02.09.10
Not in praise of…Tory Education Policy
Last year I blogged concerns regarding Tory plans to introduce Swedish-style “free schools”.
The Tories seem to think that introducting “competition” into the education system will drive up standards.
Presumably in the same way that “competition” in the artificial internal market of the NHS drove up standards so far that record waiting lists by 1997 meant that Labour had to undertake collosal spending increases to get the health service back on its feet.
Yet word now comes from Sweden itself that free schools don’t drive up standards across the board, and are leaving the most vulnerable children behind. Don’t listen to me, here’s the BBC:
More at Left Foot Forward.
In Praise of…William Hague?
On Sunday’s Andrew Marr Show, William Hague went on-record declaring that everyone in the shadow cabinet “accepts that there’s a compelling case on climate change, and a strong scientific case.” He carefully manoeuvred his response to say that climate change deniers shouldn’t be “demonised” because there’s a “legitimate debate” to be had. And contrary to the sentiments of Green Purists, this is tactically a very a sensible thing to say. It avoids ClimateHate.
Hague then dispelled any ambiguity by declaring that even if one were agnostic about AGW, or thought it was only 50% likely that the science supporting it was correct, “then that would be a sufficiently massive risk for the whole future of the planet and the human race that you would need to take pretty drastic action and that we would need to take the pretty drastic action of the sort that was being looked for at Copenhagen.”
He rounded off by saying that even on the most basic precautionary principles we need to take action against climate change.
So credit where credit’s due. Well done Mr Hague. Indeed, for all his other failings David Cameron too has stood firm on this issue. Whatever else they get wrong (and that’s pretty much everything), I applaud the Conservative leadership for not being pressured by the rampant denialism of their grass-roots, frequently evidenced on websites like Iain Dale’s Diary and ConservativeHome.
Whether the Tory top brass can put these good words into action post-2010 is another matter. There are already influential backbenchers like Douglas Carswell MP spouting denialism from their blogs, whilst former Chancellor Nigel Lawson has set himself up with the denier camp. It’s been observed that most of the expected incoming Tory MPs this spring are climate change “sceptics”.
Cameron and Co have so-far avoided pandering to an apparent growth in popular denialism. Liberal Conspiracy yesterday analysed a new poll which appears to show that climate scepticism is on the rise. Although this may have as much to do with the recent unusually cold weather, one has to wonder if the hacked UEA emails and the much-publicised false glacier claims are taking their toll.
But what certainly doesn’t help is the media persistently presenting the issue of climate change as though there is some sort of “debate”, with two equal sides. This is especially infuriating when the science is unequivocally supportive of man-made climate change, regardless of hacked emails about tree rings or one false claim about melting glaciers in a 1000 page document.
We already expect little better from the likes of The Express and The Daily Mail. But as Sunny recently raged, the BBC are at it too. Never mind the Telegraph and Spectator blogs, both hotbeds of rampant denialism.
As i’ve remarked before, the modern media presents a particularly acute problem on the issue of climate change. What to do about enormously dangerous, irresponsible, scientifically-ignorant and misleading reporting in a democracy with a free press is an aggravating question. Of course, I certainly think that free speech and freedom of the press includes the right to spout scientific ignorance – under normal conditions. But is it the same when such irresponsible reporting makes it harder to take measures required to save the entire planet? Should we perhaps ban climate denialism?
It looks like a difficult question, but really it’s dead in the water. Banning climate denialism would be self-defeating because it would only fuel the fires of conspiracy. A free press spouting climate denialism is currently a fact of life. The question is how to deal with that in a non-counterproductive way.
In all honesty, I don’t even know where to begin in effecting positive change. Yet here the Tory Party have a crucial role to play in preventing things getting worse. For as one of the two main parties, they help set the parameters of legitimate debate and action.
This is really important. As I noted last week, democracies run on legitimacy. Policies can only be conceived and enacted within the parameters of what is widely regarded as acceptable, both within and without a particular party. If the Tories embrace climate scepticism, this will legitimate denialism as a mainstream position – thereby encouraging more people to subscribe to it, and in turn legitimating any denialist activities emanating from a Tory government.
By contrast, if Cameron and his clique hold steadfast against the deniers, then there remains hope (however small) that meaningful action may be taken to avert disaster.
Outrageous as it sounds, forget about the economy. The most important thing David Cameron must do over the next 5 years is defy his own grass roots and continue to stick to the science. If the Tories plunge into climate denialism, then we really are in trouble.
02.08.10
Is my MP as bad as Nick Griffin?
I live in Bethnal Green and Bow. That means George Galloway is my MP.
It was recently suggested to me that Galloway is as bad as BNP leader Nick Griffin. At first I thought this claim ludicrous. But it actually requires more work than one might expect to get a handle on why Griffin is necessarily worse than Galloway.
The first charge is that both Griffin and Galloway have previously been adherents of extremist politics.
Griffin spent the late 1970s and early 1980s in the National Front, an overtly fascist white supremacist organisation. There’s little doubt that the National Front glorified Hitler and the Nazi Party.
Galloway has been a member of the Labour Party since he was 13. However in the early 1980s he supported Communist Party affiliation with the Labour Party. In 2002 Galloway told The Guardian that he had always been a supporter of the Soviet Union:
“Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life. If there was a Soviet Union today, we would not be having this conversation about plunging into a new war in the Middle East, and the US would not be rampaging around the globe.”
First, some numbers. Let’s take the Third Reich. It’s estimated that 5.9 million Jews were murdered by Hitler’s regime. In addition, approximately 2 to 3 million Soviet POWs, 2 million ethnic Poles, up to 1.5 million Romani, 200,000 handicapped, political and religious dissenters, 15,000 homosexuals and 5,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses were also killed, bringing the death toll to around 11 million.
In the USSR, under Stalin’s regime alone the numbers of murdered range from between 15 to 30 million (if one includes the deaths of famine victims in the Ukraine).
Numbers alone can’t really paint a full picture of the horror. But on this simple metric, Galloway’s idolisation of the brutality of the USSR is very hard to stomach.
Of course, Griffin now publicly claims that he abhors Hitler and the legacy of the Third Reich, and during that Question Time appearance he made great play of the fact his father was an RAF pilot during WWII. But there are few who believe that Griffin is anything but a closet supporter of Nazi fascism. (It doesn’t help that his protegé Mark Collett was once secretly filmed declaring that “Churchill was a fucking cunt who led us into a pointless war with other whites standing up for their race”).
But here’s an interesting thing. Knowledge of Galloway’s far-left past (and present) doesn’t seem to have the same subjective impact on ordinary people as believing that Griffin is a supporter of Nazi fascism. But why, when the numbers alone seem to put them firmly together?
There are a few fairly bad reasons, appearing to owe more to popular cognitive biases than anything else.
The first is that Sovietism does not agitate the British consciousness the way Hitler does. Our post-war national myths are constructed around the tale of plucky little Britain standing alone, defying the worst monster ever to have existed, and saving the world.
Mostly this is a load of bunk. Hitler lost WWII because he made the idiotic mistake of turning on Stalin before he’d secured his western front. Russia won the Second World War, the end of which was precipitated by the late-arrival of America. Yet in the post-imperial decline of this nation, the bogey man of Hitler has loomed large as a rallying point of (lost) greatness.
Which is not to deny that Hitler was a monster. But Britain didn’t fight the war to save the Jews (indeed, the lack of action taken to save European Jewry before and throughout the war should be a cause of great shame). Despite the Cold War and the subsequent revelations of the true horrors of Sovietism, even Stalin could never replace Hitler as Britain’s national bête noir. The (entirely justified) visceral loathing directed at Griffin is in large measure a product of our collective national myths. But the upshot of those myths is that Galloway can express admiration for a regime as brutal and horrific as the Third Reich and not be subjected to anything like the public hatred Griffin receives. Yet that’s in no way to Galloway’s credit.
The second bad reason is that Galloway has been a political insider for a great deal of time. A long-serving Labour MP before he joined the Respect Party, Galloway has walked the corridors of power without sending innocents to Scottish gulags or orchastrating famines in Bedfordshire to teach his Tory enemies a lesson. By contrast, Griffin is a political outsider and the thought of his gaining office raises the spectre of the democratic rise of Hitler.
Yet this just indicates that we’re used to Galloway, not that he is fundamentally cleaner than Griffin. After all, if Griffin gets elected as an MP he’s hardly likely to achieve anything at all in Westminster (except for being a symbolic presence for the far right, who are a million light-years from national takeover).
The third bad reason is to think that the BNP – and previously the NF – are a source of enormous on-the-ground unrest, and that they provoke trouble and use violence and intimidation to influence elections. Surely there is no parallel with George Galloway? Yet the 2005 election campaign in Bethnal Green and Bow would indicate otherwise.
So there’s less to differentiate Galloway and Griffin, when carefully considered, than might be presupposed.
There is, however, one important difference. Galloway may be unrepentant about his far-left politics and his Soviet apologism. But he can always claim that the millions of deaths in the USSR were an unfortunate by-product of mistakes, corruption, external pressure and the failure of a fundamentally good dream. Now, I don’t think we should take that as an excuse. When something produces as much tragedy as the USSR did, it’s time to completely repudiate it. Galloway must be severely chastised for his failure to do so.
By contrast, Griffin cannot claim that he formerly admired Hitler and Nazi policies but that this was somehow separate from the fact the Third Reich murdered millions of people purely on the basis of their ethnicity. Persecution of European Jewry and other minorities was a constituent part of the Nazi policy to promote the “Aryan Master Race”.
For sure, modern Britons are more sensitive and attuned to ideologically driven racism than to indiscriminate mass-murder by Communist apparatchiks. That’s partly a product of the Hitler-orientated national myths, but also of the important and highly welcome rise of race equality since the 1950s. But whereas Galloway can claim (however myopically) that there is a difference between Sovietism-the-Communist-Ideal and Sovietism-the-Real-World-Disaster, Griffin and the far right cannot divorce their racial politics and (closet) Hitler adoration from the fact of the Holocaust.
So on that metric, I’m willing to grant that there is some tangible difference between Galloway and Griffin, however thin and qualified I think that should ultimately be.
But that’s not the whole story. We have the little matter of Saddam Hussein to consider.
Whatever Griffin says now, given his past and his party’s racist policies there are few who doubt that he secretly admires Hitler (and indeed fancies himself as the Führer’s reincarnation).
George Galloway went one better than mere adoration. He flew to Iraq to shake hands with a very living neo-fascist tyrant, who had previously emulated Hitler by gassing Iraqi ethnic minorities.Indeed, Galloway was happy to salute Saddam’s “courage, strength and indefatigability“.
Galloway may claim that he was maneouvred into expressing more support than he strictly desired, that he was opposing the “worse evil” of American imperialism, or whatever. But there simply is no excuse. I opposed the war and history has proven myself and others correct to do so. Yet there is a huge distance between opposing an illegal war based on lies, and defending and celebrating a vicious tyrant like Saddam Hussein.
Nick Griffin can only idolize Hitler in the abstract. George Galloway went one better, and paid tribute to a vicious murdering dictator in the flesh.
Which forces one to ask: Perhaps George Galloway isn’t as bad as Nick Griffin. Perhaps he’s worse?
02.07.10
Spinoza on Blair
The Chilcot enquiry rumbles on. Brown is due this week. Alistair Campbell pretended to be on the verge of breakdown this morning when Andrew Marr asked him questions he couldn’t have answered without admitting that Blair misled Parliament.
Of course it’s still Blair that commands everyone’s attention. He was the man at the centre. He is the focal point of all the big questions. Hence a lot of ink has been spilled concerning his actions.
But I can’t help feeling that the reams of print are mostly superfluous. For here is 17th Century philosopher Baruch de Spinoza’s take on things.
“Those who administer a state or hold power inevitably try to lend any wrong they do the appearance of right and try to persuade the people that they acted honourably; and they often succeed, since the whole interpretation of right and law is in their hands. For there is no doubt that they assume, due to this, the greatest liberty to do whatever they want and whatever their desires prompt them to do, and conversely, lose much of this freedom whenever the right to interpret the laws devolves upon others, and likewise if the true interpretation is so plain to all that one can be in any doubt about it.”
- Theological-Political Treatise, Chapter 17
As I’ve remarked before, less changes in politics than we often suppose.
02.05.10
The Docks Are Empty Now
From ‘79 to 1990 the North was starved of air/
They thought that we would lose our voice they thought we’d disapear/
Karma flowers from the hilltops, the guilt of slavery/
Shipyards are haunted by the ghost of industry.
Union power disabled, crushed until bled/
A city held to ransom with a Tory gun against it’s head/
And what was the alternative? It wasn’t Kinock’s left/
Hatton and the militants destroyed what pride was left.
- The Down and Outs, Boys from the Blackstuff
After reading Giles’ excellent re-write of ClimateHate, I’ve been doing some introspection about where my own tribal political allegiances come from.
Because I really hate the Conservative Party. Which doesn’t meant that I hate all members of the Conservative Party. On the contrary, I’ve met two in my life that I actually quite like. They have radically different perspectives to me, but they’re good and decent people.
For the actual institution of the Conservative Party, however, I hold a deep-seated and visceral loathing. Why?
I’d like to say it’s because the Tories are the party of power and privilege. The party which defends the interests of the already prosperous and empowered. The party which does this whilst having the audacity to claim that it works for the interests of all. The party which through its appeals to crass, simplistic, selfish and unreflective ways of (non)thinking preserves the status quo in favour of the few at the expense of the many.
Certainly that has something to do with it. But that can’t explain the deep-seated ressentiment I feel against the Conservative Party. It’s something more formative, more primal, than that.
To get a handle on where my hatred comes from I have to go way back into my past. To a day when I was only 6 or 7 years old and growing up in Southport, a small, relatively well-off town to the north of Liverpool.
I was in the car with my mum. For some reason now lost to me we’d been in Liverpool and we were driving home to through Bootle and Seaforth, two large areas mostly covered by housing estates. Prior to the 1980s, these estates provided the bulk of the labour-force for the Liverpool docks, a centre of world shipping and British industry.
But as we drove through them that day the ghost of industry was more than haunting those areas, it was tormenting them.
Poverty is a little like pornography; very difficult to describe precisely, but everyone knows it when they see it. Being only 6 or 7 years old, the only thing I could compare what I was seeing to was images I’d watched on Newround or Blue Peter of faraway lands where people lived in squalor after some war or catastrophe. The broken houses, the boarded-up windows, the shopfronts smashed and the people hanging around idly on street corners whilst dogs roamed the pavement. I thought we must have secretly travelled to another country. I simply couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
My mum explained to me – and this is one of my earliest memories – that during the 1980s all the people who lived in these parts of Liverpool had lost their jobs, and that the special organisations (the trade unions) that had helped support them before were attacked by Margaret Thatcher and her government. She explained how all the jobs went to other countries, but how the people that were left behind were abandoned by the Conservative Party.
Over the following years I would ask my parents about this history. I can remember my Dad telling me about the 1970s, and about how the Unions had become too powerful and the government needed to bring them under control – but how after that Margaret Thatcher’s government had decided to take revenge on the Unions by virtually destroying them. He told me about Newcastle and Sunderland and Shefield and Glasgow and all the pit villages of Yorkshire and Derbyshire, and about Liverpool. About how the people who lived in those places first lost their jobs, and then how the communities that depended on those jobs were abandoned by the Thatcher government out of political revenge.
He told me about men like Norman Tebbit who laughed at the idea that there weren’t any jobs and that families and children were suffering, and just told the parents to “get on their bikes” and find work. Even though there wasn’t any work to be found.
All the while, the memory of those North Liverpool slums would play in my head.
Today, Liverpool is in many ways a city transformed. The back-door poverty relief fund known as the European Capital of Culture project has made a visible and tangible difference. After years of above-average unemployment rates, Liverpool has enjoyed enormous levels of regional growth and (despite the recession) levels of unemployment in the city seem to have eased. But that’s what it took: a massive EU subsidy in the late Noughties to drag the city out of the post-Thatcher depression. But it’s worth pointing out that, in many ways, areas like Bootle and Seaforth remain as poor and deprived as ever. And the spending cuts of the post-recession have yet to take their toll, so who knows what the future holds for Liverpool and its people.
The image of Thatcher’s legacy in Liverpool was burned onto my memory before, I think, anything else of substance. What I later found out about her party, what it did in the 1980s, and what it still continues to stand for, only reinforce that formative experience.
And that’s why I hate the Conservative Party. And why I always will.
02.04.10
Reading between the Lines
No proper post for you all today, because I am busy.
For the tiny minority of people who could possibly be interested in this subject, I’m making an essay I wrote for my MA available.
So, if you ever burned with intellectual fury to discover what’s wrong with the methodological approach of Leo Strauss in the history of ideas, today is your lucky day.
Over here.
02.03.10
Pensions and Public Opinion
Britain’s public sector was recently under rightwing attack. The Times claimed “Public sector pay races ahead in a recession”, whilst The Telegraph intoned that “Public sector workers earn 7% more on average than their peers in the private sector — a pay gulf that has more than doubled since the recession began.”
Ben Goldacre did the statistical demolition here, whilst Mehdi Hasan poked fun at the right for its “politics of envy”.
Misleading rants about public/private pay differentials are new on the scene, however. Much better established is the claim that public sector workers receive cushy risk-free “gold plated” pensions at the vast expense to the ordinary taxpayer. Indeed, that we must end “the pensions apartheid” is a favourite meme of right-wing front organisation The Taxpayers’ Alliance. It’s also one that’s been found in the mouth of David Cameron.
But it’s a myth, as demonstrated by this excellent TUC report [PDF].
In particular, it’s worth noting the following:
- “The mean average public sector pension is £7,000 but the majority of public sector pensioners have pensions of less than £5,000 [per year].”
- “The value of the main schemes in the public sector for new entrants are similar to a medium private sector final salary, at around 21% to 24% of salary on average.”
- “Many reports about pensions would lead you to believe that most public sector workers retire at the age of 60 on two-thirds salary, but in fact this only applies to the very few people who work in public service for forty years or more. The pension age for many public sector workers has always been 65 and this now applies to most new joiners.”
- “The average pension in Local Government is around just £4,000 per year, and just £2,000 for women while in the Civil Service the average is £6,500. The average pension for a female NHS worker is £5,000 but the median pension for women is much less. In fact half of all women pensioners who have worked in the NHS get a pension of less than £3,500 per year”
And loads more. Because this matters.
The right is attacking public pensions quite deliberately. Rather than simply being a “politics of envy” as Mehdi Hassan suggests, this approach acts as a Trojan horse for the right: by instilling the idea that the public sector is bloated, out of control and parasitic on the private sector or ordinary tax payers, the pretexts for ideologically-driven state-slashing are laid.
David Hume remarked way back in the 18th Century that all politics is founded upon “opinion”. At one level, Hume was remarking that because rulers are always outnumbered by the ruled, the former can only govern so long as they have the “opinion” of the masses behind them.
The importance of “opinion” was later picked-up by James Madison after the American founding. Madison noticed that public opinion established the terms for what we would now call “public legitimacy”, or what governments can and can’t get away with:
“Public opinion sets bounds to every government, and is the sovereign in every free one”
The problem with public opinion, of course, is that it doesn’t always track the facts (something that deeply concerned Madison). If the right – and specifically the Tory Party – can maintain and fuel the common misperception that the public sector is bloated and parasitic, then it will have “public opinion” on its side to begin a slash-and-burn attack.
The best – and probably the only – way to fight back is to shape public opinion in accordance with the facts. We can start with pensions. Read that TUC report. And spread the word.
02.02.10
Important and Moving
I really think that if you’re going to read anything online today, then it ought to be the important and moving piece by Terry Pratchet on the right to die.
At The Guardian.
Progressive London
Following my last post I’ve had an email exchange with Nick Cohen. Unsurprisingly given that I disagree with him on quite a lot, it’s been a little heated (the fact I insulted him in the last post doesn’t help).
But Nick has made me pay attention to a few things about “Progressive London“.
Firstly – and as Sunny had already noted – “Progressive London” is little more than Ken Livingstone’s re-election platform. This in itself might be no bad thing, in principle. It becomes so when we remember Ken Livingstone himself.
I’m not just thinking about the fact Red Ken probably doesn’t have the numbers to beat the abominable Boris Johnson. I’m thinking of the fact Livingstone himself is quite an unsavoury character. A latent authoritarianism in his politics seeped out at the Fabian Conference in his enormous enthusiasm for compulsory national service. His extolling of China and Vietnam as models for Britain added to my concerns on Saturday. And in fairness to Nick Cohen, two years ago he wrote a solid piece casting light on Livingstone’s shady past.
Yet Ken Livingstone himself was not the only problem at the Progressive London conference.
I’ve already noted the presence of his former economic adviser John Ross, a man who likewise extols the virtues of China whilst remaining gleefully silent about the issues of judicial murder, totalitarian dictatorship and suppression of basic rights.
But let’s not forget George Galloway, who just happens to be my MP. Another old leftist who spent his youth in the ultra-hard left, Galloway rose to his 15 minutes of international fame by personally saluting Saddam Hussein’s “courage”, “strength” and “indefatigability”. Now I was very much opposed to the Iraq war, and believe that history has proved myself and those who stood with me right.
Yet there is clear blue water between opposing illegal war and personally supporting a vicious, neo-fascit tyrant who gassed sections of his own population.
George Galloway is a national disgrace. He ought to occupy a pariah status on the left . Not a privileged position on a panel debate for so-called “progressives”.
Also present at the Progressive London conference was Bairbre de Brún MEP of Sinn Féin. Now let me say this loud and clear: I am no supporter of the loyalist cause in Northern Ireland. I am aware of the many horrors perpetrated by loyalist factions, and of the frequently uneven hand of British “justice” in Ulster.
But Sinn Féin remains the political wing of what was a terrorist organisation responsible for the deaths of thousands. Their presence at a conference for “progressives” is simply unacceptable. If a representative of the Irish nationalist cause was desired, the invitation should have gone to someone from the SDLP.
Questions might also be raised about the presence of Venezuelan Ambassador Samuel Moncada, in the light of this Human Rights Watch report. Ken, of course, has long-standing ties to Hugo Chavez. He does not appear to share many on the left’s mounting concern at Chavez’s slide into repressive authoritarianism, however.
Of course, many sensible and respectable people spoke at the event. There were also a few harmless idiots like Ann “North Sea Oil is irrelevant to growth” Pettifor, of the insufferable New Economics Foundation.
But regardless, we on the London left need to look carefully at Ken’s electoral machine, and see who he’s taking along for the ride. Then we need to decide whether it’s something we’re willing to be part of.
Personally I will not be joining Progressive London, nor attending any more of their events.
01.30.10
China: A Very Bad Example
There’s a worrying tendency emerging in some sections of the left. I noticed it in this blog post. Today I saw it writ large. The willingness of some leftists to cite China as a positive example for the UK.
At the appalingly-titled “Progressive London” conference, Ken Livingstone gave a speech in which he declared that the proof that government investment ends recessions lies in China’s staggering rates of state spending, and enormous correlate levels of growth. (He also claimed that British kids should have fewer holidays, so that they can receive the structured educations that will make them good British citizens who are competitive with Chinese children studying “from 7am to 6 at night”. They don’t call him Red Ken for nowt, eh?).
Later, John Ross of Socialist Economic Bulletin (and Ken’s former economic adviser) took some time out from claiming that Britain’s national debt didn’t need to be repaid, that the triple-A rating is meaningless, and that all spending cuts are completely a choice and not imposed by brute economic circumstances, to cite China as proof-positive that government-led investment ends recessions. He waxed lyrical about China’s 9% growth in the last quarter, and how the Chinese government simply told banks to lend and – hey presto – they lent.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for keeping government spending as high as possible to protect the tentative recovery. But citing China as a model for UK growth is idiotic, and deeply troubling.
Firstly, it relies upon deliberate economic simplification. Why might China be experiencing such high rates of growth? The fact it possess enormous and largely untapped natural resources, which it is beginning to put to use, has something to do with it. That China is still in a stage of rapid industrialisation from what was effectively a peasant society, ravaged by the Cultural Revolution, helps too. Britain is incomparable on both these metrics.
Likewise, Chinese growth is in large measure driven by enormous government-led infrastructure projects (as a component of rapid industrialisation). It also has as an enormous manufacturing base, fuelling western demand for cheap consumer goods. Britain, by contrast, relies heavily on its financial and service sectors. The two economies are thus radically different.
So pointing at China and simplistically saying “look, they have lots of government spending and lots of growth, QED” is stupid. You might as well point to Angola and its 12%+ oil-driven growth, and it would tell you as much about the UK’s situation (we, after all, still possess some reserves of North Sea Oil). Indeed, if one wants proof that government spending leads to economic recovery, why not turn to history and take the case of America’s New Deal? That at least tells you something about relatively comparable economies and circumstances – though again one would need to adjust for situation and the complex nature of macroeconomic recovery. (h/t)
But more importantly than all that, let’s remember a key method by which China achieves its phenomenal growth: by systematically denying the civil and economic rights of its domestic population.
Chinese workers have no meaningful rights whatsoever (their right to unionize, for example, means a right to join the union which reports to the Communist Party). They are paid pitifully low wages (averaging around $0.50 an hour in 2006), and have no hope of securing anything better. That’s a key way in which China’s export-manufacturing sector booms: low wages equal low costs, after all.
Another way China grows is by doing what I observed last summer: going to places like 1000-year old Yancheng, raising it to the ground, and erecting a city the size of Chicago in its place. And what do you think happened to the people living in Yancheng who didn’t want to have their homes demolished. Do you think they were consulted nicely and offered new places to live with guaranteed legal redress? Or do you reckon they were forcibly re-located as is the Communist Party’s preferred approach?
China may have very high growth rates. But it has no democracy, no civil rights, and no effective rule of law. It is a totalitarian dictatorship, achieving “economic miracles” at a cost no desirable society would ever contemplate.
Yet when John Ross was pointedly asked why Iceland and Ireland don’t simply adopt the “Chinese approach”, he simply claimed that the political consensus in those countries wouldn’t tolerate a more state-centred economy. He made it perfectly clear that he thought this a mistake: that China was leading the way, and should be followed.
We have been here before on the left. From the 1930s to the 1980s there were many who persistently claimed that Soviet Russia was a workers’ paradise, a successful alternative to capitalism. They were wrong, and millions of graves testify against them.
The left must not repeat the mistakes of history. China is an example of what we must always be against, not what we must aspire to. We forget that at our peril.
–
End Note:
The irony, of course, is that the nutty left are usually the ones blithely decrying “neo-liberalism”. If “neo-liberalism” is anything, it is usually claimed to be an economic approach which privileges growth and profit above the welfare of ordinary people.
For reasons I cannot comprehend, some of those rabidly decrying “neo-liberalism” suddenly forget those concerns about growth über alles when it comes to hailing the totalitarian dystopia of modern China.
–
UPDATE
John Ross’ views on China are well laid-out at this Guardian article. You will notice that NOT ONCE does he mention China’s horrific record on human rights, or the fact of its totalitarian dictatorship.
The comments beneath his piece are almost universally spot-on in calling him out on this matter.
Also, Nick Cohen (and you know it’s bad when Nick can successfully call you out on your shit) made the following observations of this nasty neo-Soviet Apologist two years ago:
“John Ross, Livingstone’s economic adviser on £121,000, is typical. He is so lacking in economic knowledge that he decided that the Russian Communist party was a force for the future in 1991, two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. His economic advice at the time was for the ruling class to learn ‘that they will be killed if they do not allow a takeover by the working class’.”
