Though Cowards Flinch

 This is a shortish ‘dull detail’ companion piece to Dave’s examination of how the European question may pan out following the referendum in Ireland and the Polish ratification.

 Dave’s right that for any incoming Conservative government this is unlikely to be the major factor that it was for the Thatcher and Major governments, and by and large Cameron would be able to get away with the line that it’s not his fault there was no referendum, but that’s it’s too late now.

 Even so, in the light of B Johnson’s sound bites, Cameron will need to set out why, broadly, the EU is not such a bad thing really, and why a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, which would effectively become a referendum on withdrawal, is not really needed that much.

 One of the arguments that will almost certainly be trotted out is that the Lisbon Treaty does at least allow for Council/EU parliament co-decision making and therefore national parliamentary scrutiny on a wider set of matters than were previously enjoyed, namely agriculture, fisheries and justice and home affairs. 

This is similar to the line already being taken by, for example, Andrew Duff MEP in this otherwise useful summary article on the Lisbon Treaty:

 ‘The Treaty of Lisbon will greatly improve the democratic character of the Union by increasing Parliament’s powers, by entrenching the Charter of Fundamental Rights and by strengthening the rule of law. It clarifies the values and reaffirms the objectives of the Union.’

 Those ‘objectives’, lest it be forgotten, are all about the entrenchment of neoliberal norms at the heart of the EU:

 ‘For the purposes set out in Article 3 of the Treaty on European Union, the activities of the Member States and the Union shall include, as provided in the Treaties, the adoption of an economic policy which is based on the close coordination of Member States’ economic policies, on the internal market and on the definition of common objectives, and conducted in accordance with the principle of an open market economy with free competition.’  (Article 119 of the Lisbon Treaty)

Given the likelihood of this line on increased parliamentary powers and enhanced ‘democratic character’, I think it’s instructive to note, therefore, what the House of Lords European Union Committee 17th report (July 2009) made of these new co-decision provisions (my emphasis):

 ‘Much of the evidence we have received suggests that both the codecision procedure itself and these trends in codecision practice make it harder for national parliaments to follow the procedure. The points raised most often are that:

•  Codeciding legislation can mean that a proposal will change substantially from the Commission’s initial text: it is therefore not sufficient for us only to scrutinise the proposal proposed by the Commission;
• Agreement at first or early second reading hinders scrutiny;
• The speed at which legislation is adopted is too fast to enable effective scrutiny; and
•  The use of informal trilogues is not conducive to effective scrutiny.

 Should the Lisbon Treaty come into force, these difficulties will be magnified by the expansion of codecision into new areas.’

The informal ‘trilogue’ is the part of the co-decision process that comes in for most criticism:

‘We consider that informal trilogues, whilst helpful to expeditious agreement of legislation, make effective scrutiny of codecided legislation by national parliaments very difficult. There are two reasons for this:

(a)  Their informal and confidential nature is not transparent: as a result it is difficult for us to follow the course of negotiations and comment usefully to the Government; and

(b)  The Council is represented only by the Presidency which tends to hold its cards close to its chest: as a result it may be difficult for all governments other than the Presidency to follow the course of negotiations and to represent the views of their national parliament at the appropriate point.’

 In the event that there is any hint of dissent from parliamentary types, though, when it comes to the more important issues such as who controls banking, the Lisbon Treaty has a trick or two up its sleeve. After all, absolutely anyone could get elected, including leftwingers who might want to rein in the banks!

Thus, while the Treaty Establishing the European Community (the Treaty of Rome, essentially)  is content to seek the assent of the European Parliament over how the European Central Bank should supervise the activities of ‘credit institutions and other financial institutions’, with the following wording:

 ‘The Council may, acting unanimously on a proposal from the Commission and after consulting the ECB and after receiving the assent of the European Parliament, confer upon the ECB specific tasks concerning policies relating to the prudential supervision of credit institutions and other financial institutions with the exception of insurance undertakings (TEC, article 105, para. 6)’;

 the Lisbon Treaty limits the European Parliament’s role to consultation, alongside consultation with the ECB itself:

 ‘The Council, acting by means of regulations in accordance with a special legislative procedure, may unanimously, and after consulting the European Parliament and the European Central Bank, confer specific tasks upon the European Central Bank concerning policies relating to the prudential supervision of credit institutions and other financial institutions with the exception of insurance undertakings (Lisbon Treaty article 127, para 6).’

 As might be expected then, the devil is in the detail, but next time you hear from a Tory that at least the Lisbon Treaty gives some power back to the UK parliament, and that at least the European parliament will get more of a say, you’ll know how to respond.

Now go and read Dave’s post, which is more interesting than this.

Further to the ‘Toynbee then and now’ post, we present Toynbee for a Guardian, public sector loving audience (October 2009):

‘Neither Labour nor Tories have anything to say about unjust pay structures, but they can’t expect the public sector to take the hit alone. Where is the quid pro quo?………Once the true facts are out there, an aggressive Conservative government may find voters’ sympathy rapidly swings behind their public servants.’

And Toynbee for a public sector loathing, ‘outsourcing’ audience (October 2009 ):

‘There is no doubt that putting some services out to tender has vastly improved certain standards over the years, broken the power of vested interests and brought in competition that has sharpened up results.’

Well, she knows her audience.

I’ve only recently learned about No Impact Man. I missed the blog. I missed the book. I missed the movie. I definitely missed the non-profit lifestyle advice organisation that doubles as political lobbyists who “help people ask their politicians–on both sides of the aisle–to step up to the plate and take care of the habitat we depend upon for our health, happiness and security.”

The concept is fairly simple; a family embark on a project to lower their environmental impact by eating local, walking or cycling, not buying stuff, not producing trash and so on for a year. Cue publicity storm and the movie rights. One wonders how big the environmental footprint of the books, the movie, their distribution and DVD release. Or how many smug pricks will sit in Starbucks guzzling coffee as they self-righteously read it.

Actually for shits and giggles, they don’t read the book; they drive their SUV two minutes down the road to Starbucks, guzzle coffee and watch the DVD of the movie, on a mini-laptop (because a sixty four inch plasma flatscreen is just going overboard) and then immediately catch a helicopter to their local nature reserve to shoot some badgers and burn down some trees. Because subtlety is for jerks.

Needless to say I disapprove. The movie strapline is “saving the world, one family at a time” and the very concept is bogus. Worse still is the hype which AlterNet are indulging in, promoting the movie through a PR man’s wetdream; getting other families to try something what Colin Beavan and his lot did, then talking to each other about how hard they found it, how worthy the idea and how more people should try it.

What is it that I object to so strenuously? Well, for starters I disagree that the best way to reduce the environmental impact of the human race is for everyone to individually alter their habits. For a start, it’ll never work. Capitalism is not set up like that; millions of people commute long distances every day, our food may be local but the materials used to make it aren’t, and our daily routines require electricity.

Capitalism has evolved to this point as the result of trillions upon trillions of individual decisions – but not merely the decisions of consumers. The decisions of the possessors of capital, in the context of all the processes of capitalism, are even more fundamental.

There are of course ways to change these things – but the very social organisation of our society renders it inefficient to begin at an individual, consumer level. We all live in houses that make a bad use of space; our bad use of space requires more materials per person housed and has a knock on effect that increases the number of goods owned per individual rather than communally, where everyone can access them. This is what results from building society around the individual, and no amount of moral pressure will change it.

Then there are more fundamental issues; the nature of a system based on private property makes us afraid to share, lest we lose what we’ve expended labour acquiring. This is an impulse which will restrict the amount that many individuals are prepared to sacrifice through the individualistic approach of the No Impact Man – a factor which can only be lessened by sanctioned, collective communality of goods.

I don’t think it is going too far to say that this will not happen under capitalism, the interest of which lies in everyone consuming as much as possible on a constant basis. In fact whole (wasteful, socially unproductive) industries are based upon the premise. Not to say, as Bill Hicks does, that anyone interested in advertising or marketing should kill themselves; I say all of this with deepest love for PR people.

None of this individualism challenges the basic features of capitalism and its wastefulness, which often hides behind an ephemeral “choice”. Consider the idea of No Impact Man taken to its extreme; a 48-year old blogger who has gone nine years without spending money, and who lives by foraging, hunting, raiding bins and sleeping in a cave. No doubt, this is the lowest of low impacts upon the environment.

Yet with the exception of those elements directly reliant upon nature (a return to which would necessitate the death of many billions of humans and the eradication of civilization), this man is simply a sponger off the current system. He produces nothing and uses only what is free or rejected as waste. I think it is readily apparent that there’s no future in following such an example.

Essentially you can wall yourself off from civilization, but the wall merely applies to you, it will not affect the processes of civilization. And this is the perfect analogy for the individual approach to environmentalism. We secure the safety of the environment by making ourselves masters of all of the key processes, beginning with the engine that drives it forward; production. From their, everything comes under our control – what is produced and how much, where it is produced, how it is distributed and so on.

Anything else is simply waffle which ignores the key processes at their source while focussing on their periphery.

1.  Practice

As I set out here  it was refreshing last week to do some work with a left-leaning journalist less interested in trying to become a member of the self-obsessed, self-referential commentariat than she was in recording the voice and the interests of the working class and the dispossessed. 

This was ‘proper’ journalism, of the type Jon Pilger in his heyday would have approved.  Conversely, it was not the sham journalism of the ‘get in, stereotype the masses, and get back to the comfortable office’ that this piece typified (and which I assessed here and here).

In fact there have been a couple of instances of this in the last month or so which deserve mention for their ‘proper’ approach, not least because they’ve got me thinking about the challenges that face leftwing journalists today – challenges which I think perhaps are greater than they were when Pilger was doing his stuff on the front line, and which need to be recognised before they can be tackled.

The first ‘proper’ journalism I’ve noticed recently was a longish piece by Amelia Gentleman, setting down the experiences of elderly people in a care home, using their own words to do so.  It was well written.  You could almost smell the sadness, and in so doing you felt that such a way of dying simply cannot be right. It didn’t take us further than that; that was not its intention, but it was a good first step.

 The second piece was by Rowenna Davies at Liberal Conspiracy.  This piece was not so good, and not only because of the word count constraint.  It was not so good because less than half the article was about the real experience of Yasmin, a Bangladeshi asylum seeker living with her son in Bolton on £5 a day.  More than half was about how very brave Rowenna was to attend a Conservative conference fringe meeting and ask a question about payments to asylum seekers, and to feel a little embarrassed in a terribly English kind of way about having done so. 

Yes, Rowenna slipped back into the self-adoring, liberal intelligentsia style of self-effacement-for-effect which is the hallmark of just about every boradsheet magazine in the country, but let’s give her her due.  At least she went a little way out of her comfort zone, went to Bolton, stayed, with Yasmin, and at least for half a short article paid witness to Yasmin’s experience. 

That half article is enough to make me wonder whether, amongst the new generation of the liberal Guardianista/Labourlist/CommentisFree set there isn’t some quite serious wine bar and nibbles about the need to get back to the roots of journalism, and actually start to report on what’s happening rather than comment on the commentary of others.

While this was an interesting enough notion to be going on with, of greater interest than Rowenna’s article itself  was the reaction in the comments, and I think it is here where we start to see the real challenges facing a Rowenna-wanabee-Pilger.

First, Rowenna gets the to-be-expected criticism that she’s ‘personalised’ the issue by setting out Yasmin’s current living conditions and, and the fact that she’d like to work but is not allowed to.  The criticism suggests that by doing this, but not providing the whole life story of Yasmin, what is set out is somehow less reliable as evidence, as though whether Yasmin arrived in the UK by boat or plane is a decisive factor in whether it’s now ok for her and her son to live on £5 a day.  In short, what is being suggested is that individual stories simply don’t count.

Then, when Imran comes to Rowenna’s defence, quoting  Home Office study of the reasons asylum seekers end up in the UK, and based on 65 interviews, we get the response:

‘As for your HO research, 65 interviews, ‘does not claim to be representative’, ‘Many of those in the sample were fleeing persecution… are more willing to engage in research of this kind’, an interesting document but hardly conclusive and far too small a study to be of general use in asylum discussions.’

This begs the question: what information is useful in discussions about the treatment of asylum seekers, if it is not to include findings from asylum seekers?  The answer is implicit is the question: what asylum seekers have actually experienced, and what they now need, is not important.

This is just one case where qualitative information about a single case is downgraded, because it is a single case (and indeed downgraded because there are ‘only’ 65 cases), and of course I pick up this one case in reasonable detail precisely to make my point – that where it suits the dominant agenda , individual cases are portrayed as invalid/unrepresentative, and the journalism behind that case reporting flawed.

Of course when the boot is on the other foot (the right rather than the left), individual case reporting is just fine.  Where it’s the case, for example, of a mother from an impoverished estate who has committed a heinous crime, or two brothers so brutalised by years of domestic violence that they’ve acted out their violence towards others, then this is validly representative of our ‘broken society’, and of the problem with the underclass.  No matter that the reporting is never ‘testimonial’ in the true sense of hearing what the individuals have to say, for on these occasions these single events speak are seen to speak for themselves.

Of course, such bias is not limited to journalism.  As a local councillor I see it all the time.   When single events reflect well on the local Tory council, there is no shortage of publicity, but when things go wrong and I complain on behalf of residents, these occurrences are treated as one-offs which can be corrected, or as evidence that an individual has failed to meet the council’s requirements for getting a service, rather than the other way round.

At a wider political level two, it is in abundant evidence.  When I attended a Fabian seminar about Equality in the Recession last month,Stephen Twigg, PPC, gave us the usual list of Labour’s achievements, apparently unaware that we might possibly have heard the list before. In the list of course, was the 3,500 children’s centres in the country by 2010.  In the Q &A session, a Labour member from Salford got up and said that her Children’s Centre was no good, because it wasn’t well used and certainly didn’t attract in the people who might be expected to benefit from it most.   Stephen Twigg said that he really didn’t know about individuals cases, and moved on.

This then, is the problem the left faces broadly – that individual cases only matter when they’re in keeping with the dominant narrative – but it seems to me that it is a challenge for leftwing journalism in particular, and perhaps a great deal more than they did when Pilger was doing his frontline reporting thing.

 It is, then, a problem that leftwing/liberal journalists need to really understand before they can start to challenge, in solidarity with each other (e.g through the NUJ) and with the people whose stories they seek to tell.  

To understand and challenge properly, moreover, journalists would do well to get develop between themselves not just a coherent argument in defence of  witness-based reporting, but also how wha it brings to journalism is in many ways actually epistemologically superior to the other more sterile methods of reporting now dominating the scene.  That is, they need to be able to argue the case for witness-based journalism in terms of the simply ethic of journalism – to seek the truth without fear or favour.

In the next section I set out briefly,  therefore, what I think might act as an epistemological framework for (critical) journalism

2. Theory

To set out my proposed epistemological framework for critical journalism, I’ll call what remains one of my my favourite books, Andrew Sayer’s (1992) ‘Method in Social Science: A Realist Approach’, 2nd edition (London: Routledge).

What Sayer does is to challenge the positivist ‘dominance of ordering framework conceptions of theory which tend to encourage the belief that objects are relatively simple and transparent and that the main problems concern their quantitative analysis’ (p. 99).  He provides a detailed critique (ibid: 99-103) of the orthodoxy of ‘generalization’ in social science, drawing out a number of methodological problems.  These problems include:

a)   the tendency to give ’a transhistorical, pancultural character to phenomena which are actually historically specific or culture bound’ (ibid: 100); 

b) the tendency to confuse contingent and necessary fact in the search for explanation: (ibid: 100);  

c) the risk of ‘ecological fallacy, that is, the ‘spurious inference of individual characteristics from group-level characteristics.  (ibid: 101).

In short, Sayer sets out a coherent critical challenge to the general assumption, that findings based on statistically aggregated data of the type that makes up so much newspaper coverage, from reports on the British Crime Survey through to the latest opinion polls, are  ‘facts’. 

Life, he says, is a bit more complicated than that – because it concerns people.  

Similar challenges to the orthodoxy of generalisation, and hence to the enduring importance of quantitative methods and associated claims of representativeness and external validity, are to be found in many other texts (Lincoln and Guba 2000: 29-36; Hammersley and Atkinson 1995: 5-6; George and Bennett 2004; 19-20; Yin 2003: 32-33; Scholfield 2004: 69-71).   

Conversely, from a realist (and ethnographic) perspective, the validity of single or small ‘n’ case studies lies not in its applicability to other situations, but in the capacity for ‘naturalistic generalization’ (Stake 2000: 22-23:) and its ‘verisimilitude’.  Hence Stake says : ‘A text with high verisimilitude provides the opportunity for vicarious experience, the reader ‘comes to know some things told, as if he or she had experienced them?’ (Stake 1994: 240).

3.  Back to practice

All of this can be summed up easily enough.

‘Small n’, witness-based journalism which seeks out the vicarious experience of individuals, and sets them out for its readership, is as intellectually valid now as it ever was, and an essential counter to the mainstream. 

Leftwing journalists need to be proud of their ‘truth seeking’ tradition, but also to be able to argue that ‘their’ truth is every bit as valid, if not more so, than what has become dominant, and they need to seek consciously to recapture, in solidarity with each other and then with the people they are paying witness to, some of the sense of truth-seeking integrity that many young journalists will now feel has been lost from the profession.

As I have said, and as I suggested last week, I am hopeful that this may be starting to happen, as a new post-Murdochisation generation of young journalists arrives on the scene, eager to make their own way with their own integrity. 

 I hope their heroes will not be the self-serving commentariat of the type that have betrayed the working class, but an older generation – Pilger if you like, but perhaps even one further back than that. Robert Blatchford, perhaps?

 References

 George A and Bennett A (2004) Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (Cambridge: MIT Press).

Hammersley M and Atkinson P (1995) Ethnography: Principles in Practice, 2^nd edition (London: Routledge) 

Lincoln Y and Guba E (2000) Naturalistic Enquiry (London: Sage) 

Sayer A (1992) Method in Social Science: A Realist Approach, 2^nd edition (London: Routledge).

Scholfield J (2004) Increasing the Generalizability of Qualitative Research in Gomm R,

 Hammersley M and Foster P (Eds.) (2000) Case Study Method (London: Sage). 

Stake R (1995) The Art of Case Study Research (Thousand Oaks: Sage). 
 

Yin R (2003a) Case Study Research: Design and Methods (Thousand Oaks: Sage).

At a recent discussion of the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, a few interesting points were brought up. When researching the issue beforehand, I stumbled across some figures for the “Yes” and “No” campaigns: the Yes side outspent the No side by just under 4:1. Well over half of that figure came directly from businesses like Ryanair or Intel, or consortia of businesses and celebrities. This was not counting the five million euros spent by the Irish state and the EU itself on “information” campaigns and actually holding the referendum.

Clearly the ruling class of Ireland had a vested interest in securing a Yes vote. The tactics of the Yes campaign were pretty devious – for example, IBEC’s campaign website promised jobs in massive lettering on the front page, as did plenty of posters. Yet Brian Lenihan, finance minister, didn’t disavow such claims until after the Yes vote had been secured. But capitalism does not produce a monolithic capitalist class – such a class can have divergent interests and it was this that led to a brief consideration of how parties of the ruling class react to such a division.

In Ireland, there are two coalitions broadly analogous to the two-party British system: Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats (a coalition recently including the Irish Green Party)  and Fine Gael-Labour. Broadly speaking these represent the conservative / liberal-conservative and centrist / social democratic wings of Leinster House. Occasionally it gets a bit confusing because Fine Gael, Labour’s traditional partners, are a party composed of people like UK Labour MP Denis MacShane, who is marginally to the Left of the Kaiser. There is significant overlap.

All of these parties – every single one – came out in favour of a Yes vote and spent money on securing a Yes vote on the Lisbon Treaty. The ruling class of the Irish republic seems fairly united on the point. It was left to the Socialist Party, SWP and maverick Declan Ganley, who reportedly spent over a million euros of his own money, including two hundred thousand of which on funding the Libertas anti-treaty campaign in the second referendum, to oppose the Lisbon Treaty in conjunction with UKIP. Ganley denies that his American company Rivada had anything to do with the campaign.

This unity of the Irish ruling class provoked some speculation: if there was to be a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty in the UK, would the British ruling class be similarly united? It is a standard media trope that European questions have tended to divide the Conservatives, the traditional party of the capitalist class. Recent unity has been possible because the Conservatives can have the best of both worlds, beating up a Labour government for kowtowing to European federalism run amok, whilst not actually having to give effect to their own utterances. The perfect example of this was the Lisbon Treaty referendum vote.

David Cameron voiced sentiments to the effect that the Lisbon Treaty was a dead duck, that nobody wanted it and that it should be jettisoned. Cameron has also promised a referendum if the treaty is not a fait accompli by the time a Tory government takes office. If it came down to a vote, could Cameron and his pro-EU allies campaign against the Lisbon Treaty without casting doubts over the future of the EU itself? Bearing in mind some recent polling for ConservativeHome, were I David Cameron, I would be praying that Poland and the Czechs ratify Lisbon very soon.

The Tory grassroots, according to ConHome, are overwhelmingly in favour of a referendum, overwhelmingly in favour of a No vote and quite a substantial proportion are in favour of EU withdrawal.

Wealthy support for eurosceptic parties has not exactly been hard to find. Whether from millionaires Paul Sykes, Stuart Wheeler, Alan Bown or David Sullivan, or businesses like Nightech, UKIP seem to have plenty of money to kick around – and indeed they upped their number of MEPs this year even when pitted against a seemingly resurgent Conservative Party. But little of this support comes from the first rank of British capitalism; the recent Conservative Party conference on the other hand demonstrates a totally different world of politico-business intercourse.

“…the real action is on the fringe. In meetings across Manchester this week, corporate money and time is supporting a debate which, it is hoped, will usher in a more enterprise-friendly government. General Electric, BT, Boots, Legal & General, John Lewis, Coca-Cola and BAA are there. So are Vodafone, DTZ, Serco, Standard Chartered, Aviva, Morrisons, T-Mobile, Clifford Chance, EADS, BAE and the tobacco manufacturers.”

All of which benefit from the European Union, particularly from the expanded EU into which companies like Vodafone have moved. Or BAA which has plans for eastern European airports, Serco which has contracts with the European Space Agency and in Poland to name two recent jobs. And so on. All of this investment in European markets is aided by the common framework of the EU, and when it comes to expanding further afield, the status of the EU as a primary trading partner to China and India, and as the world’s largest importer and exporter is useful muscle to keep onside.

The Lisbon Treaty is useful to European capitalism as a whole because it prevents the smaller nations, client states of the larger, from holding the economic and banking policies of EU hostage to its own individual fortunes. The new positions of President of the European Commission and High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy are formulated so as to be able to wield the economic and military muscle of the EU as one bloc, which inevitably will be used to the benefit of European capitalism.

With business support largely assured, whatever the grassroots pull, the majority of Tory MPs will work out where their bread is buttered and vote accordingly. There will always be maverick exceptions, like the Labour councillors in Ireland who backed a No vote, but amongst the political establishment, these will be a minority. A referendum, however, might allow the grassroots to shine through – and this is why, I suspect, there will be no Lisbon referendum in the UK unless the Tory and Labour leaderships are fully confident of winning.

A similar referendum, however, has happened before, on membership in the EEC. The Labour and Tory leaderships campaigned in favour of the EEC and won the vote. Despite mavericks like Tony Benn and Enoch Powell, no Tory split emerged. And this time, no doubt, the soothing balm of capitalist consensus will likewise ease the pain that any mavericks cause. UKIP is already losing steam, in that its membership numbers have been cut almost by half; I don’t think a resurgent Tory Party has anything to fear from its Right – unless the capitalist crisis deepens beyond what the Tories can easily retrench by attacking the unions, pensions, social welfare, public sector pay and public services.

Thus we simply cannot count on the Tories being broken and ousted by the issue of the EU, though Cameron himself might be damaged by seeming to speak out of both sides of his mouth. I say this at the risk of contradicting the commentariat, where there seems to be a theme developing that Europe brought down Margaret Thatcher and John Major (not the poll tax and control freakery, or habitual corruption and endless scandal then), so it could bring down David Cameron. It’s possible, I suppose, but I don’t think it is likely – and I certainly don’t think it’s a notion we can base any sort of strategy around.

What we can do is ensure that if there is a referendum, we’re on the right side. As socialists, we seek the overthrow of the capitalist state; the issue of the EU-state should be just as clear cut. No free market of labour, no terroristic capitalism through EU diktat, IMF sanction or the easy ability to relocate capital investment abroad, no to the idea that we can ‘win’ the institutions of the EU to our own ends any more than we can win round the national state – but yes to a socialist internationalism linking the trades unions and socialists of all European countries.

By making these arguments, we’re changing the terms of the debate; it ceases to be about Little Englanders versus the capitalist consensus and could mobilize section of the working classs in their own class interests – as it did in Ireland. Such a campaign, if fought with skill and honesty, could provide a basis for mass re-engagement with politicis – socialist politics that is – and potentially help us along the road towards a reconstructed mass party of the working class. All of this, if there is a referendum. And that’s exactly why there won’t be.

Polly Toynbee in 2002, noble defender of the right of workers in the public sector:

‘Unions are reporting that some councils are threatening to privatise their services to avoid having to pay the extra money. Contractors are not bound by any pay rates except the national minimum wage of £4.10 an hour. The North West Employers Organisation, which represents 46 councils, has told the negotiators that they are unwilling to accept the deal. But these threats to privatise workforces expose the harsh jungle the public sector has become in the last 20 years and how little Labour has done yet to put things right.’

Polly Toynbee in October 2009, taking the filthy lucre and writing in ‘Ethos’, the in-house magazine of multi-national outsourcing firm, Serco:

‘There is no doubt that putting some services out to tender has vastly improved certain standards over the years, broken the power of vested interests and brought in competition that has sharpened up results.’

Vested bloody interests?

Does anyone even vaguely near the left take this woman seriously anymore?

10) Eric Pickles says the conference will be a champagne free event.

Lie. There was loads of the stuff.

9) ‘We will work with councils to freeze Council Tax for two years – saving over £200 for the typical family.’ (Cameron in the Sun)

Lie. ‘A typical family living in a Band B/C property (a typical family home) will save, on average, between £136 and £158 during a two year Council Tax freeze, not ‘over £200’ as David Cameron has pledged.’ (Ministry of Truth)

8) Lansley announces an £8,000 one-off payment into an insurance scheme will stop old people having to sell their houses if they go into residential care.

Lie.  For a start, it’s £16,000 for a couple.  How many old people have £8,000 tucked away in anything other than property they may own?  And it just doesn’t stack in relation to the government social care green paper, which says, based on real working out, it will cost between £17,000 and £25,000 a person.

7) ‘We’ll double magistrates sentencing powers from six months to a year’ (Cameron in the Sun)

Lie. Magistrates can already sentence people to prison for up to a year in specified circumstances set out in the Magistrates Act, 1980 S. 31 (1). Dog whistle politics of the highest order.

6) ‘The world is watching Britain at the moment. It is casting doubt on our country’s creditworthiness. It is questioning our resolve to deal with our debts. And when that starts to happen, then long term interest rates rise.’ (Osborne)

Lie. ‘Real long-term interest rates – yields on index-linked gilts – have fallen to record lows.  Far from questioning our resolve’, bond markets have never been happier to lend to the government.’ (Chris Dillow)

5) Devolution; the minimum wage; civil partnerships, these are good things that we will we keep (Cameron)

Lie. David Cameron campaigned against the introduction of minimum wage: ‘Labour’s plans for minimum wages, the Social Chapter and large increases in spending and taxes would send unemployment straight back up.’ (The Chronicle Stafford, February 21 1996).

The Conservatives voted against third and second readings of the National Minimum Wage Act 1998.

Eleven Conservative MPs sought to bring a private members’ bill to get rid of the National Minimum wage in May 2009.   Cameron did nothing to try to stop them.

4) ‘But if we find the money that should be going into stronger bank balance sheets is being unreasonably diverted into bigger pay and bonuses – we reserve the right to take further action and that includes using the tax system.’ (Osborne)

Lie. Obviously.

3) ‘But also this year, in these difficult times, we’ve won the argument on the economy and debt.’ (Cameron)

Lie. Just saying you’ve won the argument on debt over and over again doesn’t mean you’ve won the argument.  It means you’re like a small child not getting her/his way.

Every sane economist disagrees with Conservative policy on the national debt.  See The Economist, or the Financial Times, or Sam Brittan, or Paul Krugman or Giles Wilkes.

2) Osborne claims raisng the retirement age will says £130bn over a decade.

Lie. Sensible economists, and even Tim Leunig from the LSE, reckon the most you can save is about £20bn over this period.  As Tim says ‘It really doesn’t look like Osborne can add up, subtract, multiply, or divide.’

1) ‘Who made the poorest poorer? Who left youth unemployment higher? Who made inequality greater? No, not the wicked Tories’ (Cameron)

Lie. ‘Inequality rocketed under the Conservatives.’ (Giles Wilkes) See Figure 3.7 of this IFS report).

Osborne on people screwed by the inequalities the Tories helped put in place:  ‘No one takes pleasure from people making money out of the misery of others but that is a function of capitalist markets.’

Reading over the speech Michael Gove made to the Conservative Conference, I’m glad that I’m already trying to get out of teaching. If the period of the last twelve years in education has been marked by increasing spin, pointless bureaucracy and policy announcements, the next five under a Conservative government appear unlikely to be any different, judging by the Shadow minister for Children, Schools and Families. In fact, in some aspects, the future promises to be worse, with plans to turn our kids into ‘patriotic’ automatons.

Most of the words that come out of Gove’s mouth are in fact piffle; meaningless. They only have meaning and relevance to a lot of people who for years have been imbibing every scare story printed in the Daily Mail about riotous kids and political correctness gone mad. Gove praises a headteacher who apparently spoke to the Conservative conference:

“He insists on a proper uniform – with blazer and tie – respect for authority, clear sanctions for troublemakers and no excuses for bad behaviour. He sets classes by ability – so the brightest can be stretched and the weakest given special support.

He teaches traditional subjects in a rigorous way and when the bureaucrats try to insert the latest fashionable nonsense into the curriculum he tells them where to get off.

There are fantastic extra-curricular activities, proper competitive sports and an amazing team of teachers – who work into the evenings and on Saturdays to give their pupils the best possible chance in life. Why isn’t every state school like that?”

Except that most schools have a proper uniform, “respect for authority”, clear sanctions, classes by ability and support for the weakest. Except that not every school is funded to the same degree and thus you have secondary schools which can afford special units for literacy and so forth, while others languish. So in the first sentence above, Gove is not proposing anything new – and he will find, if he gets his feet underneath the ministerial desk, that his hot air counts for very little when set against the cuts by which the Tories are promising to outdo their Labour equivalents, against even capitalist economic sense.

Of course it wouldn’t be Conservative conference is someone didn’t get a dig in at the curriculum. Yet, perhaps overcome by the sort of adrenaline-testosterone high that waving your cock about on stage tends to give, Gove has said something patently stupid. He has conjured up the image of the heroic headteacher fending off the bureaucrats; except that the headteacher in question is from an Academy, a group of schools to which Labour gave specific powers to shape their own curriculum. Whoops.

Not that I’m praising the system of Academies: despite double-figure millions being poured into such schools, some forty of them are still failing. Apparently the all-conquering initiative and cost-efficiency of private and third sector enterprise isn’t so all-conquering. As for the rest, where Gove discusses extra-curricular activities etc, every State school is like that. I have spent my fair share of evenings after school and friends of mine have spent their fair share of Saturdays running activities for the kids.

Even where there are no Saturday activities, the government’s Extended Schools programme is pushing every state school to offer more services during the week – whether it is breakfast club or track and field competitions. Even some of the worst schools in this part of the country are fiercely competitive at sport – the Abbey School in Faversham, for example. So Gove is laying out nothing new – but what I suspect will happen is that even more pressure is piled on without funds or personnel to achieve the goals, and yet more teachers will suffer.

Gove’s not done there though. Other pointless declarations include giving “teachers effective power to confiscate banned items and restrain violent pupils”, powers which we already have and which are clearly laid out for every new teacher. We can confiscate anything and we can restrain any pupil who is a danger to themselves or others. Plenty of state schools even have teachers given a free period once a week to wander the halls and to call into classrooms to ensure that the teacher has an effective grip on classroom discipline.

There’s also the claim that the Tories will

“…change the law so that when a head teacher expels a violent pupil– that pupil cannot plead that his human rights have been violated and then stick two fingers up to authority.”

When I was at school, I was part of the movement which organised a walk out on Day X, the day the bombing of Iraq began in 2003, I was lucky, in that some three hundred pupils walked out of my school and there was safety in numbers. A friend of mine was expelled from his school, however. He took the school to court, arguing that the expulsion was a victimisation of political dissent – which it was, whatever bureaucratic language one wishes to dress it up in. School kids, like any other section of the workforce, have the right to withdraw their consent from the State.

Walking out of school was our way of showing it – and it was remarkably successful. Literally thousands of school kids all around Northern Ireland took a (brief) interest in what was going on when people their own age began getting interviews on local and national radio stations in the run up to the outbreak of war. When war happened anyway, interest waned, which is to be expected – but the actual gesture changed the attitude of many young people. Protecting that right is important – and the basic point is that authority is not always right.

I was threatened with expulsion not just for organising the walkout but also for speaking on the radio and identifying myself as a student of Our Lady and St. Patrick’s College, Knock. The principal was raging because I brought the school into what he called ‘disrepute’ and he and the Vice-Principle kept me behind school one day in order to lecture me about appropriate behaviour. If I had been kicked out of school, it would have been a flagrant breach of my right to free speech. The sort of human right which kids don’t have, when it comes to school, according to Michael Gove.

Other elements to Gove’s speech are simply the re-announcement of existing policies, such as city technical schools to supply apprenticeships, which have existed since John Major’s government if not before and have continued under Labour. The only seeming exception is covered by Lee Griffin at Liberal Conspiracy.

Talk of social mobility rings a bit hollow in the mouth of Michael Gove when we know the cap for third-level education fees will be coming off under the next government. It rings hollow when we realise that no matter how hard anyone – everyone – works, poverty, deprivation and worklessness will continue to exist under capitalism and potentially get worse if George Osborne gets his wish to attack the deficit by massively slashing government expenditure – some of which keeps people in socially useful jobs. Like, er, teachers, teaching assistants and their support.

Then there are the elements to Gove speech which are plain fabrication or wishful thinking:

“Teachers have been deprived of professional freedom, denied the chance to inspire children with a love of learning and dragooned into delivering what the bureaucrats decree.

And we’ll ensure that experts in every field – especially mathematicians, scientists, technicians and engineers – can make a swift transition into teaching so our children have access to the very, very best science education”.

Teachers do not deliver what the bureaucrats decree. Most teachers, though I will explicitly limit this to my own experience, deliver what they want – and so long as it gets results, no one asks any questions. So long as the teacher controls the class and the exam results reach the expected target, teachers are left to do what they want. Even in terms of teaching methods, which Ofsted can be shit-hot on seeking, so long as a teacher makes a few gestures towards active learning (which actually works), then they’ll get a grade one on their observations.

As for ensuring that “experts in every field…can make a swift transition into teaching” I will be watching that policy with eyes glued. The few “experts” in their field – PhDs in history and chemistry and so on – that I’ve seen try and cut it as teachers failed miserably. They weren’t cut out for speaking in front of a class, or class discipline or some other aspect of teaching. Which isn’t something to be ashamed of because teaching is a hard job. These experts were weeded out at PGCE or GTP or NQT level, during training. So any policy planning to fast-track experts better have exactly the same safeguards as the extended training, and I doubt that it will.

This rant could continue but I shall end it with the following:

“There is no better way of building a modern, inclusive, patriotism than by teaching all British citizens to take pride in this country’s historic achievements. Which is why the next Conservative Government will ensure the curriculum teaches the proper narrative of British History – so that every Briton can take pride in this nation.”

What is surprising is just how similar this is to Labour ideas from the most recent version of the national curriculum. So similar, in fact, that there’s no difference. Every Key Stage 3 class studies British history from 1066 to late 20th Century. All the key periods are there: the wars with France, the English Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the world wars and so on. The ‘historic achievements’ notably left off are the millions of people the British Empire killed through mass starvation, war, colonization and the occasional genocide.

Which seems to match up precisely with what Gove wants us to teach. It’s bullshit. Any self-respecting academic would choke to see the sort of drivel that gets ladled out for KS3 history. Names, dates, places, inventions. Causes are occasionally talked about but these are largely focused on individuals; Did Charles cause the English Civil War? The fight between crown and church becomes a tiff between Henry II and Thomas Becket. Actually some of this is unfair; on subjects like the Crusades, the new Folens books are excellent, especially on religion.

My point, however, is that the “achievements” of this country are often achieved or paid for by one part (the rich part) employing another part (usually poor) to slaughter and rob the rest of the poor part, or the Catholic part, or the ancestors of the immigrant parts: Pakistani, Indian, Middle-Eastern, African or Afro-Carribean. I’d teach that til the cows came home, then point to the Tory Party with the words “And those fuckers are the ones who sat back and got rich off all of it”. Then see how happy Michael Gove is when confronted with a generation aware of real ‘British’ history.

Truly there is little difference between Tory and Labour education policy. They’re both equally rubbish. The only difference is in emphasis; whereas the Tories want teachers to construct a semiotic civic code based on “modern patriotism”, Labour call that “multiculturalism”. Where the Tories simplistically emphasize “discipline” and attack “bureaucracy”, in their bid to win Daily Mail approbation, Labour are more about the multisyllabic spinning into six paragraphs of what could be said in one – but the actual proposals are relatively similar.

So once again the country seems set to elect a party which can talk a good show to its supporters whilst fundamentally changing nothing. The real change is being exacted by ‘economic circumstances’, forcing cuts, in which Labour are equally complicit. The bottom line: if you want education reform don’t vote for New Labour MPs and certainly don’t vote Tory.

After this post, I hadn’t expected to return to the murky and corrupt world of credit rating agencies quite so soon, but this article from FT Alphaville is so astonishing I just have to.

You will remember from the previous post that the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has been investigating the way the credit rating agencies have, for the last thirty five years, been tailoring their credit ratings to maximise income from the very people whose financial products they are rating. 

That is, they have been acting corruptly.

Now that they’ve caught with their big fat fingers in the enormous till, they are belatedly trying to cover their tracks, and have been rating some of the bonds issued, especially Collateralised Debt Obligations, a bit more ‘realistically’.

The downside of this is that the ‘investment community’ also profits from their corrupt rating processes when things are booming, and they are now getting very upset about any move away from corruption.

The latest highly influential ‘HCM Market Letter’, issued by Harch Capital Management inc., says this of the changes to its ratings introduced by Standard & Poor’s (and with my translation added):

‘With these revisions S&P unilaterally changed the rules governing hundreds of billions of dollars of Collateralized Loan Obligations that were issued over the past few years. It did so without giving investors in these transactions any right of appeal, or any recourse to recover their potential losses. Investments were made based on earlier ratings which arguably constituted an implied promise by the ratings agencies to maintain the original set of assumptions underlying their ratings. By unilaterally changing these assumptions to account for the first time for Black Swans, S&P has broken its compact with the entire financial world that came to rely on its ratings.’

Translation: We liked it the way it was before, when the credit rating agencies didn’t tell the truth about the creditworthiness of highly complex financial products, because the whole secret ’compact’ thing between bond issuers, investors and the rating agencies meant we could make fat profits by conveniently ignoring the reality that the whole things would eventually collapse like a house of cards, remaining safe in the knowledge that it wouldn’t be us that’d have to pay for the consequences of any financial crisis.

‘Moreover, it is compounding those errors by making changes to its ratings assumptions that fly in the face of current data that suggests that corporate credit conditions are improving, rendering its heightened default scenarios highly unlikely to occur and unsuitable for application to these structured credit products.’

Translation:  We really thought we were through this slightly troublesome time, now that the worldwide poor is beginning to pick up the huge national debts incurred by our greed, and that we could happily move on to our next credit bubble now that the whole financial system has got its confidence back.  It’s just not fair that the credit rating agencies are still being a bit too nervous about regulatory oversight, and are not joining us again on our merry-ro-round of corruption and greed.  They should know perfectly well that the government won’t do anything serious about the corruption we’re all up to our necks in, because they’re involved too.

(Hat tip to Duncan for the FT Alphaville link)

Don Paskini has an article over at Liberal Conspiracy celebrating the fact that in many countries around the world, the Left is actually in power. By demonstrating this, the Don wishes to dispel the (seemingly) dominant narrative that the crisis has not really benefitted the Left. Recent victories in Norway, Portugal, Greece and even Germany, where the Left was ousted from government but collectively polled 46% to the Right’s 48%, are recruited to show that actually many Left ideas are back on the agenda and that the Left is advancing.

Yet all of history is a process. If the Left is elected to stem the tide of capitalism and to redress inequity, deprivation and other social problems, then it must either do this decisively or face defeat and disillusionment. The signs of this happening anywhere – either in Europe or even in the most radical Left regimes of Bolivia or Venezuela – are not good. So what seems like success is ultimately ephemeral, as the “soft” Left is caught within its own contradiction. It cannot on the one hand support healthy capitalist growth and on the other, want peace, equality and socialism.

That this contradiction is real should not be doubted. Germany’s Finance Minister under the previous government, Peer Steinbrueck, was the man who criticized Labour’s massive programme of state expenditure as “crass Keynesianism“. Steinbrueck is a member of the Social Democratic Party. This should show just how wrong we would be to trust to what we know of party political lineage. The SDP may have been the political inheritors of the first mass Marxist party, it may have the party of the German working class, but is it any longer?

Designating someone “left-wing” covers a multitude of sins, not the least of which is not being “left-wing” in any practical sense that extends beyond the rhetorical milieu in which one moves. In America, Obama’s election succeeded on the basis of his social promises, but the key difference between Republicans and Democrats was over fiscal stimulus. Fiscal stimulus has gone ahead, meanwhile what social promises were made have been substantially watered down: the debacle of Afghanistan continues, and social medicine languishes.

This is a phenomenon which seems set to repeat around the world: Papandreou’s PASOK victory in Greece, Stoltenberg’s Labour-led coalition in Norway and so on, though few of these are truly convincing victories. Even in Portugal, where PDS has been virtually New Labour-lite, the re-election has not been particularly convincing, for all the populist rhetoric Socrates could muster. Things like “cutting state bureaucracy” (sound familiar?) have been on the agenda, and the major spending projects have been geared towards a more efficient capitalism.

As Chris Dillow masterfully summarizes, the “Keynesian” approach to fiscal stimulus is essentially pro-capitalist life support. Is that what the Left parties were elected to do? And if so, what makes them Left?

In cases such as Britain and Germany, social democracy has been forced into the role of capitalist handmaiden, gearing up for cuts whilst ploughing money into the banks, essentially depriving Keynesian economics of its one-time social content. As Lenin points out, socialists will not be able to protect the Socialist Internationalists from electoral oblivion. That oblivion has been well and truly earned. There is not a person on the Left who could be enthusiastic about Gordon Brown, despite David Cameron, so why on earth would we expect any less from the average voter?

Yet the “alternative” appeal of social democratic parties that were in opposition as the global crisis has unfolded will soon wear off. Without an organised, democratic, determined movement to hold their feet to the fire, these parties will play out the contradiction enshrined into their ideological attempt both to embrace capitalism and socialism and will be promptly turned out of office by voters who never really got the alternative that they voted for. Obama’s approval ratings, for example, have already begun slipping.

Without this movement, “Left” victories in elections are essentially meaningless. As New Labour has shown, social democratic parties can play a similar role to outrightly capitalist parties. Even here, at the end, Labour has not learned its lesson. Private Eye this week documents some of the corporate funding of the Labour Party conference and the desertion of Labour by their erstwhile corporate friends, all to the sound of a string quartet valiantly playing on as the wounded ship coasts slowly away from the gigantic iceberg.

Even in those places where there is a powerful popular movement, such as Venezuela or Bolivia, there has been no final victory. The strength of “the Right” is derived from the hegemonic and material power created by a system of private ownership and market exchange. Neither of these have been overturned, and in situations where the Left actually has the potential to threaten such interests, the natural recourse of the capitalist ruling class is towards violence. Such has it been in both Bolivia and Venezuela, where the Left has gone furthest.

Neither of these South American movements has delivered on their promises, however. Whilst literacy is increasing and land has been shared out among the peasants, poverty is rife and – especially in Venezeula – Chavez’ regime is increasingly showing its willingness to attack workers in the interests of what was private capitalism and is now state-owned capitalism. This is another contradiction: Chavez’ strongest support comes from among these very workers, and yet here he is using the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state to beat them into submission.

We should be careful when speaking of Left successes, then, in this period of economic crisis. The ‘success’ of winning electoral victories – which is different from actual power – is often ephemeral. Even where it reaps real benefits for the working class, through education or health or social welfare, the very fact that there is no next step means that the step back is almost inevitable. “Left” leaders become assimilated into the political elite, connections are cut with the mass movements that created the electoral opportunity, promises are reneged on.

Obama has managed this effortlessly. Social media, once so important to Obama’s campaign, has actually been quite critical of the new government as a result.

None of which is to say that there aren’t successes. The rise of Die Linke, representing a new strand of militant trades unionism and including many socialist activists attempting to radicalize Germany from the ground up, is a great success. The doubling of Die Linke’s vote is merely the icing on the cake. A new generation is growing up without the familiar, comforting (and tranquilizing?) effect of social democracy; they are looking around for radical ideas which will solve the problems they encounter as a direct result of capitalism.

Leaving aside the new generation, this generation has not said its last word either. The recent London CWU vote to disaffiliate from Labour is a product of the titanic pressures which the Labour Party is holding back through bureaucratic trickery. In Ireland, the traditional hinterland of Irish Labour did not believe the leadership’s assurances that jobs were to be had by approving the Treaty of Lisbon. The poorest and most militant constituencies of Ireland rejected the treaty. The ties between labour and social democracy are fraying.

A few Left electoral successes, in such an unstable climate, and where even Left parties play the part of retrenching capitalists, mean relatively little.

Lastly, but significantly, it bears mentioning that a powerful workers’ movement will be built on the corpses of all those “successes” vaunted by the Don – because not one of them offers a genuine alternative. They are all subject to the contradiction I have laid out above, and must be resolved – either in our favour, with their deepening and broadening to a revolutionary movement (more than likely against the wishes of their leaders) or to inaction and ultimately electoral defeat. So much is up for grabs – of that, these electoral successes are merely a sporadic symptom.

What they don’t demonstrate is that the Left has fully grasped its opportunity: and I think the actual fact is that we have not – globally or, more particularly, here at home.