December 31, 2008
Stevie G
Steven Gerrard, the Liverpool and England midfielder, was recently arrested in Southport and charged with assault and affray. It’s not often that I write things on this blog that relate to my humble little town (even though I’m actually away in London at the moment). But apart from noting that the Lounge Inn is crap, and wondering why somebody with Gerrard’s wealth would bother going there, here are some thoughts.
Firstly, it seems a little odd that all we seem to be hearing is unconditional messages of support for Gerrard. See this BBC item for example. Right now we still don’t have full details. Did Gerrard start it? Did he cause serious harm? Etc. But surely in lieu of such answers any support offered should be rather hedged. If it turns out that Gerrard (for example) head-butted an innocent bystander and threw bottles at the bouncers before screaming that he would murder the police (for example), well perhaps Rapha Benitez and Kenny Dalglish ought not to be pledging their full support for him.
After all, Gerrard is a role-model for literally hundreds of thousands of young people – until it is clear that he is not at serious fault, messages of support should surely be somewhat more muted. And if it turns out that he is guitly of a serious offence – and recall that Newcastle midfielder Joey Barton went to prison after being prosecuted for assault and affray – then I can’t help thinking that his club, fans, manager and predecessors should condemn Gerrard’s behaviour. We hear plenty of people lamenting the violence of town centres at weekends. If this lamentation is genuine then Gerrard’s behaviour ought to be roundly condemned as unacceptable.
Believe me, there are enough drunken idiots looking to kick your head off in Southport town centre late at night without having Stevie G as a role model for such antics.
Finally, supposing that Gerrard is indeed guilty of a serious offence and is prosecuted, what should his punishment be? Part of me thinks that this is one of those rare occasions where prison may have some merit – given that most ordinary people think prison a shameful thing that ought to happen to bad people, then perhaps it will send a strong message that what Gerrard did (if guilty) is unacceptable and that society won’t tolerate it.
That path has the advantage of sending a public message. But I’m suspect of such approaches because generally the idea of punishing X to teach Y sits ill with me – surely X’s punishment should be about X? And anyway, prison is unbelievably expensive – putting Gerrard away for 6 months will cost the taxpayer thousands. So instead I propose that if Gerrard is found guilty he be fined £1 million. That will hit him where it hurts, and probably do more good than sending him to prison can achieve.
The money could be dedicated to football programmes for youngsters, for example, and Gerrard could be mandated to turn up and explain why what he did was wrong before organising some shooting practice.
December 25, 2008
Reverting to usual seriousness and gloom
Christmas silliness now over after yesterday’s tomfoolery, time to get back to complaining about the world and lamenting the follies of humankind.
Today I watched the Queen’s Speech for the first time ever. I just wanted to check that she really was going to offer a message of sympathy and support for those who are/will be struggling with the economic recession.
She did.
I still can’t quite get over it. It made me want to throw bricks at the telly. An unelected figurehead who leads a life of fantastic luxury, whose claims to pay income tax are a joke, whose fantastic wealth is based on a combination of being bank-rolled by the tax-payer and having ancestors who were the best and killing people, comes on TV at 3pm and tells the poor she feels their pain.
What happens? Rioting in the streets? Calls for a Republic of Great Britain? Angry denunciations of class privilege and the injustice of modern society? Demands that her wealth be stripped and used to fund schools and hospitals? Erm, well from a quick glance around me, those things don’t appear to be happening.
There’s an old school of thought which goes: “don’t give the masses too much, just enough to stop them rioting”. What we have is something like that in action, but it’s far more subtle.
After all, I wouldn’t really expect people to riot because Queen Elizabeth exists and gets lots of money for the privilege – that would be extreme. But then it is an interesting question as to why – apart from the Diana affair in 1997 – the monarchy has enjoyed high levels of sustained popularity. Why don’t ordinary people look at the Queen and think “this is simply unfair, it’s time for this to end”?
A similar story goes for the current Conservative Party. David Cameron will almost certainly be the next Prime Minister, and George Osborne his Chancellor. Both were educated at that bastion of class elitism, Eton, where boys learn how to keep their inferiors in check, preparing them for a life running the world in various ways. Both were members of the horrendous Bullingdon Club at Oxford. At one stage since becoming opposition leader, Cameron had 15 Old Etonians in his shadow cabinet.
Yet rather than looking at this set-up and thinking “Christ, these people aren’t like me, and they’re interests aren’t the same as mine”, the average voter supports the existence of the monarchy and if polls are to be believed favours Cameron to be the next Prime Minister.
It seems as though the British in particular have a penchant for deferring to the rule of their established class superiors. It is strange behaviour. It’s also rather depressing: if your average person thinks that it is good and proper for their lives to be run and organised by people originating from a higher social class, rooted (essentially) in wealth and selective breeding, then what hope can there be for worthwhile discussions on issues like tax fairness, the abject lack of genuine equality of opportunity in this country, or any of the other issues which prevent this society being the more equal and just one it could so easily be?
Oh well.
Merry Christmas.
December 24, 2008
This Bourgeois Deception Must End!
Alas, it is that time of the year again. Wherever one walks, one is plagued by the nausea-inducing tones of “festive” Christmas “songs”. Wherever one looks one is bombarded by the entreaties to buy, buy buy! – as though we had all metamorphosed into the stock market traders responsible for the economic misery heralded in the new year tidings.
Yet amongst the overpowering stench of the capitalist orgy which is the hypocrisy of the modern commercialised Christmas, there is one evil which stands towering colossally above all else. A deception of burgeoning proportions! An adamant fortress of lies looming over all of us! I speak, of course, of the foundational capitalist myth from which the system of social control under which we now toil spreads its slimytentacles: the Claus Myth.
The bourgeois apologists, the naive, and the blind will laugh at the truth, dismissing it with raised eyebrows and shakes of the hand. They will tell you that Father Christmas is an innocent concept, a mere entertainment invented for the happiness of children. This is all lies.
The truth is that the Claus Myth is a purposefully designed capitalist deception, designed to inculcate the ideology of worker oppression into the hearts of the youth!
Unshackle your mind from the chains of capitalist society and see the truth for yourself.
We tell our children thesystematic lie that Father Christmas brings them presents for being good – what is this but the capitalist dogma that one receives material reward for conformity to the dominant norm of accepted social behaviour!? How else can this translate, but into accepting one’s lot as toiling for the bosses, being rewarded for perceived “good” behaviour?!
When our children grow older, they learn that Father Christmas is a lie – a lie! And how are they taught to cope with the revelation that all their lives they have been systematically deceived? Discovering that, like the great Claus, the auxiliary figures of the the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy (a creature which imparts money for your own bodily substance – an analogy for wage-labour slavery if ever one existed!) are all fictional, we tell our children that “it was all just a bit of fun”. Just a bit of fun! After systematic deception we teach our children to accept their lot – unmagical, uninspired, untruthful – and furthermore, to perpetrate that deception to the next generation!
What is this but the training for a proletariat-in-waiting, a workforce who upon learning of the chains of their capitalist wage-slavery are told to simply accept that their whole lives have been a lie, and to perpetrate the lie to future generations? Plainly the Claus Myth is the foundational tool in enslaving the minds of the modern worker; the systematic bourgeois oppression of the rising proletariat generations, bonded by chains more powerful than re-enforced steel.
There are, of course, those who would claim this cannot be so. They would claim that the perpetration of a lie of such monumental proportions could not be successfully orchestrated. The disparity of organisations, groups and individuals, and the sheer complexity of the operation, allegedly rule-out the possibility of this vast bourgeois conspiracy.
Yet to think in these terms is too simple! For sure, there is no orchestrated conspiracy – but the point is that one is not needed! The myth perpetuates itself through the actions of a capitalist media whose strings rest in the hands of corporate power. The corporations need to perpetuate the Myth of Claus for two clear reasons: in the short term to sell their useless, distracting, frivolous Christmas wares, in the long term to keep the worker populations docile and productive.
The modern corporate media is dependent – directly or indirectly – upon the financial support of the corporations. The result is painfully obvious: the media perpetuates the Claus Myth, not because it is specifically instructed to do so by the shadowy Bourgeoisie Masters (for these lurk always hidden in the darkness), but because to do so is necessitated by the logic of its existence.
Thus we come to see how the bourgeois media and the corporations control us from birth, indoctrinating us into the Myth of Claus, preparing us for a life of mental and physical serfdom.
This Christmas, I urge you all to throw off the chains of this capitalist oppression! Bloggers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your book vouchers and limited edition box-set DVDs your mum ordered off Amazon!
December 22, 2008
Psychobable
Last week it was revealed that multiple murderer and rapist Robert Napper spent years walking free whilst police pursued Colin Stagg, an innocent man. It now turns out that Stagg was the prime suspect because of a psychological profile created by Paul Britton, a supposedly top forensic psychologist.
Nick Cohen has a good piece in yesterday’s Observer about the Napper case, here. The entire affair reminds me, albeit in a round-a-bout sort of way, of an encounter I had with some other psychobabalists a couple of months ago.
I was living in Oxford, unemployed and feeling extra sorry for myself when I got a call from one of the temping agencies I was signed up to. They asked me if i’d like to do a morning’s work, and supressing the urge to reply “not for you, you horrible leaching bastards”, I agreed.
The next day I found myself in a minibus heading to a very posh hotel on the outskirts of Oxford. I and 8 others were informed that we would be participating in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality test. The set-up was as follows: two people would work with each agency volunteer, first giving them a questionnaire to complete, and then later doing a short interview to determine their personality “type”. The two people administering the test were themselves trainees, being supervised by two men in suits. The men in suits were from a company which bestowes qualifications upon people deemed sufficiently able to administer the Myers-Briggs test.
It transpired that the MBTI is based on the theories of Carl Jung. Now, anybody with the slightest knowledge of Jung’s work should straightaway spot it for what it is: the crazy extrapolations of one man’s introspection on his own experiences generalised and applied to the entirety of mankind and claimed as an iron law of human psychology. Psychoanalysis in all its guises presents itself as a science. It claims to be able to predict and explain human behaviour the way physics can predict and explain thermal currents. Jung is no exception. The problem for Jung – like all psychoanalysis I have so far encountered – is that it is simply a mumbojumbo hotchpotch of empirically unvalidated (and usually untestable) nonsense, unable to stand up to even a modicum of careful rational reflection in the absence of the empirical validity which is the hallmark of true science.
The Jung-inspired MBTI is simply a continuation of this. The questionnaire I was made to answer asked me various things, like whether I prefer the word “hot” or “cold”, or asking me whether “at a party, you sit quietly by yourself waiting for someone to speak to, or speak loudly to anybody nearby”.
The point of the questionnaire is to start to differentiate people into different personality “types”. Of course, a serious problem with anything like this is the sheer ambiguity of the questions (and that’s assuming they even have an underlying substance, which in this case they don’t). Whether I plumb for hot or cold will be influenced by whether I am, at that moment, hot or cold. Whether I sit quietly at a party will depend on what kind of party it is, what mood I’m in, and who I know there. And so on.
Anyway, after answering 80 such questions, I was eventually seen for my ‘interview’. This was a continuation of the questionnaire. The first question I was asked went like this: “do you get your energy from inside, or from outside?” To clarify, I was shown two diagrams. The first had a robot plugged into the mains, recharging its batteries. The second was a solar-powered robot. From this I was told to plumb for either “inside” or “outside”, and my answer was noted down.
As the questions continued I was frequently reminded that “there are no right and wrong answers, only preferences, all of which are equal”. I bit-back the urge to ask whether the preferences of axe-murderers are equal to Christian missionaries.
The questions continued. They were all equally vague and inane, one of my favourites being: “at the end of a stressful day, how do you like to relax? Would you rather collapse in front of the TV, or go out and play sport”. To which I obstinately replied “both”. When pressed to say which I’d rather do first, I couldn’t resist saying “it depends what time it is”.
Anyway, by the end I was informed that all the questions were designed to lead to reveal which of four personality types I belong to: the sensing, intuition, feeling, and thinking being the options. Unfortunately, there was a problem. The answers I gave in the questionnaire did not correlate with the answers derived from the interview.
I’d answered honestly throughout, so I tried to suggest to the interviewers that this was a problem with the test. They baulked, and pointed out that this was based on theory, indeed no less than the theory of a Famous Man. Furthermore, this was more than the theory of a Famous Man, it was the theory of a Famous Man which Professional Psychologists had spent 20 Years refnining into the modern MBTI! Scornfully, I was told not to question the established wisdom of experts, and to answer the question.
I resisted. I looked at their conflicting results and argued that the whole process was unreliable because the questions posed were so interchangeable and ambiguous that one could give completely different answers depending on whether it was morning or night.
Ignoring this, they instead started to cheat. They pointed to things I’d said earlier, and said “so don’t you see, earlier you said X, but then later you said Y. But surely if you meant to say X, then you are an X person not a Y person”. This, essentially, is the trick that horoscopes use. Horoscopes give you lots of information, and let you pick out the information that is relevant to you, by your own hand. You thus come to believe that the information you have identified as relevant to you was intended for you specifically, rather than the truth, which is that you have picked out some specifics from a large pile of irrelevance you are now ignoring, tricking yourself into believing you didn’t do it by your own hand.
When this happened, I simply refused to budge. I can’t remember which of the four types I was supposed to be split between. But I do remember being read two utterly banal statements of the utmost vagueness, and being told to pick the one which sounded “most like me”, thus finally determining my personality “type”. In the end I gave up, picked one for no better reason than I wanted to go home, and the test was over. My the two people administering my test were proud to reveal my true personality type, claiming me as another success of the MBTI test.
I felt thoroughly annoyed. Why? Good question. When I told my girlfriend about it later, she told me to stop being an obstinate sod – after all I was gettng paid, wasn’t I? Well yes, I was getting paid, but nonetheless the entire experience infuriated me. It had something to do with the fact that other people pay them up to £200 a pop to take the test.
You see, after the test was administered I turned to speak to the man in the suit who had been observing the whole proceedings. I asked him if the MBTI programme he runs is successful: “Yes, very” came his reply. I put it to him that it was a load of nonsense, cobbled together along the design of horoscopes, leading people to say what they want to believe about themselves, and then proudly upholding these vague utterances as scientific discovery. He replied that research showed that their results were very accurate. I replied that horoscopes are notoriously accurate, precisely because they are designed to simultaneously cover everyone who reads them.
Things then turned a little acrimonious. He basically told me to piss-off by way of flashing his wrist-watch and stating how much money his company had made, claiming that MBTI is ”a vital tool for correct team-building within organisations and firms”. I bid my farewell.
Now perhaps I shouldn’t get annoyed by this sort of thing. Companies administering the MBTI are the modern day equivalent of travelling con-men, the types who would show up on market day and sell magic toads and miracle hair-restorer to the ignorant yokels. Part of me thinks “if you are dumb enough to fall for this crap, you are fair game to be exploited”.
But most of me doesn’t think this way. Most of me resents the practice by which psychoanalysts and their associated profiteers hoodwink and bamboozle ordinary people through emulating the language and practice of science. The MBTI may simply be employed so as to con management-conscious business into shelling out thousands to have their staff classified in order to ”team build”, and nothing more sinister may follow.
But it is the same invented culture of pseudo-scientific psychobable which underpins psychological criminal profiling. It is the same claim to be a science - and thereby to definitively classify people and predict their actions like molecules in a compound – which underpins both the MBTI and criminal psychoanalysis profiling. In one case it leads to businesses giving away their money to jumped-up con-men. In the other it leads to murders and rapes, with the innocent houned whilst the guilty walk free. One may be worse than the other, but I do not see why we should tolerate either.
December 17, 2008
Gang Mentality?
Many words are being written on the conviction of Sean Mercer, the killer of Rhys Jones. In particular, many are trying to offer analysis and explanation of how it could come about that a 16 year old boy was so immersed in gang culture that he not only had a gun, but tried to kill rival gang members, being apparently unconcerned when he shot an innocent 11 year old who got in the way.
Commentators on the left have given a fairly standard response: the youths in the Liverpool gangs have no futures worth aspiring to, so they turn to semi-organised crime and lawlessness. The remedy is to give these youths alternative futures away from crime.
Now I agree with the proposed remedy, at least in essence. But we have to be very careful how we get to that remedy, and what we understand it as requiring.
Speaking on BBC North West tonight earlier this evening, a woman from a Liverpool-based charity was interviewed and asked why she thought youths like Mercer turn to gangs and violence. Her response went something like this: Mercer et al see themselves as having no future. They look around and they see unemployment and hopelessness. They feel marginalised by society. Hence they turn to crime and gangs because they are desperate and have nothing else. The answer is to give them other things to aspire to.
Again, I agree with the last sentence, in essence. But the reasoning leading to it is subtly wrong-headed and can lead to an under-appreciation of the scale of the task at hand.
Youths like Mercer do see a future for themselves. That future is a life which is exciting, glamorised by their immediate peers, in which they hold power over others whilst allowing them to behave like the gangsters they watch in Hollywood films. Sure, they look around and see unemployment, but rather than this making them hopelessly depressed and thus forcing them into gang culture as a means to survive, they simply take this to be the norm. Likewise, they see drug-dealing and violent crime as the norm. And this is simply because it is the norm for them.
These people are not looking around and thinking “oh, if only I could get a job in an office, or even a factory! But, alas, I am so desperate, I guess I’ll have to turn to crime to survive”. Rather, people like Mercer don’tthink. They come from families and social groupings where it is the norm not to work, and where violence is a way of life. They don’t reflect on their situation and pursue crime reluctantly or out of desperation. Crime just is what they do. It’s what their friends, older siblings, uncles, cousins and often parents do. It is what is normal.
Now, that isn’t intended as a knee-jerk piece of right-wing rhetoric building up to an “…AND THROW AWAY THE KEY!” proclamation. The causes of cases like Mercer are still what the left claim: poverty and lack of opportunity. The remedy for cases like Mercer is to take away that poverty and create opportunity. But the rub is how to go about it, and the extent of what it requires.
If you follow the standard lefty thinking that people like Mercer turn to crime because they have nothing else, you risk viewing them as making some sort of informed, semi-detached rational calculation. That is a mistake. Most people simply don’t step back from their lives (especially at 16) and make rational calculations about their circumstances vis-a-vis their future. If they do make such calculations, they do so infrequently at major turning points in their lives (Should I go to university? Should I re-train? Should we have a third child?).
But to view people as making semi-detached self-reflective rational choices in this way removes them from their embedded surroundings. That is, their context, their concept of normality. The rootedness in everyday reality which makes them who they are and influences what they choose to do.
If we go down the path of analysing people like Mercer as detached, reflective, pursuers of the conclusions of thought-out rational calculations, we risk dangerously over-simplifying them. In essence, they become like rational automatons in some economist’s oversimplified model: DESCRIPTION: Youth X sees Job as yielding 50 units of utility, but sees Crime as yielding 70 units of utility therefore Youth X chooses Crime.
PRESCRIPTION: To make Youth X choose a Job not Crime, pursue measures such that a Job yields greater utility than Crime.
It would be nice, and easy, if the world worked like that. Cases like Mercer would be saved simply by chucking lots of money, or funky social workers with dreadlocks explaining that Crime Doesn’t Pay Kids, or piles of stats, or 6-month vocational training schemes, or whatever else is deemed necessary, at those disaffected youths until they came to a rational calculation that Jobs yield a better life than Crime. This assumes that either it is true the Job yields more utility than Crime, or we can trick youths into thinking it is. Although, here comes another problem: your conception of utility will be linked to what you think is normal. If you think Crime is normal, then there may be serious difficulties for anyone trying to convince you that you’d be happier with Job.
The underlying problem with the above approach is that it is over-simplistic. It neglects the context that individuals like Mercer are embedded in – namely, 16 years of seeing violence, unemployment and lawlessness as the norm amongst his peers and, according to some reports, significant numbers of his family. That context is what informs people like Mercer’s conception of normality.
Mercer et al are not rational automatons maximising preference on a simple scale. They are embedded in a context of what they consider to be normality. In order to change what they do, you need to change what they consider to be normal. That will require addressing (in particular) poverty and lack of opportunity. But it will be fantastically hard, and require an awful lot of time and money. It won’t be achieved by simply demonstrating that Job yields greater levels of utility than Crime. After all, if somebody considers crime normal, they may not give a stuff if a job could yield more utility.
It is of course a problem for everyone (not just those trying to analyse, but also police, neighbours etc) that often Crime usually pays far, far better than Job for people like Mercer. After all, for kids with no qualifications from broken homes on Liverpool council estates, the job market offers a shining prospectus of boredom, drudgery, low pay and even lower social status. So in trying to tackle the problem, society can either attempt to invert that reality, or else change the circumstances where it is normal to see that reality and (quite rationally!) opt for Crime not Job. Preferably it could attempt both.
So what’s the point of my post? Simply that the left is right to say the remedy for cases like Mercer is to tackle poverty and lack of opportunity - but that actually tackling such issues is immensely complex, immensely time consuming and long-term, immensely difficult, and immensely expensive. After all, what is required is to fundamentally change people’s sense of normality, acquired through years of experience and reinforced by social surroundings and interactions. That is hardly going to be easy.
The left-wing commentary I’m seeing at the moment is dodging such hard truths, simply treating cases like Mercer as automatons whom we need to entice with improved preference calculation. They are more than that. They are embedded in a complex reality, and if we are to change them, we must change their perception of the normality of certain aspects of that reality. We must not view them simply as aspiring capitalist producers cruelly denied a step on the first rung of the wage ladder, rationally turning to crime because it pays (even if at some level this is in part true).
For even if the fact that crime pays (for people like Mercer) is part of the explanatory story, more needs to be said. The remedy requires not only making it so that crime doesn’t pay (quite a task) but also ensuring that whether it does or does not pay, people don’t, by the age of 16, consider a life of crime normality.
December 16, 2008
The subtle hallmarks of a free society
Everyone will by now have seen the footage of Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi throwing shoes at George W. Bush and calling him a dog.
It seems fair to say that if Iraq were still a dictatorship, Mr al-Zaidi would be dead by now, or at the least in some dungeon, bleeding heavily and awaiting his death. As it is, he is still in custody, but the BBC are reporting that according to his brother he has been severely beaten.
So in a strange sort of way, this is progress. But there is still a long way to go.
Al-Zaidi’s employers - who on Monday claimed their journalist was expressing freedom of speech, reminding Americans this was something they promised to bring to Iraq – certainly seem to have a point. But let’s be careful as to what, exactly, it is.
What al-Zaidi did, albeit understandable and for many (and not just those in the ‘Arab world’) highly satisfying, was not quite non-violent peaceful protest. There is a case for saying that what al-Zaididid was a sort of low-level assault. After all Bush could have gotten a black eye, or something. So it’s reasonable to postulate that even in the most liberal of democracies he would have been detained (in America, he probably would have been shot by security before the second shoe left his hand), and in theory charges could be pressed against him.
Here’s the rub, though. In a truly free society, the public pressure following the shoe-throwing, especially given the context of Iraqi recent history and that of Mr al-Zaidi himself (he has been abducted by insurgents and interrogated by US forces in the past, but also had members of his own family brutalised by Saddam Hussein’s regime). Basically, a lot of people can sympathise with exactly why he did what he did. Quite a few of them took to the streets of Baghdad to make their point heard.
Now, if those shoes had been thrown in a free society, Mr Al-Zaidi would now have been elevated to a sort of politial untouchable. Too high-profile to prosecute, too much the centre of public attention to beat (though don’t kid yourself by thinking that people don’t get beaten in custody in free societies – they’re just not famous people, usually).
That the Iraqi government is threatening to prosecute – and sounding serious about it - and if Mr al-Zaidi has indeed been physically harmed by state authorities, that is a sign that Iraq is not yet a truly free society.
And so what? I hear you ask. After all, given what’s happened to Iraq since 2003 it’s no wonder it is hardly the beacon of liberal freedom Dick Cheney half-heartedly promised to light. My point is simply that this shoe throwing shows both how far Iraq has come, yet how far it still has to go.
December 9, 2008
The Delights of Job Centre Plus
Continuing yesterday’s theme, I thought I’d do a quick post relating to the world of benefits and unemployment.
As some readers may know, I am currently undertaking unpaid work experience at a local newspaper. This is because I’d like to become a journalist, but you simply don’t get anywhere without experience. And the only way you get any experience is by starting out working for free.
Seen as I work two days a week, doing the same duties as my fellow paid staff, I figured it would be a good idea to claim Job Seekers Allowance. Firstly, the £30 I get each week helps me out in itself. But more importantly, whislt i’m claiming JSA the state pays national insurance contributions for me, which really matters in the long-run.
Now, for those of you who have never had the pleasure of visiting one, a job centre is not a very nice place. Sorry, I mean a Job Center Plus. That’s what they’re called now. (You can just imagine some policy wonk deciding that “re-branding” so as to “re-vitalise the job-seeking process” would all magically be achieved by sticking the word “PLUS!” at the end).
Anyway, Job Centre Pluses (how ridiculous does that sound?) are not very nice. Firstly, you don’t feel safe in them. This is because there are always a number of decidely shifty-looking men in tracksuits smoking outside, or staring menacingly at you when you are waiting to be seen. (Today a delightful thug I remember from school was glaring at me whilst I pretended not to notice him). The presence of security guards marching up and down hardly helps things. The revelation that clients are not allowed to use the toilets doesn’t leave much to the imagination regarding what fellow clients might want to use them for.
Staff at Job Centre Pluses vary. Some of them are quite nice, though I suspect the fact that I wear smart shoes and don’t look like a heroin addict helps. Some are not so nice. They are the Job Centre Plus Staff and you are an unemployed lay-about. So you can damn-well shut up and do what you’re told, you dirty dole-claiming scrounger. Trying to point out subtly that you have a degree, and are currently working for free so as to boost your CV, won’t get you anywhere.
But regardless of whether the staff you encounter are nasty or nice, the point is they don’t do much to help you. For a start, there are no advisers who are there to help you actually find jobs. The present government cut that position as part of its efficiency savings.
So if you want to look for jobs, you have to use the interactive machines on your own. These machines tend to only present you a range of jobs advertised three months ago, with no helpful further information, soemtimes without even contact details. You’ll be lucky to get anything other than stacking shelves in Tesco, and that’s if they’re even working properly.
If you are signed-on for JSA, every two weeks a member of staff puts your ‘desired career’ into a search, and then prints off the first three results, which you are contracted to apply for. Hence last week I applied for a job as the Liverpool Everyman Theatre’s Media and Press Officer. Because I want to work in media and journalism. Get it?
However, what really got my goat today and led to me writing this past was that I went in to my Job Centre Plus to claim travel expenses for an interview in London this Thursday. The interview is for a graduate trainee scheme, lasting 6 months, which i’m very hopeful about because of the experience, contacts and opportunities to learn it presents.
I’d been told previously that I could claim travel expenses for interviews more than 60 minutes journey away. Last week I called up to enquire about this, and was told to go in today to arrange things. Here’s how my conversation went after I’d sat around for 20 minutes waiting to be seen:
And so on.
Normally it annoys me when those on the political right complain about bureaucracy and the mindlessness of pen-pushers. But sometimes they have a point.
I’m the kind of person who will take experiences like this as a reason to make it so that as soon as possible I will never need to go to a Job Centre Plus again. But it would harldy be surprising if lots of people had a different reaction, namely ’what’s the point in even bothering to try?’
December 8, 2008
A Strange Schizophrenia
Reaction to the Karen Matthews guilty verdict has been fairly uniform in its outraged satisfaction. Long before her guilt was pronounced in court it had been decided by the media, as well as most of the GP (myself included). The fact that her guilt seems overwhelming does go some way to vindicating the situation, though i’m not entirely sure we should rest easy at the very public pre-judging of her case.
Nonetheless, there has been a strange schizophrenia in the reactions to Matthews herself. On the one hand she has become the unenviable poster-girl for The Benefit Culture. She is a particularly unpleasant depiction of the hated ’Scroungers’. Chain-smoking, over-weight and jobless, Matthews has been openly vilified by the gutter press whilst it’s not hard to detect an undertone of contemptuous class distaste in the editorials of the broadsheet press.
So on the one hand Matthews is a figure to be hated: the scrounger who lives off your taxes whilst putting nothing back into the system. She is that paragon of right-wing hatred, the woman who has children only to claim benefits. The quintessential social leach.
Yet on the other hand we hear outcries at the awful reality of poverty on modern British council estates. The revelations that Shannon Matthews and her assorted half-siblings survived on crisps and little else. The realisation that some people will never experience employment, and certainly not employment allowing them to progress beyond their miserable lot in life.
So where’s the schizophrenia? It comes into focus when we recall some statistics. According to various sources Mathews claimed between £350-400 a week in benefits. From what I understand, she also has seven children. Doing some simple maths: 400/7 = 57.14. So that’s under £60 a week, maximum, to feed and clothe all members of the family. You can feed and clothe a family on that kind of money (although Karen Matthews apparently did not) but those sorts of figures nonetheless put the lie to the persistent myth that living on benefits is a life of luxury.
Now some may reply that Karen Matthews should have gone out and got a job. Perhaps they are right. But given how un-skilled she was, the best she could hope for would be minimum wage. Post-deductions, that works out as circa £10,000 p.a. Simple maths time again: 10,000/52 = 192 and then 192/7 = 27.42 . So that’s £27.42 a week for each member of the family. Now of course child benefits could be claimed to significantly boost that figure, but you start to get the picture. Going to work may not look particularly financially worthwhile for many low-skilled mothers, especially when you factor in the cost of childcare needed if somebody is out working and there is nobody to look after the children for free.
Don’t get me wrong, i’m not defending Karen Matthews. What she did was heinous, and it is beyond doubt that she is a particularly unpleasant individual. My point is a wider one which is not focused upon extreme and highly a-typical cases such as this one. My point is simply that it is inconsistent to bemoan ‘scroungers’ whilst also lamenting poverty, given what people at the bottom end of the wage-scale, especially single mothers, can expect to earn should they opt for work over benefits.
Once again, i am not defending Mathews or advocating faked kidnappings to improve personal wealth or anything of the sort. Rather, I think people need to choose between hating scroungers and lamenting poverty. Given how things are currently set-up, it’s one or the other.
Feel free to advocate the repeal of all benefits thus ‘forcing’ peolpe to work. I will disagree vehermently with anyone expressing those sorts of attitudes. (I happen to believe it’s better to tolerate a significant number of ‘scroungers’ so long as the genuinely vulnerable – especially babies and children – get basic financial security).
Alternatively, one could advocate a significant reform to both the benefits system and the pay-structure which low-earners can expect, thus alieviating the modern poverty-trap i’ve tried to highlight above. (I’ll be far more receptive to that line of thought).
But we cannot, any of us, be content with simply demonsing ‘scroungers’ whilst simultaneously kidding ourseles that we are troubled by the plight of the poor. Far more is required than that lazy and inconsistent default position.
December 2, 2008
Political Police?
Many right wing commentators have been doing a song-and-dance about the so-called politicisation of the police force in response to the arrest of Damian Green.
Richard Bacon, Tory MP and Conservative Home blogger said “we don’t do political arrests in this country” (an empirically dubious claim to say the least – cash for honors anyone?). A particularly ranty (and boring) piece by Stephen Glover over at the Daily Mail website has such choice over-exaggerations as “This really is the Stasi state in action – the police acting on behalf of the regime against its perceived enemies”, as well as claiming somewhat prematurely that Damian Green did “nothing illegal”.
The dust still hasn’t settled over the Green affair. I am still of the opinion that his arrest was probably a Very Bad Thing and that there will be considerable (much of it justified) fall-out.
I do, however, want to make one quick point: that conservative and right-wing commentators have short memories. All this out-cry about a ‘politicised police’ and about the government directly or indirectly using the forces to harm its opponents is disingenuously myopic. In the 1980s the Thatcher administration happily employed the police to smash legitimate organised labour protests and movements, often through violent means. The government had no qualms about politicising the police in the 1980s to extract revenge on, and decisively break, the unions.
Of course, most of the commentators decrying “Zanu Labour” and the rise of Police State Britain either conveniently forget about Thatcher, or else use their ideological calculator to conclude that it is OK to have a politicised police which crushes ordinary people and their labour rights, but not one which goes after opposition MPs.
My position? The arrest of Green may well be an unjustified and undemocratic action for which heads must roll - but that doesn’t mean history ceases to have happened.
