Expenses as Spectacle

The ‘issue’ of MPs expenses has been dominating the media of late, with even the usually sensible and restrained C4 News devoting almost its whole 50-minute prog to the issue yesterday evening, mostly voxpopping. What is the ‘issue’, though? Some MPs have fiddled their exes – so what’s new? Being ‘creative’ with expenses claims is a national pastime which we’ve all of us indulged in at one time or another – you claim what you can within the rules laid down. So fiddling exes is no big deal. Neither is it news that some, if not most, MPs are corrupt and self-serving – this has always been the case to some degree, and since the advent of NuLabor in 1997 with its amoral neo-liberalism and ‘business-friendly’ culture there’s been strong evolutionary selection towards careerists seeking to feather their own nests and ascend through the ranks of the Westminster court to gain power. Indeed, it’s been counter-productive for a MPs career to be at all ideological or moral or just plain honest – the few (such as the old class warrior Dennis Skinner, or the posh but effective Tam Dalyell) who are find themselves languishing forever on the back benches, waiting for their 15 minutes of fame before sinking back into obscurity. If you want to get on, you need to be ambitious, self-serving, untroubled by morals or ideology, and to adopt ‘business practices’.

Of course, that everyone fiddles exes doesn’t make it right that MPs should do it, particularly on the public purse and in the public view at a time of recession, but in truth it really doesn’t matter. What the ‘crisis’ is useful for, though, is distracting attention away from the far more grievous and damaging corruption that is an everyday part of political and business life in the UK. An ex-minister rips off 16 grand? Into the stocks with him, suspend him from the Labour Party and call for him to be prosecuted. An ex-Home Secretary picks up a cushy £50k consultancy for a security company, using his insider knowledge and contacts to profit them mightily [2]? Silence. High-ranking civil servants in the Defence Ministry join arms companies – sorry, “defence contractors” – at fat salaries and bonuses[3]? Silence. Major public IT companies (eg Capita, EDS) who ’sponsor’ NuLabor events and donate to the party get contracts worth hundreds of millions? Mostly silence, other than from some right-wing papers which conveniently ignore the exact same corruption which occurred during the Thatcher years.

What the expenses “scandal” is very good at is grabbing the headlines, column inches, and TV news bulletins, and deflecting attention away from the massive, institutional corruption of UK politics and capitalism. Deals of many hundreds of millions, sometimes billions [4], of pounds, with eye-watering profit margins, are made behind closed doors on a regular basis, with close collusion between capitalists and government politicians, deals worth many orders of magnitude more than even the most extravagant MP expenses claim. We rarely hear, watch or read about these, other than in niche magazines like Private Eye (the In The Back section is a paragon of investigative journalism). If such corruption does come to light, it’s usually a long time after the fact [5] by which time the major players have made their stash and politicians involved have retired.

The UK and US are intensely corrupt nations, but because corruption is built into the institutions and indeed laws, their governments can claim publicly, with a straight face, that they’re not corrupt and that all get held to account. This is plainly a lie of quite gigantic proportions, but because, say, the ‘revolving door’ between the Ministry of Defence and arms companies is legal it’s not counted as corrupt. This is how to eliminate corruption without eliminating it – just make it legal.

So the expenses scandal is very useful for distracting attention from institutional corruption, and is a Spectacle in the Situationist sense[6] as it absorbs public attention and at the same time renders the public as impotent passive spectators. There is one possible sting in the tail, though. The essence of the “scandal” is that claiming within the rules can be, and often is, still “immoral”[7]. Apply that to the institutional corruption of the UK State, and the Defence revolving door would be seen as corrupt, even though legal. Expect some finessing by politicians, pundits and civil servants when this issue is brought up…

[1] Profile: Elliot Morley. BBC News online, 14/5/09

[2] John Reid, aka Big Bampot, joins Group 4 Security in December 2008. See Security Oracle news item announcing his engagement, and a Taxpayer’s Alliance blog article quoting in full the Daily Mail story on how G4 won a major contract just 3 months after Reid joined up.  (The DM URL for the story is currently broken. )

[3] Solomon Hughes excellent but little-known book “War on Terror, Inc” details the institutional corruption within the UK and US security and arms sectors, and their organic links with politicians and governments on both sides of The Pond. A must-read. See Socialist Review for a review of the book.

[4] The infamous Al Yamamah arms deal, enthusiastically backed by La Thatcher and enormously profitable for the UK’s largest arms manufacturer, BAe, comes immediately to mind. See Wikipedia for background.

[5] Al Yamamah again.

[6] See nice Wikipedia synopsis of the Spectacle, which is rather more readable than the insanely abstract and jargon-ridden writings of the Situationists, Debord in particular.

[7] In “Brown wants all claims reviewed“, BBC Online, 13/5/09, David Cameron, Tory leader and Little Lord Fauntelroy lookalike is quoted:

“I don’t care if they were within the rules,” he said of claims made in the past. “They were wrong.”

Psst! Got any fags under the counter? (take 2)

As signalled back in May of this year, the regime has today announced that the public display of cigarettes will be banned [1]. The reason? For the sake of the children, think of the children (cue South Park sketch):

Alan Johnson [Health Secretary for England] said: “They see the point of sale display and as a result of seeing it, it encourages them to take up smoking. This is the key evidence as to why we have 200,000 11 to 15-year-olds smoking.”

So that’s why kids smoke, because all those shiny packets are right there in front of them so near yet so close, like jars of sweeties. What kid can resist the magpie allure of a packet of Embassy Regal or Superkings, with their cool ‘Smoke and you die horribly’ messages plastered artfully across their covers? Surely a temptation too far, any Right-minded person would agree.

Of course, this is bollocks. Kids and teens smoke for all sorts of reasons, the visibility of fag packets being a long, long way down the list. You want to look like a hard nut, you want to look cool, you want to hang out with the ’smoking crowd’ under the science block, you want to be rebellious - those were all reasons why I and my schoolmates smoked. Add to that these days a future of unemployment punctuated by spells of casual labour in McJobs and you’ve got depression and lack of self-respect to add to the list. If the regime really wanted to tackle smoking, binge-drinking, and drug-taking amongst young people, it would address the causes of these problems, but that would mean directly criticising the capitalism and obscene wealth inequalities (such that a CEO can ‘earn’ 400 times more than an ordinary worker) that NuLabor and its Thatcherite predecessors have worked so hard to create. After decades of privatisation and neo-liberal ‘economics’ with domestic manufacturing industry mostly destroyed, there are piss-all jobs for the working class to do. The chattering classes whitter endlessly about ‘dependency culture’ and ‘dysfunctional families’ without having the brains to realise that it’s their consumption, and their votes, which have been crucial to the emergence of such a savage form of capitalism.

But no, we can’t be doing with criticising capitalism and pointing the finger to it as the cause of societal ills, perish the thort. Instead, you blame the victims and take cosmetic measures that assuage the consciences of the chattering classes and single-issue lobby groups like ASH and, laughably, the BMA. (Doctors telling us to be responsible in our drug-taking? That’s like Peter Stringfellow preaching sexual abstinence (see Physician Heal Thyself).)

The purpose of this latest wheeze is the same as that of all the other anti-smoking measures: stigmatisation. Turn people who smoke into either passive pitiable suffering victims or evil subhuman scum. Turn them, indeed, into ’smokers’, whose life and character is defined by burning the evil weed. (See Psst! Got any fags under the counter? earlier this year.) This tactic is working, not surprisingly in a society of minimal political consciousness that blames others for its misfortunes. Crap housing and McJobs? Blame all the feckless immigrants and asylum seekers. Child poverty? Blame ‘dysfunctional families’ and ‘welfare dependency’. High public spending? Blame fatties, smokers and druggies for putting a “burden on the NHS” (and certainly don’t blame the billions spent on ‘defence’ and Trident, that would be unpatriotic).

Blame everyone else but yourself, or, more importantly, the very economic and political system that we labour under. Once upon a time, when there was such a thing as political and class consciousness, we’d have ‘left-wing firebrands’ pointing the finger at capitalism and calling for concerted worker action, but the destruction of the Labour Movement after the defeat of the miner’s strike [2] put paid to that. Now the Great British Public ^[TM] has the collective political consciousness of a lobotomised flea and is literally incapable of seeing systemic problems, so that such problems come almost literally like a bolt from the blue, as acts of a capricious god. In an atomised society without community or solidarity, we can only see individuals and groups as the problem, and can only lash out wildly at them as we seek scapegoats for ills which are structural, an integral and inevitable part of  modern capitalism.

Which of course suits the rulers very nicely indeed, thankuverymuch. Keep the plebs fighting amongst themselves and they’ll not even notice the Suits and Nobs, let alone unite against them.

[1] Ban on tobacco displays announced. BBC News, 9/12/08

[2] Thanks a bundle, Nottingham. See “The Miner’s Strike and its legacy: thanks a bundle, Nottinghamshire” on Harry’s Happy Hamster Home.