Though Cowards Flinch

Political Scrapbook have today written that Grant Shapps has flip-flopped over the chance to do something about payday lenders, even though he wrote a report slamming extortionate APRs just three years ago.

That’s true he did, but he didn’t say in the report that price caps were something he supported; instead he felt flooding the market with players would price out extortionate lenders, drive down costs and provide borrowers with value-for-money. In other words the market solution.

Elsewhere I have written about Shapps’ report:

In 2009 the then Shadow Housing Minister Grant Shapps opined that the lack of competition in the home credit market has meant that exorbitant rates of interest can be justified on the grounds that only very few businesses control the market. As Shapps puts it, 90 per cent of the Home Credit Market is dominated by just six companies.

So rather than through legislation, Shapps felt that six companies were keeping prices up, and that the real solution was to open up the Home Credit Market (which, actually, is also different from the payday loan market).

The problem of course is that this solution is bollocks. Shapps’ own, more considered, colleagues are only too aware of this. When I met Damian Hinds, MP for East Hampshire, he told me that even as a free-market economics advocate himself ‘Normal market rules do not apply here [in the Home Credit market]‘ – and that the rational consumer finds other motivations for paying over-the-odds for credit, such as being able to take out loans from their doorstep, which might otherwise look irrational to most.

Shapps has missed a trick with Stella Creasy’s amendment to the financial services bill, voting against her, but his naivety on the subject has been forthcoming.

During a recent event on social care, Barbara Keeley MP, Chair, All Party Parliamentary Group for Social Care, addressed an audience saying that the issue of social care, particularly funding, was a known issue among MPs, but nothing is being heard about it.

Further, they know it is an issue among the public themselves, particularly those who are often left caring for elderly relatives and juggling employment as well. Or even those who have to leave employment altogether.

Though, even in the age of internet campaigns, which really do work, not much is coming through on this subject. This is perhaps reflected in the weak plans by government to draw up a mere draft bill, which is rumoured not to even touch upon the glaring issue of funding – something which even with a cost cap, through the Dilnot review, will still see people spending a lot of money on the care they or their relatives receive.

There is another implication, that so often gets forgotten. That of the cost implications to unpaid, full-time carers. Dr Linda Pickard of the LSE put it in the following way:

Providing unpaid care to older people and people with disabilities is costly. Many unpaid carers leave employment and experience costs to themselves in terms of foregone earnings. However, initial findings from a new study at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) now show that carers leaving employment also involves high costs to the public purse. The study shows that the public expenditure costs of carers leaving employment in England amount to around £1.3 billion a year.

The implication thus being that if more money was put into social care, this would provide a counterbalance to the amount that is lost in tax receipts through people leaving their jobs to take up full-time care; not to mention the amount of money it costs employers to re-train other staff members on the back of this.

But sadly this is just another example of where short-term spending worries are given primacy over long-term savings and efficiency – or the spend to save model as it’s popularly known.

My ambitious appeal to readers is in tweeting this post to MPs, councillors and interested charities, social enterprises, private companies etc, to try and feed this issue back onto the desks of our elected senior representatives. Also it is an appeal to the Avaaz / 38 degrees-type campaigns that can engage the already-concerned public and raise this extremely important issue back to the top of the agenda again – before the problem only gets worse for social care.

President Obama coming out as supportive of gay marriage has caused quite a stir, not least within the so-called black community itself, which though largely Democrat has often been seen to have a more vocal social conservative strain within – something now challenged by the NAACP Board of Directors who recently passed a resolution saying gay marriage was a “civil right”.

As statistics from the Grio show, just 36 percent of black Democrats support legalizing gay marriage, compared to 61 percent of white Democrats”.

This brings up what Star Parker, the president of CURE (Center for Urban Renewal and Education), calls the Sunday-Tuesday problem – between the “biblical message the [black community] hears in church every Sunday or the big government liberalism they regularly vote for on Election Day Tuesday.”

Anthea Butler in the Religion Dispatches magazine recently sought to typify the reason why the issue of same-sex marriage is “so freighted for African Americans” – and to no surprise she says it isn’t simply about messages being relayed through the “Black Church”.

“Many enslaved African Americans”, Butler writes “were not allowed to marry, and after the Civil War, searched desperately to find their partners. Those who were lucky, married. Weddings were seen as a sign of prosperity, and joy for all in the community”.

So what’s the problem? Surely she knows black homosexuals were fighting in this struggle as well. She goes on:

when the black president says marriage is for everybody, straight or gay, and that it comes out of his faith, it elicits a visceral response from African-American Christians who have staked their spiritual and social lives on the institution of marriage… For them, hearing President Obama support same-sex marriage is sacrilege.

This for obvious reasons is not good enough. Butler is well-meaning, but she doesn’t even answer her own question. To be sure, this only explains why marriage is so important – we are simply to assume that its import is translated into hostility towards same-sex marriage through appeals to tradition. Something specifically formulated, if not reiterated, through the Black Church.

Another theory regarding the perceived cultural condemnation of anti-homosexuality in large parts of the black community concerns two things:

• that since black liberation theology and black cultural criticism concerns itself with what it perceives to be major problems within black life (namely the problem of white supremacy); and
• as Kelly Brown Douglas points out in her book Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective, “blacks cast homosexuality (as well as bisexuality, transgenderism, as well as other sexual practices) as a “white thing”, and not part of black sexual experience.

This notion that homosexuality is a “white thing” can even go all the way to the heart of the black male homosexual act itself. In Benoit Denizet-Lewis’ 2003 cover story for the New York Times Magazine about the so-called “Down Low” culture, he reveals:

Rejecting a gay culture they perceive as white and effeminate, many black men have settled on a new identity, with its own vocabulary and customs and its own name: Down Low (DL). There have always been men — black and white — who have had secret sexual lives with men. But the creation of an organized, underground subculture largely made up of black men who otherwise live straight lives is a phenomenon of the last decade … Most DL men identify themselves not as gay or bisexual but first and foremost as black. To them, as to many blacks, that equates to being inherently masculine.

Not only has there always been men engaging in secret sexual lives, in African communities there is evidence of homosexuality enjoying acceptance as a sexual alternative. Cary Alan Johnson in his book Hearing Voices: Unearthing Evidence of Homosexuality in Precolonial Africa, details the dynamics of accepted homosexuality in many African places, which can be typified as 1 of 4 types:

1-Type 1: between adults and youths (initiatory)

2-Type 2: between men and biological males who have “female“ or “feminine“ male status

3-Type 3: between men of different races or classes

4-Type 4: between mean of equal age, status and class.

As Johnson notes, “Type 2 behaviors were common among the Bara, Bitsileo and Tanala of Madagascar and transvestitism was usual, and in fact marriage to men provided instant status and an acceptable stake in the community for the homosexual male.”

Where these instances are forgotten, such as in the debates that are taking place between the so-called black community and President Obama, we might be as well to look towards Denizet-Lewis’ explanation that “the black community sees “homosexuality as a white man’s perversion”, even where that view is taken in the context of seemingly homosexual acts such as with the “Down Low” subculture.

But today, of course, this has gone far too far, and can certainly no longer legitimately be seen through the lens of slavery alone. Though there is no monolithic opinion, the black church and the black community is clearly, largely, condemning of all homosexuality.

What is clear is that their dismissal of Obama, and the fact they now feel let down by him, is in part due to the notion – which has been present for Obama’s whole presidency – that they feel like he is channeling white supremacist opinion, or even that he embodies this opinion himself.

Now of course with any other black male, accusing him of not only channeling white supremacist opinion but actually embodying it, would be silly – but let us not forget that Obama is of mixed origin. More than just fears of White definitions of sexuality, the issues that have arisen in black America this time have been compounded by an inability by some in the black community to accept Obama as a black person.

Since the publication of a small story in Sunday’s Observer, one Councillor in Medway – Cllr Tristan Osborne – has been on a one-man-mission to spread the word, and his disgust, at Medway Citizens Advice Bureau for their partnership with online payday lender Wonga.

It has caused no small amount of fuss around the Medway blog scene. Primett’s Perspective writes:

This stinks of a slick PR Move from Wonga.com, a business with a poor reputation that receives huge amounts of hostility from the press, from the public and of course from politicians (despite the Conservatives being all-mouth no-trousers on this) and perhaps they see supporting CAB Medway as an opportunity to say “look, we are socially conscious as a company and doing good work with the CAB” and secondly, it could even be implied that they have some sort of endorsement from the CAB.

Medway Labour have a release out from Cllr Vince Maple, Leader of Medway Labour Group, saying:

“The concept of undertaking this research for Medway is a positive thing, however, Wonga’s involvement in this is a gross error of judgement. I strongly question Wonga’s motives.

“Wonga are one of a number of payday lenders who continue to charge crippling levels of interest on their credit; with a business model based on people getting into debt. They market their product aggressively, often to the most needy and least able to pay back what they borrow; to people without any income at all, including students.

“They have no place being involved in project of this nature. If this research is to make a truly valuable contribution, it must be funded by alternate means. Otherwise, Wonga’s involvement risks delegitimising the whole project and undermining the validity of the research findings.

“Perhaps our three local MP’s could make approaches to have this funded independently by the Government’s Business, Innovation and Skills department, rather than by an organisation with a clear commercial interest in the outcomes.”

Cllr Osborne has blogged about it himself:

The CAB has rightly been held in high esteem by politicians and public alike for holding to a firm line; that these types of loan shops are predators in our community, leaches on society, and should be vigorously opposed at all levels. The CAB does immense good in Medway and has been working very closely on getting money from government; they are a fantastic example of good intentions.

…

However, make no mistake, Wonga is giving the money and paying for the service and that to them is small change for maximum benefit; legitimacy.  These types of firms are desperately seeking to legitimise themselves to the public and I would personally feel very very uncomfortable seeking sponsorship from this type of firm.

If I had to start from scratch gleaning gossip to write about, I’d imagine carefully constructed narratives using “sources” in order to give the illusion I was someone that insiders already go to – the illusion might well pay off to the extent that insiders do start sending me gossip. That’s how I would do it.

Anyway, enough about that. Here’s Dan Hodges’ latest piece for the Telegraph.

Today sees the release of a new collection of essays by the think-tank Demos called Iron Ladies, edited by Beatrice Karol Burks and Max Wind-Cowie.

I’ve skim-read through the collection, but one particularly interesting piece I found was the one by Tracey Crouch, the Conservative Member of Parliament for Chatham and Aylesford.

Crouch’s essay aims to show that the “Conservative party has changed so it is no longer simply focused on core policies and that it can be confident in securing public support to having an understanding of wider, modern day issues”.

Given the recent criticisms of the party, and of Cameron and Osborne in particular, that they are “arrogant posh boys” who have no idea what, among other things, the cost of a pint of milk is (which, if you’ve seen the film The Iron Lady – which as of last night I have – you will know Mrs Thatcher did, and she was not best pleased at how much it has increased. Her move on milk when she was PM was a bit hasty, but that’s for another time), it’s no wonder that up and coming figures feel they need to re-de-toxify the brand.

But on matters of personal debt, and how new conservative MPs climbing the ranks have a handle on it, there is hardly any better than Crouch to comment. I had the good fortune of interviewing her myself towards a book I’m writing, and she told me about her own financial mismanagement on leaving university. She has since called it “youthful stupidity” but her £15,000 credit card and store card debt was largely the outcome of living a lifestyle she couldn’t afford, which some of her peers could.

When I spoke to Crouch she told me that much of the problem today had to do with a kind of quick-fix “I want it all, I want it now” culture. In many ways this is correct, with products being available on the market only a short while before something else comes along, there is a race to purchase new gadgets before they are seen as out of date. But whether this is the cause of sky-high unsecured debt is another question.

As an article on soaring personal debt in the Telegraph put it “Average incomes have fallen by nearly 3.5pc in real terms over the past year, squeezing budgets even further as consumers have faced soaring bills.” We must not forget that not all debt is to do with financial imprudence, but a failure of our incomes catching up with rising cost of living today.

Elsewhere, Crouch does well to show the positive side of access to credit, but highlights the negative aspect which has seen a rise in what PWC has called the underbanked – those who still have bills to manage and cashflow problems to overcome, but are restricted in their access to mainstream credit products.

As Crouch rightly notes, this has seen “a rapid rise in [the market share of the payday lending sector] from £500 million in 2007 to £1.7 billion in 2010.”

To solve this, we need a radical rethink on how to properly regulate the credit market and curb the dominance payday lenders have over the lives of so many vulnerable people.

Although Crouch is thankful for BIS examining the idea of imposing a cap on the total cost of credit, this has been driven by yet another expensive research grant to the very worthy Personal Finance Research Centre in Bristol University – despite there already being a great wealth of supporting literature to back up the benefits of a cap.

I think Tracey Crouch is a good asset to politics, and her own experience has clearly impacted upon the way in which she views the dire personal debt outlook in the UK – a nuanced view that was perhaps missing when Cameron told us all to pay our debts back.

But I do think the coalition, which her party leads, has a lot to answer for. This is, after all, the coalition of child trust fund cuts and rollback of the social fund. I think Crouch would do better to be more critical of the government, it would certainly help her case.

If the Europeans are telling the truth in their claim that they have killed six million Jews in the Holocaust during the World War II – which seems they are right in their claim because they insist on it and arrest and imprison those who oppose it, why should the Palestinian nation pay for the crime. Why have they come to the very heart of the Islamic world and are committing crimes against the dear Palestine using their bombs, rockets, missiles and sanctions.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, December, 2005

Ahmadinejad doesn’t like that Israel’s foreign policy has been predicated on events that happened during World War II.

Mr [Vladimir] Putin declared that Russia had won the “moral right” to assert its foreign policy views because its people had suffered the most in the fight against Hitler.

In a clear warning to the West that he will oppose any attempt at military intervention against regimes such as Syria or Iran, Mr Putin declared: “The strict observance of international norms and respect for each nation’s state sovereignty and choice are an indisputable guarantee that the tragedy of the past war will never repeat itself.”

Vladimir Putin, May 9 2012 (£)

But I bet the Iranian President won’t mind this.

How not to dodge an egg

Just over 8 years ago I walked from my parents’ house In Pitsea, in Essex, to Wickford which is about 5 miles. Despite being so close there is no train route, as both places cover different grounds up to London, one via Stratford, the other Upminister, Barking and West Ham.

With buses there would have been two changes, and I didn’t have much change, so I just walked it.

The reason I did so was to go on my first political protest. The British National Party were having a “family” day and my various friends from Unite Against Fascism had organised for us to show our disgust at the BNP, who were meeting at Wickford train station before going on to Crowsheath Farm, near Ramsden Heath.

I was incredibly nervous. Physically shaking. Being inexperienced I thought I would get hurt. I was worried I would get arrested for no reason, or that local nasties would recognise my face and hunt me down.

It was never quite like that, in fact afterwards I felt relieved I went. So much so, in fact, that I joined protests at any point I could against the BNP.

Naysayers said the BNP were so small that it wasn’t even worth their time. It seemed fair play to me, protesting a small party, simply because of how dangerous they were. They took legitimate fears, and they modified them to suit their odious agenda.

Not only that, their efforts to pretend a respectable image were working. It was depressing, as I became voting age, to be given four options in the local council: Conservatives, Labour, Liberals and the British National Party.

Their schtick was that real working people in the area should be voting for them, all the other parties were for the rich. When I was younger I agreed with the latter part, but the former was a lie that I was worried would start to be believed as people became more and more disillusioned with politics.

But to me this was not an opportunity for me to be party political. I was not a member of any party, nor did I want to be. I was happy to work with Tories, socialists, liberals, anarchists, anyone who was willing to oppose the fascists.

This was one coalition that did seem to work, but the BNP were gaining ground and our work became harder.

As I’ve mentioned before, efforts to make the party more mainstream didn’t begin with Nick Griffin. Part of the influence for this was with 1960s BNP leader John Bean, even more so than with the French Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen (generally thought to be Griffin’s influence as well as closest European ally). John Tyndall, the man to take Bean’s place in the later years was an unreconstructed neo-Nazi who embedded the fascist image in to the BNP, leaving behind an important dividing line, made particularly more relevant by the decline in support for the National Front.

Griffin pretty much succeeded in his attempts to make the party seem more caring and less neo-nazi, which was extremely disturbing, especially as he had detailed these plans in the company of former KKK figurehead David Duke. The BNP could rely on getting councillors, pushing new recruits straight through as fast as possible, and trying to stand in as many places as possible. Richard Barnbrook became a member of the London Assembly giving them a boost, the prospect of getting a member of parliament was on the cards, and then the party managed to get two members into the European parliament.

But then they started to lose speed.

First there were the tensions within the party between those who were backing Griffin, and those who were backing Andrew Brons, Griffin’s colleague in Europe and enemy within. In a vote among members, Nick Griffin was re-elected as the party leader but only by the skin of his teeth – receiving 1,157 votes compared to Brons who secured 1,148.

I said in a blog post at the time that the “split in the party is deep and public, and I’ll be surprised if it survives this tense public display.” 10 months later and they still exist, but for how long?

Expert on the subject Matthew Goodwin published an article on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site recently called “The BNP is finished as an electoral force” going on to say in the article that after the recent local elections, which is where they seek to sway power, “the party leaves the contest facing the daunting realisation that it is no longer a significant player in British electoral politics.”

It was a wipeout. Goodwin notes “for the first time in 10 years there is not a single BNP councillor on Burnley borough council.”

The BNP lost every seat they contested.

At the very least, how can Nick Griffin remain the leader of that silly party.

And while we may think this was luck, the whole time there was concerted efforts by anti-fascists across the country that made sure the real BNP was highlighted. They aren’t respectable, they’re not good politicians, they’re out for themselves and their racist designs.

There is plenty to do, mind. For example in Basildon, which is equidistant between Pitsea and Wickford, the National Front did better than the BNP. Fascism obviously still haunts our local communities.

But on the bright side the BNP, who were once Britain’s most electorally successful far right party, “has just three councillors left from a high of 57 three years ago“.

Now to rid them of that last three.

If anyone was able to do it, it was Alain “Communism without Marxism” Badiou who could criticise Francois Hollande from the left. He has delivered.

The argument of the day is that Sarkozy has been pitching to the hard right in order to pick up the second preference votes from the surprising surge of Marine Le Pen. Orthodox opinion has it that Hollande is above this type of crass politics, and may go on to beat Sarko without appeal to “populist” politics.

But Badiou has it different – referencing the recent history of the French Socialist Party.

Badiou, in his recent article in Le Monde asks, who do we end up blaming for populism? Who do we end up blaming for the rise of Le Pen? The political establishment go on to blame the gutter vote. We, sadly, don’t get the public we want sometimes, and they vote to fit.

But this is only half the story, says Badiou. Who wrote off 1983 Renault strikers as “immigrant workers (…) agitated by religious and political groups which are based on criteria that have little to do with the French social realities”? Who said Le Pen speaks to real problems? It wasn’t the prols, it was Francois Mitterrand – the longest serving President of France, leader of the Socialist Party.

The intellectuals, Badiou goes on to say, creates the “populism” that sticks to the supposed “working class vote” to which the likes of Le Pen, Sarkozy, and, counterintuitively, the socialist party candidate, can and must appeal to.

The point, however, about the academics is neither here nor there. The push to the right is worth focusing on.

It’s a clear chicken and egg question.

There is a legitimate discussion to be had about migration, one which Badiou doesn’t help actually. For him it’s easy to push it aside as all xenophobic. This says more about the intellectuals than he cares to admit, and it’s an argument that the populist right often level against academicised leftists, that Badiou is leaving himself open to.

I don’t think Hollande has pushed anywhere near as rightwards as Badiou is acusing him of. Therefore I should be interested to see Sarko lose his Presidency after his push to the hard right, because this does a disservice to the theory that this is necessary in French, nay, European politics.

Badiou raises an important point, but he is off the mark. Hollande’s victory would be extremely important for the immigration question.

Have you seen the Sunday Times headline for tomorrow yet?

Interventions like this by Cameron, to offer olive branches to the right by losing something from his more “liberal” toolbox, confirms my long held belief that the Conservative party is held back, from being conservative, by a more “toxic” audience; indeed what I have called the party’s “toxic constituency”.

According to an Ipso Mori poll studying 2010/11 matters of political importance, immigration was more focal than the NHS, crime/law and order and unemployment, and leagues away from the 1997 general election run up where immigration was of very minor importance indeed.

In February 2011, from a sample of 1004 adults, 37% felt that immigration was a very big problem, 37% believed it was a problem, 16% felt it was not a very big problem and 5% felt it was not a problem at all.

Further, according to a YouGov poll studying the same period, 35% of those who voted Conservative in 2010 appealed to family values over anything else, 41% voted for them on matters of traditional values (compared to just 19% for Labour) and 28% on patriotism – while only 6% voted for the Tories appealing to tolerance and diversity (which, actually, Cameron sought to highlight).

The Conservative party – very much through fault of its own – is not conservative, but a big tent dominated by tubthumping angry old bastards.

I’m hardly surprised they don’t take too kindly to gay marriage. What I am surprised at is Cameron doesn’t want to challenge them – even from a conservative position.

But hold up! Should Cameron really be listening to the likes of Stewart Jackson MP, who pleaded with Mr Cameron to drop “barmy lib Dem policies” like gay marriage? As it has been noted, Conservatives were not wiped out by independents, the right, the far right, or the even fringier. They were routed by the Labour party.

If rumour is true, the Conservatives held a policy review last night at 11.00pm (though that is probably untrue since the mayoral election result didn’t come through until before 12). Regardless of when they had or have it, the proposals when they do are set to see the right get more than just olive branches, but bunches of fucking great bouquets. Bad move, Dave.