UK politics

Victory to the public sector workers

Crisis? What Crisis?, Life under Capitalism, Tories, UK politics, Unions
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Today public sector workers in the UK are on strike. According to a BBC poll,
the majority of the British public supports them:

An opinion poll commissioned by BBC News suggests 61% of people believe public sector workers are justified in going on strike over pension changes.

[…]

Younger people, it also suggests, are considerably more supportive of the strikes than pensioners; almost four in five 18 to 24-year-olds back the action, a little under half of over-65s do.

Half a million public sector jobs have already been lost and the ConDem government yesterday confirmed that more cuts were coming, which may mean another 300,000 people losing their jobs as the UK is to cut its way to becoming a growth orientated export driven economy. Those workers who haven’t lost their jobs have to swallow pay freezes (extended by two years of below inflation salary growth yesterday), less pension and having to work longer to get their pension (brought forward yesterday). These are all cuts supposedly driven by the government’s desire to bring down Britain’s debt, yet what was also revealed yesterday was that it’ll have to borrow up to 100 billion in the next few years, or more than 30 billion over what needed to be borrowed in Labour’s plans until 2014 if their policies had been maintained…

Instead these and other ineffectual crisis measures (certain tax cuts, less protection for workers against being fired, undosweiter) are ideologically driven, a wish list of their pals in the City. These measures are not intended to solve the crisis, but to get a bigger share of the country’s wealth to the one percent, while everybody else suffers. It’s simply fat cats stuffing their pockets. The public workers strike is the next major act of resistance against this agenda, after protests earlier this year by other affected groups, including an earleir union led day of protest in March for which half a million people turned up.

Middleclass families to adopt a scrounger?

Poverty, Tories, UK politics
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Here’s the latest ConDemned brainwave to force scroungers to work: get middleclass volunteers to sort out trouble families:

It began in December when the prime minister said: “All evidence suggests that it’s no use offering a range of different services to these families – the help they’re offered just falls through the cracks of their chaotic lifestyles. What works is focused, personalised support.” This fits neatly into Cameron’s big society narrative – cut government funding, let amateurs fill the gap, and clap yourself as social deprivation segues into riot. The government has already slashed Connexions, the catch-all advice centre for 13- to 19-year-olds, and abolished the Educational Maintenance Allowance and the Future Jobs Fund, which existed to find jobs for the young. The careers advice service for school-leavers, meanwhile, is now only a memory – and a website. But no matter – an army of Emma Harrisons is waiting.

Emma Harrison is the founder of Action for Employment (A4E), and she is establishing Working Families Everywhere on Cameron’s behalf. You may know her from Channel 4’s The Secret Millionaire, where she gave £50,000 away in front of a TV camera in 2007, after the poor had proved their worthiness for her bounty. The scheme is being piloted in Hull, Blackpool and Kensington & Chelsea, and will roll out in the next four years. Volunteers with no prior experience of social work, creepily renamed “family champions” (FCs), will enter “never-worked” families with drug, crime and child protection issues, and turn them into “working” families. Once polished, these families will inspire others, like a game of Social Democratic dominoes, but backwards. “Family champions are going to stalk the streets, they are going to find the jobs,” says Harrison, who is clearly, like Margaret Thatcher, a Nietzschean. They will get a small wage and priority access to all other services the family is using, and they will be handpicked by Harrison. They may also get badges, but this is not confirmed.

As insanely stupid social initiatives go, this is about average for the coalition. It seems tailor made for trousering yet more money from already existing social programmes to dodgy private firms like erm, Emma Harrison’s A4e while making sure the actual worth of the work these firms do is not easily quantifiable. Money for old rope, in other words.

I would hope therefore that some enterprising journalist asks Harrison the questions Watching A4e would like her to answer:

  1. Has A4e bid for the contracts the DWP is putting out, to use European Social Fund money to pay private companies to run the same scheme that you’re promoting? Are you trying to pre-empt these contracts by getting your scheme up and running first?
  2. You have argued in the past for “super-contracts” in which a private company would run all the services in a local authority area. Is this scheme a step on the way to that?
  3. Given your company’s record of missing targets by some distance in previous welfare-to-work contracts, why do you believe you will be any more successful with this?

Bankers steal, politicians cheat, the police is corrupt — why not loot?

Life under Capitalism, UK politics
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Phil hits the nail on the head when looking for the reasons behind the London riots:

What people are saying (self included) is that politics doesn’t stop when crime starts. There are reasons why people steal and smash windows; more importantly, there are reasons why most people don’t steal and smash windows, most of the time. (Sunny was more or less on the right track here – but I don’t think the calculation that you wouldn’t get away with it is the only reason why people tend to obey the law, or the most important one.) One or two people whose behaviour isn’t governed by our usual reasons to obey the law is a problem for the police, the social services and politicians, in that order. The problem becomes political first and foremost when lots of people start acting differently – when all those reasons suddenly stop working in a particular place and time.

[…]

What’s it like to grow up in this world – a world where your only consistent role is to ‘consume’, because nobody, at any level, has any interest in you as a worker? What’s it like to be told that you’ve got to take whatever job you can get, on whatever pay you’re offered, and not to depend on the job still being there for you next year or next week? What’s it like to be told that you’ve got to prove you’re actively looking for work before you can sign on as unemployed – or that you’ve got to prove that you’re incapable of work before you can claim disability benefit – and you’ve got to prove these things to someone who won’t get paid if they believe you? And what’s it like to have grown up in a world like this, and then to be told by a government of unprepossessing Old Etonians that you’ve had it far too easy up to now? And then, what’s it like to read that those same politicians, and the people who write the papers you buy, and the police who keep everything under control, are all involved in a network of corruption and deceit?

The riots should not have come as a surprise. The proximate cause, the police murder of Mark Duggan under very dodgy circumstances was exactly the same sort of incident that set off the riots in France back in 2005 and like then you have a large group of marginalised, criminalised young people with no prospects and nothing to lose who have long felt the police to be their enemies, not unjustified. Frustration and anger kicked off the first night of riots once it became clear peaceful protest didn’t achieve anything, the unexpected success of that first night meant the riots would spread, as other frustrated groups took inspiration, while the heavyhanded police repression after the fact added new fuel for anger. Voila, nationwide riots.

The looting and rioting itself is not political, let alone revolutionary, but they had been made possible through the politics of both the current Tory government as well as the previous Labour governments. My coblogger Palau has been predicting them for years as she saw earlier than most how particular groups of young people (young Black men especially, but “chavs” too) had been written off, condemned to a life on the margins of neoliberal Britain. Take enough angry young men, stoke the flames long enough and they will riot.

Which of course is not an excuse for the riots and I feel for the people trapped in them, abandonded by police and under siege by neds; quite a few friends, both pretend internet and “real” ones are living in or near the affected areas and they must be shit scared and angry and I don’t wish this experience on anyone. This is not a game and because this is not a game we need to understand what drives these riots, even if many of the rioters themselves do not quite know why they’re doing it, or are just doing this for kicks. This is too important not to put it in a political and economical context.

Weird drugs, bizarre sexual practises or something more sinister?

Cameron, Tories, UK politics
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David Cameron’s constituency chairman dead at Glasto:

David Cameron said he was “devastated” after the chairman of his local constituency was found dead in a portable toilet in a backstage area at the Glastonbury festival.

Police said they did not yet know the cause of death of Christopher Shale, a 56-year old businessman, although friends said there was a history of heart problems in his family.

Heart problems; ‘syeah right. Hands up who didn’t think this is the Tories continuing the deviant behaviour that got record numbers of the buggers killed and/or disgraced when they were last in power…

Labour’s strategy: don’t oppose

New Labour, UK elections, UK politics
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Lenny riffs on Dan Hind’s observations on the need to break the ConDem coalition before the next election, and Labour’s role in this:

I would guess he rightly judges Labour’s position, which is that the last thing they want at this point is political power. The Blairites are convinced that they would have to implement the same cuts as the Tories are doing, (ex-chairman Peter Watts has even bizarrely claimed that opposing cuts is hurting Labour), and that it would be much easier to allow them to get on with it. The Labour soft left doesn’t yet have a coherent alternative, or at least not one they’re able to articulate or willing to fight for. Neither side really wants to re-open an old civil war, though the Right are better placed to wage it if it comes. So, they are sitting it out, passively awaiting the Tory meltdown and their dream ticket in 2015. Their strategy would involve striking the correct poses in the face of catastrophe, while nonetheless doing little to prevent it. (Dan does not say, but we should note, that this has significant consequences for the conduct of the labour movement’s resistance to austerity. If the trade union leadership subordinates its actions to the objective of getting ‘their’ party in government, then that most certainly entails an attempt to keep the lid on militancy).

If that sounds familiar it’s because it’s the exact same strategy as the Democratic Party followed during the Bush era. Over the years I’ve explained that the failure of the Democrats to meaningfully oppose Bush was a feature, not a bug. The party leadership knew that sooner or later the voters would return to them as the only real alternative, once they were sick to death of Republican mismanagement. At the same time the leadership wasn’t too unhappy with what Bush and co were doing anyway, even if their base was. And once the disgust with the Republicans was large enough and the Democrats did have a charismatic presidential candidate their strategy was validated – they got their cake and ate it too. And in the meantime they dissipated a lot of the grassroots militancy that sprung up in the wake of the War on Iraq and the like.

Whether or not Labour is consciously following the same strategy, or is just too divided at the moment to meaningfully oppose the coalition doesn’t really matter. The fact of the matter is that Labour too has shown itself not to be trusted when in power, to no longer be a meaningful leftwing party, if perhaps still slightly better than the LibDems are now. Bringing them back into government won’t solve anything, unless Labour is returned to its roots as a true socialist party.