Politics is in a mess. The Tories are relying on immigration hysteria to rally support, and are tearing themselves apart in the process. Labour is tearing itself apart in Scotland. The Lib Dems face annihilation in 2015. The spectre of UKIP hangs over debate. Politicians are loathed. Russell Brand tells people not to vote in protest whilst Hong Kong fights for the right to political representation. Scotland almost left the Union. And our Prime Minister fulminates on EU contributions that he plainly should have known about in a way that can only be designed to spread our internal confusion into a wider arena.
Through all this there is, although politicians appear not to have noticed, an economic crisis going on. Real wages are falling. House prices are increasingly unaffordable. A younger generation are being saddled with debt if they go to university, and they do so because their work prospects are poor if they don't and not much better if they do. Maybe 5 million people are unemployed, under-employed or say they are self employed but appear to be making little income and are paying almost no tax as a result. Those on benefits for any reason are despairing. The NHS is out of money and no politician is saying how they will fill the gap. Protest in Parliament Square is oppressed and the national media mysteriously ignore it, leading to quite reasonable questions about independence. Growth, such as it is, is not reaching most people and is anyway not expected to last, but the rich are definitely getting richer and the stock market has had a go at breaking its all time high.
It does not take rocket science to see these events as connected. They are. People are completely disenchanted for good reason. We all get fed up when no one appears to listen to us, or they say they do and then completely fail to understand what we have said. And that is exactly what most politicians - including UKIP (who simply say nothing of substance) are doing to all those who address them.
What those politicians are universally ignoring is the message people are sending that they do not think what is happening is fair. Any parent will be used to hearing that message from a protesting audience for whom they are responsible. Frequently it is wise to admit that things aren't fair because that is the only way to retain credibility, and in the case of children that may, very often, be as far as the matter goes, because the unfairness is about the unequal relationship between carer and child that sometimes means the carer's wish has to prevail, come what may. But in the case of politicians addressing adults the admission that the world is not fair (usually described as "we hear your concerns") cannot then be followed by an absence of action because the people of this country, rightly, feel that they have the right to be treated as equals, and that politicians are treating them with contempt when they fail to acknowledge that fact. Just reward is now being delivered for that failure to respect the electorate.
So what is unfair?
Globalisation and the unjust reward of companies is unfair.
Income and wealth distribution is increasingly unfair.
The political system is unfair, as is access to it.
Job prospects are unfair.
The terms of employment are unfair.
The benefits system is unfair.
Housing is unfair.
The tax system is unfair.
The burdening of the young with debt is unfair.
Forcing people to borrow because wages are too low is unfair.
To be blunt, the bias of the whole economy towards rewarding some especially well at cost to most is unfair.
The role of the media in relying on advertising that promotes unattainable wants for many whilst revealing lifestyles that only highlight the unfairness that exists reinforces the whole message of unfairness.
And the result is anger. And a blame game that the Right have turned onto an innocent party, because that is what they always do, making immigration the focus of concern when it is a symptom of the malaise, has resulted.
So what is the malaise? That's our whole economic system. We cannot continue with an economic system that is predicated on employing fewer and fewer people on lower and lower wages to increase productivity to thereby increase the return on what is described as capital of which there is less and less being invested because those who own it do not wish to take the risk of their wealth being used productively in case it is lost, meaning that they prefer short term speculation instead of long term wealth creation, which is a choice that only deliberately exacerbates wealth and income divides.
So what are the choices? The right would have it that the market is the solution, even though it is thirty five years of market based solutions that have created this crisis. The right are, therefore wrong. There is no market based solution to a crisis of market failure. Let's not pretend that there is, because it cannot happen.
The only solutions are to be found in alternatives to the mess that markets have delivered. As Scottish Labour are rightly saying, this requires a profound shift to the left. There is no other choice.
The state has to invest in the economy when no one else will.
The state has to build houses because no one else will.
The state has to build the infrastructure that no one else can.
The state has to liberate the underused resource of this country - the capacity of it's people - to build the prosperity that people want and know they deserve.
The state has to make clear that its vision of prosperity cannot be based on a consumer boom: the prosperity we need is not based on a quick fix of a move in a decimal place in quarterly GDP. The prosperity we want is all about security, of jobs, of incomes, of services for all, of pensions, of healthcare, of access to education, of security when things go wrong and environmental security.
That said, there are people who very definitely need more right now - because there is real poverty in the UK. So the state has to deliver redistribution too.
And the state has to finance this. The money exists: we bailed out banks. We can bail out economies. The money comes from borrowing, from Green QE, from a levy on new pension fund contributions in exchange for the tax relief given, from a financial transactions tax, from a wealth tax, from progressive income tax, and from collecting taxes that are due. And all are important, for funding, policy and political reasons.
And the state could do more. It could give its staff pay rises.
It could promote union rights to counter corporate power.
It could provide decent state pensions and remove people's well-being from the casino of the stock exchange.
It could commit to the NHS and say tax will be raised to pay for it.
All of this could be done. But it is not being done.
No wonder people are angry.
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The politicians appear to be on the side of the corporations. I suspect if this could be made apparent to those in Hong Kong hustling for political representation, they’d stop bothering and reach for their guns instead. Had our ancestors, those who we’re constantly told fought and died for us to have the right to the vote, this to try to justify in some way the latest abrogation of responsibility by our so-called elected representatives, had they foreseen this outcome they’d have turned their guns instead on those masters of the status quo who were so keen to send them out to die for it. As you say, the State has to finance a recovery but I see no reason to believe, without a whole lot of guns at its head, physical or metaphorical, that it ever will.
Bill, I’ve just shared this on FaceBook, with this comment “Come on, you politicians! Wise up – ESPECIALLY Labour, which claims to represent the downtrodden and oppressed. WISE UP, LISTEN, or REAP the WHIRLWIND.”
I truly believe – or at least fear – the Britain is sliding into a pre-revolutionary mode of response, and no politician appears to have acknowledged this, presumably relying on the legendary “British sang-froid” (which is actually more like the complacency of the comfortable in the South-East. Try appealing the the “sang-froid” of the north, the ignored West Country, the disenfranchised Midlands, not to mention Wales and Scotland), and the comfortable delusion that we Brits don’t behave like the combustible Continentals.
Well, I’m just reading an account of the 1926 General Strike, in times that bear comparison with now, and there was no lack of militancy in every part of the UK, including even the South-East, and of course London.
Politicians who rely on our so called apathy and “sang-froid” haven’t been reading the signs of the times, and should JFK’s observation that those who preclude the possibility of a peaceful revolution make a violent one inevitable – especially apt, in the light of the Parliament Square demo, and the shameful arrest of the Deputy Leader of the Green Party for exercising her right to demonstrate peacefully.
So I repeat – WISE UP, LISTEN, or REAP the WHIRLWIND.
Yes; but sadly the strikers in 1926 were betrayed by the very organisations who claimed to support them-the unions. We the workers need to take our unions back from the comfortable elite in whose interest they seem to operate. Then of course the workers need to take back their political party. goodness I’m sounding like a revolutionary, need to sit down and have a cup of tea !!!
A minor correction to Andrew Dickie – Baroness (Jenny) Jones is our Spokesperson in the House of Lords and is a member of the Greater London Assembly. She is not Deputy Leader of the Greens.
there’s no point turning to guns unless it’s within in arena where you hold all the guns. out on the streets, all we’ve got is pitchforks (or in the people of Hong Kong’s case, umbrellas).
the public are also seriously outgunned in the realm of state elections. perhaps that will change as mainstream media influences subside but even if a progressive party did get elected, they would still be subject to the pressures facing any other politician holding that position. the trouble with figureheads is that they are easily shot at, and in this example the enemy is well armed in that it owns most of the media outlets and i’m guessing most of the country’s bonds.
for me the key to victory is in finding a battlefield that amplifies your natural strengths and your enemy’s weaknesses. the internet and the general explosion of tech. into the hands of the masses in the last decade has created an amazing landscape rich in opportunities for collaboration and coordination between the many. the Fair Tax mark, for example, would never have seen the light of day 20yrs ago.
and so i think the key to victory may lie in abandoning the old ways of fighting, be it on the streets or the halls of Westminster, and maybe even abandoning the fiat money system (which is so skewed in favour of elites that any reforms will be piecemeal), and creating a new way of doing business altogether.
The house price thing: couldn’t the state help by having the courage to take on the nimbys and abolish their power to restrict the building of houses.
Bill, as a former history teacher, I ponder the idea that we fought two world wars for democracy. The first was about national rivalries and emotional posturing -Russia ‘protecting’ the Serbs, Germany ‘standing by her ally, Austria’ and so on. One third of the British soldiers did not have the vote. It was hard to deny them in 1918 but it could have been granted without a war.
We did oppose Fascism and power politics of the ultra nationalist sort in world war two. It had to be done, there was little choice. It was a war for democracy in that sense.
People remembered the poverty after the First War and were determined to do better after Hitler’s war and we had Beveridge implemented. The war had made people used to high taxation so it helped the process of change but social reform wasn’t the cause of the war. It might have been a consequence.
In conclusion, there are no easy answers but I think what it does show is that when people can be mobilised in a cause, great things can be done. Richard points out many of the threats to our well-being today-not armed invasion or bombs but a shift of power away from the many to the few. Mobilisation in opposition -I’m not talking riots or armed insurrection- to these shifts actually comes nearer to a ‘war for democracy’. Not war in as 1914-18 or 1939-45 but a struggle none the less for the rights of the people.
The polite term is ‘Democratic deficit’: I will be happy to supply entertaining and intemperate terms on request.
It stops being entertaining when we look at a Labour party that has nothing to say about housing, for fear of headlines in the Daily Mail about the effects of such talk on house prices; and I fear that suburban Labour politicians are too middle-class to say anything so vulgar among voters who matter…
…Which leads to the situation we saw in Barking & Dagenham a few years ago, with fraudsters and violent criminals being elected to the borough council in preference to an indifferent and unrepresentative Labour Party.
There’s no good analogy in politics to ‘Nature abhors a vacuum’, but I would observe that human nature fills a democratic deficit with decidedly unpleasant politics and people.
Or, at times, with chaotic outbursts of destructive violence: you might ask why it is that we look to ‘community leaders’ rather than elected politicians when these things occur – why aren’t these two groups of people the same people?
Meanwhile, there’s a democratic deficit in the Conservative Party: the constituency bedrock of small businessmen and successful professionals are increasingly aware that the economy is being run for someone else’s benefit, and very much to their detriment.
Which democratic or undemocratic party can they turn to?
That democratic deficit is every bit as dangerous as Dagenham or Tottenham or Woolwich: we don’t get entertaining fools or intemperate racists trying to be credible, or even fraudsters and thugs – we get effective grassroots organisers and untraceable funding for whatever fills the democratic deficit.
regarding your point about the country being run for other people’s benefit, the rather excellent football writer Tim Vickery, who works in Brazil, hit the nail on the head when he said that whenever he comes back the England it looks more and more like a theme-park for the rich, and that is exactly what i see when i look at London.
Two steps to a British revolution: 1) Only in your lunch hour. 2) Don’t make a special trip.
Thinkin’ bout a revolution 1 and Thinkin’ bout a revolution 2.
Bill interesting read. Thanks.
Were you trying to get a lot off your chest? When was the world ever fair?
I always cringe when I hear the “people” want this or the “people” want that.
(Especially in the UK) they probably don’t if history is anything to go by.
But my biggest fear is that tangible progressive reform is damaged by this kind of over weaning argument which I think can only get the people’s (!!) backs ups.
Stephen
The quest for justice is innate and very clearly one of the highest callings of humankind
Richard
Politicians do hear what we are saying & they don’t care.
All the Political Parties are working for the City of London because they take their money. The City of London/political alliance used to be justified as “in the interests of the national economy” but now its just rampant fraud.
We laugh at the Arabian baksheesh corruption but the “I’ll scratch your back” mutuality of business organisations in this country is actually fraud & often cartel based.
In fact there is an insidious heritage of secret societies which links City of London corruption through all the County Councils, Local Councils to our smallest villages. And I have to say it’s all male.
How the masonic lodges in Parliament get away with excluding women is beyond me.
But this is why the Labour Party is now The Corporate Labour Party & only gets voters who don’t realise its betrayal of the working class & the UK Real Economy.
We wait for the women to save us from our own stupidities.
To respond to ‘Time Traveller’, we shouldn’t allow ourselves to go down the route of talking about how the Freemasons are behind all the country’s ills, or the next thing we’ll be doing is talking about the conspiracy between them and the Jews and the Bolsheviks, and noting how Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky were both Jews.
As for Stephen Griffiths, does he think that because the world is not fair now, and never has been, we should not strive to make it fair, or at least _fairer_ than it is? That we should accept unfairness as a donnée – as something that is an intrinsic part of social reality and can never be altered? What a very convenient doctrine for someone who probably benefits from the unfairness! Or is he one of the last remaining ‘deferential’ poor, who likes to tug his forelock, and lick the boots of the rich? Either way, I cannot say I have very much time, either for him or his opinions.
The élite have two options, as the status quo is not available to them. One is peaceful Reform, the other is violent Revolution. If they choose to oppose the former, in the hope of retaining the status quo, that will be very foolish, because all they will succeed in doing is ensuring the latter, and they will end up like the Romanovs. If they want to avoid Ekaterinburg, then they must be prepared to give up some, at least, of their wealth and power, and see a more equitable and equal distribution of same in our society. If they try to hang on to it, refusing to give any of it up in the face of the pressures from below, they will lose it all – and their lives as well. ALL our politicians had better realise the truth of this, or THEY will swing from the lampposts round Parliament Square, too.