Though Cowards Flinch

Have you heard the one about Nick Griffin, former Lib Dem MP Alex Carlile and a conviction for incitement to racial hatred?

If not, you will before the General Election’s out. Over and over again.

The recently launched anti-fascist media organisation Expose the BNP is aiming to lay bare the real intentions of the BNP and halt the normalisation process in the media whereby the BNP are treated as an ordinary political party.

The campaign argues that media workers have a special role to play in challenging the representatives of the far right when they are granted column inches or air time.

In some ways I sympathise with this argument, journalists are often poorly briefed on the BNP and there have been a few instances in recent months where the BNP and the far right in general have had an easy ride.

The two obvious examples that come to mind are the fiasco with Mark Collett being interviewed as the ordinary man in the street on Radio 1 and Channel 4′s ‘Young, Angry and White’ where the youth organiser of the National Front was presented as some misguided, troubled young man.

However, I have serious reservations about the underlying assumptions of this campaign. A failure to understand the way the BNP is gaining support and the impact this has on the process of normalisation and overestimating the ability of the media to influence BNP support will limit it’s effectiveness.

Firstly and most importantly, I think the campaign has got things the wrong way round. Favourable press coverage is a consequence of the growing normalisation of the BNP not a major contributing factor.

For understandable reasons fascist groups in Britain have generally got a pretty bad press since the outbreak of the Second World War. The BNP is no exception to this and hostile press coverage towards them has become a regular feature at election times.

Nevertheless, many fascist groups have used the press to win recruits and spread their ideas, either through the shock value of the ideas they espouse or taking advantage of journalists’ naivety about what they really represented. Combat 18 quickly learnt the value of the former approach in the 1990′s while the nice, moderate patriots of the National Democrats (who weren’t the old NF, honest) tried the latter at roughly the same time.

In this fascinating personal account of life in the National Front and the New National Front (the forerunner of the BNP) a former organiser describes how he combined both methods to generate large amounts of publicty for a march in the West Midlands that, in reality, they didn’t have the numbers to pull off.

Some far right groups still try this approach, with varying levels of success. The best example of it in recent years in the English Defence League’s amazing capacity to publicity when their marches involved a dozen blokes hiding behind police near a mosque in Harrow.

The BNP, however, do not rely on the media to build support and win recruits. For some years, the party has been following the ‘ladder strategy’ of taking power. This is not to say what the media prints plays no part in this but it’s not a very important part.

First outlined by National Front activist Steve Brady in the 1980′s (whatever happened to him?) the strategy envisages taking power step by step, gaining representation on a lower rung of the power ladder before moving up to the one above it.

This is what has been happening over the last decade. The BNP won its first county councillor last year in Burnley, where the party first made a breakthrough in 2002, and representation in the European Parliament after a decade of standing in local elections all across Yorkshire and the North-West.

This is the process of normalisation at work as the BNP become a familiar part of the electoral process for millions of ordinary voters through grassroots political work. They have achieved this in the face of the approach favoured by ‘Expose the BNP’. Formerly hostile press coverage is changing because people unfortunately increasingly regard the BNP as a legitimate part of the political process.

Without wanting to labour the point, it’s not because of overly favourable coverage from The Sentinel or the Barking and Dagenham Recorder that Stoke or parts of East London have become electoral strongholds for the BNP.

I think the best illustation of this argument is this article about the work of BNP councillors in South Oxhey (where the BNP had county councillor elected after first having representatives elected to Three Rivers district council):

TWO councillors from the far right British National Party (BNP) were entertained by a newly-formed community rugby club in South Oxhey yesterday.

The South Oxhey Rugby Club Exiles invited county councillor Deidre Gates, and Three Rivers district councillor Seamus Dunne, to share their post match drinks, and a game pie cooked in their honour at The Dick Whittington pub in Prestwick Road.

Mat Sharpe, who got the club off the ground at the start of the season in September, said: “If it had not been for the help given by these councillors, our club could not exist…

“South Oxhey is an area of high deprivation, and although there are five football clubs there isn’t much else for people to do for physical exercise.”

Anticipating criticism for accepting the BNP’s help – refused by the South Oxhey Community Choir – he said: “I am not interested in politics, but I know this club is a good thing for the community and I need help from wherever I can get it.

I’d be interested in seeing what supporters ‘Expose the BNP’ think would have been an appropriate response to this or what can be done about it. A rapid press release drawing attention to the convictions of a councillor in Burnley for football related violence? A link to the Youtube video of Nick Griffin spouting offensive bile on the Cook Report in 1997?

The second problem with the strategy of Expose the BNP is a shorter and more glaring one: what they are offering is nothing new.

We’ve been here before. The run up to last year’s European elections saw a huge campaign in the press and negative stories about the BNP making a regular appearance, particularly in papers like the Manchester Evening News. As Searchlight’s Nick Lowles notes anti-BNP stories were placed in the national press on a daily basis in the run up to the poll.

Whatever reason people attribute to Griffin and Brons election to the European Parliament, favourable press coverage was not among them.

The BNP have come to anticipate such campaigns and plan to undermine their impact. The BNP’s European election campaign last year which attempted to invoke the Battle of Britain, with the use of Spitfires, posthumously recruiting Churchill and plagiarising his speeches, was designed to wrong-foot opponents pinning the Nazi label on the party. Anti-fascists walked right into it because they didn’t have an alternative strategy beyond exclaiming that this was totally illegitimate because they were Nazis.

The motivations of the people behind ‘Expose the BNP’ are admirable, the results may be disappointing.

Further to this little story of the Tory manifesto announcing legislation which 

a) already exists; 

b) has been used by people in Bickerstaffe a while ago, we also have this little snippet from the Tory manifesto (p.53): 

[W]e will give parents the power to save local schools threatened by closure, allowing communities the chance to take over and run good small schools. 

No, sorry Tories, we’ve already done that in Bickerstaffe too. 

Five years ago, the role of Bickerstaffe Village Primary School had declined to around 50.  We were advised by the Council’s Education Adviser to live within our means (funding is more or less on a per capita basis) and reduce the number of mixed age classes to two. 

As parents and governors, we canvassed opinion and realised that if we did that some parents would take their children out, reducing the school roll into the 30s, and that closure would inevitably follow at some point. 

So we politely told the Education Adviser that we disagreed with her view, and on behalf of the governing body and parents I wrote a ‘recovery business plan’ seeking permission from the Education Authority to run a deficit budget for up to two years while we went about marketing the school and increasing the roll. 

We never did in fact go into deficit, and now have 82 children on roll, with an expectation  of around 100 in 3 years time.   

No drama, no need for new legislation – just sensible parent initiative and a sensible reaction from a sensible Labour-run education authority.   

The full story is here. 

In Autumn 2009, the newly Tory run education authority sent round a secret memo (over which the Cabinet member was sacked when it got leaked) setting out proposals for the closure of small schools, with precise details about the distance to neighbouring schools.   

Bickerstaffe school was on that list, but we are confident that with a growing roll, and a village wholly committed to the school, we will withstand whatever the Tory cutters throw at us. 

In Bickerstaffe, we’re organised.  The Tories could learn a thing or two from us.  

I’m not going to be doing a full review of the party manifestos.  There’s plenty of better read sites doing that.   In fact, I don’t think I’m going to be blogging much about the election; like Paul and Phil I’m starting to feel a bit blogged out with it all, and I’ve got more than enough drafting and designing of election stuff to do round my way. 

But I can’t let this wonderful little snippet go from the Conservative manifesto at page 75: 

[M]irroring our reforms at the national level, we will give residents the power to instigate local referendums on any local issue if 5 per cent of the local population sign up… 

Two simple points: 

1) This power to call a referendum has now existed for 38 years, in the form of the Local Government Act 1972 (part 3, schedule 12, para. 18, sub-paras. 4-5) and was used by the good people of Bickerstaffe, Lancashire (where I live) in December 2005 to force the council to hold a referendum on its proposed sell-off of public housing.  The current provision does’nt require 5 per cent of the population to sign up; it’s much easier than that. 

2) The planned Power of General Competence legislation, mentioned further down page 75 of the manifesto, will necessarily enable local authorities to ignore the outcome of any referendum, just as it would allow them to ignore any other legislation. 

Oops, Tories. 

Today the government used its manifesto to reaffirm its commitment to the construction of a high-speed rail link between Birmingham and London. 

I’ve expressed my doubts about the overall economic value of the project, but I can see the logic behind it, not least in relation to the road-building and airport alternatives.

The Conservatives, on the other hand have refused to engage with the proposals set out on March 11th, largely for fear of alienating voters in constituencies along the path of the proposed line.

However, the Conservative-supporting Sunday Times has risen to the challenge, giving prominence to the outrage felt at the proposals by one Lord Jacob Rothschild. 

His sorry story is that the proposed line will pass about a mile away from Waddesdon Manor, where he doesn’t live. 

Even more terribly for Lord Rotschild, the new line will need a viaduct  on his land about a mile away from where actually he lives at Eythorpe Pavilion, on an estate of 5,700 acres (one acre is about the size of a football field).

That’s right.  The line will pass a full mile away from the house his family owned until 50 years ago, but without encroaching on its 120 acres, and a mile away from where he currently lives, though not (if you look closely at the green boundaries on the map) through the parks and gardens as the Sunday Times suggests, but through the farmland he also owns beyond.

In fact if you look at the map the very same viaduct planned for Rothschild’s land will actually be built closer to hundreds of houses on the south western edge of Aylesbury, but that is not deemed worth of mention by the Sunday Times.

Anyway, Lord Rothschild’s got his planning consultants on the case, and as the Sunday Times notes, he “is likely to prove a formidable opponent”, lining up as he is alongside celebrity residents Fern Brittan, Sophie Dahl, and Ozzie Osbourne.

Meanwhile, a hundred and fifty miles to the North, and in a parallel universe, a council is proposing the extension of a hazardous waste dump with a ‘doubtful’ safety track record about 500 hundred yards from hundreds of houses on a Skelmersdale housing estate, with thousands more directly downwind (see plan on page 115). 

For some reason, these residents’ misgivings about the scheme planned for near them have not been covered in the Sunday Times.   I’m sure their hearts bleed for Lord Rothschild, though.

I am most grateful to Conservative blogger Iain Dale for doing the spade work that now allows me to highlight David Cameron’s rank hypocrisy, when it comes to the plans for the transference of longstanding powers away from the UK parliament and on to other bodies.

Iain Dale helpfully refers to David Cameron’s interview in today’s Sunday Telegraph with Patrick Hennessey:

Among the first things Mr Cameron wants to do, he discloses, is pass new legislation ensuring a referendum will be held in Britain if the European Union makes a major new effort to transfer powers to Brussels.

“I think what’s exciting about this is, that if we are able to do this, in a first Queen’s Speech, the other parties will be challenged to back it. I don’t see how they will be able to get out of backing it.”

This would presumably be the same Queen’s speech in which a Conservative administration would announce legislation, without any hint of a referendum, on the transfer of powers away from our ‘sovereign parliament’ and onto bodies which, unlike the European Union, do not even have their own constitutional basis.

I refer of course to the proposed Power of General Competence legislation, under which (at section 3, paragraph 1 of the draft bill):

Primary [parliamentary] legislation and subordinate legislation must be read and given effect in a way which is compatible with the power of general competence.

This is the legislation modelled closely, in an extra little dose of hypocricsy, on the Human Rights Act which Cameron himself has said he would abolish.

This is the legislation designed to allow Conservative local authorities to avoid meeting current statutory commitments set down by the parliament whose powers he professes now to treasure.

 Cameron and his Tories are hypocrites, constitutionally speaking.

Spot the key difference in these recent Tory election announcements and policy directions, which have been coming thick and fast since the election really got going?

Group A

 1)      Tax breaks for marrieds

2)      A neighbourhood army

3)      National Service

4)      Not too fussed about the digital economy bill (only 9 Tories turned up to vote)

Group B

5)      Against increased NICs for employers

6)      Against governmental oversight of takeovers by overseas corporations

7)      Against telling B&B owners they have to accept gay people under their roof

8)      Legislation modelled on the Human Rights Act to allow local government to do whatever it wants, even where it conflicts with existing law.

9)      Not too fussed about the digital economy bill (only 9 Tories turned up to vote) – again

Yup, you’ve got it.

All the ones aimed at individuals are based on the state intervening in the way people live their lives so that they conform.

Meanwhile, all the ones aimed at businesses and the state itself are aimed at allowing them to do exactly as they choose.

Freedom means something different if you’re a Tory.

When the Socialist Worker Party gets obsessed with the best way to pay down government debt, then you know the world’s gone mad.

 Here’s the SWP setting out why there’s no need to cut public spending:

The main parties claim we need to cut £167 billion to solve the deficit. Here Socialist Worker shows how we can raise almost twice that—without cutting any public services.

And it all seems very convincing for lefties; cut tax avoidance, tax evasion and make sure all the other tax debt is collected, for example and that £123 billion in the coffers already, against a total deficit of £167billion,with plenty more to come without touching a single public service.

The only slight problem we have here is that the maths are utterly, utterly wrong, because the deficit is confused with the debt.

The debt that would need paying off before we get back into surplus as a nation is not £167 billion, but around £1.3 trillion. It’s this figure that supposedly has the credit agencies and the bond markets worried, and which is forcing the government’s hand on public spending.

 As Giles Wilkes said when Johann Hari made exactly the same mistake:

This bespeaks a lack of understanding of the difference between debt (a stock) and the deficit (a flow)…..

£25bn [from tax avoidance] is a huge amount of money.   But you don’t ‘pay off’ a deficit.  Both are annual amounts – flows.   The deficit would be reduced by ~1.8% for each year if we got £25bn somehow, but the savings from zero avoidance do not accumulate to the deficit, they accumulate to the debt – the stock.  

The stark reality facing the SWP is that even finding double the £167 billion deficit, as they suggest they can, will not make that big an impression on the overall debt; if we want to do that, the alternatives are taxing, cutting spending, and exporting.

But the maths error is really beside the point.  The real shame is that this focus on HOW to reduce the gap between national spending and income within a manageable time frame has completely overshadowed the question which should precede it –  WHETHER we need to reduce the gap at all within anything like the timeframes being bandied about by both main parties.

The shame is that the need to do so has now  been widely accepted, apparently even by the SWP, even though there is no real evidence that we do actually need to.

Sensible rounded economist thinkers like Giles Wilkes recognise that the rush to close the gap has become almost self-fulfilling – we feel me must close the gap because we believe something awful will happen if we don’t, though Tory scaremongering aside no-one can quite put their finger on what it might be.   Giles refers to it as ‘deficit fetishism’, while pointing to the fact that interest payments on debt remain really quite manageable, and are very likely to do so.

Even the Irish finance minister, who has been busing pushing through swingeing cuts of the type that really do look like sending the country into a long term deflationary tailspin (and as a smaller country, in the Eurozone, there has been less leeway with the markets), thinks Britain has ‘breathing space’.

More radically, there is the widely ignored, but still highly plausible argument, that the country does not have much of a deficit at all; because the domestic private sector holds much of the public debt anyway, it’s simply that the money is being held in a different place (by grandparents with pension funds on behalf of their grandkids), and that actually that may not be such a bad thing.   

In this reading of the situation, there’s no great need to pay off the debt as soon as is being made out, with all the deflationary risk that that entails, and the best way to go about getting into surplus is to have governmental confidence that the bond markets will back a balance of trade-focused strategy, get stuck into funding higher education and research, and get making an honest living.

That’s not even that radical, is it?

Sadly, it seems to me, even the radicals down at the SWP appear to have forgotten what being radical is really all about.

The blog Stumbling and Mumbling has posted a short article on an alleged tendency of the rate of profit to rise , contradicting the Marxian argument about the falling rate of profit.

The results he publishes are not new, Marxian economists including myself were reporting 10 years ago that the rate of profit in the UK and USA had started to rise after falling for most of the previous 30 years.

For instance see here or there .

The interesting question is why this happened, Stumbling and Mumbling identify Thatchers anti-union laws and the opening up of China as factors. Marxian economist would not disagree with this, but the more interesting question is whether one can come up with a more general formulation of Marx’s theory of the rate of profit which deals with both the period 1945-1980 and the period since 1980.

The answer is yes, and it involves going back to what Marx wrote about over accumulation of capital — that the rate of profit falls when capital stocks accumulate faster than the rate of growth of the workforce. It then becomes possible to formulate a Marxian master equation of state for the rate of profit that not only is compatible with both the pre and post 1980 period, but also has real predictive value. This was done most clearly by Zachriah in his paper to the July 2008 Probabalistic Political Economy Conference available here .

One can also apply this theory to predict trends in the rate of profit about 2 to 3 years in advance.
The key point is that one has to look at the relationship between the share of profit that is reinvested and the growth of the working population. Countries like Egypt with a rapid population growth and low reinvestment rate have rising rates of profit, whereas Japan and Switzerland, where the reverse applies have falling rates. You can study this interactively at my website here.

The work of Zachariah showed that there is an equilibrium rate of profit governed by the rate of growth of the population and the share of capital accumulated. If capital accumulation is high and population growth is low, this equilibrium rate is low, and the real rate of profit falls to meet the equilibrium rate.

In the case of the UK, decisive factors have been the slowdown in the share of productive reinvestment in the post 1980 period which shifted up the equilibrium rate alongside this has gone the growth of the labour force made possible by the free movement of labour in the EU.

Over the longer historical period though, the world average rate of profit will be increasingly determined by the demographic transition in which birthrates accross most of the world are falling. This will produce a global slowdown in population growth, with a consequent global reduction in the world equilibrium profit rate.

In commonsense terms, labour will be in short supply relative to capital, which will strengthen the bargaining position of labour and weaken that of capital.

A key point will be when the Chinese working population peaks some-time in the next 15 years. This will shift the balance of social power within China, and in consequence, the threat of jobs being exported to China will diminish. Overall the tendancies that Marx identified, and which came to fruition first in Britain ( de te fabula natur), are now being played out on a world scale, and on a world scale, they will reproduce the rise of Labour that we experienced a century ago.

On the same day that David at my local paper, the Skelmersdale and Ormskirk Champion, ran a commendably full piece on my and other bloggers’ stance of Total Politics’ interviewing of Nick Griffin (not yet online), I listened to a report on Radio 5 Live (from 10 mins 15 secs in) and heard Though Cowards Flinch’s and Bad Conscience’s forecast about the media ‘mainstreaming’ of the BNP coming true.

The report concerns the release of Office for National Statistics figures on who has taken up new jobs, which had been willfully misinterpreted by the Spectator, and then picked up by the Daily Express.

The story has quickly died of as the twist put on the figures by the Spectator has been thoroughly debunked, but yesterday it was being portrayed by the Five Lives reporter as very important development in terms of the election.

So whom did the BBC editorial at Five Live choose as it’s first interviewee on the matter?  Yes, the presenter, Peter Allen, says:

So, first a comment from Simon Darby, the deputy leader of the BNP.  What did he make of these figures?

This, remember, is a story being sold as primarily about the general election, and one with a specific economic focus.  Yet the BBC chose as its prime interviewee a spokesman for a party which has no representative in the House of Commons, and which has very little to say about economic matters.

True to form, the deputy leader of the BNP more or less immediately stated that he was less interested in what he called the ‘spurious’ economic debate, and that we should instead focus our attention on the deliberate drive to ‘multiculturalism’ by the government.

No-one challenged him on the fact that he had changed the subject, that he had no grasp of economics, or that he was simply spouting hateful crap.  He was thanked for his time, and away he went, happy in the knowledge that a few more people might have bought into the Mad Mel lie of the great multiculturalism conspiracy, and that the BNP that was just telling it straight.

And there we have it – pretty decent evidence that the racist, lie-peddling BNP has been swiftly legitimized by the mainstream media, in excess of all reality of its actual gains in the democratic process, to the extent that it is seen as the first call of choice when a matter relating to migration policy is discussed.

Of course it will be impossible to establish the causal link between this new legitimacy and the legitimizing actions taken on their behalf by people like Iain Dale and John Harris, and less directly James MacIntyre, but I do hope that they and other journalists with similar simplistic conceptions, about how ‘exposing the BNP for what they are’ is the best way to defeat them, will quietly take a second look at the kind of media-fed monster they are helping to create.

Perhaps also this is time for the National Union of Journalists to stand up and be counted on this matter, by opening up a debate on whether its member journalists should or shouldn’t be acting in cahoots with media bosses keener on headlines than on a coherent journalistic ethic.

In the meantime, I think Paul from Bad Conscience, whose judgment on many matters I value, put it more pithily in a recent comment than I have ever managed , and what he says bears repeating:

Cheers Dale.

Griffin comes across like a twit, but a fairly normal one.

The gradual process of normalisation and legitimation continues. If anyone thinks Dale was “tough”, well fuck them. Saying “that’s bollocks” doesn’t constitute a tough interview. Griffin is allowed to peddle nonsense and lies on multiple counts.

In news that is likely to send shock waves through the Westminster Village-focused publishing industry, and possibly also some of the posh bistros in the immediate neighbourhood, Conservative opinion-former and magazine magnate Iain Dale has threatened to sack Total Politics magazine executive editor Shane Greer*, or maybe someone else instead, unless people really, really listen to what he has to say about the economy and things.

Dale, well-known as a ruthless business type quite prepared to put profit before the greater social good, made the threat under mild pressure from a sensible person, who had simply made the point that someone at the Financial Times with an actual understanding of economics thinks the Conservative position on employer National Insurance is ‘nonsense’.

Dale commented:

@AlbertoNardelli I run two businesses and employ a dozen people. Please don’t lecture me on business costs! More tax, fewer jobs. Simples.

The message seems to be clear.  If employer National Insurance contributions do rise in April 2011, then Dale will need to sack one or more people just to prove he was right all along, even though James Caan changed his mind as soon as he had a chance to read about what was going on.

We haven’t quite been able to contact Shane Greer for comment on whether, in the event that he is sacked, he will take Dale to an Industrial Tribunal for constructive dismissal on the basis that Dale was already planning  to sack him as a political stunt, irrespective of a whole range of business variables with much, much, greater significance than an increase in NICs.

Meanwhile, a major employer in Bickerstaffe, Lancashire, has set out his own rigorous and well developed case on the proposed national insurance rise:

I run a small business employing 8 people (the fact that I choose to take no profit from it is neither here there nor there).  Like anyone running a business, I work out what I can afford in the way of staffing on the basis of how much money is likely to come in, and how much I’m likely to have to spend.  NI is one small component of that calculation, and is not treated differently because it’s NI.  

I then have a choice, which our wise ‘business leaders’ seem happy to ignore.

I can, broadly, cope with extra costs by investing less in the future; I can reduce staff hours; or – lo and behold – I can pass on my increased costs to the consumer.  Bet they never thought of that.

Reducing staff hours, or staff numbers is certainly one option, but for me and for most employers, it is only one, and one which is taken only after other options are exhausted, not least because in real businesses staff skills and capacity are valued, and people running businesses realise that losing such skills can be something very hard to recover from even when the outlook is brighter.

Conversely, if things are going well, I have a choice of investing more in the future, lowering prices or increasing staff numbers and/or rates of pay.  In this event, the latter option goes up the priority list, as it does for most employers.  I want to employ more people, and if I can I will, and the presence of a small NI increase is not going to deter me any more than any other cost pressure.

* Though Cowards Flinch has no idea what an Executive Editor does, and whether Shane Greer is actually employed by Total Politics magazine at all or is just on the team picture for show, and we can’t be arsed to try to find out as this post is really just a cheap shot at Iain Dale’s economic illiteracy.  So there.