Though Cowards Flinch

The Tory leader of Blackpool Council on a regional BBC blog, saying why he went to London on Tuesday to argue that areas of deprivation should not be so bady hit by the local government cuts:

What’s particularly painful is the way the government is cutting area based grants which support poorer areas.

The Tory Leader of Blackpool Council, Peter Callow, says he doesn’t think the government has got its sums right or understands the position the town is in.

“I’m hoping any reasonable person would hear my plea and where I’m coming from,” he said.

A Tory ‘Ministerial Source’ on a Westminster-focused BBC blog:

My ministerial source explained that, during the Labour years, extra grants were given to poor areas – money, he said, “they were not due”. His point was that the Formula Grant councils receive from central taxation already includes additional funds taking account of the level of deprivation in an area. The new settlement, he explained, was simply “unwinding that process”.

There’s Blackpool, and there’s Westminster.   There’s a ”reasonable person”, and there’s a Tory minister.

Communities Minister Greg Clark is proposing greater transparency when it comes to local authorities contracting with the third sector.  In a letter to Local Authority leaders, he says:

We are proposing to require all local authorities to publish details about their grants and payments under contracts to the sector. This will help voluntary groups understand how services are currently delivered, and to assess whether they might be able to put forward a credible bid to run them differently and deliver greater value for money. 

 I’m a bit bemused as to why this only appears to apply to the voluntary sector, and will be writing to Mr Clark to ask him if he’ll be requiring the Tories at Lancashire County Council to disclose the details of their mega-contract with BT. 

So far, I have had been refused sight of the contract, despite the fact that I am an elected councillor of a Council planning to enter a partnership with the County Council which depends wholly on that contract, and despite the Information Commissioner’s very recent ruling in favour of disclosure of BT’s contract with Liverpool City Council.

It has been revealed, while Chancellor Osborne faces accusations of being soft on bankers, that 50% of Tory funds come from the City (£11.4m to the Tories election war chest in 2010). In a few days time we can expect to see a think-tank revelation that the Pope is a Catholic and a government report looking into the facts about bears shitting in woods.

But that aside, there are enough reasons to suggest the government is not acting fast enough, or effectively enough, to bring down pay differentials or save jobs – and one major example of this has been breaking headlines these past few days.

Lloyds Banking Group come under fire yesterday for axing another 200 jobs – this time in group operations, general insurance and wholesale divisions – which tallies up the total job losses to 26,000 since the recent merger of Britain’s biggest retail bank with HBOS.

One of the areas which will be most affected by this is Leicestershire, where up to 1,000 jobs will be axed over the next four years, including 600 in the next 12 months, in an attempt to make savings of £100 million.

Jobs are not being created in vulnerable areas meaning dole queues will only get longer.

All the while, it has emerged that Lloyds Banking Group Chief Executive Eric Daniels – who is due to step down next month – is to receive a bonus package of just under £1.5m – worth 225 per cent of his £1.035m salary.

In May 2010 Will Hutton was asked by David Cameron to look into cutting top public sector pay, and yet it’s quite clear that disparity in salaries is a cross-sector problem. Another bone of contention here is bonus pay. Cary Cooper of Director Magazine recently said:

… if bonuses, pension contributions and other benefits are not taken into account, there will be a big loophole available for lawyers and accountants to fill-and they will take advantage.

There are two main points to draw upon: if the government doesn’t want to seem soft on banking or on bonuses it ought to buck up and support a high-pay commission across the board, factoring in bonuses which could be used as a way around efforts to reduce high pay ratios.

The second point is that while a high-pay commission may be good, what use is it if people find themselves losing jobs. It is beyond contempt that Eric Daniels will receive millions while many Lloyds employers go jobless. The government has a lot of work to do on these issues, but at the moment it doesn’t look up to the challenge.

The nuts of David Cameron’s speech is as follows: it was badly delivered by the Prime Minister; it used vacuous terms no-one is familiar with like muscular liberalism; and though it chimed with things he has previously said, perhaps it was an error to deliver a speech addressing political and extreme Islam, in Germany, on the same day as the English Defence League marched in Luton.

Many bloggers and writers have been quick to point out that Cameron’s speech was ill-informed. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown for example said:

“Many of us Muslims would be with David Cameron if his speech hadn’t shown him to be selective, hypocritical, calculating, woefully indifferent to Muslim victims of relentless racism and chauvinism. He was speaking the words of white extremists but in posh.”

An Independent leader article explained that though the PM was spoilt for choice as to where he could’ve delivered a speech of national interest – Luton, Bradford, Birmingham, London – instead he chose Munich, which for Indy editors seemed “especially odd … since Germany is going through a spasm of intolerance towards its ethnic minority communities at the moment.”

Cameron’s use of the word liberal concerned others. Victoria Williams at Labour Uncut wondered if by “liberal” Cameron meant “forcing your beliefs onto others and excluding them from society if they disagree”.

However none of these examples really get to why Cameron was flawed in his actual sentiments. Moreover they seem less inclined to engage with how we oppose all forms of segregation and extremism, while being tolerant and multicultural without being culturally relativist.

Appealing to a sense of (muscular liberal) Britishness – which John Milbank yesterday noted for sounding far too ‘Cleggian’ and ‘Osbornite’ – was one notable error of Cameron’s. Most people oppose extremist tendencies of any stripe, but do so with a set of tangible ideas, which “Britishness” is not. Instead it is a term which can be twisted and turned into whatever meaning one wishes. Ideas which Cameron was quite happy to promote – universal human rights for everybody including women and people of other faiths; equality of all before the law; democracy and the right of people to elect their own government – are formed through political appeals to freedom and prosperity for all, border markings are irrelevant here, and serve only to trivialise.

There is nothing contradictory about multiculturalism and integration, but Cameron – if he was any kind of ideas man, transcending the Conservative Party’s recent past of patriotism for its own sake – ought to have spent less time trying to work out what Britishness means and reject what Nick Johnson, author of a recent Fabian Society report on integration, calls the “narrow conservatism that erodes diversity into a monolithic whole.”

Credit where it is due, Cameron does understand that diversity ought not to be forced, and individuals in a society should not be tenuously pigeon-holed in what he rightly referred to as “state multiculturalism” (though it’s fair game to ask what Cameron imagines can replace it?).

Finally the criticism levelled at Cameron’s speech that it was propaganda for the EDL (which Sadiq Khan accused the PM of) is way off the mark. The impetus here should be for leftist groups and anti-extremist movements who rally against the far right to make their opposition to fundamentalist Islam more vocal, ruining any opportunity the EDL have of saying Mr Cameron is talking their language. To be sure, nothing Cameron said on extremism in some communities should be to the contrary of what the left fights for, and yet instead of engaging with this angle, some are happier to accuse Cameron of propaganda and leave that void wide open for the EDL.

Cameron made a pigs ear out of his recent speech, but many on the left have hardly been accurate in their critiques.

As is well known, I’m just about the most zeitgeistful blogger around. Here’s another example.

Just this morning, I wrote about how Labour had started to talk up an adjusment to its position on high speed rail, taking greater account of the possible downsides around regional inequalities

A couple of hours later, this appears in the Birmingham Post:

Maria Eagle said Labour could not guarantee it could find funding for the high-speed line, if it wins the next election in 2015. And she announced the party would launch a full review of transport policy next month “with nothing ruled in or out”.

I was asked by a local journalist, aware of my interest in the socio-economics of trasnport, to comment on this Taxpayers’ Alliance press release about high speed rail being a total waste of money. 

To my astonishment, I find myself half in agreement with the press release, and in even more agreement with the report behind it.  So I replied to the local journalist thus:

Comment on TPA press release on high speed rail business case

This is, I think, the first time I have ever agreed with anything put out by the Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA), which has a poor track record in substantiating its claims.  Even here, the TPA’s summary of an interesting report is misleading, because it misses out what the report has to say about the “opportunity costs” associated with the proposed high speed rail developments.

The report itself, however, reflects many of the doubts I have already expressed (1) about the economic geography of highspeed rail project.

In particular, the report makes some reference to the risk of increased economic inequality within regions like the North West; while places ‘on the line’ may benefit in the shorter term, this could be at the expense of ‘off line’ places (in much the same way as we argue that huge shopping centres can kill off smaller town centre shopping).

Under the current plans, the benefits of highspeed rail as far as West Lancashire is concerned are doubtful, and I would much rather see investment in smaller rail infrastructure like a rail station for Skelmersdale and the reinstatement of the Burscough curves than in what might be considered a ‘big government’ vanity project.

It is this intra-regional equality issue which is driving Labour’s reassessment of its support for highspeed rail (2), and this is an reassessment I support.  Meanwhile, I’m continuing my lobbying work in support of less glamorous, but ultimately more beneficial investment in local schemes.

Notes to editor

(1) See my Feb 2010 analysis at Though Cowards Flinch  in which I say:

There is a real risk, I contend, that the building of a high speed rail link through a country which is already both quite densely populated along the length of the line, and heavily integrated, will actually have major negative unintended consequences; intra-regional inequalities will grow as those towns on the line ‘suck in’ prosperity, and the majority of the people living more than a few minutes travel from the few stations will end up not just worse off in relative terms, but perhaps also in absolute. 

There is also a reply to this article from Tom Harris MP, previously Transport Minister under the Labour government.  Tom is “careful not to overstate” the benefits of high speed rail, while remaining supportive of it.

(2) Maria Eagle MP signalled a rethink of Labour policy on highspeed rail in December when she said:

David Cameron has claimed that high-speed rail will narrow the north-south divide but Eagle, who represents the Garston and Halewood constituency in Liverpool, said the prime minister should reinstate regional development agencies if he wanted to boost northern England.

BBC website 5th February 2011:

Security minister Baroness Neville-Jones said when Mr Cameron expressed his opposition to extremism, he meant all forms, not just Islamist extremism.

Sun headline 5th February 2011:

Zero tolerance for Muslim extremists

The Tories’ new Communications Director doesn’t seem very good.

During my university days I engaged in frequent debates with a friend who identified himself as Sartrean. Where he maintained the primacy of choice in the individual, I took the position that Sartre failed to correctly characterise the part played by social determinism in our so-called ‘choices’.

One of the interesting elements of our debates was on the question of homosexuality – one certainty when undertaking a course of Sartre is that if choice is the primary culmination of being, then homosexuality be reduced to a mere choice – which most on the left would surely take exception to.

But Sartre’s position on this matter was rather more than the simple choice/bad faith conundrum. In his giant book on Jean Genet, Sartre recalls a time when Genet was caught stealing. He was 10 years old, an age where many start to organise a personal identity, and in a moment that proved to be rather formative, someone approached him from behind to point out that what he was doing was wrong.

For Sartre this moment meant that Genet’s personal identity was formulated in the negative. It wasn’t a positive identity created autonomously, but was forced upon him by that moment he engaged in theft.

Importantly for Sartre, it is an utmost disturbance having ones identity created from outside. When one aims on realising themselves, identifying who they really are, to have that process disturbed and moulded by the other – or in Sartre’s term “Being-for-others” – means that initially that individual is imbued with a bad faith – which specifically for Sartre is the instinct against personal responsibility.

His conclusion is that Genet’s passivity leads to his homosexuality. This for Sartre is unquestionably so. The contention is whether Genet will become an active or passive homosexual.

I myself am not in any authoritative position to comment upon whether sexuality is ultimately genetic, but by process of elimination I suspect it probably is. How sexuality is expressed, however, has the potential to be determined from the outside in the manner Sartre has suggested. But what I find interesting, particularly in regards to the debates I had, is that this genetic determinism is not ruled out for Sartre, even when his theoretical premise – from the heady anarchistic days of ‘existentialism as a humanism’ to the more Marxian years of a ‘critique of dialectical reasoning’ – is choice.

I’ll be back to word-based blogging here in a day or two, but for now I’m happy with this image if the Egyptian revolution.  It’s had plenty of coverage worlwide already, but I hope it becomes truly iconic.

By @nevinezaki: Christians protecting Muslims at prayer, February 2nd 2011, Tahir Square, Cairo

Lindsey German, formerly of Respect, now Counterfire, had this to say about Hamas on 17 July 2006:

whatever disagreements I have with Hamas and Hezbollah, I would rather be in their camp…they want democracy. Democracy in the Middle East is Hamas, is Hezbollah.

Why as a socialist would she say this, knowing that in their charter they state: “Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims”.

While watching the rolling news on Saturday, German wrote:

Most people in the Middle East have a combination of economic and political grievances; the task of the left is to build mass united movements which can address those grievances and take the struggles forward to challenging capitalism and imperialism across the region.

The Egyptians have made a brilliant start.

According to German, in taking to the streets against Mubarak, the Egyptians have made a “brilliant start” at uniting against capitalism and imperialism.

A pity that Hamas authorities have decided to prevent demonstrations in the Gaza Strip aimed at showing solidarity with anti-government protesters in Egypt.

Perhaps it’s time for German to withdraw her comments about Hamas.

(H/T Richard Seymour)