Though Cowards Flinch

Today will see schools, prisons and courts employees, represented by trade unions, take strike action against the government on the grounds that public sector workers will work longer while contributing more towards their pension pots.

Union leaders have responded ahead of today explaining their positions. Christine Blower of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) has called the action “regrettable” but “due to the position that the government has taken, unavoidable”. TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber pointed out that pay has been frozen for two years despite high inflation, and that the feeling is public sector workers are being punished for a poor economic outlook they had no part in creating.

Strike

It is beyond despair that Ed Miliband has dismissed the strike out of hand, given that he is the leader of the Labour party. More depressing is he’ll gain nothing for it; David Cameron will continue accusing him of being in the pockets of the unions, while the laughing tabloid press continue running headlines to suit.

Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, has hardly pledged undivided support for mass action, but what he has said is of interest. Commenting on Osborne’s strategy, he called on public sector workers not to fall into the chancellor’s trap. The trap being laid out is one, not too dissimilar from the bad snow episode – where if recovery appears slow, Osborne can raise the alarm that public sector workers are the cause.

It would seem that if Balls is saying this he knows it to be dishonest – therefore him and his party should not be giving undue credence to Osborne’s trap by withdrawing strike support.

To be sure Balls knows, and opposes, Osborne’s plans (he calls Osborne joining the Treasury another “fork in the road moment”). At a speech given at the LSE earlier this month (seen to counter the chancellor’s speech at Mansion House the day before) Balls noted that Britain’s slow recovery could cost families £3,300 by 2015, as well as leaving Britain £58bn worse off. The economies in America, France and Germany have all returned to pre-crisis levels, whereas Britain is still below that by 4%.

Commenting on recent ONS figures for growth, Balls said “These final figures confirm that in the six months since George Osborne’s spending review and VAT rise the economy has flatlined and the recovery has been choked off.”

The former children’s minister can see the risks, has been keen to point out that this is ideological (or what William Keegan calls Osborne’s “political straitjacket”) and so should respond in turn by supporting strike action, while preparing to brush aside excuses given by the chancellor for possible poor economic recovery.

What Recovery?

Esther Armstrong writing for Interactive Investor yesterday said “This was supposed to be the year economies the world over got back on track.” In fact George Osborne was hoping the whole mess would be sorted by now, but his inability to change tack through fear of looking weak has meant the British economy is shooting below target (indeed Jonathan Portes, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research and former chief economist at the cabinet office, was reported saying “you do not gain credibility by sticking to a strategy that isn’t working”).

The Office of Budget Responsibility (OBS) has downgraded UK growth projections for 2011 three times now, while we also face a wave of what Duncan Weldon has called “consumer recession”.

Osborne himself admitted that recovery will take longer than he expected, but this has also been compounded with the flatlining of many low and middle income earners. In fact real wages have fallen for the last 17 months and are likely to do so until 2013 – earnings falling below inflation does nothing for consumer confidence, and as Chris Dillow noted (as one of the differences between 1981 and 2010) the ability for people to run up personal debt through loans, in turn offsetting the decline in public spending, is a privilege (if you can call it that) we cannot enjoy today while banks are reluctant to lend.

If Osborne wasn’t so stubborn about saving face, he might have listened to Ed Balls’ idea for a temporary cut to VAT, which would instantly lower inflation, increase real wages, be as easy to implement as to reverse while the cost to do so is way under borrowing forecasts (the former being around £12-13bn versus the latter of £40bn). But alas the horrible show must go on.

What do we have to lose in striking?

In spite of proper Labour support, strike action is necessary. Unions are the only bargaining chip available to the workforce, and the government have been very clear they are not listening.

The damage being done by the cabinet of millionaires (whose pensions, along with other MPs, even after changes “will be among the most generous in the country“) must be challenged. As a Labour party member I’m loathe to say this; but we cannot wait for the opposition any longer – this fight will come from the bottom up, from those most affected by Tory/LibDem bullying, and it is high time this battle was won. This country will no longer be walked all over by the undeserving rich.

Something about the Conservative tradition has been lost as time has passed, namely in that Edmund Burke was not simply against the French Revolution per se. Instead Burke was positively for the Monarchical tradition that preceded him, pleading at revolutionaries to explain why they were going to put into jeopardy a system of governance that had the benefit of tradition, for a new experimental system, benefits of which were not entirely known.

The knee-jerk opinion that Burke was simply a thorn in the side of revolutionary change has normally been the preserve of liberals, but the Conservative phobia of experimentation with evidently useful, treasured and existing elements of society has clearly been overturned by Andrew Lansley, the UK health minister, and his new health bill. So much so in fact that Liberal peer Shirley Williams declared her opposition to what she called the “untried and disruptive reorganisation” of the NHS, back in February.

Yesterday, during the Liberal Democrat Spring conference in Sheffield, party members (still able to change policy) voted for an “extensive and radical re-write of the government’s NHS bill”.

Williams, along with former MP Evan Harris, “tabled calling for proper accountability and safeguards against privatisation” which has thankfully paid off, and not without support from party leader Nick Clegg who accepted the “rebel” amendments.

What this will do in the short term is create deep ruptures within the coalition. The Liberal Democrats, and Nick Clegg – who has vowed not to let the “profit motive drive a coach and horses through the NHS” – have sent a message to the health minister saying that they do not support the inclusion of “any willing provider” in the NHS. But as Paul said recently on this blog, proposing amendments to the health bill may not stop the coach and horses so soon. The backdoor attack on the NHS:

has been in the form of the abolition (in 2013) of Primary Care Trusts, and the establishment of three waves of GP commissioning consortia, already covering 35 million people in England.

This has created the space in which most GP consortia, who have nothing like the capacity to commission their own secondary care services, will buy in what the commissioning PCTs used to provide.

This time it won’t be the PCTs who provide it, but private sector health management firms like Capita, Dr Foster and the US giants like McKinsey, who are already working with 25 consortia.

Sure, some ex-PCT staff will get jobs in these management firms, as their technical understanding of secondary care contract development and monitoring will be needed, but little will remain of the PCT’s public-health oriented, public service ethos.

Though many of us are unsure what will happen if the coalition collapses, we hope Lib Dem rebels pull something out the bag to shake things up for good. Many people I know were hoping for the floor to fall in over tuition fees, but to no avail. Hopefully enough courage from the Tories’ orange bedfellows will be plucked to tear apart this horrible political mess once and for all.

Perhaps even the British Medical Association will pass a vote of no confidence to really bollocks things up for Lousy Lansley. But amid all celebrations that the majority of Lib Dems have dealt an important split in the coalition, we must still remember that the pressure by the Tories to pursue round-the-back privatisation to the NHS extends further than this new bill.

(H/T Alex for information on the BMA)

There’s something to the Take That song I heard on the radio just last night, which goes “They say nothing / Deny everything / And make counter-accusations”, referring to ”Kings and Queens and Presidents / Ministers of Governments”. Perhaps from Take That it’s just a catchy line – I doubt Robbie Williams has had a serious political thought since he was sixteen.

But the whole song, entitled “Kidz” seems almost custom-built for a video of the recent violence between police and students in London, as a result of the Conservative-Lap Dog coalition attempt to finally demolish whatever vestiges of equity remain in the education system. Everything fits if you just add in Vince Cable-and-assorted-others who got nailed in the Telegraph sting to fit the lines quoted above.

Cable has come out to condemn the Telegraph for demonstrating that the Lib-Dems are inveterate liars, saying one thing in public and another thing in private. His rationale is that the poor showing of the MPs who fell victim to the sting threatens the constituency-MP link. One wonders what state he thinks that link is in when MPs habitually lie to their constituents. Just a thought.

It is some indication of the stage I’ve reached that part of me wants Vince Cable’s head on a plate. Literally.

There is something righteous and eminently admirable about someone who takes up his position honestly and defends it rationally. This cannot be said about the Lib-Dems who have been exposed by this little sting. The worst of them were prepared to court privilege and position by saying nothing in public whilst expressing misgivings in private that would endear them to those facing the business end of this government.

So kill them all. What would we miss, exactly?

Of course the majority of me is governed by intellect and not instinct. I value human life. I also appreciate that these people aren’t entirely responsible for their actions – they are fallible individuals placed in a system which is organised from the top down, with the Prime Minister and his coterie wielding immense patronage, and to that extent it is the anti-democratic system which is fault.

There’s also the part of me which doesn’t want to simply disregard the bourgeois-democratic system as so many turkeys turning up to vote for Christmas and sees instead that these people were elected, however flawed the system. If people cared enough, they could vote for someone else, whatever inertia is lent to such change by other elements of the political system.

What pains me the most is the faux self-righteousness evinced (geddit?) by Cable in his attack on journalists who actually did their job for a change and showed up the penchant of certain MPs to act completely different in government and in private. It is reminiscent of the position taken by some MPs when their expenses came under intense scrutiny and I can’t help but feel that it results from a sense of entitlement.

Do these people believe they have some god-given right to govern, and that what is expedient for them must ipso facto be the right thing to do?

Meanwhile there are people who feel they have to riot and burn to have notice taken of them. Is it then too much to suggest that these two elements are directly related to each other, or born from the same root cause?

Recent commentary by Liberal Conspiracy and the New Statesman on the Con-Lib “u-turn” over whether or not to abandon free milk for nursery school kids seems to have missed how suspicious the whole thing looks. Or maybe I’m being overly cynical.

Why do I think it was a stunt? The evidence is circumstantial at best, and requires the addition of a deep sense of skepticism as regards the government’s relationship with the press. But I’ll do my best to present it.

The letter that health minister Anne Milton sent to the Scottish executive is declarative, that there is a Tory proposal to scrap free milk for the under-5s. It doesn’t waffle, it doesn’t suggest this is a trial balloon. It says that the Tories want to press ahead with it and want the opinion of the other three home-nation governments.

A timeline for the transmission of information from government to government is as close as August 18th.

Why does this have an impact? Something as controversial as this will have had higher approval. It doesn’t have the feel of an errant minister floating tentative ideas, which is what Tory spokesperson Stephen Dorrell subsequently claimed. So either the Tories were genuinely proposing this or it was floated in order to be smacked down.

There are plenty of reasons to do this. Importantly, it defies a Thatcherite precedent of cutting school-age milk, and is a sop to legislation that formed part of the original welfare state (a fact mentioned in both the letter, where such a mention feels oddly out of place and in the subsequent retraction by more senior Tory figures).

Anne Milton’s letter presents justifications typical of both Tory Right and Tory Centrist thinking. Fiscal discipline must come first, runs one line of argument, and it would be cheaper to do something else (the efficacy of which, the letter admits, is untested). The second is that universal measures are inherently unfair – what money is spent should be targeted only at the poor. This is a principle New Labour held to also.

David Cameron slapping down these arguments is a bone to the Liberal Democrats at a time when their members and backbenchers are unsettled, as the impact of cuts become clear and economic perspectives are revised downwards.

This is why the program’s status as part of the original welfare state is key, and, if one had a suspicious mind, why it is mentioned prominently by Milton and Dorrell: Lib-Dem figures (e.g. Ms Featherstone) like to make a song and dance about the fact that Beveridge was a Liberal and it was his eponymous report (not Labour’s massive landslide victory) which was the basis for the welfare state. Left-Lib-Dems have the same affection for this as the actual Left. Defending it is a Good Thing, in their eyes.

Dorrell’s phrasing in explaining the u-turn seems to endorse this view; it is heavy on allusions to protecting the least well off etc. If it does bolster Lib-Dem support, it’s a tactically smart move – and incidentally, from the point of view of any Lib-Dems inclined to take this view, allows them to continue pretending that they can blunt the worst Right-wing excesses of this government simply by being visible on Cameron’s political radar.

I certainly don’t buy Mehdi Hassan’s view at the New Statesman that the reversal was a “humiliating…climb down”, and that is one reason why. Another reason is that the climbdown happened too fast, it was too pat. The BBC article was up for maybe an hour before it was amended to include the turn-around.

Perhaps I give the Tories too much credit, but without a whiff of opposition having time to develop, this policy is suddenly dropped. I don’t think the Tories are gun-shy just yet. The long list of protests currently in planning stage will prove that. Thatcher’s approval ratings see-sawed with the wind but that government pushed onwards.

Milton’s letter even mentions that opposition is expected from “media, parents, nurseries, childminders and the dairy sector” as though lining up exactly the justification that Dorrell subsequently uses to explain the u-turn; too much moo for too little milk, as it were. It feels too neat to be the sort of gaffe which Labour figures like Ed Balls are jumping up and down about.

The only element that I can find to substantiate the view that it was a gaffe was the reaction of David Willetts, who was described by the BBC as “floundering” after being informed live on air that the measure had been ruled out, just while he was defending the measure as one of “a whole range of option”. Far from floundering, Willetts too made an appeal that would likely sound good to Lib-Dems, affirming the retention of free milk as “progressive values”.

On the other hand, the vast weight of the political class disagrees with me, it seems, and they know this stuff better than I do.

I am not here addressing a long treatise against Hobbes’ thesis of barbarism which can only be overcome by sacrificing freedom to the state. Such a theoretical work must wait until I have more time. Yet in discussing with a Liberal Democrat friend the role of the state in certain matters, I feel obliged to commit some thoughts to writing.

As mentioned in a previous article, Nick Clegg has recently come out to declare that the state should ‘back off.’ The examples which he gave were primarily education and health care. In this line of argument Clegg follows a long line of late 20th Century politicians from the American Christian evangelists (and their allies in corporate America) to the left wing No2ID campaign.

It is the ‘right wing’ attacks upon the role of the state that concern me most at the present time. As regards both health care and education, the reforms which guaranteed everyone free secondary education free from indoctrination and free health care were pioneered by those nominally in charge of the state. Those changes seem to have been the high-water mark of the left wing movement in Britain.

In the USA, the period opening with the Roosevelt-Truman Presidency and a Congress which even had socialist independents in the Senate and closing with Richard Nixon was the high water mark. During these years even the conservatives nominated for the Supreme Court like W.E. Burger delivered judgments on things like abortion, domestic surveillance and desegregation which would today be considered liberal.

No one denies that the left – as it was traditionally seen – is in retreat almost across the board in Western Europe, the United States and other developed nations. Many who now currently rank themselves as ‘centre left’ (but whom the rest of us see as somewhat ‘centre right’) see this as a good thing, a modernisation which was inevitable. In Britain, so thought the leaders of Labour; Kinnock, Smith, Blair and now Brown.

The rhetoric of the last two particularly mirrors a lot of the nonsense the Conservatives started in the 1980′s about choice. Back then it was ‘choice’ in education and it masked the reintroduction of selection by the back door and the marketisation of education. For the Conservatives, the rhetoric hasn’t changed. One must only look at the Reform think tank.

Yet the worrying part of this is that since what has traditionally been seen as the two sides are using the same rhetoric and are basically tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee in terms of policy, there is no one defending the gains the British people achieved back in the 1940′s. The conclusion must be seen that the low water mark hasn’t been reached – and now the third and final party has thrown their hat into exactly the same ring with exactly the same rhetoric.

When the state withdraws, those with economic resources that might be brought to bear step in. As this usually means that capitalists, religious organisations and so forth move in, the state has often formed the last bulwark of the left on matters such as education and health care. In the US, where the constitution prevents the withdrawal of the state from education, the response of the right has been to denounce the public school system – particularly from a Christian standpoint.

No party is now defending that bulwark. All are calling for it to be rolled back, and for a greater role for voluntary organisations. Has anyone bothered to consider the effect that all this might have in the medium-to-long term? In the US, the inability of the left to reorganise the Democratic Party and find a stance which doesn’t involve looking ashamed that the state does anything has seen categorical roll backs in welfare etc,

This causes the very thing which the Democrats don’t want – more people feeling vulnerable and seeking out ideologies like fundamentalist Christianity which will happily point to ‘the enemy’ and declare that all woes can be ended by destroying that enemy. The enemy for them is the ‘liberal intelligentsia’ with its ‘homosexual agenda’ and so forth and their masking of their hatred of Christianity with a feigned ‘tolerance.’

I do not source these because you can hear them ad infinitum by looking at anything by Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson or other similar talk show hosts whose audiences run into millions.

With Britain, the situation will always be rather different because there is no history here of widespread, mainstream Christian evangelism. Necessarily, therefore, the same agenda must cloak itself in different robes. In the US, corporate America disguises itself as Christianity, funding huge creationist museums and churches and TV programmes etc which feed their audiences the lie that welfare causes domestic abuse, the homosexuality is promulgated by state schools against the will of parents etc.

There have been similar instances here but this is a society that, as a result of religious apathy, has become much more secular and less responsive to such motivations as the USA. We also have a much more active, powerful left wing movement in the trade unions and their affiliated bodies – a movement which itself prevents the spread of the same hope-conquering despair that is emergent across the former industrial belt of the USA.

The word ‘choice’ is therefore used repeatedly as a bludgeon until anyone who listens to Radio 4 can only roll their eyes every time they hear a Conservative speak about the role of the state. Nick Clegg is just one more to add to the eye-roll list.

One must ask the question, how long till all the judges on the Federal Bench are evangelical Christians? How long until not just a hundred and sixty Representatives are ‘saved’ but three hundred? Britain is not so far along – de-industrialisation never hit this country so hard as it hit the United States. Yet with the extension of private sectors in education etc, how long til we finally crowd out the bulwark which the state forms and launch ourselves down the same path as the USA?

We should always remember that the most farseeing of capitalist bosses see the advantages is wrapping themselves in things like religion and promoting religion through education. Promoting ideologies which are hostile to critical thinking means less pesky workers criticising – and those that do not conform can be denounced as unchristian or unpatriotic or un-whatever other ideology the capitalists cloak themselves in.

That is the almost certain result for Britain of these constant and persistent attacks on the role of the state in matters such as education.

It seems that Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has joined David Cameron in pinching leaves from Tony Blair’s communitarian hymn sheet. Yesterday in a speech to Lib Dem activists, Clegg declared that the state should back off. [1] From education to health care, the gratuitous binge of attacking the role of the state heralded the anticipated move rightward in the aftermath of Clegg’s victory.

Most of what Clegg is talking about seems almost meaningless. His attack on ‘excessive’ regulation of schools seems almost paranoiac and his support for ‘Free schools’ seems to have little which differentiates it from New Labour. The demand that patients be treated free, privately, if they exceed a certain waiting time on the NHS seems the logical free market capitalist extension of paying private clinics to do NHS work. That’s another New Labour idea.

The concept of giving patients their own personalised ‘budget’ for treatment through the NHS seems to me a few steps from undermining the whole point of socialised medicine. Rather than the efficiency achieved by central planning, Clegg’s idea will create new dilemmas for patients which otherwise they wouldn’t face. Attaching a price tag to treatment (which they would have to do, in order for someone to expend an individual budget) is only a few steps short of asking individuals to pay for it. Or, knowing the piecemeal approach to the dismemberment of social democracy, asking individuals to pay for the most expensive treatments first…and so on.

I’m not doubting Mr Clegg’s ideological commitment to the course he proposes, but it really highlights the walking contradiction that forms the Liberal Democrats; and their activists have the gall to attack New Labour for selling out to the Tories!