One Nation Labour and the abandonment of politics

Like many others, I’ve found the concept of One Nation Labour elusive.  The term is deployed in almost every utterance from senior Labour politicians, but its meaning remains obscure.  Like everyone who has studied nineteenth-history politics, I’m familiar with the origin of the phrase One Nation in reference to Tory politics and Disraeli, and it is a phrase that has been used predominantly on the centre-right – usually as a signifier for a more socially-liberal form of Toryism.  In this context it’s worth noting that the phrase originates from a scene in Disraeli’s early novel Coningsby in which an aristocratic  character realises that the gilded world in which he lives is not all there is – and that the poor exist too:  two nations – the rich and the poor.  The use of the phrase “One Nation” was designed to demonstrate that there need not be conflicts of interest between the rich and the poor – and therefore, ironically enough, originates in a denial of what most Labour people have argued for most of that party’s history.

Labour has obviously seen an attraction in seizing this piece of language from the Right as our society becomes more obviously unequal and divided.  Fortunately Jon Cruddas has, in a  widely-trailed speech to the Resolution Foundation, sought to set out a strategic vision for One Nation Labour, answering – if obliquely – the question of what Labour is for.  It’s a fascinating, eloquent read – but frustrating, because of what it does not cover.  It is in those omissions that we perhaps get closest to what One Nation Labour really means.

Cruddas’ paper is entitled Earning and Belonging, and he states at the outset that these two verbs are the building blocks of Labour’s policy review – and that they shine a light on what Labour has lost.  He contrasts them with a Labour policy paper of 2005 which sought to answer the question “what is Labour for” with the verbs earning and owning; a position which puts consumption at the heart of Labour aspiration. Cruddas (in my view rightly) argues that this reductivist view simply does not express the richness of the Labour tradition – it ignores community and the progressive instinct, and points out how the need to recapture a dialogue about community, important though it is, flirts dangerously with the reactionary.  But Cruddas argues eloquently about how Labour’s – I’d go further and say the English left’s – roots lie in mutualism and points out how many of Labour’s salient campaigns today continue to display that mutualistic and communitarian urge.

It is, as I have said, a powerful and attractive narrative.  Implicit in much of this is the need to reach out to an electorate that is disillusioned by process; on the one hand battered by the market, on the other deeply suspicious of what Cruddas describes as state managerialism.

But there are huge omissions.  There is not a syllable about the environment – whether in terms of the big issues of climate change or the more local issues about urban liveability and public space.  There is no real consideration of what the state is for.  And, beyond a couple of platitudinous sentences about the pointlessness of opposing cuts without an alternative,  nothing about the economy.

It is in the latter that One Nation Labour looks most like a tactic of avoidance.  Austerity economics is clearly failing; not only is it destroying living standards, in particular of the most vulnerable – even on its own terms it is simply failing to deliver the objectives of reducing the deficit and promoting economic growth.  Not only is the confidence fairy nowhere to be seen, but Labour is quite explicitly promising more austerity to come; a commitment to keeping the Coalition’s cuts and possibly making more.  Cruddas’ eloquent generalities about earning and belonging are conducted in the shadow of Ed Balls’ great clunking fist.  It’s ironic that if ever there is a figure in Labour’s past who could be seen as emphasising the One Nation tradition it is Keynes – whose writings were inspired by a need to rescue capitalism from the idiocies of its most fervent supporters and to create a stable society in which the benefits of wealth were spread.  Ed Balls seems intent on repeating the errors that Keynes excoriated.

And it seems clear that a deeper consideration of economic priorities is off the agenda.  Austerity, it appears, is assumed – but the narratives surrounding it appear to be falling into disrepute, as the economy continues to tank, living standards fall and the hope that this might be a simple recession preceding a return to business as usual looks increasingly untenable.  There is no recognition that this time it might be different – that, for example, we may be in the throes of a long-term depression like that at the end of the nineteenth-century (with the irony that Labour partly grew out of a realisation that the conventional politics of the time was simply not equipped to deal with that).  In this context, Cruddas’ review of Labour’s traditions is notably incomplete; redistribution and the use of the power of the state to achieve economic policy ends has always been central to Labour’s view of the world.  Everybody knows that the post-war Attlee government founded the NHS; most people know that it nationalised key industries like coal and steel; fewer know that it presided over the most significant redistribution of wealth from rich to poor undertaken in British history, and realise the way in which the experience of total war – in which trade unions and government worked together to provide the means for victory – shaped the debate about economic priorities.  Of course economic priorities and structures have changed – but one does not have to deny that fact to recognise that this very significant piece of Labour history is wholly absent from Cruddas’ survey.  And the time when the failure of market economics (explicitly recognised in Cruddas’ comments about housing) is all too clear, such an omission looks like a major piece of evasion.

As does the failure to ask questions about the boundary between public and private – it is hinted at in Cruddas’ comments about voluntarism, and it’s notable that he recognises the difficulty of this area, but it’s a pity that at a time when other thinkers on the Left are seeking to rediscover the Courageous State,  One Nation Labour appears incapable of moving beyond generalisations about state managerialism.  At one level, the coalition years can be seen as an experiment in the withdrawal of the state – and it is obvious that the consequences are disastrous (not least because the tired rhetoric about the Big Society fails to recognise the extent to which the voluntary sector and the state were already working closely together – it is ironic that the withdrawal of the state has decimated parts of the voluntary sector).  There is a serious debate to be had about the role of the state and the voluntary sector, and how such a relationship can be made more democratic and accountable.  On the basis of Cruddas’ comments that is not really a debate that One Nation Labour appears to want.

And alongside that sit crucial economic issues – the question of whether that collapse in living standards and growth in inequality is arising out of the pursuit of paper growth, and the way in which we fail to ask questions about the purpose of economics and the relationship between growth and prosperity when we continue to deplete the world’s resources at a wholly disproportionate rate  (a reminder here too that the traditional internationalism of the Left appears to have little place in this dialogue.

These omissions are important, and drive one towards the conclusion that One Nation Labour is not so much a slogan (although it is undoubtedly that) as a catalogue of omissions; a refusal to join a debate about the most important economic issues of the day.  Politics is about the big issues, or it is nothing – and policy reviews, important as they are, deal with the detail of implementing a larger political vision. Labour once sought to debate big issues of capital, of wealth, of distribution and of economic structure – indeed, as a Party it grew out of a recognition more than a hundred years ago that the polity of the day did not provide the framework for such a debate.  It is perhaps ironic that One Nation Labour seems to be represent a recreation 0f that political failure.

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.

A royal engagement and a narrative of national failure

I’ve been fascinated by the spectacle surrounding the announcement of the engagement of William Windsor and Kate Middleton – much of it of course following an entirely predictable pattern.

For a start, there is the endless overage on the rolling news outlets, vox-pops and helicopters flying over London to produce the aerial shots over which TV anchors can pour forth witless banalities, the toe-curling interviews, the cringe-making congratulations from politicians (apparently, according to David Cameron, there was much cheering and banging of the table at yesterday’s cabinet meeting, indicating the extent to which public-school manners are ingrained in the behaviour of our politcians). Add to this some fantastically sexist news coverage (the Telegraph described the hapless Middleton as “good wife material”) and there is a sense of the utter unreality of it all, although the unwritten assumptions about breeding stock hang heavy over the whole affair.

It’s all frippery, of course, and it’s not hard to see the political usefulness of all of this – nothing like monarchy to maintain the pretence that we’re a united society and all in this together. The attempt to brand millionaire’s daughter Middleton as “normal” and an icon of monarchical modernity reveals much more about the mainstream media than it does about her.

But it surely goes much deeper than this.  It seems to me that the drama being played out in the media is really a narrative of national failure. Outside the Westminster and media bubble, our society is deeply dysfunctional, ridden with class difference and inequality, in a political system that has ceased to function as a meaningful democracy, headed for economic catastrophe and unprecedented social division. A healthy, functional, prosperous democracy would digest the news and move on, because it would have the self-confidence to do so. Protocol and pomp and flag-waving and Ruritanian ritual are what a society does when it can’t bring itself to look in the mirror.

So of course the establishment jumps on this royal wedding bandwagon; it’s all they’ve got left.

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?

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.

Consumerism – bad for somebody else’s health

A sobering piece by Johann Hari in today’s Independent, exposing the cost of consumerism at the sharp end.

It exposes the horrific conditions under which Chinese workers labour to produce the mechanical toys that Western consumers enjoy – an environment in which it is estimated that 600,000 people per year die of overwork.  Hari points to the fact that wages have fallen as a proportion of GDP in China every year from 1983 to 2005; sobering indeed.

But it also shows how Chinese workers are fighting back, through organising into trade unions.  The Chinese authorities have been forced into making concessions, proposing to allow limited trade union rights – but Western companies are lobbying hard to prevent this.

We in the West must recognise that this is our struggle too – not just because we consume the products that are produced by this exploitation, but because, crucially, the organisations that are resisting change are here in the West.  This is not about China; it’s about capitalism.

Economic reality in broken Britain

Once in a while, you read a contribution to the political debate that encapsulates so much that one wants to say in a few eloquent sentences.  This anonymised letter in yesterday’s Guardian was one such contribution, and I am happy to reproduce it in full:

It is futile to attempt to address poverty (Frank Field to think the unthinkable for Cameron, 5 June) without looking at the ever-widening gap between the highest and lowest paid in the private sector. My own experience may be illustrative.

I earn under £17,000 a year working in an office in London. When I have paid my bills, rent and transport costs I have under £60 a week left – barely more than the dole. I am doing a virtually identical job to one I did five years ago. Then, I got £24,000, and my living expenses were 60% of what they are now. Many of my workmates who have children are eligible for tax credits because they cannot cope. I am thinking of checking to see if I am too. I am merely surviving on what I earn. My employer has given no pay rises to staff for two years because of the recession.

For the board, however, things are rather different. Our chief executive received a pay rise of over 60% last year, taking his salary to just over £300,000. He also recently exercised stock options which, if sold immediately, would net him around £600,000. The board has forced down pay for staff, relying on the taxpayer to help make up a living wage, then pocketed the difference.

Inflation is now rising fast and the benefits of work are being rapidly eroded. If Iain Duncan Smith and Frank Field want to make it worthwhile going to work, they should start by ensuring businesses can no longer force the taxpayer to subsidise them by paying tax credits. They should also do something to link the pay of the highest and the lowest in a company. That way, if directors want more money they will have to make greater profits and improve living conditions of staff. This will also cut the amount the government pays to support the working poor.

When a small group is holding the rest of the country to ransom, whether it is the union barons of the 1970s or the company directors of today, it has ceased to be part of the solution and has become part of the problem. Something, as they say, must be done.

Name and address supplied

Next time an Old Etonian, or one of the cabinet’s eighteen millionaires, starts werbling on about broken Britain, or how we’re all in it together, it’s worth thinking about the realities in this letter.

Always with us?

Sometimes the most interesting news stories are hidden away in the odd recesses of newspapers, especially when they sit uneasily with conventional narratives

This story from today’s Guardian seems to me to fit into that category – it points out that poverty in Britain is on the increase among those in work as well as those out of it; partly because the recession has meant more part-time working, but also implying that even with Labour’s minimum wage it is becoming increasingly difficult for those in work to survive financially.

And I think there’s a much bigger story here – one to which I aim to return in future posts.  There is a lot of rhetoric about economic growth and high living standards, and how progress has been made in recent years; but I believe there is considerable evidence to suggest that more than thirty years of free market economics has had precisely the opposite effect.  Not only has the gap between rich and poor got larger, but most people, on middle as well as low incomes, have in real terms got poorer.  The presence of a lot of shiny toys – TVs with larger, flatter screens, holidays in increasingly remote places – hides the fact that many of the essentials of life have become more difficult for an increasing proportion of people to obtain.

The most obvious one is housing.  Quite how massive house price inflation can be seen as a symptom of wealth completely beats me.  In precisely what way can a vast increase in the price of the most basic commodity of life – a roof over one’s head – be a sign of prosperity?  How can the increasingly desperate struggle of many people to find decent housing possibly be something that should be regarded as a good thing?

Of course, those people who already own houses have seen their assets increase on paper, but the difficulties for those looking to buy a family home for the first time are obvious.  It’s a huge form of redistribution from the young and poor to the old and rich, in other words towards the people for whom the media in general look to cater.

But there are other things too – what in the 1970s used to be described as the social wage.  Pensions, for example – increasing numbers of people find their pension provision being gambled away by the city, or diminished by corporate pension holidays.  Education – it’s  not so long since higher education was free, and now Government is preparing to allow British universities to start charging fees of Ivy League proportions, without the generously-endowed scholarships of the American elite universities.  The cost of travel for those who do not own a car has soared; for the privileged car owners (and it’s worth remembering that a third of the population has no access to a car), it has fallen.

I could go on,  There are innumerable examples of ways in which for the average individual, life has become more expensive, more uncertain, less secure.

And to return to the Guardian article, there’s a message that Government is missing.  We hear quite a lot from politicians about getting people into work as the way out of poverty.  We’re going to hear quite a lot more, I’d guess, from our new Government about the workshy on benefits.  But the research quoted in this piece shows that this rhetoric doesn’t survive scrutiny.  At a stroke it rewrites market ideology, and demonstrates poverty is far more pervasive than politicians of all parties are prepared to admit.  Low-paid jobs are the key to poverty, not unemployment.  Outsourcing, privatisation, the decline of trade unionism, the pathologising of solidarity.  That’s where the blame lies.

Where is the politician who is campaigning to change this?

Play up, play up and play the game

Like potlatch in this blog post, I’ve long been fascinated by the role of sport in our economy and culture.  It’s an activity which in our capitalist society has acquired an iconic value.  he rhetoric of businessmen is full of sporting analogies, always used with approval.

Of course, the analogies are obvious.  Competitiveness and team-building are key concepts for capitalists.  And potlatch is surely right in describing how the rhetoric of sport, like the rhetoric of capital, is increasingly concerned with crude power.  This contrasts with the interplay of equal participants envisaged by market theory.

Crucially, sport legitimises some of the most feral aspects of capitalism.  It posits an environment where there must be winners or losers, and allows the position of the winner to be rationalised as achievement, rather than the product of inherent inequality.  At the same time, market capitalism can draw on sport to wrap itself in metaphors of fair play, obedience to the rules and the spirit of the game, hiding the feral exchanges of power that I would argue more accurately characterise capitalist behaviour.

It’s also about metaphors of control.  Organised sport in Britain is very much tied up with the public school ethos (although there is of course an essential strand of working men coming together in sports clubs). It’s about getting the apparently unruly to put aside their bad habits and come together in an ideologically safe way, expending energy in activity that reinforces rather than threatening the established order.

And finally it’s about national glory.  Not just the nationalism of getting behind “our team” and the way in which the achievement (or otherwise) of eleven men on a football pitch becomes synonymous with national success; but through prestigious grands projets like the Olympics and the World Cup, reminiscent of the heyday of imperialism in the reach of their ambition, the ideology they glorify and the financial disaster that invariably follows in their wake.

Sport is much more than a game, in other words; it’s an important expression of dominant ideology.  It illuminates the hegemony.

Some essential truths

I have a lot of respect for Jeremy Seabrook, and I read his article on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site with a strong sense of agreement with his diagnosis about the impact of rampant consumption.  There are some really important truths here that are apt to get forgotten in our commodified world, this in particular:

The greatest threat to global stability comes not from the poor but from the rich. This startling proposition runs directly into another received idea, which is that the risk of disorder is a result of excessive materialism. What we suffer from is not a surfeit of materialism, but a deficiency of it; for if we truly valued the material basis upon which all human systems depend, we would exhibit a far greater reverence for the physical world we inhabit. If materialism means respect for the elements that sustain life, then we are gravely wanting in it. What is sometimes referred to as “materialism” is actually something else: perhaps a distorted kind of mysticism which believes we can use up the earth and still avoid the consequences of our omnivorous appetites.

And, particularly importantly:

The first task in achieving a decent security for all people on earth is to affirm the distinction between human nature and the nature of capitalism.

The latter sentiment is about as fundamental and important a statement as one could find of what it needs to bring our society back to its senses.

Where I find it hard to agree with Seabrook is in the optimistic tone of some of his argument.  He is of course absolutely right when he argues that consumerism is unsustainable; but I’m not sure that I can agree that some of the glamour of extreme wealth is wearing off, at least here in the Anglo-Saxon West.

In part, this is about addictions that are extremely difficult to break, and in whose maintenance a lot of very powerful people have a strong vested interest.  It is going to be extraordinarily difficult to break out of the web of envy, conformity and greed that sustains this set of addictions.  And the blame for the underlying dissatisfaction can always be laid off somewhere else, at migrants, for example, or simply at people who are different.  Watch the nastiness in our society increase as, in the months ahead, Western capitalism hits one of the bumps in the road.

But, additionally, part of the point about glamorous consumption is that it provides a very good smokescreen behind which real wealth and power can hide – for every footballer or pop-singer in the public eye there are grey men in suits who manage the system in obscurity, who will use an unprecedented range of strategies to protect what they own.

What is the answer?  Beyond a critical mass of individuals who will stand back and look critically at what is happening around them, and reject the sheer irrationality of it, it’s difficult to say.  But that’s probably where it has got to start.