose attempts to hitch a ride on the bandwagon of British sporting success have been increasingly risible – and London’s part-time mayor Boris Johnson.  But it’s the casual assumptions these comments reveal that make them interesting.

First, Cameron on school sport, and his much-quoted remarks about Indian dancing on ITV’s Daybreak programme:

“The trouble we have had with targets up to now, which was two hours a week, is that a lot of schools were meeting that by doing things like Indian dance or whatever, that you and I probably wouldn’t think of as sport, so there’s a danger of thinking all you need is money and a target.

Now I know precious little about dancing – Indian or otherwise – as my friends and acquaintances who have never seen me on a dance floor will testify; but it’s surely obvious that dance provides excellent exercise and, when undertaken by groups, involves disciplines of co-ordination and team work.  What is fascinating is not just the casual racism of the India reference, but the claim that this is not sport; because, of course, it’s not inherently competitive (although we all know that it can be).  That failure to distinguish between exercise and competition seems to me (like the casual racism) to be one of those moments when Cameron’s mask slips and the easy assumptions of his class background comes through.

Now to Boris Johnson, and his assertion that state schools should be required to undertake two hours of compulsory sport per day, like he did at Eton.  It’s tempting to wonder whether this is one of those carefully-scripted casual asides that are apparently the hallmark of Brand Boris; but it’s an idea that is both inherently deeply stupid and, once again, reveals much about Johnson’s understanding of the world.

State schools aren’t Eton, obviously.  For a start, the students go home at night. And how on earth do you fit two hours a day of sport into the school day?  And where do you do it, given the long Tory history of selling off school playing fields?  And who do you pay to lead it, since relying on big society volunteers to staff a mandatory activity is an act of lunacy? The playing field can be a cruel and traumatising place for sensitive children – are we now being told by Old Etonians that we must return to the ideology that bullying toughens you up and makes a man of you?  Above all, are we being told that working-class children should have their energies focussed on sport rather than academic study, because that is (the subscript goes) what they are fit for?

Boris Johnson’s stupidities have long been given an easy ride by the media (witness the barking idea of moving Heathrow to the Thames Estuary); in almost any other politician this would have been career-finishing stuff.  That it isn’t is a rather sobering commentary on the state of political discourse today.

In making these comments, Cameron and Johnson show their profound ignorance of how the vast majority of people live and are, whether they realise it or not, consciously returning to the nineteenth-century origins of organised sports in Britain, with Dr Arnold’s model of work among the slum poor to create sports clubs which kept those on the margins of society out of Godless and criminal activity.  And Cameron’s reference to competitive sport fits closely with the social Darwinism that underpinned that ideal; the belief that life is a race in which the most able win, while conveniently ignoring the fact that a small minority of the populace are equipped by birth and wealth to run the race so much faster than their peers.  It’s the old reactionary game of, to use Ivan Illich’s phrase, rationalising the head start as achievement.  And of course we know that modern management jargon is laced with the language of competitive sport – the presiding ideology of a thousand management courses and team-building exercises.

Britain is a country with an exercise problem.  We read almost daily of the childhood obesity problem; of coddled children parked in front of TV and games console, parents mesmerised by traffic and tabloid hysteria about paedophiles into keeping children indoors, while in term ferrying them across town to school by car in the name of school choice.  The Government whose leaders mather about competitive sport is the same one that is busy selling off school playing fields and degrading the nutritional standard of state school food.

Behind Cameron’s and Johnson’s statements are the old, desperate ideology that sports are really about producing the right school of chap, and the assumption that the public schools should teach the rest of us how to do it. Britain’s Olympians deserve better than to have their achievements hijacked in the name of class politics.

Olympic cycling: an opportunity missed

The heroics of British cyclists in the Olympic velodrome have been widely celebrated – and quite rightly so. Whatever one thinks of organised competitive sport – and I’m the first to admit I’m far from being a fan – what those competitors do (regardless of their nationality) is pretty astonishing.

But one feels that in the prevailing mood of celebrating all things British a rare opportunity has been missed to reflect the authentic British cycling experience.  There’s a whole range of events that could be included – for example the team swerve into traffic to avoid the white van parked in the cycle lane, the individual emergency stop to avoid the 4×4 turning left across your bows while the driver is on the phone, the pothole avoidance peleton, avoiding the driver who thinks it’s clever to pass as close to you as possible. The possibilities are vast.

And of course the whole competitive atmosphere could be made far more true to life.  Instead of cheering, flag-waving supporters you could fill the velodrome with BMW drivers yelling random abuse.  In the case of accidents, instead of medics a team of specially trained magistrates, police officers and journalists could be bussed in to reassure injured cyclists that it was their fault for being on “our” roads.   And of course the whole thing could be presided over by a witless exhibitionist Mayor who claims to back cycling, despite his indolent efforts at cosmetic measures to promote cycling having actually made it more dangerous (perhaps we managed that one).

The fact is that outside the two weeks of Olympic competition, cyclists are treated as second-class citizens in Britain’s cities.  Cyclists are routinely killed on Britain’s roads – not least by goods vehicles drivers – and the courts routinely deliver no more than a slap on the wrist.  And yet – as most continental cities realise – any city that aspires to be clean, liveable and sustainable inevitably places cycling at the heart of its policy mix.  Britain, currently facing EU infraction proceedings over its poor air quality record and with its cities choked with traffic, could learn something pretty important from, say, Den Haag or Copenhagen (both cities I know well).

It would be wonderful if the long-term legacy of these Olympics included the political class uniting around a strategy to place cycling, rather than the car, at the heart of urban transport policy.  But it requires vision, intelligence and an ability to see beyond the profit motive and beyond the curious psychopathology of our relationship with the private car.  No optimism there, then.

Fred Goodwin and gesture politics

There are growing calls for Fred Goodwin, former chairman of RBS whose extravagant remuneration while presiding over a failing bank has become a powerful symbol of the excesses that led to the 2008 market crash, to be stripped of his knighthood.  Even the Conservative Party, not known for its willingness to deprive bankers of the spoils of failure, has jumped on this bandwagon (if only to point out that it was Labour who knighted him).

It’s an easy, populist move.  Outrage can be expressed and the decent thing can be seen to be done.

But it’s irrelevant.  The point about Goodwin is not that he had his snout in the trough while his bank failed, but that he is one of hundreds who did so – and continue to do so.  There’s a particular poignancy in the generation that were told by Thatcher to take out private pensions in the 1980s as the key to a prosperous old age now finding themselves struggling while the people who gambled away their pensions continue to prosper – and indeed enjoy the active support of politicians like Boris Johnson, who appears to believe that the sole purpose of the Mayor of London is to promote the interests of banking and finance.  Cameron makes a stand at Brussels against the proposal to write austerity economics into the EU constitution, not on behalf of the people whose lives would be affected by it, but to protect his friends in the City of London.  The Conservative Party remains overwhelmingly a party bankrolled by bankers and financiers.

Against this background, it’s worth remembering that Goodwin’s conduct, while reprehensible, does not appear to have been illegal. This contrasts with the activities of Lord Archer, who served a prison sentence for perjury, or Lord Hanningfield, who served a prison sentence for fiddling his House of Lords expenses.  Both continue to hold their titles, and in the case of Archer retain the Conservative whip.  Lord Taylor is suspended from Parliament but keeps his title.  Evidently there is no overriding principle that criminals forfeit their honours; it seems inconsistent that a man who remained within the law should do so.

This, then, is gesture politics. By removing Fred the Shred’s knighthood, Cameron and his allies can be seen to be doing something, while in fact doing nothing to deal with the root causes of what went wrong in 2008.  Cameron is in effect signalling business as usual to the City, and reminding them that the real offence is getting found out. It gives the illusion of action while avoiding calls for real reform.

The honours system has long been the whited sepulchre of the British establishment.  It evidently has not outlived that usefulness.

 

 

Fuel price blues–how the Tories are missing the plot

Daily Telegraph columnist and part-time Mayor of London Boris Johnson is the latest Tory to come out in favour of a fuel price stabiliser.  He joins a growing number of Tories backing the idea, and Liberal Democrats are now talking about fuel concessions for the country’s periphery.  Recent increases in fuel prices have given impetus to the scheme.

The inaccuracies in Johnson’s article have been spelt out elsewhere, and I don’t intend to repeat them here.  The proposal is however Government policy – it was announced by George Osborne in July 2010, with an instruction to the Office for Budgetary Responsibility to devise a scheme. So it’s worth considering whether it is a runner, and whether it really would achieve the objectives of being fairer and more business-friendly.

The principle behind the stabiliser is that the tax system should be used to stabilise fuel prices.  When fuel prices are high the tax would automatically fall, and when they fall the tax element would rise, in order to provide stability.

But the OBR has already reported and suggested that the numbers don’t add up.  The report points out that a short-term increase in fuel prices of £10 per barrel over the year boosts public finances by £2.4bn but the cost of offsetting it at the pump would be £3.7.  In other words, the stabiliser’s supporters would need to explain how a £1.4bn hole would need to be plugged.  Boris Johnson’s article sticks to the default coalition script that Britain’s economic problems were caused by Gordon Brown’s profligacy, a comment that sits uneasily with his advocacy of the stabiliser.

Moreover, we’re being told nothing about the fairness or otherwise of such a proposal.  Johnson’s scenario of middle England being forced to pay more to fill up the people-carrier gives the game away – the stabiliser would subsidise the middle classes most, especially since businesses will be able to claim back the VAT on increased fuel prices.

We’re not yet being told how it would work, and therein lies a key weakness.  One of the attractions of fuel duty is that it is extremely cheap and efficient to collect, with no more than marginal evasion.  Complications arise where there are special considerations, like the low-tax red diesel that is effectively used to subsidise agriculture – it’s sold for off-road use but fraud is widespread.  The introduction of a stabiliser would require more bureaucracy at a time when HMRC is being scythed back and, by being linked to pump rather than wholesale prices, would mean greater complexity for the fuel distribution industry, which is currently acting as a de facto cut-price tax collector.  Questions of how often the rates would change have not been addressed.

In other words, it’s a political sop to middle England.  Fuel prices have been a Tory issue – witness the (wholly mendacious) rhetoric about the “war on the motorist” which, eight months into office, Government ministers still parrot. Pure politics, and bad economics 

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?

Free speech in the lower fourth

The picture at the top of this blog shows Democracy Village in Parliament Square, set up since the start of May.  It may not be there for very much longer.

There is of course a long history of campaigners setting up here, and a matching determination of the authorities to get rid of them.  The vigil of Brian Haw has become a cause celebre, although it appears he is not entirely happy about the newcomers.

The latest shot is that the Mayor wants the village moved before the state opening of Parliament – in case the sight of it offends the Queen.  The Evening Standard reports that particular offence is likely to be caused by the sight of two soldiers protesting against the war in Afghanistan.  More generally there are comments about squalor, but I’ve visited the villageand the place was orderly and peaceful – no squalor to be seen.  The idea that it is offending tourists is risible – they appeared to be fascinated by it.

What does this tell us about our society?

Orwell famously wrote that Britain was like a dysfunctional family with the wrong members in charge.  Boris Johnson’s comments about the Queen – a truly classic piece of excuse-mongering -suggest something a bit different: Britain as a sort of gargantuan minor public school, obsessed with the appearance of respectablility, strong on chapel, tradition and team spirit and governed by the whim of a homogenous prefectorial elite.  It’s like Molesworth and St Custard’s fifty years on, with Grabber still winning the prize for raffia work in recognition of his father’s generous donation.  A society in which inconvenient and challenging realities are wished away in a nostalgic haze, but which have an habit of breaking through nonetheless.

Lessons from Ireland

The Republic of Ireland has recently introduced an emergency budget to address the effects of the economic downturn.  It’s the latest in a set of measures in an economy which, to an even greater extent than Britain, has been dependent on speculation and booming property prices.  The contraction of the Irish economy has been savage – official estimates suggest it will be 8% in 2009.  The rhetoric is about stabilising the public finances in order to bring a huge deficit under control, to restore confidence in the Irish economy.

The Irish policy response is interesting because it reflects quite closely the sort of policy framework that David Cameron and George Osborne have been setting out for the UK, in opposition to Gordon Brown’s stimulus package.  So it’s a useful exercise to unpack it to assess what Conservative policy could mean for the UK.

There’s an interesting analysis at Though Cowards Flinch which demonstrates how, despite the rhetoric that those who earn the most should pay the most, some of the changes in the tax regime actually bear down hardest on those least able to pay, by reducing income tax thresholds.

But this follows on from the announcement earlier this year of the Pensions Levy, which is in effect a swingeing pay cut for public sector workers.  The justification is simple; public sector workers enjoy substantially better pension provision than those in the public sector, and should therefore pay more for it.  Understandably it has provoked fury and mass resistance in Ireland, and the recent budget package modified it so that that it did not apply to lower-paid workers.

It’s a measure that fits closely with the rhetoric coming from the British Tory Party and its supporters in the Press.  In particular, the Daily Mail has been banging the drum about featherbedded public servants and their gold-plated pension provision, and individual Tory spokesmen have been making guarded comments on the subject (ever mindful of the fact that there are 600,000 voters in the public sector who have to be convinced somehow that voting Conservative is in their interests).  Others, like London’s Mayor Boris Johnson, have been much more outspoken.

The truth, of course, is totally different.  Mailwatch dissects the poisonous rhetoric about public sector pay here better than I could and some of the specific lies about public sector pensions are nailed by the Secretary General of the PCS, Mark Serwotka, in a radio interview in December last year.  Mailwatch points to the fact that public sector workers – who are overwhelmingly among the lower-paid in our society – have enjoyed years of below-inflation pay increases, while the private sector has forged ahead.  It however forbears to comment on the spectacle of Cameron and Osborne – both of whom sit on piles of vast inherited wealth -denouncing as bloated the average public sector pension of £7000 p.a. – barely enought to equip a member of the Bullingdon Club with tails and waistcoat.

The official Conservative line is that nothing has been ruled in or out.  But if the Tories win the next election, watch for the assault on the public sector.

Our friends in the city: why the Tories have nothing to say

It has been fascinating over the last few weeks to watch the whole edifice of market capitalism unravelling.  There is of course a huge inevitability about it all – an entire system of world finance built on gambling and greed disintegrating.  Others have written far more eloquently than I could about the spectacle, although the sight of the advocates of the market with their hands out to the state has certainly indicated the shameless greed and hypocrisy of these people. 

I’m more interested now in picking up on some of the issues in domestic British politics.

Hedge funds and Tory funds

Not the least entertaining spectacle of the last few weeks has been the desperate attempt by the Conservative Party in the UK to avoid criticising the out-of-control financial institutions at the heart of the current crash.   One by one, Tory leaders have said that we shouldn’t criticise the bankers.  David Cameron says it won’t save a single job.  Boris Johnson says we must protect the reputation of the City of London. Only now, with evidence of the backlash in the United States against the banking community, is George Osborne apparently willing to state that the banking community should take its share of the responsibility.

Here’s the reason why.  A piece in the Times shows that hedge fund managers deeply involved in short-selling (i.e. gambling with your pension) are among the Tory Party’s largest donors, with regular personal access to David Cameron.   Are these people really going to let a future Tory government undertake the sort of large scale regulation of the financial markets that the current situation requires?  In whose interests will a Tory Government act?

It’s typical.  The most important issue of the day, and not only do Cameron’s Tories have nothing to say; it just another occasion when the snouts are in the trough. 

The fact remains: the people who are responsible for this mess – the financiers who developed ever more dodgy financial instruments, the hedge funds who have used short selling to speculate against the banks, are at the heart of the Conservative Party – and, to quite a considerable extent, are its wallet.  Whatever rhetoric emerges from the Conservative Party conference, this is the background reality.