About half a year ago on Question Time the question was raised whether it is right to point out Osborne's exceptionally privileged background and assets. Every panelist (including a Labour minister and Ian Hislop) deferred to Osborne pointing out that it is not 'his fault' (is the same 'argument' used to explain systemic poverty?). But I think it is obvious that this lies at the heart of the debate.
This budget and its ensuing cuts will hit the poor the hardest, along with areas that don't directly 'make money' (education and the arts), so it is not at all the case that 'we are all in this together'. On the contrary, Osborne et al have probably never had it this good - rich, and now in power too!
The idea that the Liberal Democrats will somehow soften the blow has also evaporated. Until the election, it somehow went unnoticed that the parliamentary party - particularly the frontbench - is even less egalitarian than the Tories (quite a feat!). Not only have they changed their minds on the timescale of cuts (now, and not as they had campaigned for: later), but they have also reneged on yet another election promise of not raising VAT (Is there any major pledge that they have stuck to? I cannot think of one.).
Then there are these 'tough choices' and the 'pain'. To paraphrase Tony Judt, the way it has been presented in the media is the wrong way around. 'Tough & pain' would mean the ability to endure pain, not to inflict it, as this multimillionaire government is now doing. Shedding crocodile tears about the 'pain we are all going to share' will not do and is cynical beyond belief.
But the media are going along with this entirely. There is no real questioning of their position in using such rhetoric, less still of the political, ideological, and economic reasoning behind further dismantling the British public sphere.
Perhaps the UK (Europe?) has to go far deeper into this vortex of collective stupidity (ironically enough, of fetishising individualism) before asking constructive questions about culture, society, and solidarity.
15 comments:
'(along with the other 22 millionaires in a cabinet of 29)'
It is remarkable statistic isn't it? I read a blog on Cif recently that said that 1 in 5 of Tory MPs get farm subsidies. I thought this was just a Cifism but it also seems to be true.
I'm not the class warrior I once was Olching, but what a gap between people and their rulers.
1 in 5 of Tory MPs get farm subsidies.
I didn't know that. What an indictment of British society.
It's very simple, I think, Edwin: If you smell a rat with the current make-up of the government (indeed of society) then I suppose that makes you a 'class warrior'. Somehow, privileged individuals and groups have managed to make their image 'post-modern' and cool (note how most frontbenchers are no longer racist, homophobic, or even sexist in the conventional sense (yet of course sustain hierarchies in that respect)) and so pointing out obvious inequalities and unjust social and economic hierarchies is seen as being 'chippy'.
Hello Olching and Edwin, excellent article.
Richard Murphy's tax research website has just pointed out that by the end of this Parliament, multinationals (after allowances and relief) will be paying an effective income tax of below 20%- lower than the basic rate of income tax, lower than VAT and lower than the rate charged to SME's.
As well as the poor or low income savers as is disingenuous term, there is no regulation in place to prevent irregular and high risk business practices. Additionally, as many as 750,000 state sector jobs could go with all the knock on effects this will have in the delivery of an effective civil society.
It's an act of wanton vandalism on the country. Something has to give at some point and as the real cuts are implemented (not the ones for public consumption displayed in the 'emergency budget') I do wonder what the short term future holds.
But of course to argue the case for SME's as well as the poor still makes you an unreconstructed Dave Spart Trotskyite in the eyes of the popular meida and the creatures whi inhabit CiF.
@Duke:
I agree entirely. The political discourse has shifted so far to the right that even basic notions of ironing out inequalities are met with derision or, as you put it, with a 'reds under the beds' suspicion.
It's an exceptional and unfortunate set of circumstances that has let this coalition wield the axe on fibre of this country; don't forget, the election results didn't endorse this at all (which leaves a residue of hope, though it's important not to let this neoliberal madness strangle political discourse over the coming years).
Hi Yiur Grace, hi Olching - here is the link to the 1 in 5 Tory MPs getting farm subsidies blog (who says Cif is useless)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/17/common-agricultural-policy-cap-rotten-system?plckFindCommentKey=CommentKey:4d354128-f517-45b5-9f6e-0b429d5841b7
I found this gobsmacking. I kind of assumed that Tory MP were now all, I dunno, car dealers and estate agents, but as someone once observed, the landowners know to protect themselves.
Channel 4 News did point out the discrepancies between Lib/Con pledges and Lib/Con reality but you're right-- no-one in the media seems to see the big picture-- the rolling back of the state and all the rest of it.
How were otherwise law abiding Christians able to justify slavery? In precisely the same way that today's power mongers sleep easily whilst enslaving the nation in "an act of wanton vandalism on the country" (thanks Duke) in syphoning wealth upward to themselves...
To a Tory landowner or a Corporate power junkie (the latter characterised by being as busy as the former is slothful) the destruction of civil society today is as reasonable as enslaving of Africans back then...
It's a terrible indictment of the failure of what we (laughingly)refer to as democracy that nothing has changed...but understandable in as much as the driving force is the same...a dangerous combination of power being overly concentrated in a micro-culture separated from greater society and driven by a market mentality...
As far as media goes I guess they are both complicit and entombed...when capitalism was really beginning to get a head lock onto society, schools were heavily pushing the notion of timeliness and punctuality...in the US they had a range of school books in the late 1800s that literally equated being on time with godliness...obviously this was done to deeply inculcate hourly work rate mentality on the masses but the point is that what what Bernays called the "invisible government"...a union of PR and press and advertising and especially television that utilises the power of broadcasting to manipulate opinion is as much in evidence today as it ever was...
So it's expected for media to be complicit because to some degree that is it's role but also entombed because as Chomsky points out in "Manufacturing Consent" the individuals who rise within media corporations begin to exercise self censorship in order to achieve their positions...and round and round it goes...
The worry for me is that there is no reason why getting further into the vortex as you rightly say olching is actually going to lead to any kind of enlightenment on how stupid we are being...
And another worry is the accelerating pace of the exploitation because "we" really have no possible way to counter it...there is no structural process to alter course available...
I posted this on cif the other day (on a thread by the dreadful Tim Montgomerie)and perhaps it fits here as well:
I had thought, over-optimistically, that the near meltdown of the global financial system they had created, avoided only by massive state expenditure, would teach these neo-liberals the error of their Chicago School ways. Instead, they now seem intent on applying their failed doctrine as the solution to the problems they have created
So I'm beginning, rather pessimistically, to think that the only way the lesson will finally be learnt will be to let them cut everything in sight and see where that ends up. If, as they claim, there is plenty of wasteful 'fat' to be trimmed and, when the scalpel has been wielded a new age of prosperity emerges then I suppose they will have been proved right. But what seems more likely is that they will re-create all the problems of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness (as the Beveridge Report put it) - and all that flowed from these things - and we will then, in turn, have, god knows how, to re-create the social democratic state that significantly alleviated them.
Unfortunately, the majority of us are going to be the guinea pigs in this rancid experiment - in that sense only we are all (or most of us) 'in it together'.
Peter
I read your brilliant post on the appalling Montgomeries waffle and I thought it was spot on then...
...except where we might disagree is on the point of lessons learnt...I've reached the opinion that these people are happily engineering the "problems of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness" and they frankly don't give a flying fuck about these consequences...in fact the horror they create reinforces their prejudice and bolsters their micro-cultural self importance...
Lester
Yes, probably right. But I suppose it is a question of where the balance of opinion lies at a particular time. Those free market ideologues never went away, and are ultimately unteachable as you suggest, but, for at least a period, they went out of fashion because the broad sweep of intellectual and popular sentiment was against them. What mobilizes that sentiment? The sad truth seems to be: sufficiently widespread suffering. Was it Lenin who said: 'things have to get worse before they better'?
The neo-liberal right is in the ascendent again - not just in the UK but much more widely - with their naturalized conceptions of 'the market' (as if 'it' were something apart from human action and the politics of that action) and all the vicious, self-righteous moralizing that goes with such conceptions.
It is amazing how quickly the neo-librals recovered themselves - and this recovery is a depressing reminder of the intellectual and orgfanizational failure of 'the Left'. But that very rapidity might be a cause for optimism - established and seemingly secure blocks of thought are anything but. Or it might be a cause for pessimim in that there are even more malign forces on the right than neo-liberalism ready to step into the chaos engendered by its failure.
I am not sure where to look for hope. Olching has recently been quoting Tony Judt (including in this article) and I have read, with great interest, his recent book 'Ill Fares the Land'. And it is worth reading, but ultimately it is a paean for a lost past rather than a manifesto for the future.
If there is hope it either lies with global labour organizations or perhaps with the environmental movement. The latter have been remarkably successful in entering popular consciousness and politics, but perhaps for that reason now to co-opted to be effective. The former has been the failed hope of the Left for 20 years or so but perhaps, as welfare gets cut in Europe and labour conditions become increasingly contested in Asia, it will in the end deliver.
Well, this has become a ramble. Anyway, hope all is well with you, Lester - I still have the same email address as before if you fancy getting in touch directly.
Peter G.
@Czarny:
The discrepancies between the pledges and reality are stark, and will probably finish the LibDems as a party.
@Lester and Peter:
Firstly, I agree, the structural processes, as Lester says, aren't really there. It's something to do with which discourses dominate public spheres etc...so suggestions that don't chime with neoliberal wisdoms are treated as 'whacky' in public (even if, as I suspect, resistance to these processes runs much deeper than it appears in the public sphere).
It's really about the power people can exercise in public space; that is why I think neoliberalism is so resilient.
As Peter indicates, since discussion is hemmed in, the only resolution to this is some form of meltdown.
On the treatment of the market as a self-contained non-human organic unit, see idiot businessman Brent Hoberman on Question Time (who also just said 'impacting' - twat).
Interesting, Peter, that you should speak of the environmental movement having been co-opted. I agree, and it becomes apparent when centre-right parties speak of 'greening' the economy and other areas. I think it is also sections of that movement itself (an example of that is the US conservationist movement). Where it drew/draws on socialist and social democratic ideas, it has been at its strongest; see the Green Party in Germany in the 80s...or indeed Caroline Lucas talking a lot of sense tonight on Question Time.
I've seen it all:
Vince Cable just used the words 'suppressing aspiration' in order to rebuff criticisms of 'pushy middle class parents' buying into privileged education. Jesus wept. What a wanker.
Lester,
a dangerous combination of power being overly concentrated in a micro-culture separated from greater society and driven by a market mentality...
A CiF article by Rachel Reeves , the Labour MP for Leeds West this morning is a case in point.
A quick check reveals that Reeves is a 31 year old, London born, Oxford educated (with no connection to Leeds), ex-Bank of England economist and ex business analyst and adviser to HBOS (between 2006 and 2009).
The alarm bells should be ringing already. A Bank of England economist and adviser to a bank that required approximately £17billion in bailout, is now in her majesty's opposition proclaiming her views as adverse to the same managerialists in power.
Westminster politics is a grotesque charade where the neo-liberal Scylla and Charbydis play at being conviciton politicians at loggerheads with one another for public consumption.
Rachel Reeves eptitomises exactly your quote above.
Peter,
If there is hope it either lies with global labour organizations or perhaps with the environmental movement.
You almost sound like Winston Smith here and his 'hope in the proles' quote! I must admit to sharing your hopelessness at the situation.
The post war consensus was only won after the worst depression in History and the deadliest global struggle in History and I do believe things have got to get a lot worse before they get better.
On the environmental and labour movement, have you read Zizek's new tome,'Living in the end times'?
I haven't got on to it yet. I was wondering if anyone has and if it's worth it or if it'smerely more of his intellectual grandstanding.
Duke
Yes,that crossed my mind as I wrote it and it's a bit worrying as it implies I'm going to end my days drinking Victory gin whilst waiting for a bullet in the head. Still, at least you were allowed to smoke at the Chestnut Tree.
It was midsummer here yesterday so - Glad midsommar på er!
As we've seen minority and very exclusive interests hijack almost (if not all) institutions of power in society (Dukes example of silver-spooned economist of the Labour movement perfectly encapsulating the gulf between posture and position), then what makes you feel Peter that environmentalist or even Labour movements are somehow defended from the same processes?
I was speaking to an interesting person the other day who works for an organisational research government dept, and she made some salient points about the structure of research being tilted toward market mentality for a whole raft of reasons...but the upshot was that truly progressive research outside of a capitalist realism was just not happening in any real sense...not economically and not politically at any rate...
...this makes the meltdown of society an almost inevitable step to "change" (if there's any meaning to this word in political terms these days)...and again reiterates the stranglehold the powered minority actually wield...
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