There is a certain surrealness about blogging at present. There's this slight, but persistent and nagging feeling that no one is listening.
i am not talking about readership: that's doing nicely. I think the right word is impact. It's as if Brexit has swept everything off the agenda and for the time being there is no political capacity to think anything else. As a result the political classes (Scotland apart, it would seem, for their own good reasons) are disengaged with the realities of the world that still surrounds them.
Massive benefits injustices have been largely ignored.
The economy only exists through a Brexit lens.
The environment has fallen off the radar.
Defence is reduced (and that is the right word) to talk of gunboats.
A political crisis in Northern Ireland is almost ignored.
And it feels like we're all just talking into this void. I want to quietly scream that there's a real world of injustice, issues and lives lived short of their potential because of this.
But I have a feeling Westminster won't notice.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
I suspect you have a wider audience than you know. This brexit rubbish surely indicates that the best way to make money is to destroy something. You have picked out with a great deal of clarity the things being thwarted and broken and I am reminded of the Goldman-Sachs creature who boasted quite firmly that he would be able to make money whether the stock market went up or down. So much for any morals in business just greed is left. The destruction wrought by austerity is barely reaching public awareness. We will have to learn how to be good neighbours once again to support and help each other.
We need your input. it is beyond priceless. I for one am listening hard.
Thank you
But I was not speaking entirely personally – it seems a universal issue at present
It’s not just Westminster, Richard. It’s pretty tough for many people at the moment – witness the soaring rise in private borrowing and collapse in savings. There are several reactions I have come across recently here in Barnsley. The first is to blame immigration, but that is wearing thin. The second is that there is nothing ordinary people can do – no one thinks that any political party can make life better for them and they mistrust all political activists. The third is that we have to accept austerity because the country is living beyond its means. The last is straight Tory dogma/nonsense, but it is surprising how far it is accepted as gospel. People expect the bad times to get worse – some are having a last credit-fuelled binge on a foreign holiday or a new car. It’s pretty depressing for those of us who believe that we can, together, change society for the better. The ‘together’ has been blown apart.
David
I accept the analysis: I hear it too
I guess we just keep going….
Richard
Agree with you David. People seem to forget that the ‘crash’ disaster is still being left to ordinary folk to deal with.
So people accept that the country is living beyond its means but then have a credit card fuelled binge to cheer themselves up? How daft are they? Isn’t that a prime example of cognitive dissonance? With this kind of behaviour, its no wonder the Tories won the 2015 GE, and the anti EU fanatics the referendum.
I’m not sure everybody has given up though; tell that to the SNP and Scottish Independence advocates.
It sounds like the last few hours in the bunker with Hitler.
Sadly this was entirely predictable. another thing which has fallen off the radar is the reduction of MPs to 600 in such a way that stinks of blatant gerrymandering. The thought of a UK without Scotland raised the spectre of a permanent Tory majority.
Agreed
FWIW, and I know you’re not the best of friends these days, but yesterday John McDonnell did make a statement on some work the party has just done on the pernicious effects of Tory benefit and corporation tax cuts that was roundly ignored.
http://press.labour.org.uk/post/159144984599/this-april-the-tories-are-taking-working-families
I’ve had that impression for years. Even at my exalted level of trying to get my local city councillor to stop the One Stop shop from littering the entire neighbourhood … etc etc.
In the last decade or so it is probably from the internet that many of us have learned what a grotesque and manifold shambles so much of our government has been. It seems that the people, the detached, have been ruled by the demented, or more likely people on the make always going for the short term media friendly option. With globalisation and increasing complexity we stagger from one crisis to another.
You’ve chosen to limit participation in this blog to like minded people, from a particular side of politics that isn’t anywhere near the levers of anything at the moment, and nothing likely until 2020 and probably even 2025.
Fair enough, your place, your rules.
You just got on here
Anyone is welcome
But they do need to be able to make their case. and not just spout nonsense, as you just very obviously did
Which bit is nonsense? Is it nonsense that you are being listened to, or that you are not being listened to?
The fact you just dismiss anyone not from your side as ‘nonsense’ might be a reason for your predicament.
The nonsense is that I dismiss anyone not from ‘my side’
And you know it
You tend to be quite dismissive of people you don’t agree with, as you are being with me. That’s fine, and you might say you don’t suffer fools etc.
But you can’t then be surprised if your point of view isn’t having much traction, as your post here suggests. Maybe others (who do have influence) are treating you the same in return???
Some do, I am sure
But you have still missed the essential point of my comment
Is that deliberate?
As I understand it, given the title is posed as a question, you are appearing to identify a problem (insufficient traction), without offering an explanation or attempting to do so.
It seems to me you are unsure of the cause of your problem. I am merely suggesting one cause of the problem – your blog appears to be friendly to those within your side of politics, hostile to the other side.
What a staggering insight! I never knew it! Heavens above! I am inadvertently addressing some of the MSM bias.
Now get a life and stop wasting time here.
Scotland needs people to grow our economy. All welcome here, especially those who are interested in undoing the worst excesses of neoiberalism and creating a fairer society. The highlands is a wonderful place to live. What are you waiting for?
Up in two weeks….
I have the very property for you. I suspect you’re talking about a speaking engagement though.
I am….
There’s a ‘wait and see’ vibe combined with London/Westminster centric bubble. People feel more comfortable talking about the familiar rather than the unfamiliar. Fear surrounding being seen as a unique voice in the crowd fighting for something they don’t have others to back them up with (in other words the all too familiar safety in numbers, hurd or tribal mentality). Its easier to join in rather than take a stand with the fear of rebuttal (even when rebuttals are wrong or based on ignorance).
Well – I too have this fear.
The best thing is to find a private space and have that scream. Don’t do what I did and debase yourself by wishing ill upon the nasty politicians who do all this stuff. Don’t allow yourself to be radicalised to the point of losing your empathy with others as I have done in my darkest moments when considering these issues.
But at work, I have got a few people looking at books and documentaries that I have been consuming since the crash in 2008.
These are people who know something is wrong and are looking for answers. I never lecture them – I just say ‘Watch this/read that and see what you think?’. Some of them think I should be in politics after I patiently and gently unravel things for them in discussions we have!!!!! Little do they now how hot under the collar I get or how many of my posts Richard has decided not publish!
Anyhow. Louis Hyman (the American Economic Historian) says in the documentary ‘The Flaw’ that we need to get capitalism working for us rather than ‘working us over’.
He sees the capitalism of the last 30 years and its propensity to funnel money to the top and debase wages (and therefore wealth) as something that people will not stand for. He maybe right, and Trump, UKIP and Front Nationale are all symptoms of something awakening that needs to be channelled into something more positive.
I will share with you something recently that gives you a clue to the trend on low wages. I went to a factory that makes prefabricated restaurants for a major fast food retailer. Basically, these are modular boxes that are fitted out ready for use and transported to the location and are then craned into the site to be assembled and then opened for business. It was amazing.
The men employed in this factory were all on minimum wage and were called ‘semi-skilled’. As we walked around we noted the skills on show and we knew that our workforce was paid well above this for same work but on site – not a factory. These were the same skills we used in the construction of our homes. The major attractions of this off-site construction was the saving of traditional labour costs (brick layers, plumbers) – all sorts of trades would be displaced and put in a factory basically – in fact these prefabricated buildings did not use bricks at all but a coating that looked and felt like bricks and mortar.
If this sort of technology grows, then the consequences are all too clear. The investor in the restaurant chain will get their return because the cost of operations are reduced because the men who build them will be paid a lower wage that the current industry standard. Also, the supply chain is greatly reduced (which also means less turnover and therefore less jobs for them too).
It was modern capitalism at work, right there. It was impressive. But I noted that we were all lost in our own thoughts on the way home mulling over the ramifications of such ‘innovation’ on our futures.
Modern capitalism has a blind spot – it is too narrowly focussed on the bottom line at the expense of wide social consequences. It could well be its undoing as Marx has predicted it might.
The Tories believe in ‘the tipping point’ and how if they change things like benefits peoples behaviour and expectation will also adjust. What they may not realise is that the same logic extends to their nasty policies and their laissez-faire attitude to social and economic change. People will not stand for it when (unfortunately) more of them are effected. It means a further erosion of the middle class before any real change but that may well have to be the price we have to pay before we do get some form of change and a new way of doing things.
Hone building is moving that way
Not that there is anything at all wrong with mass production lines in factories.
One of the first to employ such techniques – Henry Ford – understood very well that you need to have a market for your goods and therefore famously paid his workers well enough that they could afford the cars they were building.
The difference between the people running businesses then and now is marked – employ via agencies, pay the bare minimum, offshore, etc – fundamentally, anything to get as much money in the coffers, regardless of the welfare of the workers.
If you think back further, many of the Victorian philanthropists were even more keen on looking after their workers – I was quite impressed about what had been built when I visited Saltaire last year, for instance.
What is it that has caused the ongoing moral decline of large business owners since then, I wonder? Ever more lax regulation and taxation, perhaps?
Anyone know what’s going on with ACOBA at the moment? Have they been soliciting public opinion in any form?
https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/advisory-committee-on-business-appointments
This will sound boringly repetitive but there can be no progress until the economic framework (theory) within which politics is planned and executed is trashed once and for all. It really is that simple. There are many analogies (eg Copernicus & the solar system) and another one has come to mind. Architecture. For millennia buildings were constructed according to established principles of stress and availabe materials. All that changed at the start of the 20th century when the ‘revolutionary’ architects – Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius et al. – embraced the new technologies to bring us what we now accept as being the norm. Their equivalents today are 3-D printing buldings. And so it is with economics. The old ‘rules’ no longer apply. They are regressive and detrimental to creating a better world fit for us all.
It’s a time issue. It takes generations for old orthodoxies to die and new ones to replace them, not least because power is rooted in the status quo. Nothing will or can move forward until there is systemic economic change. In the meantime everything else is tinkering on the edges to make the prevailing system a little more acceptable. Just as so-called progressive slave oweners (Democrats for the msot part!) gave their slaves more freedom and better living conditions … a ‘better’ form of slavery but still slavery. You don’t have to be a Marxist to understand this.
Of course there’s no harm in flexing one’s intellectual muscles to develop a social agenda that would improve the quality of life for the majority and not the few. But until the economic framework within which it can function is radically changed, little can be achieved other than smoothing over the rough edges of neo-liberalism.
I have no doubt in my mind that when the history books of the 21st century are written the likes of Abba lerner, Hyman Minsky, L Landall Wray, Bill Mitchell, Warren Mosler et al. will be seen in the same light as Keynsians have been in the 20th century. The bad news is we’re still a long way from that radical transistion becoming the norm. If current trends of inequality, austerity and environmental degradation continue it may even take a violent revolution as with the American Civil War. Never say never.
No one who matters is listening, people who really should be voting for parties that will improve their community.
Remember that right leaning parties got the majority of the vote in 2015.
I hear Scotland Yard are investigating deals with Saudi Arabia, do you trust the government not to get involved on the quiet and tell them to back off? I don’t, and if it ever came out that they did just that, people would just shrug their shoulders.
Richard, I have had that “void” feeling since last year’s Welsh Assembly elections (2016), although the 2015 General Election started the process for me. UKIP captured seats in the Welsh Assembly – that hurt, especially Neil Hamilton capturing one List position for UKIP. I spoke at hustings for the Green Party and understood more about UKIP candidates’ simplistic ideology, but Hamilton takes the biscuit and he hasn’t disappointed having uttered, “suicide is an option” during a Brexit debate this week and the effects on the people of Wales.
Politics today is like being in a discotheque with blaring music drowning out any meaningful conversations, except for the guy who owns the PA system who can communicate what and when he likes. It’s about money and its effect on meaningful elections where ‘dark money’ and ‘dark analytics’ caste a shadow over the vestiges of democracy.
Today I’ve been chasing up a whip around to pay for elections leaflet printing costs, because I’m not giving in. Whilst Greens are polling poorly, my local Labour run council is taking up Green policies. It is building new social housing to Passivhaus standards, a success for green campaigning in west Wales over the last two years. Greens may not get recognition for their manifesto policies but I have a growing awareness they make sense to other political parties.
Perhaps Brexit will split the Tory Party, which is Theresa May’s main task to prevent above that of thwarting Brexit. Then we may have an opportunity to bring about PR through coalition and save the UK becoming a one-party state.
Your last hope is our best hope
First of all Tony, please accept my admiration for your determination and fortitude in pursuing the Green cause, which appears, despite everything ranged against you, to be making waves where you live.
As for your last paragraph; yes, it’s about time the wretched Tories finally split, and the pro EU Tories show some guts and principle by voting against the government’s handling of Brexit, and force a vote of no confidence, and hence an election.
Alternatively, if the May government actually realises that it has to compromise with the EU because of the UK’s weak position, the Brexit fanatics may bring the government down instead.
And then we need a massive surge in the Lib Dem and Green votes so that the 48% can kick back against the Europhobes.
Last night, my local Labour Party attracted 80 people to a meeting about housing from the point of view of private renters, council house tenants facing rent arrears because of the bedroom tax, and the role of mortgages in underpinning the disastrous financial system of rentiers and fictitious capital. Last month, the same number listened to Heather Wakefield on the collapsing care system and Diane Elson from the Women’s Budget Group. The month before that it John Harris on immigrant workers in the fens … and many other speakers in the months before that, including a big one on the NHS and STPs. Only one was on Brexit, with speakers from Syriza and another from Podemos.
I’m saying this because it evidences that there is a hunger to address the very real issues that you list but the MSM only wants to talk about the EU and how terribly Jeremy Corbyn is at being leader of the LP. On the doorstep, nobody talks about the EU and very few mention Jeremy Corbyn… and those that do say that they like his policies (when they learn what they are). Our media, and I include the BBC, are not doing their job… and I’m tired of those commentators who say it is the fault of Jeremy Corbyn. I have never known such a distorting, biased and misrepresenting media as we have now. I agree with the LSE academics who say that this is having a detrimental impact on democracy.
I know that the media is not telling what is happening
But let’s also be clear, Jeremy is a liability
I wish that was not the case, but it is
Any socialist leader of the labour party will be a liability since we have allowed the meejah to set the political agenda which is now one of self-interest if not self-absorption.
Would that it were not so, but facts must be faced.
I question whether the term socialist is very useful
Not because of the media but because of its inherent materialism
Talking about blogging and who’s listening, this one is doing exceptionally well…..He just gets better and better. https://weegingerdug.wordpress.com
I’ll give it another read
An interesting report was released today by the International Bar Association entitled ‘Artificial Intelligence and Robotics and Their Impact on the Workplace’.
The present wave of automation, driven by artificial intelligence (AI) — the development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence — is creating a gap between current legislation and new laws necessary for an emerging workplace reality, states a report published in April 2017 by the International Bar Association Global Employment Institute (IBA GEI).
Some of the key findings below:
· Innovation in artificial intelligence and robotics could force governments to legislate for quotas of human workers
· A third of graduate level jobs around the world may eventually be replaced by machines or software
· The competitive advantage of poorer, emerging economies — based on cheaper workforces — will soon be eroded as robot production lines and intelligent computer systems undercut the cost of human endeavour
· Peering into the future, the authors suggest that governments will have to decide what jobs should be performed exclusively by humans — for example, caring for babies. “The state could introduce a kind of ‘human quota’ in any sector,” and decide “whether it intends to introduce a ‘made by humans’ label or tax the use of machines,”
· The pioneering nation in respect of robot density in the industrial sector is South Korea, which has 437 robots for every 10,000 employees in the processing industry, while Japan has 323 and Germany 282.
These inevitable developments should hasten the necessity for a macro-economic revolution. The current neo-liberal paradigm couldn’t peacefully accommodate such radical social change, could it?
There’s a lot of proposed ideas in this report:
You can read it here
http://www.ibanet.org/Document/Default.aspx?DocumentUid=C06AA1A3-D355-4866-BEDA-9A3A8779BA6E
[…] asked yesterday why it seemed that people weren’t listening at present. As is true of much of what I write […]
I share your concerns, Richard, but I do feel that the current situation is strictly temporary… once the full costs of leaving the EU become apparent, reality will assert itself sooner or later. The main thing to do – indeed, the ONLY thing to do – is to carry on trying to reach the widest possible audience with good quality commentary. The total failure of the mainstream media to report on anything in a sensible manner means that we are obliged to take matters into our own hands.
We agree!
The sense of a vacuum is real and not in your mind. We have no opposition and I would argue no government, if that is for the people and on behalf of the people. We have a cabal and unfortunately a media that is is interested in tits, bums, scandal and violence. Your are too logical for this world Richard. I would ask all fans of RM to remember that the educated rational people made this world as it is. It is late in the day to start making amends; Brexit and Trump did not appear from another planet, they are the product of the educated but credulous ‘leaders’ we have indulged. We cannot ignore the price for that indulgence. The populist dog and cat are out and free and they will need to be put down to shut them up. We are witnessing rational argument in the face of narcissism and moral partisan thinking. We have tolerated extreme wealth but then are m=panic stricken when it creates the madness we are witnessing now. Both are social pathologies that need to owned up to and ended.
I hope I’m in the real world….
Even when I do not like what I see