Booze pricing

A report buried inside yesterday’s Guardian [1] started off:

Heavy drinking is a major cause of a 25% increase in deaths from liver disease in England in under a decade, according to the government’s specialist NHS unit on terminal care.

The first report from the fledgling National End of Life Care Intelligence Network warns that the victims of liver disease are getting younger, with deaths increasing among people in their forties. Deaths rose from 9,231 in 2001 to 11,575 in 2009; some 60% of these were men, and 90% of them were under 70.

Deaths are more common in England’s northern regions marked by high unemployment and low educational achievement.

(My emphasis.) Now, this is surely the bleedin’ obvious – the poorer you are, the more you drink to alleviate your daily stress. The obvious corollary is that, to get drinking down, you need to improve economic and social conditions. Pretty much the same applies to illegal drugs. However, liberal and reactionary moralists can’t be doing with that, and instead of treating the cause they aim at the symptoms:

The British Liver Trust called for higher alcohol prices, taxing of high fat food, and testing for viral hepatitis, and said: “The current nature of the disease means that people are diagnosed late in their condition. This exposes the inadequacies in our healthcare in identifying patients early and also the lack of will to invest in prevention strategies that will have a serious impact, such as alcohol pricing, taxing high fat foods and testing for viral hepatitis.”

The Tory regime is now proposing minimum alcohol pricing [2]. This is pretty much the same old bourgeois complaint about the sozzled lower orders, a complaint that goes back centuries. The higher orders can be trusted to drink responsibly, and not to make a scene (such as getting pissed on a Saturday night in town). Perhaps if liberals were to spend as much effort campaigning against the evils of neo-liberal capitalism as they do on telling the lower orders how they should behave, they might have some influence on the cause of drug abuse rather than its symptoms.

Whilst increased fag pricing might have effects on smoking tobacco, increased booze pricing will just change boozing behaviour. More folk will get into home brew, which is easy enough to make, even if the result (at least from cheapo kits) isn’t a patch on the real thing. If you want to get pissed, though, home brew is cheap, easy and you can make it as strong or weak as you want. Kits don’t contain alcohol so aren’t affected by alcohol taxes, and if the ruling regime tries to tax them then you’ll just get more dry kits coming out. When it comes down to it, producing beer is a pretty simple process: roast your barley, boil and mash it, add some hops if you want, then bung in yeast and perhaps sugar and wait for those lovely microbes to do their work. Which is why beer has for so long been the drink of the working class, because it’s so easy to make. For those wanting stronger stuff, distilling is easy enough too  as the poitìn makers of Ireland and moonshiners of the US clearly demonstrate. Even school pupils doing Chemistry learn how to distil as a basic skill.

Pubs and microbreweries will suffer under increased booze prices, of course, but the blue and yellow Tories don’t give a monkeys about them, and indeed would welcome fewer pubs in inner cities as that’s where workers get together and discuss sedition and rebellion (though, as we all know, the revolution starts after closing time).

The simple fact is that humans want to get out of our heads, and we’ve been doing it for millennia going by archaeological finds as far back as the neolithic. If moralists stop us using one psychotropic drug, we’ll just find another to take its place. An unintended consequence of pricing workers out of alcohol will be a rise in the consumption of illegal drugs, with all the healthcare costs that implies. Perhaps there’ll also be an increase in grow your own cannabis. You can’t grow tobacco plants in this climate, but hemp grows like crazy on rough ground and doesn’t require curing or preparation, and you can get the seeds easy-peasy from legal and illicit sources.

[1] Alcohol abuse contributes to big rise in deaths from liver disease. Guardian, 22/3/12

[2] Minimum price for alcohol planned. BBC News, 23/3/12

Reasons to leave England, part 5

Part 5 in an occasional series featuring news stories that just make me want to pack my bags and escape across the Border to a civilised country.

Westminster Council proposes banning “tents and similar structures” and “noise equipment” in crackdown on political protest

Statewatch, 11/01/12

London’s Westminster Council is currently running a consultation on proposed new byelaws that seek to prohibit long-term or noisy political protests. If made law, the draft provisions would ban the erection or keeping of tents “or similar structures”, whether for sleeping in or not, as well as permitting “constables and authorised officers” to seize “noise equipment” being used to cause “annoyance”.

Kettling protesters is lawful, appeal court rules

Guardian 19/1/12

Police tactics of kettling protesters, used extensively during the G20 protests in London three years ago, have been upheld as lawful. The appeal court overturned a previous ruling by the high court on the controversial technique deployed to contain demonstrators during the climate camp sit-in.

UK riots: paratroopers are trained in riot control

Daily Telegraph, 28/1/12

Hundreds of soldiers from 3rd battalion The Parachute Regiment spent last week learning how to contain and arrest “rioters” in a series of exercises mirroring last summers violence. Defence sources have confirmed that if violence were to return to British cities, especially during the Olympic Games, the Paras would be “ideally placed” to provide “short-term” support to police forces around the UK.

Sick and disabled people could be forced to work for nothing

Guardian, 17/2/12

Some long-term sick and disabled people face being forced to work unpaid for an unlimited amount of time or have their benefits cut under plans being drawn up by the Department for Work and Pensions. [...] The policy could mean that those on employment and support allowance who have been placed in the work-related activity group (Wrag) could be compelled to undertake work experience for charities, public bodies and high-street retailers. The Wrag group includes those who have been diagnosed with terminal cancer but have more than six months to live; accident and stroke victims; and some of those with mental health issues.

Now, imagine that you’ve been given, say, a year to live by your doctor. What do you think you should be doing in that time? Having as good a time as you can have with your condition and making the most of what little life you have left, or working in some pointless McJob? No civilised society would make someone with terminal illness work for what remains of their living.

Gunning for Gold

Schnews, 6/1/12

The deployment of up to 13,500 military personnel, two of the navy’s largest warships, unspecified numbers of military attack helicopters staffed by snipers, typhoon fighter jets, surface to air missiles, support from the SAS and Navy Marines 12,000 police officers, 300 MI5 agents, 20,000 private security guards and up to 1000 US agents including 500 FBI. The extension of Section 44 of the Terrorism Act across the whole of Britain. All costing in the region of £6million.

So the invasion of Iran? The military contingent sent to join Arab Spring rebel groups? The recent deployment in Libya? No – it’s a just a few folk running and seeing who can throw something the furthest. In the capital city of a country that according to the Country Risk Index is one of the most stable in the world. East London is set to resemble a warzone (again) as the Olympic Games 2012 rolls into town. [...] All of this set to the background of a city crippled by the economic insanity of the last few decades. With the lottery fiasco of Olympic ticket allocation that has seen, predictably, wealthy and influential applicants cream the best of the seats and over a million ordinary families missing out on even the most obscure of events, this complete suspension of civil liberties and obscenely gross spending of millions of pounds is the final insult. The unprecedented security measures being put in place make a mockery of even the draconian Beijing Olympics in 2008 hosted by the Chinese Communist Party. These are the actions of a government that is very, very scared – not only of the ‘threat of international terrorism’ but also of its own people.

Criminal classes and their sponsors

It’s a bit late in the day, I know, but I’ve just now watched the documentary Inside Job on video. There are scads of reviews of it around, ever since it premièred at Cannes last year, and I’m no film critic. It is, though, the most powerful condemnation of Finance Capital that I’ve ever seen, and all the more powerful because of its understated approach, its liberal pro-capitalist viewpoint, and its forensic attention to detail. It’s all well, and justifiable and true, to say that the recession/depression is man-made [1] and to castigate the 1%, but rhetoric, though necessary, is nothing without evidence, and this film provides evidence aplenty that the criminal classes wear suits, and are fully supported by the State. Had Michael Moore or Ken Loach made this as a polemic it would have preached to the anti-capitalist converted but been written off by everyone else; made by a capitalist liberal, Charles H Ferguson, with unimpeachable establishment credentials, and featuring big noises like George Soros and IMF bigwigs such as Christine Lagarde, it can’t be summarily dismissed as socialist agitprop. It goes to show that, sometimes, the deadliest attacks on ‘the system’ can come from within [3].

The very clear points to come out of the film are:

• Suits are criminal scum. They’re filthy, rise to the top, block light from those of us beneath them in the pond, and consume the lion’s share of the nutrients. The only differences between Suits and the Mafia are:
  • Suits have State backing and are ‘legal’, and have effective immunity from prosecution [4]. Indeed, Finance Capital uses the US and UK States as enforcers.
  • Suits cause suffering many orders of magnitudes greater than the Mob
• corrupt and fraudulent politicians made tens, hundreds of millions in personal gain, then used trillions of public funds to bail themselves and their Suit sponsors out
• corrupt and fraudulent Suits gambled on a staggering, mind-boggling scale using non-existent money, to the extent of selling ‘products’ which they not only knew were ‘crap’ but on the failure of which they actively wagered.
• corrupt and compliant credit ratings agencies (yes, those same ones who are deciding the fates of national economies) stoked the bubble with fictitious ratings for which they were paid enormously. And still are.
• corrupt and compliant media took the Finance Capital shilling and shilled beautifully in return
• corrupt, fraudulent, compliant and thieving States stole trillions from their publics in order to bail out their capi
• everyone in the criminal classes gets away with it, and many even have the chutzpah to demand ‘freedom from regulation’ and ginormous bonuses for the ‘national interest’

The simple, overall lesson is that Finance Capital and its State sponsors are profoundly criminal and destructively anti-social. Parasitic is too gentle a term as a successful parasite doesn’t kill off its host. Wilfully, amorally destructive is the only way to describe how this criminal class operates. Ok, in a way this is old news, though on a massively greater scale, with enormously more damage, than in the past when capitalism was primarily concerned with making things and providing services, but the bleedin’ obvious needs to be restated time and again for new generations and to counter compliant and complicit media that root for the Suits and make unemployment, poverty and economic crisis out to be natural disasters that we just have to put up with as a forces of nature, rather than deliberately man-made evils to feed profit margins.

SFW?

So what’s this issue to do with Ingerlan? Everything. Finance Capital, which was made dominant in the 80s by the Thatcher regime’s plundering of public resources (sorry, ‘privatisation’), has roundly defeated Industrial Capital and is now the dominant economic force in the UK, such that it can tell the Prime Minister what to do, as Cameron so aptly demonstrated with his EU veto which was explicitly on behalf of the “Financial Services industry”. Though the Mail and Express readerships, and the Colonel Bufton-Tuftons and White Van Men, want to believe that he was ‘standing up for Britain’, he was no more than a little boy obeying his masters’ orders. The UK is, economically and politically, a semi-detached State of the USA, as discussed in an earlier blog entry [2], such that what happens across the Pond happens here, often on a more damaging scale. And, of course, we are ruled by a bunch of Atlanticist toffs who are implementing Thatcherism Phase II, intent on privatising what little is left of public service and industry, on driving down wages,  on pursuing a class war in Spades, and on rendering the already enfeebled English working class into a barely skilled, unconscious casual labour pool of McWorkers. All so as to further boost the coffers of City Suits.

References

[1] And I mean “man”. All the prime actors in the ‘crisis’ were male, and a telling section of the film is about traders being testosterone junkies who were plied with coke and prostitutes on expenses.

[2] Europhobia on the rise

[3] On a tangent, John le Carré’s Smiley novels are a blistering critique of the English haute bourgeoisie and ruling class because the author is a part of that very class and knows it intimately.

[4] As the film points out, not one Suit has even been investigated, let alone stood trial, for criminal offences.

Links

Inside Job: movie website

Wikipedia: Inside Job (film)

Wikipedia: Charles H Ferguson

Europhobia on the rise

The Europhobic Right is on the advance again. At this very moment, Tory blowhards are gassing away in the Commons about the EU superstate, UK sovereignty, the Euro crisis, and how much they hate Johnny Foreigner. This is but the start of what the super-reactionary Express calls, unselfconsciously and quite possibly as a deliberate insult to Muslims, its “Crusade“. The Europhobes are a motley mix of Little Englanders and US agents, or less inaccurately petit-bourgeois English nationalists and bourgeois Atlanticists. Such is the febrile atmosphere of reactionary English nationalism carefully stoked and propagated by the current and previous regimes, the petit-bourgeois and reactionary print media, and of course the BNP and UKIP (nicely described by Jeremy Hardy as “Fascism Lite”), that ‘Eurosceptics’ have the confidence to call for outright EU withdrawal. Quite possibly, in a few years, they’ll have their way.

Political pundits are forever saying that the Tories are “split over Europe”, but that disguises the reality, which is that the Tory Party reflects UK Capital by being divided between Atlanticist and European interests. Usually this is hidden behind the rhetoric of patriotism and sovereignty, but the recent Liam Fox scandal brought the Atlanticist faction momentarily into the spotlight through his membership of the Atlantic Bridge , a body which describes itself as a:

“Group which coordinates the sharing of policy ideas and personal networks between conservatives in the UK and the US”

It could more accurately be described as an alliance of Finance Capital across the Pond, with the Thatcherite Atlanticist Tories making common cause with the US Tea Party [1]. There have been previous spats between Europeans and Atlanticists which have occasionally brought the factions blinking into an unwanted light, one of the most notable in the Thatcher reign being the “Westland affair” [2] which become a very public US v EU struggle. That was in the days when manufacturing Capital had some leverage with the Tories, but now the party is dominated by Finance Capital [3] its political axis has moved sharply towards the US and away from the EU. For all that the Tories bang the nationalist drum about sovereignty and the “overweening” power of Eurocrats, they’re really following the money. Tories are traditionally pragmatists who know which side their bread’s buttered on and who’s doing the buttering, and there’s no question these days that it’s Washington providing the spread. From a national viewpoint it might seem to make more economic sense to stay with an EU which, for all its travails, is a growing economic and political power with a currency set to derail the dollar as a reserve currency [4] and not weighed down with the multi-billion costs of a parasitic massive military-industrial complex and of waging imperialist wars producing relatively little return (not enough buck to be worth the bang). However, from a factional viewpoint, there’s little doubt that Finance Capital is dominant in the UK economy, and that’s inextricably linked to US interests. The nation might benefit from the EU, but factions in Capital make their money across the Pond.

Still, WTF does it matter if the UK is a declining peripheral nation in an Atlantic ‘alliance’ or a European superstate? It’ll make a difference to the bourgeoisie in the opposing factions, but the working class has a ‘choice’ between:

a) a corporate authoritarian racist EU superstate in hock to European corporations

b) a corporate authoritarian racist UK state (in reality, a 51st US state) in hock to US corporations

Hobson’s Choice, right enough, so why get up tight about it? Because it signals the inexorable rise of virulent English nationalism which may lead to fascism. EU withdrawal would lead to:

• greater authoritarianism
• intensified racism
• sharper intra-UK conflicts leading to hostility, possibly violent, towards Scotland and Wales
• subordination to the USA [5], such that the UK becomes part of a dollar zone and resumes its role as US military outpost
• steep economic decline, with sterling nose-diving against major currencies

Undoubtedly the Scots would be aghast at UK withdrawal, and would rush to independence to become a State within the EU [6], particularly with the UK regime increasingly acting as an English State. Scotland is already a ways to the Left of England, with Tories wiped out North of the Border, and has far more in common with European social democracy than US/UK neo-liberalism. Serious noises about EU withdrawal would be the final goad towards independence. That will undoubtedly lead to conflict, stoking English nationalism, and you can just see the Sun and Daily Mail calling for action to secure ‘UK assets’. The Welsh might have less room to manoeuvre, but they also wouldn’t want to be part of an isolationist English regime and would at the very least be pushing for full economic and political autonomy.

Without Scotland and the EU, there would be no brakes on English reaction, and England would rapidly move to a form of fascism portrayed in the films V for Vendetta and Children of Men. England is already virulently racist and violently authoritarian and becoming more so, under official sanction, by the week, so without the checks of EU legislation and Scottish social democracy, and with a rapidly declining economy driving sharp social tensions (the recent riots will be a tea party in comparison to what would follow) the creep towards fascism would become a headlong rush.

There is a respectable strain of opinion on the Left for EU withdrawal, so as to build a progressive and socialist, or at least social democratic, nation free of an EU in hock to multinationals. Whilst in theory this is an option, in practice, with a Tory majority solidified in England after Scots independence and zilch political consciousness in the English working class, there are two chances of a socialist England: fat and slim (and Slim just left town). EU withdrawal would result in an isolated and xenophobic England, deeply racist and reactionary, in which worker’s interests would be ruthlessly stomped on by the State. Those on the Left (Bob Crow and Tony Benn come immediately to mind) who support EU withdrawal are living in a state of denial, and their attempts to distance themselves from Right-wing Europhobes are futile.

Still, this is all just wibbling. In practical terms, all these games are played out by factions way above our heads and completely unaccountable and uninfluenceable by ordinary people. We might get a referendum, but if Europhobia has reached such a pitch that that takes place then the result will be a foregone conclusion. If that ever does happen, then this writer for one will be for the off to a Celtic civilisation before the borders are sealed. I’m no fan of the EU superstate, but I’ll take a civilised European country over a fascist England every day of the week.

References

[1] Liam Fox’s Atlantic Bridge linked top Tories and Tea Party activists. Guardian, 15/10/11

[2] Wikipedia: Westland affair. Accessed 22/10/11

[3] Revealed: 50% of Tory funds come from City. Guardian 8/2/11. City’s influence over Conservatives laid bare by research into donations. Guardian 30/9/11

[4] And has gone up significantly against Sterling. According to the Interactive Currency Table, the Euro is currently worth 87p, and five years ago was worth 67p. That’s an appreciation of over 30%, and that with the Euro in crisis.

[5] Those Right ‘idealists’ who dream of a UK independent of power blocs are naive fantasists

[6] The SNP’s stated objective is “an independent Scotland within Europe”. See, for instance, the press release “SNP to relaunch Independence in Europe campaign” on the SNP website.

Rioting: simple explanation

An awful lot of spleen and verbiage has erupted into print and on the airwaves since the recent riots kicked off. A true volcano of hot air that’s grounded all rational discussion. Nearly all of it tells you more about the ranter than the riots, and is easily discountable as the English bourgeois and petit-bourgeois letting its hair down in a 2-minute hate of the ‘lower orders’. WTF, let them have their fun, and with luck the rising blood pressure will bring a few to an earlier demise than would have otherwise been the case (or, more ironically, will bring them into the arms of the NHS they so want to slash and burn).

The explanation for the rioting is simple: when the rich get richer at the expense of the poor who get poorer, then you’ll get social tensions that will occasionally explode. The State knows this only too well, and has spent the last two decades increasing its social control through surveillance, interception, detention without trial, laws creating thought crime, and ratcheting up repression of Left and radical opposition. Whilst the State’s been steadily withdrawing from the public sphere through spending cuts (driven by income and corporate tax cuts) and privatisation, it’s been spending like crazy on the Security State for the time when the lid comes off.

And the lid has come off, if only for a short time, so the Security State kicks into action and arrests and jails everyone it can get its mitts on, even for just nicking a packet of fags or a bottle of water [1], pour encourager les autres. So add to spending cuts and the rapidly increasing wealth gap between haves and have-nots indiscriminate repression, and you get a vicious (or, for the Security State, a virtuous) circle: more folk criminalised with even less to lose will be more likely to riot again, leading to further repression leading to further hatred and rioting.

It’s bleedin’ obvious for any of us who’ve been on the dole and skint (unlike most of the pundits and pontificators and moralists). The skinter you are, the fewer prospects of becoming not skint, and the richer the feckers above you get, the more likely you are to eventually shout “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more!” and to lash out, and if possible cop a few desirable goodies through looting. It’s no coincidence that less unequal societies, such as Norway, are more stable and settled.

Unequal societies in history, including this one, have regularly suffered riots and insurrections as the inequalities worsened. Cause and effect: simple, no? No need to invoke ‘loss of community’ or ‘moral decline’ or ‘mindlessness’ or ‘greed’ or any other moralist hobbyhorse. The more unequal a society, the more violent it is.

There are more than a few ironies in the moralist’s rants. Posh boy Cameron bangs on about the loss of community blithely ignoring what his predecessors did in the 80s, when the Thatcher regime deliberately and systematically destroyed manufacturing and extraction industries around which communities had evolved since the Industrial Revolution (mining, shipbuilding, car manufacturing, steel making, etc), and actively and gleefully dismantled those communities in the process.

As for ‘greed’ being a motivating factor of rioters, that really does bring out the darkest belly-laughs. Whose greed started this feckin’ economic recession in the first place? The answer’s bleedin’ obvious. The damage that the City Suits did to economy and society through their greed for massive bonuses and profits dwarfs any physical damage that rioters have done by several orders of magnitude, but when a Suit shows greed it’s ‘enterprise’, when a hoodie shows it it’s ‘sheer criminality’. As has always been the case going back centuries.

A more ‘intellectual’ outlook on the recent events will follow in due course, if I can be arsed.

References & Notes

[1] Fears grow over excessive sentencing as cases pile up. Independent, 14/8/11. “On Thursday a 23-year-old was sent to prison for six months for stealing a £3.50 case of water from Lidl. A 43-year-old is still being held in prison for stealing items worth £1 from a newsagent”

These riots reflect a society run on greed and looting. Seumas Milne, The Guardian, 10/8/11

Reasons to leave England, part 2

Part 2 in an occasional series featuring news stories that just make me want to pack my bags and escape across the Border to a civilised country.

UK: New “anti-extremism” strategy

Statewatch News Online, No 1 of 2: 13 June 2011 (15/11)

Updated anti-extremism strategy published (BBC News, link):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13679360

“The new strategy also puts a renewed focus on the use of the internet and says the government will consider a “national blocking list” of violent and unlawful websites. Under the plans, computers in schools, libraries and colleges will also be barred from accessing unlawful material on the internet.”

See also: Doctors asked to identify potential terrorists under government plans (Guardian, links):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jun/06/doctors-identify-potential-terrorists-plans/print

and Official review finds scant evidence of state funds going to extremists:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jun/07/review-state-funding-extremism/print

“It will also introduce a new definition of extremism as “vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect, and tolerance for different faiths and beliefs.”

SICK BENEFITS: 75% ARE FAKING

Daily Express, 27/7/11

THREE in four people on sickness benefits are fit for work or drop their claim before facing strict new tests, shock figures revealed yesterday.

This from a newspaper run by a porn baron (Richard “Dirty” Desmond) and thus hardly a paragon of middle-class probity. Mind you, the figures can’t be that much of a “shock” as the reactionary rag ‘reported’ back in January that “75% ON SICK ARE SKIVING“. Not to be outdone, the neo-fascist (a label I don’t used lightly) Daily Mail’s lead story the same day screamed “The shirking classes: Just 1 in 14 incapacity claimants is unfit to work“, which works out at 93% of claimants being ‘shirkers’. It says a lot for the state of Ingerlan, this green and pleasant land whose inhabitants are so proud of their “tradition of tolerance” ^[TM] when the leading petit-bourgeois papers are putting the boot into folk with disabilities and/or chronic illnesses and causing real damage to real people in real situations. Aren’t they the brave and tough guys, eh? It would be nice to see the ‘journalists’ and editors who publish such stories being held directly and personally to account by those whom the stories damage. Back in the ‘heyday of union power’, the 70s and early 80s, the barking Press always accused union leaders of having power without responsibility. Now there’s the pot calling the kettle black.

Anarchists should be reported, advises Westminster anti-terror police

Guardian, 1/8/11

What should you do if you discover an anarchist living next door? Dust off your old Sex Pistols albums and hang out a black and red flag to make them feel at home? Invite them round to debate the merits of Peter Kropotkin’s anarchist communism versus the individualist anarchism of Emile Armand? No – the answer, according to an official counter-terrorism notice circulated in London last week, is that you must report them to police immediately.

I can’t help paraphrasing the famous saying of Pastor Martin Niemöller from some decades ago, as it looks like anarchists might become the new bogeyman for the Security State now that Islam is just soooooo noughties, darling:

First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

Then they came for the muslims,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a muslim.

Then they came for the anarchists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t an anarchist.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

The English working class put to the test

Tomorrow’s strikes by public sector workers, including teachers, university staff, and civil servants, will be the start of a major test of the English working class. The Tory government has declared open class war through devastating spending cuts and privatisation. This is the most blatant and aggressive class offensive since the Thatcher regime, seriously degrading workers rights and conditions whilst at the same time enriching the financial capitalist class that single-handedly brought about the economic depression that we’re now in. The government is run by and for public schoolboys, with no pretence of commonality with ordinary people other than the token, oft-ridiculed mantra of “We’re all in this together”.

The cuts and privatisations – in universities, public services, the NHS, to mention but a few – are materially affecting working people, worsening their life chances, physical and mental health, and lifespans. The rich are getting richer, the poor poorer and sicker. You don’t have to be a class warrior to see the stark, unvarnished reality – it stares you in the face every day. It’s the bleedin’ obvious, made as bleedin’ obvious as it could possibly be. [1]

The big question is: will the English working class meekly suffer and doff its collective cap to the toffs, or will it fight back and develop some sort of political consciousness? That question will be answered by the strike turnouts, and by the level of sympathy and solidarity offered to the strikers by the rest of the working class. The regime is trying to divide and rule by painting the strikers as “feather-bedded” public sector workers who enjoy “gold-plated” and “generous” pensions courtesy of the hard-pressed taxpayer, unlike private sector workers who’re lucky to get a fish supper when they eventually retire. This is an old ‘argument’ and easily countered, and it’s obvious what the regime is playing at, but much of the middle class has already fallen for it [2].

However, will the English working class fall for it and turn against the strikers? It would have to be terminally stupid and unconscious to do so in the face of the bleedin’ obvious class war launched upon it, but then the last two decades at least have seen the English working class develop a numbing collective stupidity, with the political consciousness of a lobotomised bee. The defeat of the NUM in the last major class battle of 1984 (in which Nottingham played such a sterling role on behalf of the bosses – thanks a bundle, guys), the ideological victory of Thatcherism, and the deliberate economic and social destruction of working-class communities, has seriously enfeebled traditions of solidarity and wrecked what little political consciousness the working class possessed. Maybe, though, in the face of such a determined onslaught from the Tory regime and the classes it represents, English workers will finally awaken from their thrall to the individualist Thatcherite ideology of The Sun and White Van Man, and will wipe the rheum from their eyes and see what’s really happening, and do something about it.

That’s being optimistic. The evidence of recent decades is not encouraging, and if the working class can’t rebel even when it’s being beaten around the head by public schoolboys and suits with a nailed stick then it’s doomed as a force. We’ll have to see what happens tomorrow and in the next few weeks.

Notes

[1] As a for instance of the bleedin’ obvious, see yesterday’s report on the greatest fall in UK disposable income since the 20s.

[2] See the comments on a Nottingham Evening Post story about the teacher’s strike to get a glimpse of the thought processes, if that’s what such knee-jerk reaction can be called, of the East Midlands petit-bourgeoisie. This shouldn’t be nationally-representative as Notts is especially backward and scabby, going back to its inglorious scabbing role in the Miners Strike (see this blog passim), and of course web fora bring out the green inkers in droves, but it’s still depressing to see how people swallow the regime’s propaganda whole.

Class war redeclared

I rarely turn on ‘Any Questions’ on the middle class’s favourite station, Radio 4, because the poncey patrician pundits and barking backwards blowhards just wind me up bigtime, but whilst I was out in the car getting a takeout the other night I switched on the radio and heard Bob Crow giving it large. I can’t remember what the question was but it was something to do with spending cuts. What he said cut through all the bollocks burbled by the other pundits. To paraphrase, he said that the simple and basic point of all the spending cuts was to force down wages and conditions for all workers, not just working-class workers but, eventually, the middle classes. The bosses want us to work longer and harder, for less money and in worse conditions, in order to boost their margins.

And this is the core of the matter. For all the millions of words of verbiage that have issued forth from the pens and mouths of conservative and liberal pundits and ‘experts’ and politicians and columnists, the essential truth is that Capital has once again declared open class war on the rest of us. Not just the working classes, but on sections of the middle class as well. This regime governs for and on behalf of corporate interests [1]. These are the corps which had bounteous years of essentially free banking, which enabled a golden age of asset-stripping and enforced productivity increases [2], but which suddenly found themselves ‘exposed’ once the finance bubble burst and money became too tight to mention. Naturally, they’ve done what all free-spirited free enterprise capitalists do when their margins are squeezed: go running to the State to put the squeeze on workers, cut direct taxes on the rich and on profits, and cut public spending. And the current figureheads for the English State have done this with public schoolboy zealousness.

So let’s be clear about what’s happening now. It’s class war, the same as the class war declared by the Thatcher counter-revolution back in 1979 which, after a decade of continual assaults on workers, bankrolled by the bonanza of North Sea oil, aided by ‘fifth columns’ amongst the workers (step forward, the Union of Democratic Mineworkers), and helped by fair smatterings of luck (victory in the Falklands/Malvinas war), it finally won and crushed the labour movement for a generation. The Blair regime enthusiastically carried forward the counter-revolution (but in like, y’know, a passionate and caring and third way way) which saw wealth disparities increase to obscene proportions, the coercive and surveillance powers of the State burgeon far beyond Orwell’s nightmare, and the corrupt theft of common assets (sorry, ‘privatisation’) continue apace.

And all seemed well in the corporation space, until the banks went tits-up and their easy money disappeared like the morning mist. Despite hundreds of billions of pounds of public money spent bailing out the Jaspers and Ruperts who buggered up on a literally unimaginable scale, their profit margins and dividends still aren’t back to ‘satisfactory levels’ so they bankroll the government to privatise what’s left of public assets and public space and to coerce workers into working until we drop into our graves.

Naturally the bourgeois and sewer Press, and the compliant broadcast media, go along with this as if it were an inevitable act of nature. That the ‘debt problem’ could, perhaps, be at least ameliorated, if not solved entirely, by raising direct taxes, cutting arms spending, quitting imperialist wars, and injecting demand into the economy in terms of public sector jobs, is an option that is quite literally out of the question. It is quite literally inconceivable amongst the chattering and political classes indoctrinated by the ‘post-Thatcherite consensus’ – it’s not in their ‘idea space’. The only solution to the ‘debt crisis’ is to screw the workers in and out of work.  Given the conservative and liberal makeup of the Press and media, and their corporate backers, this isn’t surprising, even if it is by turns infuriating and intensely depressing to hear plummy-voiced patricians and earnest middle-class commentators lecturing us on the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor. (Oh, to have Kelvin Mackenzie forced to live on the dole in a high-rise-full of asylum seekers – I’d pay good money to see that.)

The big question is: will the working class fight back, or will it bend over and spread ‘em? After the defeat of the Miners in the Waterloo of the last class war (thanks a heap, Nottingham), and the depressing and mystifying insistence of trade union leaders on only acting ‘within the law’ [3], the labour movement has been reduced to an unconscious rump which only sporadically twitches in response to the direst provocations. The English working class has taken it on the chin (and in the kidneys, up the arse, in the gonads, and indeed no metaphorical body part has been left undamaged by Capital’s onslaught since 1984)

There are opportunities. The big difference, financially, between the Thatcher era and today, is that the Thatcher counter-revolutionaries had billions of pounds of North Sea oil to bolster their spree of destruction, and hundreds of billions of pounds worth of public assets to sell off. The Cameron regime has no such bankroll to fall upon, and if the natives do start revolting it’ll not be able to buy off sectors of the working class with favours, as Thatcher did [4].  It’s only weapons are State coercion and surveillance, and ideological and moral onslaught against the ‘undeserving poor’. As millions of jobs bite the dust and State benefits become ever more restrictive, the moral onslaught will be exposed, by the everyday reality experienced by unemployed and sweatshopped workers, for the sheer Victorian nostalgic confection that it is. That leaves only coercion, and once the State has only the iron fist to deploy its authority to govern goes. That would make any semi-politically-conscious working class revolt, but on current form the English working class [5] is in stupefied zombie mode, and is more likely to carry out racist pogroms than take to the streets behind red flags.

Still, I remain optimistic: strange things do happen, 100-1 shots win races, and sudden ‘phase changes’ in society can occur without warning. The ruling classes may have gone too far in this latest onslaught and might have provoked such a social ‘phase change’ which will manifest itself on the streets. We’ll have to wait, and see, and hope. In the meantime, for all his obvious personal flaws (a Millwall supporter, FFS!), we need Bob “Jurassic Park” [6] Crow and other socialist “dinosaurs” to thump the tubs and put dents in the “post-Thatcherite consensus”.

[1] A namecheck on the sponsors to Tory conferences, and corporate lobbyists who’ve had privileged access to the government-in-waiting, as chronicled by the ever-vigilant Private Eye, gives a good idea of the string-pullers of this regime. See HP Sauce in Eye issue 1273.

[2] Remember all those ‘private equity’ companies with their ‘leveraged buyouts’ – buying a company with money borrowed at low interest rates then sacking thousands of workers, flogging off assets, and forcing the remaining workers into worse pay and conditions and higher workloads.

[3] Unlike our continental counterparts in France, Spain, Greece and Italy, to name a few, who need little encouragement to hit the streets and put themselves about in highly ‘unconstitutional’ ways.

[4] Remember Eager Eric’s Trainee Poodle’s Union?

[5] The Scottish working class is in fine fighting form.

[6] The rightist liberal Simon Jenkins, quoted in the blurb to Any Questions, BBC, 12/11/10, as writing:

“Yes, it is Bob Crow memorial day yet again. We can perhaps console ourselves that we will be able to tell our grandchildren that we witnessed Jurassic Park trade unionism.”

Allez les Français!

The Sarkozy regime in France declares class war on the workers by trying to raise pensions and cut spending, and they rise up, go on strike, riot in the streets, blockade roads and ports, and generally make a bloody good Gallic nuisance of themselves [1]. The Tory government (coalition my arse) in England declares class war on the workers, and the workers sit there and take it, doing little more than mumbling into their beer and ranting on blogs. More than a few pundits in the Ingerlan media [2] have pondered the question: why do the French workers fight, and the English bend over and spread their cheeks for a shafting? Liberals see a philosophical difference between French and English societies (for liberals, everything is idealist), reactionaries see it as a matter of national characters, and what socialists think is hard to track down as they’re an endangered species in post-Thatcherite England.

The simple, and bleedin’ obvious, difference is that the French labour movement, and class consciousness, is still strong, and historically a country born of revolution has a clear precedent for revolting again and again (indeed, some commentators have, perhaps a little optimistically, seen l’esprit de ’68 in the recent events). In contrast, the English labour movement is an ineffectual reformist rump, severely damaged by its defeat in the ’84 Miners Strike (thanks a bundle, Nottingham), and the working class has the collective class consciousness of a stunned bumblebee. (I exclude Scotland from this, as there are still – gasp! – active socialists North of the Border, and vigorous political debate and class struggle.) Put simply, the French workers are strong, willing to struggle, and have a history of recent successes on their belt; English workers are weak, divided, and have a consistent history of failures since ’84.

One thing’s for sure: the State fears people on the streets. The French State may succeed in suppressing the current wave of strikes, but there’ll be more to come as workers become radicalised by action and the State loses its moral and political authority and increasingly relies on the iron fist. By getting off their culs and on to the streets, the French workers are changing themselves and changing the system, and literally fighting for their rights and to defend the hard-won gains of previous generations. The English State has no such fear: the English are happy to sit on their arses and be fucked over.  The only reason the English take to the streets is to go shopping. Maybe, just maybe, the ‘French disease’ will spread across la Manche, and it wouldn’t be the first time that the English ruling classes quaked in their boots at the fear of export of French rebelliousness. We can only hope that even zombified English workers are inspired by the French example and drop their TV remotes to take up placards. Only then will the Tories sit up and take notice.

In the meantime, the French workers are showing how we should engage in class struggle against a class enemy.

Allez les Français! Come on you frogs!

[1] See, for instance, just a few BBC News stories (1, 2, 3) or Guardian stories (1, 2)  from this week.

[2] Including that old veteran Tariq Ali in the Guardian.

Oh Nottingham… (2)

Today I got a real in-yer-face reminder of how backward and reactionary Scab City – sorry, Nottingham – is. An anti-cuts demo was announced for 5pm in the Market Square. I turn up, barely 50 were there, with just a couple of banners and a few lefty paper sellers whose hearts weren’t really in it. This is in response to the most savage cuts to public spending since the 20s (and look what happened then) – only 50 people can be arsed to come out to protest. Oh well, I thought, usual English apathy, then a 50-something unshaven pissant knuckledragger comes up to me and starts ranting into my face about “socialist wankers” and indolent public workers and “human nature” and the rest. Pretty aggressive toe-to-toe stuff too, and had there not been coppers around I’d have challenged him to back his loud mouth up with actions. Which wouldn’t have done any good of course, but I’ve a short temper – must be the Irish blood, or maybe just lack of patience with scabby lumpens.

However, the fact that he thought he could just pick on anyone in the street to rant to indicated that he thought that most Nottingham folk would be in his camp, and I reckon he’s right. I’ve lived in Scab City for 7 years now (a job’s a job, eh?) and not once in that time have I met, or even overheard, anyone with an ounce of class consciousness. Even the few activists around the Sumac centre are middle-class animal rights moralists, who openly scorn the working class and only care about their own narrow campaigns and identity politics. There’s a small Anarchist Federation rump, and fair play to them, but they sure have a hard job on their hands making any headway in this place. Even the Trots have given up on Nottingham’s workers – they know a lost cause when they see one.

Earwig Nottingham-ites in any pub and when any political topics come up they parrot the Daily Mail line. A good taste of Nottingham thinking can be gathered from reading the reader comments on stories on the Nottingham Evening Post website, where the green ink flows freely and contributors (more than a few of whom are BNP supporters) make the Daily Mail seem liberal. Yet once upon a time, so I read, Nottingham was a hotbed of radicalism, but that was all snuffed out by the city’s shameful yet still unrepented betrayal in the ’84 Miners Strike. Now they take whatever the bosses throw at them – for instance, 700 made redundant by Boots last month, and nary a whimper, let alone a factory occupation; 500 made redundant by Experian earlier this year, and Nottingham Forest continued to wear the Experian logo on their shirts.

I’d gone along to the ‘demo’ in the vain hope that even the zombie-like Nottingham-ites would be capable of understanding that we’re all being screwed by the Tory cuts, and would come out in force if only out of pure self-interest. Fat chance.

For a decent summary of the effect the cuts will have on Nottingham, see the Notice Nottingham ‘special’ on the Comprehensive Spending Review - this is usually a council propaganda sheet trumpeting only good news, but for a change it’s spin-free and fact-packed.

(For previous thoughts on Scab City, see Oh Nottingham… from a few months back.)