if you click on the image it should get clearer
Friday 29 June 2012
Letters to myself?
To Guardian Weekly
28 June 2012
Welfare blitz
David Cameron's attack on benefits is no 'ambitious plan' (PM outlines welfare blitz) but cynical opportunism. His earlier ill-judged pot shot at tax-avoiding comedian Jimmy Car risked an open-season on rich friends and relations, so he turned his gun on hapless claimants he will never meet. In the process he also hurt poor Iain Duncan Smith who has spent months in the undergrowth of tax and benefits in search of a clear way out.
Now, like the man who got a dog and barked, Cameron makes a fool of himself. By targetting social divisions, his latest cunning plan shoots more holes in any once or future Big Society.
To Observer
Monday 25 June 2012
Oh lords
No (Andrew Rawnsley) it's not silly to defer reform of the House of Lords until we've settled more urgent matters, but it would be silly to lumber us with yet another expensive set of local or regional representatives to second-guess the Commons. (Here in Wales we already vote, if we vote at all, for local councillors, MPs, AMs and MEPs.)
The present Upper House is more of an attic, but sometimes its assortment of bloodstock, bishops and party-pensioners turns out to be wiser than the lower lot we elect. If we're going to overhaul it, we need to go back to first principles, and that may take more time and thought than any of our party leaders have allowed for.
As I understand it, the house of lords began as a council of effective interests and powers in the land: feudal warlords who owned the land, if not quite the people, together with bishops commanding hearts and minds. Lawlords joined in later. Now that more of us can act, think and speak for ourselves, this is not the sort of mob we need to chart our lives, but we do need representatives who know what they're talking about.
We've got one national parliament of locally elected representatives, professional politicians working to party lines. They somehow govern the country on our behalf, if not the economy that drives and directs it. What we haven't got is any elected, accountable representation for the collective powers, interests and expertise in which many of us share and on which we all depend.
Perhaps our social democracy could benefit from a different sort of representation based not on region or locality but on the wide range of organisations, groups and networks that make up a functioning civil society. Not the lords spiritual and temporal, but elected by bodies representing unions and employers, professions and arts, religions and sports, charities, minorities and other sectional groupings.
The list of eligible groups and procedure for selection will be controversial. Some constituent groupings are already democratically structured, others would become so if it entitled them to a national hearing. Public interest in politics will be reawakened and some of the private interests that now lobby in high places and dark corners will be drawn into the open.
Some present peers, especially life peers, are distinguished by experience, expertise and commitment in the wider world. The introduction of more functional, as distinct from geographic, constituences would extend and rationalise that range.
Obviously, such a new venture in democratic representation will take time, thought and and energy to prepare. Lords reform deserves a creative deferment, but not to be kicked into the long grass.
To London Review of Books
Saturday 23 June 2012
'Market society'
From 'my kingdom for a horse' to 'my kidney for an i-pad', desperation is no basis for fair trade:
Glen Newey follows Michael Sandel and the Sidelskys into the gothic refinements of a market society, blind economic growth and the impassive mask of GDP. He challenges some of their detailed arguments, sometimes by extending them to absurdity: is the monetarisation of slavery or domestic labour a corruption of some better or more natural state?
Only in the last couple of paragraphs does he address what seems to me a fundamental imbalance in the recent - most welcome! - focus on inequality, consumerism and the blinkered economics of GDP. Inequality of wealth and income damage all of us and a market that largely excludes and demeans the most needy can not be 'free'.
It's not just products, or even body parts, that we routinely buy and sell, it's the whole process of working life. Under capitalism, a wealthy few get control of the economy, the direction of our working lives and the options open to us at the end of the day. The distinction between work and leisure assumes that working time is not our own but driven, and the trick of capitalism has been to bleed the hard drive of survival into more malleable desire and demand for whatever can be turned to corporate profit.
Survival assured, what's where hunger used to be? What are or might be the basics of happiness and a good life as informed by nature and choice? What's to do, if only for the joy of it? The debate must be ongoing. What's certain is that to work out what's best for us, we need the time and space for that debate, in our lives and at work where the effective decisions are made. In the Marxist image, living labour must free itself from the congealed, dead labour of capital.
As Tim Jackson demonstrated in Prosperity without Growth, there is no future for relentlessly expanding GDP on a finite earth. In their Spirit Level, Wilkinson and Pickett showed how gross inequality sets us in unhealthy competition for diminishing returns and distracts us from the damage we do to ourselves, each other and the world.
Now, as Newey concludes, the argument must be political. Where better to start than widely- shared notions of personal freedom, fairness and social democracy? And the extension of those aspirations to the working economy that forms and deforms our lives. Not just by regulation, but with a democratic voice within the organisations that employ us, determine product and distribute proceeds.
I'm not sure what to make of 'viatical firms', 'asymptotic' growth or even 'sufficientarians' but I do trust that others too will find resonance and strength in commons, common feeling, common sense and commonwealth.
To Observer
Tuesday 29 May 2012
Work-for-free
Government plans to force thousands more unemployed people to work for nothing or lose their benefits raise an obvious question: when does work experience become exploitation? And the quick answer is: when people are forced to work for private employers (i.e other people's profit) for less than the legal minimum wage.
There are now a million young people without paid work, and the job-seekers' allowance for 18-20 year-olds is £56.25. For those in rented accommodation, there may be another £50 in housing benefit, but average benefit income for a young unemployed person totals less than £100 per week.
The minimum wage for 18-20 year-olds is £4.98. For a 40-hour week at that rate, a young person would earn just under £200 per week. So, assuming those on government work schemes are employed full time, their benefits amount to a about half what they would have earned on the minimum wage.
It may be true that the experience of regular hours and more-or-less useful activity is good for people, but, according to the Commons Library analysis you quote, this does not translate into real jobs for work-scheme graduates. With little obvious economic benefit for job-seekers, there is a clear risk to those in low-paid jobs, and to future minimum wages, if the government encourages employers to undercut its own wage thresholds.
I speak from the relative comfort of a work-free state pension, and with the early benefit of two years work-camp experience lieu of military service from age 18-20. For me this was a useful introduction to various basic skills, a welcome change of company and scenery and a taste of democratic self-management. Most of the jobs we did would not have been done otherwise by paid labour.
It we're serious about fairness and social mobility, then some such varied work/training programme might be considered for ALL young people, rather than forced labour for the poor, freely-chosen gap-years for the well-off and a blinkered 'higher education' for many in between.
To Guardian Weekly
25 May 2012 (printed 08.06.2012)
Economics by other means
Gary Younge is right to link the Nato summit in Chicago to street killings on the ground and the chilling Friedman quotation about the military fist behind the invisible hand of the global market.
And Friedman is right as long as we fall for a Market that creates and exploits gross inequality within and between societies. It's not just a conspiracy by the rich - though there's plenty of that too. The rich are creatures of wealth, and the wealth that drives the market can also outgun any opposition: war is an extension of economics by other means.
At the heart of the Friedman proposition, and the root of market inequality, is the self-serving fiction of the Invisible hand itself: there was never a market magic that turned the sum of individual and corporate greed into common good. There never was an invisible hand, unless its the one that feeds us with such swill. Left to itself, the capitalist market favours wealth, the rich against the poor. Economically, socially and - when conflict erupts - by force.
The myth of a benign, self-regulating market has absolved politicians, business leaders and the rest of us from common humanity, social responsibility for economic behaviour. It's not just piggy bankers but common practice to stick our heads in the trough, if we're lucky enough to have one in reach. (If we dont, we squeal, hit out, self-harm.)
From Squeezed middle to Commanding heights, we help ourselves regardless and trust that somehow - in defiance of science, common sense and professed moralities - all will be well.
It wont of course. No peace in our time, no happy-ever-after unless we recognise what should be obvious. We've only got each other and one fragile world. If we cant reach out and take back the common ground between us, we've had it.
To Observer
Sunday 20 May 2012
Hokum
Yes (Calamitous strategy), this government, like several before it, leaves our lives at the mercy of Market 'hokum' which is meant to turn individual and corporate greed into common good. And in Britain, it has been the Banks - or money market - that have hijacked our economy in the interests of a mostly faceless few.
But intelligent management of the economy requires rather more than rebalancing between banks, industry and public services. Or between a bit more austerity or a bit more growth. The conduct of economic life requires not just fiscal accelerator and brakes, but clear direction and objectives. Francois Hollande hinted as much when he talked of 'projects' as well as indispensable growth.
Yes, we need to recognise 'interdependency between public and private, business and social' but also to reassert and re-imagine what a political economy might mean. If we're restructuring and refinancing banks, what do we want them for? If the squeezed middle is to be squeezed further and work harder, what exactly are we sacrificing and working for?
The assumption of a return to credit-driven business as usual is not plausible. Will the private sector, or a privatised public sector, provide decent jobs for all our children, while keeping us at work till 70 and looking after us until we're 100? Can we be proud of a new GM deal at Ellesmere Port, and replicate its reported agreement on a six-day week and ten-hour shifts?
Neither market, nor generalised austerity, nor unlimited growth makes sense. Blanket austerity is socially and politically unacceptable because it comes down hardest on those with least. And unlimited growth is economically and environmentally unsustainable because it threatens the climate and resource base of the planet, while doing nothing to redress inequality. Austerity and growth muts be selective, and targetted.
Your 'Good capitalism' sounds contradictory, like Good King. The same goes for the conventional description of corporate power as 'private' (and gross selfishness as 'compensation.) Yes, 'in democracies, the neglected can hit back and hit back they will.' And the same goes for undemocracies - although the explosion may be delayed and arbitrary when it comes.
If elected governments are not to get bogged down in regulation and corrective taxation, they may need more representative partners in business. The basis of social democracy must be extended into the so-called private sector, into business and working life: 'One person, one vote' makes most sense when we know what we are talking about.
To Observer
Sunday 13 May 2012
SEDUCED?
Obviously photographers are influenced by paintings they have seen. More importantly, both painters and photographers share with their audiences in patterns of life as lived in the world.
You illustrate the National Gallery's painting-to-photo theme with an outdoor Gainsborough portrait and an interior photo by Martin Parr. Both works feature comfortable couples. As you might expect from a portrait, or indeed at your own approach, these people face towards us. All four are smartly dressed as we tend to be for public appearances, including work. In both pictures the women are seated while the men stand. One man carries a gun, the other wears his office suit. In the photo, the woman too may have been out all day, but, as a woman, she is entitled to the armchair before she...makes dinner. The Gainsborough pair are sheltered by a tree to one side, and we can look past them over fields to hill and sky. In the photo too, we see out over grass to what may be hill and sky, but the man stands centre-stage between us and the grassy space. Behind him, the way is already blocked and his back covered by a plate-glass window.
Now, as in the past, those who can afford it can have - and be seen to have - the best of both urban and rural life. In your feature on life at the Osborne's Dorneywood residence, you use two photos, one for the people, the other of the property.
In my Swansea living room, I have prints of drawings by Rembrandt and Samuel Palmer. One is a Quixotic vision of two men, one on horseback, tother on foot, winding their way towards a citadel or cathedral on a hill. The Palmer has three people, women but also back to view, looking through a gap in the corn towards church and rooftops on a hill. (In the bookcase John Donne says 'Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will Reach her, about must, and about must go.')
We share an allotment in the shadow of Oystermouth castle, built on a hill to command a port and sheltered bay. The castle may have been built partly for appearances and has often been painted and photographed. But it has often commanded the lives and deaths as well as the vision of those around. The same goes for the crosses, gallows and other killing fields that have drawn the attention of painters, photographers and others concerned.
Art always speaks of other art, but does it best when not seduced from life outside the frame.
To Observer
Monday 7 May 2012
Snakes and ladders
If politics has anything to do with a better future, it must be more like an escalator than snakes and ladders (one up, one down at the throw of a dice, winner takes all). For all Labour's talk of fairness and growth, the contest between Labour and Conservative is still a toss-up between Tweedle Dee and Dum, with minor permutations of austerity and growth, pay now or later.
What neither party offers is a clear vision of where the sacrifice might lead. If a return to growth is possible, then what is to be grown, and what – in the interests of fairness and sustainability – must grow no more. Cameron has his empty Big Society thought-balloon. Milliband would reslice much the same old cake to relieve the squeezed middle.
Neither side faces the need for longer-term austerity, redistribution and redirection of resources in a world where life is threatened by aimless growth and competition between unequals. Both Labour and Conservative have bought into, or sold out to, the Magic of the Market. The nonsense of the invisible hand turning blind selfishness to common good also absolves politicians from defining that good or the steps towards it.
In that limbo, with the rich still visibly rich, why should we tighten our belts without some prospect of a better world ahead? While the coalition may have lost the plot, we expect something better from opposition than more or less the same. If not a stairway to paradise, then a feasible common project to secure the world and riches for all. Snakes and ladders was ever a boring game.
To Observer
Sunday 22 April 2012 (printed 20.04.2012)
Carrot and Stick
Lansley's 'market-facing' model for the NHS favours greed at the top - top money for top talent - and need at the bottom, wages minimised in low-wage, low-price areas. Carrot in front and stick at the back for this Tory hack - until the two ends, both human after all, part company, geographically, socially and politically.
What this dropdead model overlooks is the power of common humanity: the poor and half-way poor are also greedy, proud as well as necessary, and able to vote with their feet; while the rich, greedy or not, are also moved in other ways, not just to money but to do a good job well.
Some NHS executives, like some bankers, see no further than their own pay cheques. But even in banks, with money as their object, a bonus-blinkered leadership broke down.
Often, in a public service, people want to serve. What's needed for the NHS, across ranks and specialisms, regions and post-codes, has less to do with divisive differentials than with fellow-feeling, pride-in-work, consistency and common sense.
To Observer
Sunday 8 April 2012
Spoilsports
Now politics even intrudes at the Boatrace and the Globe! Spoil-sports! Rome may be burning, but let's at least enjoy the fiddler... Clearly there are cases where politics - principle, humanity etc - trump public pleasure. But which are they?
Boatrace, Globe or neither? The cases are quite different. Oxbridge elitism is not, as I uinderstand it, a policy objective enforced by law along racial or religious lines (nor would it have made sense for a suffragette to throw herself under the king's horse if women had enjoyed democratic representation at the time)
The Israeli occupation and settlement of Palestinian land is violent, illegal and undemocratic. Jewish settlement embodies racial and religious apartheid on stolen ground. While settlers are governed by a civil authority for which they vote, most of occupied Palestine is under Israeli military rule. Settlers live apart, in subsidised housing, well-armed, with their own exclusive transport links to Israel and other settlements. In a drying land they enjoy swimming pools and sprinklers on public lawns. Native Palestinians are forbidden to build houses or sink wells on their own land, denied mains water and blocked at every economic turn. Areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority are effectively separated from each other and the outside world, subject to Israeli raids and detentions without trial.
The artistic director of Habima, the Israeli company booked for the Globe, says the the company is 'completely independent, artistically and politically.' But in almost the same breath he says the company is 'state financed...to perform all over the country. This is the law, we have no choice.' Fine, except that this 'country' includes occupied Palestine and illegal settlements.
Some Palestinians, Muslim or Christian, speak Hebrew as well as Arabic, and many might enjoy Shakespeare, but they would stand little chance of admission for Habama performances in the Ariel settlement or even Jerusalem.
However sadly, I support the banning of the Israeli theatre company at the 'Cultural Olympiad' as I supported the boycott of apartheid South Africa - despite the distress caused to some athletes and performers. With the benefit of hindsight I wish there had been an international boycott of Hitler's 1936 Olympiad.
To Observer
Sunday 25 March 2012
Politics and murder
Nick Cohen says we should not play politics with murder, or pontificate on a rolling story, then tugs the unrolling story of the Toulouse killings into his own tweedle-dee politics: Blind-to-racist-Right vs Islam-hugging-Left and nowt to choose between them. In doing so he neglects some important emerging details.
According to the Observer's own Toulouse report, police said the Jewish school was selected on the spur of the moment and they found no evidence of links with al-Qaida. The killer's armoury seems to owe more to image than calculation: besides a 'highpowered scooter' (sprayed black), a 'pump-action shotgun,' he carried two iconic Colt 45s and a legendary Israeli Uzi.
Other reports on Mohamed Merah's past mention not only his Afpak visits but a life of petty crime and violence nearer home, time in prison and self harm. In other mass murders, say a US school shooting or rampage by an English taxi driver, these details might carry weight.
This is not to deny the importance of race, politics, religion. The Toulouse killer was an Algerian Muslim – North Africans forming a depressed minority in most French cities - and is reported to have talked of avenging Palestinian children. The week before the Toulouse killings, we all heard of 'tit-for-tat' fighting between Gaza and Israel. Merah, like many Arabs and Muslims, may have had a fuller account from al-Jazeera TV. He would have heard that 25 Palestinians, including a child or two, were killed in the exchange, and that two Israelis were injured.
To London Review of Books (printed in shortened form)
13 March 2012
Killing sans frontieres
'Drones, baby, drones,' says defence secretary Gates, but where the US military goes, the Brits are inclined to follow. I have a letter from UK minister of state Nick Harvey confirming that RAF drone pilots based in the States are working alongside their US counterparts at the controls of Reaper drones.
He says the RAF Reaper sorties are confined to Afghanistan, and 'operate in accordance with International Humanitarian Law (also known as the Law of Armed Coflict)'. This is not reassuring in the light of recent remarks by the US Attorney General Eric Holder about the use of lethal force. The United States is at war, he says, and 'Given the nature of how terrorists act and where they tend to hide, it may not always be feasible to capture a United States citizen terrorist who presents an imminent threat of violent attack. In that case, our government has the clear authority to defend the United States with lethal force.
'Of course, any such use of lethal force by the United States will comply with the four fundamental law of war principles governing the use of force. The principle of necessity requires that the target have definite military value. The principle of distinction requires that only lawful targets – such as combatants, civilians directly participating in hostilities, and military objectives – may be targeted intentionally. Under the principle of proportionality, the anticipated collateral damage must not be excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage. Finally, the principle of humanity requires us to use weapons that will not inflict unnecessary suffering.
'These principles do not forbid the use of stealth or technologically advanced weapons. In fact, the use of advanced weapons may help to ensure that the best intelligence is available for planning and carrying out operations, and that the risk of civilian casualties can be minimized or avoided altogether.'
Oddly, these reflections are focussed on a 'United States citizen terrorist,' but it's hard to see a foreign citizen getting off more lightly.
Drone pilots themselves say that the detachment and comfort of their operating stations make it easier to distinguish calmly between 'the bad guys' and the good. But an Associated Press study of drone deaths in Pakistan suggests that nearly one in three of those killed are civilians, or at least non-terrorists. The AP reporters who visited sites of 10 drone attacks 'were told by villagers that of at least 194 people killed in the attacks, about 70 percent — at least 138 — were militants. The remaining 56 were either civilians or tribal police.'
These figures were presented as a counter to much higher Pakistani estimates of civilian deaths, and were more or less in line with a broader-based London study by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. US officials cast doubt on such evidence while refusing to disclose their own, but in other surgical operations, a one-in-three failure rate might not be acceptable.
It may be that RAF Reaper pilots operate by different rules from their US playmates, and quickly pass the joystick if their bad guys approach an unnmarked frontier. But slippage seems inevitable, in the air, on the ground and in the legal and moral debate surrounding such 'agile, innovative and flexible' systems.
Humanitarian Law and the Law of Armed Conflict may indeed be interchangeable, as an indeterminate War on Terrorism degenerates into killing sans frontieres. Is it any comfort that the game seems set to become fairer, as drones and cyber ops prove more replicable than stealth bombers and ICBMs? If a self-taught British hacker can penetrate the Pentagon, young militants in other failed or failing states may soon be able to hit the 'return-to-sender' button.
To Observer, Sunday 4 March 2012
Tit, tit Titian (acquired for the nation)
Luminous pastry (Catherine Bennett)? Given the technical mastery of our new Titian - and our craze for celebrity chefs - the concept of this expensive confection has less in common with,the Demoiselles d'Avignon than the blue nymphs of Schoolkids' Oz. The men behind their exploitation were tried/celebrated for obscenity in 1972, but the artwork was modestly priced at 4 shillings (20p). As a state-pensioner, I would be content to pay £1 for entry to an art gallery, museum or bus. I dont know what, if anything, I would charge for old copies of Oz.
(The cover of the schoolkids' Ox featured some naked black girls happily entwined in various shades of blue)
28 June 2012
Welfare blitz
David Cameron's attack on benefits is no 'ambitious plan' (PM outlines welfare blitz) but cynical opportunism. His earlier ill-judged pot shot at tax-avoiding comedian Jimmy Car risked an open-season on rich friends and relations, so he turned his gun on hapless claimants he will never meet. In the process he also hurt poor Iain Duncan Smith who has spent months in the undergrowth of tax and benefits in search of a clear way out.
Now, like the man who got a dog and barked, Cameron makes a fool of himself. By targetting social divisions, his latest cunning plan shoots more holes in any once or future Big Society.
To Observer
Monday 25 June 2012
Oh lords
No (Andrew Rawnsley) it's not silly to defer reform of the House of Lords until we've settled more urgent matters, but it would be silly to lumber us with yet another expensive set of local or regional representatives to second-guess the Commons. (Here in Wales we already vote, if we vote at all, for local councillors, MPs, AMs and MEPs.)
The present Upper House is more of an attic, but sometimes its assortment of bloodstock, bishops and party-pensioners turns out to be wiser than the lower lot we elect. If we're going to overhaul it, we need to go back to first principles, and that may take more time and thought than any of our party leaders have allowed for.
As I understand it, the house of lords began as a council of effective interests and powers in the land: feudal warlords who owned the land, if not quite the people, together with bishops commanding hearts and minds. Lawlords joined in later. Now that more of us can act, think and speak for ourselves, this is not the sort of mob we need to chart our lives, but we do need representatives who know what they're talking about.
We've got one national parliament of locally elected representatives, professional politicians working to party lines. They somehow govern the country on our behalf, if not the economy that drives and directs it. What we haven't got is any elected, accountable representation for the collective powers, interests and expertise in which many of us share and on which we all depend.
Perhaps our social democracy could benefit from a different sort of representation based not on region or locality but on the wide range of organisations, groups and networks that make up a functioning civil society. Not the lords spiritual and temporal, but elected by bodies representing unions and employers, professions and arts, religions and sports, charities, minorities and other sectional groupings.
The list of eligible groups and procedure for selection will be controversial. Some constituent groupings are already democratically structured, others would become so if it entitled them to a national hearing. Public interest in politics will be reawakened and some of the private interests that now lobby in high places and dark corners will be drawn into the open.
Some present peers, especially life peers, are distinguished by experience, expertise and commitment in the wider world. The introduction of more functional, as distinct from geographic, constituences would extend and rationalise that range.
Obviously, such a new venture in democratic representation will take time, thought and and energy to prepare. Lords reform deserves a creative deferment, but not to be kicked into the long grass.
To London Review of Books
Saturday 23 June 2012
'Market society'
From 'my kingdom for a horse' to 'my kidney for an i-pad', desperation is no basis for fair trade:
Glen Newey follows Michael Sandel and the Sidelskys into the gothic refinements of a market society, blind economic growth and the impassive mask of GDP. He challenges some of their detailed arguments, sometimes by extending them to absurdity: is the monetarisation of slavery or domestic labour a corruption of some better or more natural state?
Only in the last couple of paragraphs does he address what seems to me a fundamental imbalance in the recent - most welcome! - focus on inequality, consumerism and the blinkered economics of GDP. Inequality of wealth and income damage all of us and a market that largely excludes and demeans the most needy can not be 'free'.
It's not just products, or even body parts, that we routinely buy and sell, it's the whole process of working life. Under capitalism, a wealthy few get control of the economy, the direction of our working lives and the options open to us at the end of the day. The distinction between work and leisure assumes that working time is not our own but driven, and the trick of capitalism has been to bleed the hard drive of survival into more malleable desire and demand for whatever can be turned to corporate profit.
Survival assured, what's where hunger used to be? What are or might be the basics of happiness and a good life as informed by nature and choice? What's to do, if only for the joy of it? The debate must be ongoing. What's certain is that to work out what's best for us, we need the time and space for that debate, in our lives and at work where the effective decisions are made. In the Marxist image, living labour must free itself from the congealed, dead labour of capital.
As Tim Jackson demonstrated in Prosperity without Growth, there is no future for relentlessly expanding GDP on a finite earth. In their Spirit Level, Wilkinson and Pickett showed how gross inequality sets us in unhealthy competition for diminishing returns and distracts us from the damage we do to ourselves, each other and the world.
Now, as Newey concludes, the argument must be political. Where better to start than widely- shared notions of personal freedom, fairness and social democracy? And the extension of those aspirations to the working economy that forms and deforms our lives. Not just by regulation, but with a democratic voice within the organisations that employ us, determine product and distribute proceeds.
I'm not sure what to make of 'viatical firms', 'asymptotic' growth or even 'sufficientarians' but I do trust that others too will find resonance and strength in commons, common feeling, common sense and commonwealth.
To Observer
Tuesday 29 May 2012
Work-for-free
Government plans to force thousands more unemployed people to work for nothing or lose their benefits raise an obvious question: when does work experience become exploitation? And the quick answer is: when people are forced to work for private employers (i.e other people's profit) for less than the legal minimum wage.
There are now a million young people without paid work, and the job-seekers' allowance for 18-20 year-olds is £56.25. For those in rented accommodation, there may be another £50 in housing benefit, but average benefit income for a young unemployed person totals less than £100 per week.
The minimum wage for 18-20 year-olds is £4.98. For a 40-hour week at that rate, a young person would earn just under £200 per week. So, assuming those on government work schemes are employed full time, their benefits amount to a about half what they would have earned on the minimum wage.
It may be true that the experience of regular hours and more-or-less useful activity is good for people, but, according to the Commons Library analysis you quote, this does not translate into real jobs for work-scheme graduates. With little obvious economic benefit for job-seekers, there is a clear risk to those in low-paid jobs, and to future minimum wages, if the government encourages employers to undercut its own wage thresholds.
I speak from the relative comfort of a work-free state pension, and with the early benefit of two years work-camp experience lieu of military service from age 18-20. For me this was a useful introduction to various basic skills, a welcome change of company and scenery and a taste of democratic self-management. Most of the jobs we did would not have been done otherwise by paid labour.
It we're serious about fairness and social mobility, then some such varied work/training programme might be considered for ALL young people, rather than forced labour for the poor, freely-chosen gap-years for the well-off and a blinkered 'higher education' for many in between.
To Guardian Weekly
25 May 2012 (printed 08.06.2012)
Economics by other means
Gary Younge is right to link the Nato summit in Chicago to street killings on the ground and the chilling Friedman quotation about the military fist behind the invisible hand of the global market.
And Friedman is right as long as we fall for a Market that creates and exploits gross inequality within and between societies. It's not just a conspiracy by the rich - though there's plenty of that too. The rich are creatures of wealth, and the wealth that drives the market can also outgun any opposition: war is an extension of economics by other means.
At the heart of the Friedman proposition, and the root of market inequality, is the self-serving fiction of the Invisible hand itself: there was never a market magic that turned the sum of individual and corporate greed into common good. There never was an invisible hand, unless its the one that feeds us with such swill. Left to itself, the capitalist market favours wealth, the rich against the poor. Economically, socially and - when conflict erupts - by force.
The myth of a benign, self-regulating market has absolved politicians, business leaders and the rest of us from common humanity, social responsibility for economic behaviour. It's not just piggy bankers but common practice to stick our heads in the trough, if we're lucky enough to have one in reach. (If we dont, we squeal, hit out, self-harm.)
From Squeezed middle to Commanding heights, we help ourselves regardless and trust that somehow - in defiance of science, common sense and professed moralities - all will be well.
It wont of course. No peace in our time, no happy-ever-after unless we recognise what should be obvious. We've only got each other and one fragile world. If we cant reach out and take back the common ground between us, we've had it.
To Observer
Sunday 20 May 2012
Hokum
Yes (Calamitous strategy), this government, like several before it, leaves our lives at the mercy of Market 'hokum' which is meant to turn individual and corporate greed into common good. And in Britain, it has been the Banks - or money market - that have hijacked our economy in the interests of a mostly faceless few.
But intelligent management of the economy requires rather more than rebalancing between banks, industry and public services. Or between a bit more austerity or a bit more growth. The conduct of economic life requires not just fiscal accelerator and brakes, but clear direction and objectives. Francois Hollande hinted as much when he talked of 'projects' as well as indispensable growth.
Yes, we need to recognise 'interdependency between public and private, business and social' but also to reassert and re-imagine what a political economy might mean. If we're restructuring and refinancing banks, what do we want them for? If the squeezed middle is to be squeezed further and work harder, what exactly are we sacrificing and working for?
The assumption of a return to credit-driven business as usual is not plausible. Will the private sector, or a privatised public sector, provide decent jobs for all our children, while keeping us at work till 70 and looking after us until we're 100? Can we be proud of a new GM deal at Ellesmere Port, and replicate its reported agreement on a six-day week and ten-hour shifts?
Neither market, nor generalised austerity, nor unlimited growth makes sense. Blanket austerity is socially and politically unacceptable because it comes down hardest on those with least. And unlimited growth is economically and environmentally unsustainable because it threatens the climate and resource base of the planet, while doing nothing to redress inequality. Austerity and growth muts be selective, and targetted.
Your 'Good capitalism' sounds contradictory, like Good King. The same goes for the conventional description of corporate power as 'private' (and gross selfishness as 'compensation.) Yes, 'in democracies, the neglected can hit back and hit back they will.' And the same goes for undemocracies - although the explosion may be delayed and arbitrary when it comes.
If elected governments are not to get bogged down in regulation and corrective taxation, they may need more representative partners in business. The basis of social democracy must be extended into the so-called private sector, into business and working life: 'One person, one vote' makes most sense when we know what we are talking about.
To Observer
Sunday 13 May 2012
SEDUCED?
Obviously photographers are influenced by paintings they have seen. More importantly, both painters and photographers share with their audiences in patterns of life as lived in the world.
You illustrate the National Gallery's painting-to-photo theme with an outdoor Gainsborough portrait and an interior photo by Martin Parr. Both works feature comfortable couples. As you might expect from a portrait, or indeed at your own approach, these people face towards us. All four are smartly dressed as we tend to be for public appearances, including work. In both pictures the women are seated while the men stand. One man carries a gun, the other wears his office suit. In the photo, the woman too may have been out all day, but, as a woman, she is entitled to the armchair before she...makes dinner. The Gainsborough pair are sheltered by a tree to one side, and we can look past them over fields to hill and sky. In the photo too, we see out over grass to what may be hill and sky, but the man stands centre-stage between us and the grassy space. Behind him, the way is already blocked and his back covered by a plate-glass window.
Now, as in the past, those who can afford it can have - and be seen to have - the best of both urban and rural life. In your feature on life at the Osborne's Dorneywood residence, you use two photos, one for the people, the other of the property.
In my Swansea living room, I have prints of drawings by Rembrandt and Samuel Palmer. One is a Quixotic vision of two men, one on horseback, tother on foot, winding their way towards a citadel or cathedral on a hill. The Palmer has three people, women but also back to view, looking through a gap in the corn towards church and rooftops on a hill. (In the bookcase John Donne says 'Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will Reach her, about must, and about must go.')
We share an allotment in the shadow of Oystermouth castle, built on a hill to command a port and sheltered bay. The castle may have been built partly for appearances and has often been painted and photographed. But it has often commanded the lives and deaths as well as the vision of those around. The same goes for the crosses, gallows and other killing fields that have drawn the attention of painters, photographers and others concerned.
Art always speaks of other art, but does it best when not seduced from life outside the frame.
To Observer
Monday 7 May 2012
Snakes and ladders
If politics has anything to do with a better future, it must be more like an escalator than snakes and ladders (one up, one down at the throw of a dice, winner takes all). For all Labour's talk of fairness and growth, the contest between Labour and Conservative is still a toss-up between Tweedle Dee and Dum, with minor permutations of austerity and growth, pay now or later.
What neither party offers is a clear vision of where the sacrifice might lead. If a return to growth is possible, then what is to be grown, and what – in the interests of fairness and sustainability – must grow no more. Cameron has his empty Big Society thought-balloon. Milliband would reslice much the same old cake to relieve the squeezed middle.
Neither side faces the need for longer-term austerity, redistribution and redirection of resources in a world where life is threatened by aimless growth and competition between unequals. Both Labour and Conservative have bought into, or sold out to, the Magic of the Market. The nonsense of the invisible hand turning blind selfishness to common good also absolves politicians from defining that good or the steps towards it.
In that limbo, with the rich still visibly rich, why should we tighten our belts without some prospect of a better world ahead? While the coalition may have lost the plot, we expect something better from opposition than more or less the same. If not a stairway to paradise, then a feasible common project to secure the world and riches for all. Snakes and ladders was ever a boring game.
To Observer
Sunday 22 April 2012 (printed 20.04.2012)
Carrot and Stick
Lansley's 'market-facing' model for the NHS favours greed at the top - top money for top talent - and need at the bottom, wages minimised in low-wage, low-price areas. Carrot in front and stick at the back for this Tory hack - until the two ends, both human after all, part company, geographically, socially and politically.
What this dropdead model overlooks is the power of common humanity: the poor and half-way poor are also greedy, proud as well as necessary, and able to vote with their feet; while the rich, greedy or not, are also moved in other ways, not just to money but to do a good job well.
Some NHS executives, like some bankers, see no further than their own pay cheques. But even in banks, with money as their object, a bonus-blinkered leadership broke down.
Often, in a public service, people want to serve. What's needed for the NHS, across ranks and specialisms, regions and post-codes, has less to do with divisive differentials than with fellow-feeling, pride-in-work, consistency and common sense.
To Observer
Sunday 8 April 2012
Spoilsports
Now politics even intrudes at the Boatrace and the Globe! Spoil-sports! Rome may be burning, but let's at least enjoy the fiddler... Clearly there are cases where politics - principle, humanity etc - trump public pleasure. But which are they?
Boatrace, Globe or neither? The cases are quite different. Oxbridge elitism is not, as I uinderstand it, a policy objective enforced by law along racial or religious lines (nor would it have made sense for a suffragette to throw herself under the king's horse if women had enjoyed democratic representation at the time)
The Israeli occupation and settlement of Palestinian land is violent, illegal and undemocratic. Jewish settlement embodies racial and religious apartheid on stolen ground. While settlers are governed by a civil authority for which they vote, most of occupied Palestine is under Israeli military rule. Settlers live apart, in subsidised housing, well-armed, with their own exclusive transport links to Israel and other settlements. In a drying land they enjoy swimming pools and sprinklers on public lawns. Native Palestinians are forbidden to build houses or sink wells on their own land, denied mains water and blocked at every economic turn. Areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority are effectively separated from each other and the outside world, subject to Israeli raids and detentions without trial.
The artistic director of Habima, the Israeli company booked for the Globe, says the the company is 'completely independent, artistically and politically.' But in almost the same breath he says the company is 'state financed...to perform all over the country. This is the law, we have no choice.' Fine, except that this 'country' includes occupied Palestine and illegal settlements.
Some Palestinians, Muslim or Christian, speak Hebrew as well as Arabic, and many might enjoy Shakespeare, but they would stand little chance of admission for Habama performances in the Ariel settlement or even Jerusalem.
However sadly, I support the banning of the Israeli theatre company at the 'Cultural Olympiad' as I supported the boycott of apartheid South Africa - despite the distress caused to some athletes and performers. With the benefit of hindsight I wish there had been an international boycott of Hitler's 1936 Olympiad.
To Observer
Sunday 25 March 2012
Politics and murder
Nick Cohen says we should not play politics with murder, or pontificate on a rolling story, then tugs the unrolling story of the Toulouse killings into his own tweedle-dee politics: Blind-to-racist-Right vs Islam-hugging-Left and nowt to choose between them. In doing so he neglects some important emerging details.
According to the Observer's own Toulouse report, police said the Jewish school was selected on the spur of the moment and they found no evidence of links with al-Qaida. The killer's armoury seems to owe more to image than calculation: besides a 'highpowered scooter' (sprayed black), a 'pump-action shotgun,' he carried two iconic Colt 45s and a legendary Israeli Uzi.
Other reports on Mohamed Merah's past mention not only his Afpak visits but a life of petty crime and violence nearer home, time in prison and self harm. In other mass murders, say a US school shooting or rampage by an English taxi driver, these details might carry weight.
This is not to deny the importance of race, politics, religion. The Toulouse killer was an Algerian Muslim – North Africans forming a depressed minority in most French cities - and is reported to have talked of avenging Palestinian children. The week before the Toulouse killings, we all heard of 'tit-for-tat' fighting between Gaza and Israel. Merah, like many Arabs and Muslims, may have had a fuller account from al-Jazeera TV. He would have heard that 25 Palestinians, including a child or two, were killed in the exchange, and that two Israelis were injured.
To London Review of Books (printed in shortened form)
13 March 2012
Killing sans frontieres
'Drones, baby, drones,' says defence secretary Gates, but where the US military goes, the Brits are inclined to follow. I have a letter from UK minister of state Nick Harvey confirming that RAF drone pilots based in the States are working alongside their US counterparts at the controls of Reaper drones.
He says the RAF Reaper sorties are confined to Afghanistan, and 'operate in accordance with International Humanitarian Law (also known as the Law of Armed Coflict)'. This is not reassuring in the light of recent remarks by the US Attorney General Eric Holder about the use of lethal force. The United States is at war, he says, and 'Given the nature of how terrorists act and where they tend to hide, it may not always be feasible to capture a United States citizen terrorist who presents an imminent threat of violent attack. In that case, our government has the clear authority to defend the United States with lethal force.
'Of course, any such use of lethal force by the United States will comply with the four fundamental law of war principles governing the use of force. The principle of necessity requires that the target have definite military value. The principle of distinction requires that only lawful targets – such as combatants, civilians directly participating in hostilities, and military objectives – may be targeted intentionally. Under the principle of proportionality, the anticipated collateral damage must not be excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage. Finally, the principle of humanity requires us to use weapons that will not inflict unnecessary suffering.
'These principles do not forbid the use of stealth or technologically advanced weapons. In fact, the use of advanced weapons may help to ensure that the best intelligence is available for planning and carrying out operations, and that the risk of civilian casualties can be minimized or avoided altogether.'
Oddly, these reflections are focussed on a 'United States citizen terrorist,' but it's hard to see a foreign citizen getting off more lightly.
Drone pilots themselves say that the detachment and comfort of their operating stations make it easier to distinguish calmly between 'the bad guys' and the good. But an Associated Press study of drone deaths in Pakistan suggests that nearly one in three of those killed are civilians, or at least non-terrorists. The AP reporters who visited sites of 10 drone attacks 'were told by villagers that of at least 194 people killed in the attacks, about 70 percent — at least 138 — were militants. The remaining 56 were either civilians or tribal police.'
These figures were presented as a counter to much higher Pakistani estimates of civilian deaths, and were more or less in line with a broader-based London study by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. US officials cast doubt on such evidence while refusing to disclose their own, but in other surgical operations, a one-in-three failure rate might not be acceptable.
It may be that RAF Reaper pilots operate by different rules from their US playmates, and quickly pass the joystick if their bad guys approach an unnmarked frontier. But slippage seems inevitable, in the air, on the ground and in the legal and moral debate surrounding such 'agile, innovative and flexible' systems.
Humanitarian Law and the Law of Armed Conflict may indeed be interchangeable, as an indeterminate War on Terrorism degenerates into killing sans frontieres. Is it any comfort that the game seems set to become fairer, as drones and cyber ops prove more replicable than stealth bombers and ICBMs? If a self-taught British hacker can penetrate the Pentagon, young militants in other failed or failing states may soon be able to hit the 'return-to-sender' button.
To Observer, Sunday 4 March 2012
Tit, tit Titian (acquired for the nation)
Luminous pastry (Catherine Bennett)? Given the technical mastery of our new Titian - and our craze for celebrity chefs - the concept of this expensive confection has less in common with,the Demoiselles d'Avignon than the blue nymphs of Schoolkids' Oz. The men behind their exploitation were tried/celebrated for obscenity in 1972, but the artwork was modestly priced at 4 shillings (20p). As a state-pensioner, I would be content to pay £1 for entry to an art gallery, museum or bus. I dont know what, if anything, I would charge for old copies of Oz.
(The cover of the schoolkids' Ox featured some naked black girls happily entwined in various shades of blue)
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