Graham Stewart

Writing to discover what I think and believe in increasingly fractured times

Politics

Britain’s Labour party responds to the looming financial crisis

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…..by proposing the same old tired neoliberal sh*t

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

So there you have it. The Labour Party under Sir Keir (the Strimmer) Starmer has finally found its financial policy. It’s going to threaten the Tories with a plan to become economically competent. This radical policy — of basically following the traditional neoliberal playbook of balanced budgets and austerity — was announced by Shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds in the annual Mais Lecture on January 13th.

Now follows a rant.

This is a return to playing by right-wing economic rules. It’s a commitment to drain useful money from the economy and ensure it filters upwards. Balanced budgets — or treating the national economy like a household budget where spending should match income — is simply a guarantee of stunted growth, low wages, poor services, inadequate housing, and ever-increasing inequality.

Labour, by returning to this failed notion — this economic illiteracy — is simply showing that they are no longer the party of the working majority of this country. Fiscal responsibility is code for asset stripping. True economic competence would be about ensuring that money is spent where it is needed most. Housing, health, jobs. We have a fiat currency, which means we cannot go broke. There is no direct relationship between tax and spending. Tax is a tool to combat inflation and to manage levels of employment. To pretend otherwise is to commit to increasing the wealth of the plunderers of the national treasury and to lead us further down the road to a right-wing authoritarian nightmare.

It is both depressing and furthering that our main party of opposition has no expert in economics who can guide our shadow chancellor away from making the usual errors of judgment and bowing to the Daily Mail’s view of how an economy works. Couldn’t Labour perhaps think outside the box for once and try to hire someone like Stephanie Kelton?

That it fails to do so sentences the majority of us to a future of greater need, little protection against the climate crisis, and the threat of fascism as the anger of the deprived is used by those benefiting from the growth in inequality. Instead of blaming ignorance of economics, of course, the wealthy will have us blame someone or something ‘other’. Immigrants, the ‘undeserving’ poor, benefit ‘scroungers’, the disabled, ethnic minorities, the plain old unemployed. These all become categories to be despised and targeted. Instead of treating the nation as a community, the right want us to see only competitors for scant resources.

And the irony, of course, is that there is no practical limit on the money to spend on public services. On housing. On transport. On health. It is always an ideological choice how money is spent and how it always seems to be spent upwards.

Shock, horror, as private company screws over those in need

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Privatisation is still the best answer, says nobody


Photo by Maria Teneva on Unsplash

From the time that the first photo was posted on Twitter yesterday, a storm has erupted across much of the media — both social and mainstream — about the miserly portions sent in a food parcel as part of the free school meals programme. The picture was, indeed, shocking and confirmation was soon pouring in from other households that this was what was being sent out by the private — of course — company handling the distribution of the food. In a great irony, some of this confirmation came from furloughed staff of the company who had received one of the parcels.

The response from the usual suspects on the right to this appalling example of something that combined both greed and heartlessness in a particularly British way was informative. The extreme free-market ideologues saw the company behind the outrage — after exhausting all avenues trying to prove it was poor administration rather than deliberate and planned graft — fell back to the usual position when privatisation of any sort shows its true face. In other words, this was an unfortunate case of one bad apple — or, as many of the recipients of the parcels commented, just two bad apples — and was a rare example of poor oversight. It was, in short, a mistake.

Those on the left, of course, were less inclined to accept that this was something rare, unexpected, or accidental. These inadequate food parcels — and I assume this is not some undeclared war by the Tories on childhood obesity — illustrate what happens when the private sector performs public service. It is almost too perfect an example, with all the right players and the right callous ideological motives. And wonderful visuals and with children as the victims. If anything could put a dent in the mantra that private is best, this could be it. But don’t hold your breath.

It was a simple enough problem to solve. It was decided — no doubt by someone who has never had to feed children for a week on such a sum — that £30 was the amount to be given to parents. The easiest way to deliver this would be to send a voucher, which could be used only for a range of goods. But no, apparently vouchers were open to abuse. Drugs and alcohol — and no doubt porn and televisions and football season tickets — would be sought and acquired by these nefarious poor people. Putting money straight into bank accounts would be even worse. Let’s face it, you can’t trust someone earning less than a living wage to make sure their children have enough to eat.

So, with the recipients properly demonised, neoliberal ideology came to the rescue. Privatisation was the answer. Let’s take the £500 million — say — we have set aside for this programme and, instead of spending it all on getting food to those in need, we’ll spend the same amount and make sure some of our friends running private companies can get some of the action. Who shall we pick? What about someone who has been a loyal donor to the Tory party for a long time.

This is how privatisation works. Nothing is made more efficient. Nothing is about better value for money. It is about ensuring that money targeted for the rest of us is diluted, siphoned off, and used to fill the cash reservoirs of those already rich enough.

The company running this little food delivery scam were no doubt paid their £30 per parcel and told to take their profits out of that. (This, after all, is how companies rejecting benefits claims make their money.) There might have been some talk of savings through bulk buying, for instance, but everyone involved in that deal — both on the government side and on the Tory donors side — knew that this was code for skimming off the top. That the result was so brazen, so indifferent to the suffering of those in receipt of their joke bags of food, says a lot about Britain, the companies that fleece us on a daily basis, and the Tories and their ideology that takes us all for fools and treats us as either fools or accomplices.

Will there be much comeback on this for either the company or the corrupt team that chose them? I doubt it. Not enough, that’s for sure. The parent company of the shit-show running this insult to those struggling to survive after a decade of Tory austerity is a global catering brand. In the latest post on their site, Compass Group’s CEO talks about how proud they are to support HRH The Prince of Wales’s Sustainable Markets Initiative. This is something called the Terra Carta Charter. The CEO writes:

Our strategy to reduce environmental impact focuses on minimising food waste

I suspect that the charter focus on food waste is not really about providing minimum food in the first place.

The post just before this on the Compass Group blog — do you really want to visit? Oh, well, here you go — is about Chartwells, the very company at the heart of this national rage. And what is the post about? Well, the headline probably tells you all you need to know: Chartwells supports children across the UK during Christmas

Apparently, “Chartwells, the leading provider of catering and support services to schools in the UK, delivered 11,500 nutritious food hampers to children across the UK this Christmas.”

I wonder who defined ‘nutritious’ for them.

And so privatisation will remain the route to socialism for the rich, where transnational corporations continue to loot the treasuries of the nations in which they operate. To each according to their greed, from each nothing in return.

It wasn’t funny but…..

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How satire nailed events at the Capitol better than mainstream media

The thing about satire is that if you find it funny and you recognise the truth that makes it funny, it’s probably wasted on you. That’s not to say that good satire is worthless or that a good belly laugh at the absurdities of the politics of the day is neither satisfying nor restorative. It just means that those on ‘the other side’ won’t be laughing along with you.

On the back of the mob gate-crashing the Capitol, there were a number of tweets and posts that captured the events with humour. This is in contrast to the apocalyptic responses from those so worried about democracy they immediately forget what the US has done recently in Venezuela, Honduras, and Bolivia, to name just three near neighbours.

So, first, the Onion explained why police numbers were low at the Capitol:

D.C. Police Lose Control Of Rioting Trump Supporters After Hundreds Of Officers Called Away To Deal With Black Jaywalker

Then there were a couple of tweets that appeared in my feed. Neither of which I saved or copied because I’m an idiot.

The first tweet went along the lines of :

“At last, a right-wing coup not supported by the Democrats”.

That was both accurate and timely, I thought. Kudos to its originator and I apologise for the lack of attribution.

Same goes for the next tweet:

“The coup was bound to fail because Washington doesn’t have a US Embassy to co-ordinate communications and logistical support.”

A serious moment captured through a wry humour that does more to explain the dangers we face from the right—and what we can call the ‘extreme centre’—than some easy blaming of Trump and his supporters. The ills that have led us here lie deeper in the rotten core of empire and the capitalism that makes victims of more and more of us.

Can I get a mass party of the left, please?

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…and I think we know now that Labour is not it




Photo by Maria Oswalt on Unsplash

Sir Keith Strimmer revealed his true colours (blue?) quite quickly after assuming the leadership of the Labour Party. This has led to much discussion both inside and outside the party about whether socialists should leave and form a new party of the left. A socialist party, in fact.


I’m pleased to say that I left Labour the day after The Strimmer was announced as leader. I didn’t have any foreknowledge that he would be quite so disastrous a leader but my reasons for leaving were straightforward. As a socialist, I had never seen a reason to join Labour, but I joined to vote for and support Jeremy Corbyn, and I left when he was no longer leader. Although I believed that Sir Strimmer was one of the main reasons behind the disastrous 2019 election result, with Corbyn gone, it was clear that Labour’s once in a generation flirtation with the left was once again over.

There are left wing parties out there. Is there room for a new one? Possibly. However, remaining within Labour and thinking that there is any possibility of advancing socialism from there smacks to me of a combination of wishful thinking and laziness. The laziness that comes with the comfort of a party with large membership. So I think the only chance of success for a new party of the left depends on a majority of those who joined or re-joined Labour under Corbyn to switch en masse. This is not a guarantee of electoral success, of course. It will only generate funds. There have been desertions from Labour since the purge of the left began but, to be frank, not enough — and not quickly.

Would I vote for a credible socialist party at an election? Yes, in short. Then again, it’s an easy choice for me because I live in a constituency that is a Tory safe seat. Then again, with the proposed boundary changes and with Scotland lost to Labour for ever, an increasing number of English seats appear to be safe for the Tories. A party offering mild rebukes to the corporate class and pandering to business and repeating the old canards about spending and cuts and taxation is not going to instil a new generation of voters with passion — or even hope. After all, it was the centrist bromides of Clinton and Obama that led us to Trump. And the long decline of hope under Blair that brought us Johnson ultimately. A party of the centre always finds itself drifting ever to the right.

And speaking of Scotland, I remember when the SNP was considered a joke, both inside and outside Scotland. When they won a Westminster seat, it was thought a flash in the pan. A new party with a purpose, a strong message, and a grassroots network that links movements and communities may not win many seats at a first election. But this is about the long term, despite the fact that ‘long term’ is becoming increasingly relative with the planet burning.


I suspect, too, that in the not-too-distant future The Strimmer will want to pursue his own Clause IV moment and suggest the time has come to rename the Labour Party. After all, the name has overtones of, well working and the working class. Surely that connection is now redundant, they will say. The new party should describe where the true interests of its members lie. A focus group will be set up. Brand managers will be hired. And after many hundreds of thousands of man-hours and many hundreds of thousands of membership fees, the new name will be presented. Something bland like The Centrist Party, perhaps. More on the nail, do you think? How about the Neo Liberals?

Is this a good time to discuss guaranteed jobs?

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Photo by Joel Barwick on Unsplash

One of the things I want to do this year is to learn more about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Lat year I listened to a few episodes of The MMT Podcast and read a few articles about MMT that had me believing this was the missing piece that explained how the ideological foundations of austerity could be dug up and destroyed.

When Cory Doctorow appeared on The MMT Podcast not once, not twice, but four times….. and talked sense, as always, I was hooked. Listen here to the first of those episodes.

Two of the MMT books on my reading pile at the moment are Stephanie Kelton’s The Deficit Myth and Pavlina Tcherneva’s the case for A Job Guarantee.

Early on in chapter 2 of the Tcherneva, she discusses the way neoliberal idealogues have convinced us that unemployment is not merely an unfortunate by-product of a successful economy but, indeed, essential. This is both morally corrupt and completely wrong.

Tcherneva uses the examples of starvation, homelessness, and education to point out the stupidity off a policy that states that a level of, say, 5% unemployment is unavoidable. Here is how she relates that to some other measures of a successful society:

“Suppose you heard that, in a strong economy, the optimal level of children who wanted to but were unable to receive primary and secondary education was 5 percent; or that there was a natural level of starvation equal to 5 percent of the population; or that 5 percent of people would ideally remain without shelter.”

As she says, although — for the latter two categories, especially — our so-called advanced economies could do better, “we do not design or implement policy on the basis that there is some ‘optimal’ level for these social ills.”

On the other hand, it is clear that we do implement policies that keep a large number of people unemployed. This is likely to become a policy that becomes increasingly apparent as our corporate servants in government seek to reimpose austerity — possibly under a new name — to ‘pay’ for the cost of the Covid-19 pandemic.

I have skin in this game. My son is at home and unemployed. This is not a good time to find work, of course. It is especially not a good time to find work that he has trained for. His sense of self-worth diminishes by the day.

We have not always been so tolerant of an ‘optimal’ level of unemployment. And it’s worth asking; ‘optimal’ for whom? Although high levels of unemployment depress wages and lift profits, it turns out that unemployment has a detrimental effect, not only on the unemployed but also their families, their communities, and the economy as a whole. Go figure: economic policies are pursued that knowingly damage the economy simply to prevent wages from rising.

Of course, the old canard is that rising wages cause rising inflation and there is nothing that a central bank hates more than inflation. There are two things wrong with this belief now.

The first is that in the years since the crash of 2008 inflation has not been a concern. There were fears that great dollops of stimulus and quantitative easing would be followed by inflation. With low interest rates bordering on the negative, we’re more in danger of deflation now than inflation. No sign of increasing wages, of course.

The second is that, even in the old myth of inflation-driving wage increases, this happened when firms were competing for the same resources (i.e. workers). A policy of providing employment funded by the government at a living wage for the currently unemployed would not trigger competition with those employers who have no need of staff. (It might drive down the numbers of those forced into the gig economy — at what tends to be less than the living wage — or who are forced to hold down multiple part-time jobs but that does not feel like such a bad thing.)

Tcherneva makes a good case for the detrimental impact of unemployment beyond the unemployed worker. I don’t think this is new information or will come as a surprise to anyone with a modicum of awareness of our society. The issue is not so much how to pay for jobs for everyone as how can we afford not to?

It’s worth noting here that the points that Tcherneva makes about the cost of unemployment are valid regardless of whether you think MMT is a fantasy about a magic money tree or you see it as a mystery-dispelling antidote to the ‘there is no alternative’ brigade who believe in balancing the budget.

In the end, though, I suspect turning unemployment ‘benefit’ into employment benefit can only improve all our lives.

Julian Assange safe from extradition… for now

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I had a post all ready to go to excoriate so-called British justice, expecting the decision of Vanessa Baraitser this morning regarding the extradition of Julian Assange to go the way of the US. And, by contrast, definitely not in the way of Julian Assange. My post was going to be angry. I was going to use lots of bad language. I was going to label the UK America’s favourite rent boy, for instance. The UK is now happy to bend over for any abuse of law and rights at the behest of the US government.

Then I heard the result.

Astonishing.

Then I read a full report. For all the welcome news that Julian Assange will not be extradited to the US — pending appeals by the craven forces of evil, of course — Dame Vanessa managed to make Assange once more the cause, claiming that it was only because he was likely to attempt suicide should he suffer extradition. She gave no sense that she had any sympathy for the man or even any sense of the injustice she had overseen in her court. You could almost hear the sighs and tuts. She was blaming Julian Assange for not taking his medicine like a man. Real men can handle 175 years in solitary for exposing war crimes.

More than that, she accepted that the US government had won its case. Perhaps the most chilling comment came from the US justice department, whose spokesperson said, “While we are extremely disappointed in the court’s ultimate decision, we are gratified that the United States prevailed on every point of law raised.” Every point of law. That is something for all journalists to ponder.

Jeremy Corbyn — unsurprisingly — put it best when he said, ” [it’s] alarming that the judge has accepted US government arguments threatening freedom of speech and freedom to publish”.

Julian is not free yet but this is certainly a victory, however tainted by the poor decision by a poor judge to temper the outcome with a sop to the US. In a better world I might think that the judgment was so worded to give everyone a face-saving way out. The US could quietly walk back into the shadows and make no appeal and UK subservience to the US would be fulfilled. That better world is not here yet, though, I don’t think. It would be nice to be proved wrong.

Oh, and by the way, there is now no mention of this case on the BBC home page this evening. These are the top stories — below some understandably important Covid updates — that the BBC feels are more important:

Hair ice: The strange phenomenon of ‘candy floss’ on trees

Zara Holland faces court for ‘breaking Covid rules’ in Barbados

Blue whales: New population found in the Indian Ocean

Woman’s Hour: The Queen sends ‘best wishes’ to show on its 75th year

EU firms refuse UK deliveries over Brexit tax changes

This is the national broadcaster, remember, with real journalists working there, who are now in real danger of being prosecuted for doing journalism after Baraitser’s judgement that the US had ‘won’ its case. It rather sums up the BBC, who barely reported during the lengthy hearing process at all. They have to be careful now. One slip from the corporate line and they could be on a plane to that super-max prison in the good old US of A.