This comes from here, and I don’t think he’ll mind (read from bottom up, of course):
Aug 102011
Aug 102011
Simon Jenkins is the sort of annoying columnist with whom you have on occasion to seriously agree and sometimes seriously disagree. I guess that’s a merit.
This morning he’s on form, arguing that local response is needed to the riots we’re suffering. As he puts it:
There is no substitute for proper, open, responsive democracy at any tier of government. There can be no localism without some discretion over taxation and resources. There can be no big society without a vote. Curing any community’s woes is not the job of the police. Leave it to them and trouble will simply recur.
In other words, community matters but it has been undermined in the UK and that process does have consequences for a lack of identity with place.
I think he is right.
Neither Labour or Tories have got this right. It’s a big issue to be addressed. What it says is Courageous States are confident enough to delegate power. We’ve not been there.
This morning there will be thousands of business owners, large and small, facing the devastation of their premises.
None of these people deserved the trauma they will face.
Some will face the loss of their livelihoods and all they have worked for. Nothing can really replace that.
But that’s not to say nothing can be done by the government today, because much could be, and needs to be. It needs to be done for those facing an immediate crisis. It needs also to be done to prevent this crisis turning into commercial disaster for the areas affected by the crimes of the last few days with untold consequences for all innocent people in those communities who will already be living with fear.
The crisis I am referring to is one relating to insurance. Some of those who have lost livelihoods and businesses will not be properly insured: that’s a fact of life. Of course, as these losses were criminal damage the government can be called upon to pay, but this morning it has to be made very clear by Vince Cable or even David Cameron that resources will be thrown at meeting claims from those who have lost to ensure lives can carry on as soon as possible. It’s the least the government can do.
More than that; the government now needs to make clear it will bear these costs and that massive hikes in insurance premiums cannot be justified as a result. Many businesses in inner city areas are marginal at best. Tipping them into loss making, or even preventing them trading by denying them insurance, would be a catalyst for yet further social issues in such areas and must not be allowed to happen. Firm action to support communities in these areas requires swift action by government on the issue of business insurance this morning.
This is something the government can do today. It is something it should do.
And lease don’t suggest that this just creates moral hazard: rioters don’t think like that. But people this morning will be facing real loss.
Some parts of London burned this weekend.
It’s important not to overstate things: I lived very near Brixton and in the cordoned off are in 1981 and to be honest, life went on despite those riots. It will this time too, but that’s not to diminish their significance. Crime has happened, people have been hurt and both are to be regretted: as important though, causes have to be understood. It’s just too glib to say this is criminality. Of course there is some of that, but when the normal social fabric that prevents crime has failed it has to be asked why.
That fabric has failed in my opinion because of feral capitalism: the capitalism that this blog has described over recent years, where a tiny elite have looted society to increase their wealth at cost to all the rest of us. They’ve done so by capturing banking, capturing regulation, capturing the economics profession and by capturing states themselves (and most especially tax havens) from which to launch their attack on the well being of the vast majority.
That attack has worked. In 1980 58% of UK GDP went to labour. Now it is 53%. Real wages stagnated. Those of an elite grew, massively, and that same elite extracted value from those in work by extending them excessive credit – credit they now demand be repaid whether there is capacity to do so or not. And they have captured UK politics to reinforce their claim.
That has left millions alienated. They have no hope. Some rioted. I don’t condone it. But they did it anyway.
And they did so because they maybe implicitly understand that there seems no way out of this mess right now. Even Julian Glover, a LibDem commentator for whom I rarely have much time seems to have now realised the error of that parties Orange Book ways when writing in the Guardian this morning, saying:
Five centuries ago in Europe, Protestants and Catholics vied to define the route to salvation – but both thought they knew a way. Two centuries ago, in the long shadow of the French revolution, conservatives and radicals tussled for ownership of a future that they both thought they could make brighter. In the last century, cheerleaders for the free market disputed the apostles of Marxism. Each was sure theirs was the remedy for present ills. The crises we face in the summer of 2011 are no less sharp or scary, but what’s missing is leadership, not so much by people as by ruling ideas. The best, as Yeats said, lack all conviction.
He’s right. My answer will be in my forthcoming book – the Courageous State.
But there’s another one available right now. It’s to follow the leadership being given by Israel. They’re not leaving a few discontents to riot; they’re taking to the streets en masse. As the Guardian notes:
An estimated 300,000 people took to the streets on Saturday to press their demands for social justice and lower living costs in the largest demonstrations over social issues ever seen in the country. Despite scepticism that turnout could surpass previous events, almost twice as many people joined marches in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and other towns and cities.
Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, was forced to respond to the spiralling protests with the establishment of a committee to “listen to the distress” and recommend action.
Our government and police are trying to kill off the right to demonstrate in this country – but it is possible, it can work, and I strongly suspect that this next year will see millions on the streets of the UK demanding change.
Yes we need new ideas.
But we also have to make them heard.
We need hope.
Our children need hope.
Our world needs hope.
Each of us has to deliver our small share of it.
And mass action may be a part of delivering it.
But it must be peaceful mass action. Because that’s what delivers real change.
When hundreds of thousands of people stand up and simply say “no – you can’t do this in my name – I want something better – and I expect you to deliver it, or move aside for those who can” then the world tilts a little on its axis.
And it’s very clear it needs to do that, right now.
I am pleased to be one of the signatories to the campaign launched today for ‘public juries’ intended to help take power away from the tiny elite who control it in the UK.
The campaign is explained in the Guardian, and laid our in detail as follows:
Something is unraveling before our eyes. From bankers to media-barons, private interests have bankrupted and corrupted the public realm. Power, for so long hidden in the pockets of a cosy elite, has been exposed. Those who wield it have been found wanting – in scruples, in morals and in decency.
Things are now in flux, but will not stay so for long.
Without decisive and sustained action, power will fall back into the hands of a small elite who have their own, and not the public’s interest at heart.
They want to prevent public revulsion turning into public action. But, it’s time for real change. Things cannot be allowed to turn back to business as usual.
Britain can no longer be just the plaything of a handful of powerful, remote interest groups treating the wider public with contempt.
The current press and political scandal is not an isolated event.
It’s the third crisis in quick succession.
First, the bankers and their bonuses, then some politicians and their expenses and now there is the press, profiting from peoples’ pain, grief and private lives.
These crises share common origins.
Left to their own devices politicians, bankers and media moguls could not regulate themselves.
They share a common culture in which greed is good, everyone takes their turn at the trough, and private interest takes precedence over the public good. They have protected each other and left the British people with a financial and political crisis.
They do what they can get away with, not seeming to care for the common life of our country. And, they are scared of only one thing. Us. The public. If public organisations and citizens are vigilant, that elite won’t be able to get away with it again. With the right checks and balances we can put the public interest back into the heart of the system.
Only we, the public, can hold power truly to account by testing whether what happens is in the public interest.
To work out how to do it we call for a new Public Jury for the British public interest to propose reforms of banking, politics, media and the police.
The Jury would be made up of 1,000 citizens drawn as a random sample of the electorate. It will be a jury of our peers. We do not need yet another inquiry in which one elite asks another elite to tell them what cannot be done.
The Jury will be funded out of the public purse, with a paid secretariat with the resources to commission research and call witnesses.
It will have the power to require attendance where persons will be asked by the public to explain themselves.
Reporting within a year of its launch the convention will study and report on:
• Media ownership and the public interest
• The role of the financial sector in the crash
• MP selections and accountability
• Policing and public interest
• How to apply a ‘public interest first’ test more generally to British political and corporate life
Signed by:
Greg Dyke
Henry Porter
Lord Stewart Wood
Lord Smith of Clifton
Baroness Helena Kennedy QC
John Kampfner, Index on Censorship
Philip Pullman, author
Gordon Roddick
Caroline Lucas MP, leader of the Green Party
Professor Zygmunt Bauman, Leeds University
Professor Francesca Klug OBE
Professor David Marquand, Mansfield College, Oxford University
Professor Kate Pickett, University of York
Professor Richard Grayson, University of London
Ann Pettifor, Prime Economics
Peter Facey, Unlock Democracy
Deborah Doane, World Development Movement
John Christenson, Tax Justice Network
Richard Murphy, Tax Research LLP
Charlie McConnell, Schumacher College
Professor Tim Jackson, University of Surrey
Guy Shrubsole, Public Interest Research Centre
Richard Hawkins, Public Interest Research Centre
Alan Mac Dougall, PIRC
Neal Lawson, Compass
Martin McIvor, Renewal
Gavin Hayes, Compass
Andrew Simms, nef fellow
Will Straw, founder of Left Foot Forward
Clifford Singer, Other Taxpayers Alliance
Dave Prentis, General Secretary, Unison
Heather Wakefield, Unison
Polly Toynbee, The Guardian
Madeleine Bunting, The Guardian
Laurie Penny, journalist
Heather Savigny, UEA
Professor Judith Marquand, Wolfson College, Oxford University
Professor Alan Finlayson, University of Swansea
Professor Jonathan Rutherford, Middlesex University
Professor Danny Dorling, University of Sheffield
Professor George Irvin, University of London, SOAS
Professor Prem Sikka, University of Essex
Professor Richard Wilkinson, Emeritus Professor of Social Epidemiology
Professor Stefano Harney, QMUL
Professor Peter Case, Bristol Business School
Owen Jones, author of Chavs
Howard Reed, Landman Economics
Stewart Lansley, research fellow, University of Bristol
Professor John Weeks, SOAS
Jenny Jones AM, Green Party
Jeremy Leggett, founder and CEO, Solar Century
Tamasin Cave, Spinwatch
Professor Victoria Chick, UCL
Ruth Potts, The Great Transition, New Economics Foundation
Stewart Wallis, executive director, New Economics Foundation
Rajesh Makwana, director, Share The World’s Resources
To support the call for a People’s Jury for the British Public Interest go towww.compassonline.org.uk
As Sunny Hundal notes on Liberal Conspiracy:
A weekly briefing by the City of Westminster’s ‘Counter Terrorist [sic] Focus Desk’ (see here– PDF file) calls for al anarchist activities and events to be reported to the police.
Next to an anarchist symbol, the briefing states:
Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy. Any information relating to anarchists should be reported to your local Police.
As Sunny then notes on Twitter:
I’ll only accept this if they arrest Tory libertarians first. They believe about the same and present a far bigger danger to society.
I’m a long, long way from being an anarchist and have no sympathy with the underlying logic of their philosophy. Given that I’m at the computer today working on my new book, ‘The Courageous State’, I think that’s pretty obvious. But Sunny is right: those left-wing anarchists who the police are focusing upon are not a major threat to society. Again, let’s be clear – I do not condone any violence, and some anarchists have undertaken it in the last year, but a shop window or two, whilst reprehensible and worthy of punishment is behaviour about equivalent to that of many yobs on a Saturday night, and cannot be considered a serious threat to the state.
On the other hand, on the Tory right there are many organisations that are actively going out of their way to suggest the state is a bad thing. As I noted recently, I spoke at a supposed All Party Parliamentary Group meeting in the House of Commons last month sponsored by three organisations that seem to have outright opposition to the state at the core of their purpose. They are the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Adam Smith Institute and the Cobden Society. At that meeting the audience, drawn very largely from those organisations and certainly not representing All Parties or even Parliament (which is unsurprising, this Group – which is new – appears to be yet another right wing Tory front) lapped up the comments by one speaker – Mark Pennington – who argued that the state does not have the legitimacy to create law and only the market does. Now that I call a serious challenge to the state – but it was readily apparent that it was popular with some Tories present, including sitting MPs.
And if we are talking about threats to democracy I have long argued that the four largest organisations that pose a serious, coordinated, threat to democracy are the Big 4 firms of accountants. They are, after all, largely responsible for legitimising the activities of tax havens or secrecy jurisdictions as I prefer to call them*, and use them in coordinated fashion (detailed here) to ensure that their clients pay less tax than the democratically elected governments of major states think is due to them as a result of their activities. Is there any better way to undermine democracy than to deny a government the tax revenue stream it requires to fulfil the mandate it has been given by its electorate? I can’t think of one that’s likely to be more subtly effective.
We do face threats to democracy, our way of government and our way of life right now: very serious threats indeed. But it seems the police aren’t able to identify them. And perhaps that is one of the most worrying things of all.
* Secrecy jurisdictions are places that intentionally create regulation for the primary benefit and use of those not resident in their geographical domain. That regulation is designed to undermine the legislation or regulation of another jurisdiction. To facilitate its use secrecy jurisdictions also create a deliberate, legally backed veil of secrecy that ensures that those from outside the jurisdiction making use of its regulation cannot be identified to be doing so.
The USA is about to commit one of the biggest, if not the biggest, frauds in history. It is giving notice of its intention to default ion its creditors, not because it can’t pay, but because it won’t pay.
Or rather, a group of far-right wing, Christian fundamentalist politicians, rightly called ‘dangerous charlatans‘ by the Guardian this morning are seeking to force it to default on its debt even though it could pay.
Worse though, even if they agree to pay the debts, they’ll do so at a price that will devastate their country. Whilst they will grant the richest in their community lower taxes they will deny to the poorest many of the services, and indeed the incomes, on which they are utterly dependent.
These people, for the so-called ‘Tea Party’, claiming to be driven by God, are going to willingly unleash economic mayhem on their country and gross poverty on many people already desperately poor whilst they will, without doubt, drive millions out of work, hundreds of thousands of businesses into ruin and the world economy into deep recession, all they claim because of their love of the markets they seem so intent on destroying.
There is no rational reason for this act of wanton vandalism: it is motivated by dogma and nothing else. But that is a dogma of greed, that says ‘what is mine is mine’. And it’s a dogma of wealth – that says a few shall inherit the earth. It’s also a dogma of hate – that treats those without great wealth as contemptible. It’s based on a dogma that applauds ignorance – the ignorance that says that the way to reduce debt is to cut the very income income that is your only source of repayment of that debt. Of curse, it’s also a dogma of complete irresponsibility - because millions, if not billions of people will suffer and many will die as a result of the wanton acts of this group.
And in the process they will seek to destroy democracy itself, and the so-called American dream. Nye Bevan wrote in his classic book ‘In Place of Fear’:
The issue therefore in a capitalist democracy resolves itself into this: either poverty will use democracy to win the struggle against property, or property, in fear of poverty, will destroy democracy. Of course, the issue never appears in such simple terms. Different flags will be waived in the battle in different countries and at different times. And it may not be catastrophic unemployment. There may be a slow attrition as there was in Britain before the war, but poverty, great wealth and democracy are ultimately incompatible elements in any society.
He was right. Yet what we have in the USA is a group promoting massive increases in wealth for those already wealthy, massive unemployment for those already poor, an indifference to the rule of law by refusing to accept obligation for debts already incurred and the outcome will, undoubtedly, be a threat to democracy itself.
That’s what makes it so worrying that Barack Obama is not standing up to this mob (for a mob they are).
And if he fails to do so, then we all need worry. For not only is recession highly likely, it’s democracy that’s also under threat, and not just in the USA, but in all places where this logic prevails – as it undoubtedly does now in the right wing of the UK’s Conservative Party.
These are dangerous times.
Let me stress, straight away, I’m not suggesting the Tea Party are physical terrorists. But in conversation yesterday an idea occurred to me.
Suicide bombing changed the whole environment of terrorism. Suddenly we faced people for whom what had been presumed to be the ultimate deterrent – risk of their own death - held no threat. The terms of engagement changed, utterly. No one has yet worked out how to deal with it.
The Tea Party may be politically similar. As has become clear in their attitude to the discussions going on in Washington, they don’t care about their chance of re-election when negotiating on the budget deficit. All they care about is killing the government. The normal sanction of political life – the loss of office – holds no threat for these people. That changes the rules of engagement. We don’t know how to deal with it yet.
Both groups are extremist. Of course they’re operating in radically different ways. But both have the aim of destroying what, for reasons of dogma, they consider to be the enemy which the vast majority would consider otherwise. And in the process they’re quite willing to sacrifice their own selves.
It’s not how we think democracy works. I’m not yet sure how we handle it.
I’m fascianted to the reaction to one of my blogs this afternoon.
I noted that rather surprisingly Jesse Norman MP (a Tory) and I had sided against the far right in a debate yesterday.
The reaction of one commentator – who I confirm was there – was so typical of the right. First he resorted to sophistry – asking me to define terms (it’s a standard trick of the far right – they hate common understanding of terms expressed in plain English comprehensible to all, which is what I was using).
Then there was denial (“I’m not an adviser even though I sit on an advisory panel”).
Throw in a touch of dissembling after that – “I’m not a right winger – how dare you say so? I’m a free marketeer” type of thing.
So let’s use plain English.
That I know of there is no one on the left who says the role of the state must be restricted as far as possible and that the market must be left to resolve all issues. So it follows that free marketeer = right wing.
And then let’s note that arguing that democracy gives no legitimate right to the state to regulate – a right that should apparently be left to the market without interference – is a) anti-democratic and b) way into the fringes of free market thinking and yet it was being openly endorsed yesterday at a meeting sponsored by and largely attended by members of the IEA and Adam smith Institute. That’s extremism if ever I heard it, and exceptionally dangerous extremism too if I might say so (and as you’re libertarians you really can’t deny me the right).
So it follows you’re 1) right wing and 2) extremists.
I might rest rest my case there.
But let me add that if it so happens people of this persuasion populate the IEA and Adam Smith Institute well, you can see what follows on…it’s not hard to work it out. So if they don’t want the label, expel the thinking. That’s an easy solution for you.
If not live with the fact that I’m right to say you oppose democracy. Because as far as I can see and hear and read that’s what you do.
And much as I hate racists I find that opposition to democracy as repugnant because you share with racists a goal of oppressing people whether on grounds of ethnicity or on the grounds of wealth (or lack of it). And both are an assault on the dignity of all human beings who I believe are, and have a right to be treated as equals irrespective of such issues and gender, sexual orientation, belief, disability and more besides.
You’re challenge that principle - and I name that as extremism. Right wing extremism.
