August 29, 2009
On Holiday
Through my deceptive use of the WordPress schedule function, I may have fooled you into thinking I have been actively blogging for the past two days.
I haven’t. I’m on holiday in Slovenia and have been since Thursday morning.
Now I’ve run out of autoposts, so no more here until I get back next week.
August 28, 2009
Radical Steps?
At the end of September, the G20 is meeting in Pittsburgh. When it met in April the issue of tax havens was high on the political agenda. Much fuss was made, but the results were meagre: an OECD pledge that in order to be “white listed” jurisdictions were merely required to sign pitifully ineffectual Tax Information Exchange Agreements (TIEAs) with just 12 other nations – including microstates like the aeroe Islands or even other tax havens.
Yet Tax Havens will again be on the agenda at the September G20 – and rightly so. There are two things in particular that tax justice campaigners should focus on demanding from the G20: a commitment to Automatic Information Exchange, and Country-by-Country reporting.
Click the links, and get educated. These things matter. If the G20 adopts them, then the world will be a drastically different – and better – place.
But what can our British leaders do at the G20, apart from (we would hope) arguing for these two measures? Well, they could lead by example. For they are better positioned than anyone else to do so.
Now in an ideal world, tax havens would simply be abolished. Assuming the unrealistic possibility of being able to act unilaterally against other jurisdictions without devastating diplomatic consequences, I would advocate Britain simply invading and closing these places down on the grounds that they are a menace not just to our society, but that of the world. We do not tolerate burglars to rob our homes; why tolerate tax havens to steal our revenues, launder illicit financial flows and promote global economic instability?
The world, however, is not so simple. Yet it does not follow that Britain is therefore powerless to act directly against the globe’s tax havens. It could, if only the will was there: for some of the most prolific and worst-offending tax havens in existence are constitutionally dependent upon the UK. If the UK chose to revoke their effective autonomy, then the world of tax havens would suddenly find itself minus some of its biggest players.
The three UK Crown Dependencies – the Isle of Man, the Bailiwick of Jersey and the Bailiwick of Guernsey (incorporating the isle of Sark) – are all major tax havens. Of the UK’s 14 Overseas Territories, Anguilla, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat, the Turks and Caicos Islands, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands and Gibraltar are all tax havens.
Of that list, Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man and especially the Cayman Islands are some of the most important tax havens in existence, with Cayman in particular self-defining as a major international financial centre.
Yet none of these territories are independent. They are all, ultimately, dependent upon the British Parliament, and exercise autonomy only upon the continued whim of UK Governments. If the political will to revoke their independence existed, it could be done.
Indeed it is being done in the case of the Turks and Caicos Islands, the government of which has been taken over by the British Parliament via statutory instrument, on the grounds of endemic corruption, societal collapse and a responsibility of the UK parent Government to mitigate the worst consequences of the Islands’ failure.
The truth is, the UK is uniquely placed in world affairs. Virtually overnight it could eliminate a swathe of tax havens by revoking their autonomy and legislating to end their banking secrecy. In doing so it would send a clear, unambiguous and bold message to the rest of the world: tax havens will not be tolerated.
Britain could lead by example, and in doing so have far reaching impacts. Not only would it help protect its own revenue, but it would also help protect that of other nations – particularly developing countries who, because of endemic capital flight operating through the world’s tax havens, suffer to a degree considerably worse than the UK.
And let us not forget that tax havens were at the heart of the complex financial mechanisms, the off-balance sheet financing and the overly risk-laden financial order that collapsed from 2007-8 and dragged the global economy into chaos. Eradicating the UK’s network of tax havens would be a bold step in remaking the world financial order into a safer, better regulated and less risky place. Given the magnitude of the present downturn, and the stated aims of the G20 being to promote economic recovery and global stability, what better step could Britain take than to clean up its own back yard?
As the G20 approaches, and the rhetoric from Downing Street spills forth, we should all bear this in mind: that Britain can do more than any other individual nation to end the world of offshore abuse. Everything that Gordon Brown says should be measured against that benchmark.
August 27, 2009
Empire and Immigration
There was an interesting discussion at Liberal Conspiracy the other day. Dave Semple was basically arguing that debate isn’t the way to tackle the BNP, because it can’t work given the context, whereas others were challenging this view. I rather agreed with this comment by Lee Griffin, however:
“The mass media need to take their place, as do the political parties, to actually TRY the “debate” side of things in the first place. To claim it’s not working when no-one is actually en masse debunking these myths and lies is jumping the gun.”
But regardless I think it’s worth exploring ways in which the wind can be taken out of BNP sails apart from the medium of public debate in the immediate term.
Much of this will have to focus on immigration, resentment about which the BNP has capitalised upon. The problem is, in this country it’s very difficult to have an intellectually honest debate about immigration which doesn’t revolve around kneejerk racism, or pandering to knee jerk racism by passing off hollow platitudes like “it’s Just-A-Fact that we can’t take any more immigrants.”
Let me lay my cards upon the table. I find it very, very difficult to see a convincing moral justification for restricting immigration which extends beyond self-interest. Many people want to come here because they know that life in the UK offers a higher standard of living than where they are from. That applies, with varying degrees, as much to Polish plumbers as it does to Congolese rape victims. Whether would-be immigrants are motivated by economic or asylum issues, they want to come here because it’s better than where they are from.
Yet nobody anymore deserves to be born in Congo than in Poland or in Britain. Birth is something nobody controls – and yet it decides so much. The rub is this: we Britons no more deserve to be born into a prosperous developed nation with a welfare state and high standards of living than a Congolese deserves to be born in war-torn, devastated Congo, or a Pole into better-than-Congo-not-as-good-as-Britain Poland. So how can we look Poles or Congolese or whoever in the eye and say “no, you cannot come here and share in what we’ve got, because you were born somewhere else”. That argument holds no moral water with me: I honestly don’t see why it is any different, as it stands, from saying “no, you cannot come here and share in what we’ve got, because you were born black”.
Which isn’t to say there are no arguments for limiting immigration. The following would probably pass muster: “No, you can’t come here because if you did it would threaten our wellbeing to such an extent that as a matter of self-defence we must keep you out (sorry)”. But note two things. First, this is an argument from self-interest. Justified it may be, but self-interest does the spadework and that has to be acknowledged. Second, it’s not argument that can be applied to modern Britain. Pace BNP propaganda, NOTW op-ed pieces and the Daily Mail, Britain is not at risk of collapse from immigration. If anything, we enjoy a slight economic benefit from immigration overall. Now there are valid concerns – which i’m going to delicately leave aside here for now – about immigration suppressing wages for the indigenous working class. But to say that our lowest-paid workers have an unfettered right not to experience competition from migrant workers simply because they are British rests upon the unjustified use of the same arbitrary factors of birth I pointed to above.*
What is often doing the work in anti-immigration rhetoric, I contend, is something rather closer to the following: “We have more than you, and we don’t want to share, and we are going to keep you out and use the arbitrary fact of your being born elsewhere as our stated justification for keeping you out.” And that, when laid bear, is a rather unconvincing justification for closing the door to immigration, because it just amounts to selfishness.
But simply going through that process of argument isn’t going to cut it, I fear. The rightwing media has a stranglehold on the immigration discourse in this country, and lofty arguments about arbitrariness of birth coming from poncey egalitarians are not going to get a look in. At least, not directly.
But maybe there is a way in. For there’s something I’ve left out of my above argument, something which makes my points about arbitrariness even sharper: that much of the world is poor because we in the Britain in particular are rich. For in this debate about immigration, the British Empire is the biggest elephant that ever plonked itself into the tinniest of rooms. Acknowledging that elephant could be a very powerful thing to do.
Let’s cut the shit. Part of the reason Britain is so prosperous is that we spent several centuries sailing around the world, raping, killing, enslaving and exploiting indigenous populations whilst stealing their natural resources. As Joseph Conrad noted regarding the scramble for Africa, which was the last big land-grab the Western powers including Britain took part in: “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”
Yet we are in large measure either ignorant of, or in denial about, our shameful colonial history. With the exception of right wing historians like Nial Ferguson (who as far as I can tell wanted to make apologies for exploitation because it makes him controversial and therefore famous as a “revisionist”), Prince Charles (who as far as I can gather wants Empire to be taught in the hope that that way it’ll come back and make him King of the World), and commentators like Johann Hari (who spoils his arguments by going for the most extreme statistics available, even when they’re apparently disputed by most experts) we as a nation don’t talk about our Imperial legacy.
It’s known about, for sure. But generally in a sort of abstract “yeah that was supposed to be really bad wasn’t it?” sort of way, which is quickly glossed over with nostalgia about when Britain was a first-tier power and How We Won The War (And Saved The World). Accordingly, the thousands of colonised subjects from the Indian subcontinent and Africa who fought in that war for our freedom are usually pushed to the side by visions of Spitfires and black-out curtains. Throughout my educational career, for example, Empire only ever got the barest of mentions. Hitler’s Germany was a far more permanent fixture of my historical education than Britain’s Empire.
But you know, things may be changing.
I went away and did some research, and whilst I still couldn’t find substantial inclusion Empire on the GCSE syllabi of the main three exam boards – OCR, EdExcel and AQA [PDF] – I was delighted to see that for 11-14 year olds, things have apparently changed a great deal since my school days. For the National Curriculum website states in its blurb:
“Sequences of work should enable pupils to gain knowledge and understanding of key aspects of British history and of how these relate to the wider European and global contexts. In addition, pupils should have opportunities to study some exclusively European and world topics. For example, a study of the British Empire should include its effects both on Britain and on the regions it colonised.”
And in the specification [PDF] it emphasises that children should learn:
“the development of trade, colonisation, industrialisation and technology, the British Empire and its impact on different people in Britain and overseas, pre-colonial civilisations, the nature and effects of the slave trade, and resistance and decolonisation”
Now it’s hard infer from just this how much students are being taught about our colonial legacy. But the idea that they should be taught about the colonisation of indigenous peoples, the existence of pre-colonial civilisations and the effects of Empire upon colonised regions is probably a very good thing.
I’m not a teacher (though I’d be delighted to hear from one) so I don’t know to what extent the full horrors of Britain’s Empire are being taught. But if our kids aren’t yet learning about the famines which killed between 12 and 29 million Indians, for example, or the brutal suppression of the Mao Mao rebellion in Kenya which saw thousands imprisoned in concentration camps to be tortured and murdered, then they really should be. (See Monbiot.com for more, though he like Hari relies somewhat on the Elkins book which I’ve been warned off by a reliable source for being over the top in its estimations). After all, we teach kids about the Holocaust perpetrated by Germany, so why not about our own millions of graves?
Yet however limited it may be in practice (though again, please tell me more if you know), the very fact that we are starting to teach our children about our shameful past is to be welcomed. This is for many reasons, but for one in particular that I’ll focus on today: the more that Britons learn about our nation’s disgusting history of exploitation – of the role we played in raping vast chunks of the rest of the world – the harder it may be for people to nonchalantly turn away the descendants of those whom we abused and exploited when they come to our doors asking for a slice of the pie.
If children learn that a lot of asylum seekers and economic immigrants – particularly from the Indian subcontinent – come here because one of the few non-harmful legacies we left them was our language, then dismissing immigrants as mere “scroungers” may be considerably harder to do.
If we as a nation can acknowledge our cultural history, then perhaps fewer people will find palatable a political party that advocates the very racism and amorality that underpinned our past colonial exploits.
And to get back to my starting argument, the idea that arbitrariness of birth is no justification for denying people a share of our wealth gains a whole lot more power when people know that what makes the arbitrariness of birth especially significant is a centuries-long history of exploitation that our forefathers facilitated. That many are so poor in large measure because we are so rich.
So if we want to not only beat the BNP, but also reclaim the discourse on immigration from the kneejerk right, let’s play the long game. Let’s teach our kids our history, but let’s teach it in all its rancid horror.
–
* Which means that if one cares about low-paid workers having their wages suppresed, as I do, then it’s no good simply blaming immigrants. Other solutions must be looked for, with the case for increasing the National Minimum Wage being a prima facie good one.
** Conrad was talking about Congo, under the exploitation of King Leopold II. But Britain was as guilty of exploitation in the African scramble of the late 19th Century as Belgium: witness self-authorising imperialist Cecil Rhodes’ arrogation of vast swathes of what is now South Africa and Zimbabwe to extend his diamond and mining empire.
August 25, 2009
Why Tories Should Bother to Watch The Wire
Liberal Conspiracy today reported that Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling claimed that parts of Britain are now akin to sublime American drama series The Wire’s depiction of Baltimore. He said:
“The Wire used to be just a work of fiction for British viewers. But under this government, in many parts of British cities, The Wire has become a part of real life in this country too. Far too many of those features of what we have always seen as a US phenomenon are now to be found on the streets of Britain as well.”
As Sunny Hundal at LibCon and Sunder Katwala at Next Left have already pointed out, Michael White at the Guardian politics blog has exposed Grayling’s claims as complete nonsense:
“Now down to the stats. The city of Baltimore, where The Wire was set by local reporter David Simon, has a population of around 640,000 and a murder rate – falling, I am happy to note – of 234 in 2008, down from 282 in 2007 after rows about fiddled figures – a detail which echoes the TV series.
Is that around 40 murders per 100,000? That’s around six times the New York rate of 6.3 per 100,000 in 2008 (523 murders, slightly up on 2007) and a lot, lot higher than the UK – where the murder rate per 100,000 is around 1.4, slightly higher than France, lower than Scotland (2.56), a lot lower than South Africa (49.6). The overall US murder rate is 5.5 – a quarter of post-Soviet Russia’s.”
Yet Grayling’s claims are to be lamented and criticised on a number of levels. As Sunder Katwala points out, this is indicative of the Conservative’s tactic of pounding out the mantra of “Broken Britain” which deliberately perpetuates a myth and lie about our society, in a cynical bid to gain votes through fear.
This cynicism is only made more tasteless by the fact that Grayling has clearly never watched The Wire. As Sunny Hundal reported, Grayling squirmed when questioned on BBC Breakfast:
Interviewer: Have you really seen any more than that first episode?
Grayling: Yes I’ve seen a number of … I’ve seen most of the first series. I have seen a number of the other episodes yes. I have.
But then, as Sunder points out, “Grayling won’t mind demonstrating his ignorance of The Wire – and he probably wanted a row about the state of our cities.”
Which is a real shame, because Grayling – and the rest of the Tories – could learn a thing or two from watching possibly the greatest television show ever created. To this end, there’s the more obvious points which have already been well-made in the LibCon comments thread:
“If Grayling had watched The Wire he’d have realised that it portrays the ‘tough approach’ to drugs to be an abject failure, and that the key lies in education and decriminalisation.”
“The final series also explored the role of the media in turning complex social and political problems into simple narratives of goodies vs baddies. You have to wonder if Grayling saw any of it at all.”
- Shatterface
“I would say it also demonstrates how good our relatively restrained policy on drugs is in comparison to the shit that Americans have to put up with.”
-Nick
Yet I want to focus on something specific about what The Wire achieves amidst those more general assesments. Namely, a sublime exposition of the importance of uncontrolled arbitrariness in life. The Tories would do well to pay attention.
Arbitrariness – and more generally, luck – have preoccupied a lot of the best philosophers of the last 60 years. John Rawls, for example, devised an entire political conception of justice around the idea that people could not be held responsible for arbitrary factors of their birth, and that social and material inequalities that result from such arbitrary factors can only be justified if they serve to make the worst-off better-off than they would otherwise have been. Ronald Dworkin and the late, lamented G.A. Cohen battled for decades about the role of luck in which socio-economic inequalities society ought to tolerate. Bernard Williams, probably the greatest moral philosopher of his century, spent many a paper exploring the impacts and effects of “moral luck”; the way arbitrary uncontrollable factors influence our conceptions of, and responses to, ethical situations.
The Wire is engaged in the same exploration of issues of arbitrariness and luck in determining socioeconomic distributions, and the attitudes we attach to them. In particular, it brings out beautifully the way in which one’s birth – over which one has no control – determines so much.
Take, for example, the character of D’Angelo in Series 1 and 2. Most viewers probably start out disliking D’Angelo: he is a murder, a drug dealer, and a man who conducts a long-running affair behind the back of the mother of his child. As clear a cut case of a conventional “bad guy” as you could ask for? Not at all. For one of the best aspects of the first two series of The Wire is the manner in which the D’Angelo is gradually humanised to the audience: he turns out to be a man of great integrity, loyalty, intelligence and honour.
How to reconcile these apparently contradictory characters? There’s no quick answer – in part because the beauty of The Wire is that it doesn’t deal in quick answers – but in large measures the contradiction is resolved as one comes to see that D’Angelo is who he is because he was born a member of the Barksdale crime family. He was born into a life of crime, raised to be a drug dealer from day one. Thus the extent to which he is a man of integrity, honour and loyalty is forever reflected through the prism of the arbitrary fact that he is a Barksdale.
What The Wire shows is how powerfully that arbitrary fact of his birth controls D’Angelo’s destiny – and how different it could all have been. For if D’Angelo had been born on the other side of the tracks, if his mother had not been the sister of a drug lord, he could just as easily have grown up to be a cop as a criminal. It’s the arbitrary fact of his birth – the sheer luck of the matter, for which he did nothing to deserve – that dictates his future.
The Wire not only explodes the conventional myths that there are “good guys” and “bad guys” by presenting every character as multi-faceted and complex, it goes further and shows that if there are such things as clear-cut bad guys, understanding why they are bad is no easy task. What it certainly shows is that in many cases bad guys no more choose to be bad than good guys choose to be good; that arbitrary factors of birth play a far greater role in determining fates than choices individuals make. And it is the brutal, unflinching realism of The Wire’s character depictions which make this lesson so compelling and hard to refute.
It is against this backdrop that the Tory’s attempt to co-opt The Wire as part of its rhetoric about “Broken Britain” is so misguided, and why the Tories would do well to actually bother to watch the programme from start to finish. For a key component in Tory rhetoric about “Broken Britain” is the notion that society is disintegrating because people do not take personal ‘responsibility’ for their actions, choosing to blame external factors instead. Accordingly, the way to “mend” Britain – we are told – is to increase the focus upon ‘personal responsibility’, reflected in an emphasis on retributionist punishment of the individual as oppose to society-wide attempts to deal with situational causes. Indeed, just last Thursday David Cameron managed to include such rhetoric in his speech about the NHS:
“I stuck my neck out on this before when I said that instead of blaming external factors for everything, it’s time we recognised that there is a moral choice…that personal responsibility cannot be shirked.”
Presumably when he spoke of “sticking his neck out”, Cameron is referring to his speech of July 2008:
“society…is in danger of losing its sense of personal responsibility, social responsibility, common decency and, yes, even public morality.”
Yet these are messages about society which are completely antithetical to the lessons of The Wire: that life and society is complex, that much is determined before one is even born, that judgements about good and evil cannot be reduced to simple, convenient narratives about “personal responsibility”. Because such a notion is worse than meaningless in the real world: it is positively dangerous because it leads politicians to advocate simple solutions to complex problems, with disastrous results.
Which is not to say that The Wire removes all questions about personal responsibility and reduces everything to simple determinism. It doesn’t. But what it does do is show that it is wholly inadequate to just emphasise personal responsiblity at the expense of situational factors and determinants over which one has no control.*
That’s why the Conservatives should bother to watch The Wire. Without leaving the comfort of the Westminster Village they could learn more about the real world than they have ever yet managed to grasp. All they need are some DVDs.
There is, however, a final and considerable irony to Grayling’s attempt to appropriate The Wire to promote social policies which are completely contradictory to the programme’s message. And I’m not thinking of the quote from Wire creator David Simon that’s already been remarked upon:
“It is possible that a few thinking viewers, after experiencing a season or two of The Wire, might be inclined, the next time they hear some politician declaring that with more prison cells, more cops, more lawyers, and more mandatory sentences that the war on drugs is winnable, to say, aloud: “You are hopelessly full of shit.”
Rather, I draw your attention to the following:
“Why is it that it’s so hard for everyone to focus on these problems? What are we paying attention to? What gets our focus, and what doesn’t? And why? The Wire spends a lot of time pointing its finger at this institution and that institution, and deconstructing a lot of the dysfunction slice by slice. But the last finger to point is at our selves. So to quote the great line from Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” That’s kind of where we’re going with the last season. If this is really what ails us, and if this is really what needs to be addressed, where the fuck are our heads at as a people?”
That final question remains unanswered. Grayling and the Tories, by pumping out their tired, simplistic rhetoric about “personal responsibility” can only cause such a question to remain unsanswered. That’s the biggest – and most egregious – irony of it all, because I want to know, where the fuck are our heads at as a people?
–
* This paragraph is an edit made in response to a comment from John Meredith at the Liberal Conspiracy shortened version of this piece.
August 24, 2009
Tory Free Schools?
The Tories want to emulate Sweden and introduce so-called “free schools”. These would be owned and operated by charitable bodies, but will continue to be funded by the Department for Children, Schools and Families. They will have more autonomy than ordinary state schools, especially over the curriculum they teach – but they won’t be able to select pupils on the basis of ability.
Ostensibly, the only real difference between these “free schools” and Blair’s City Academies is that the free schools will not be constrained by e.g. having to take a certain minimum number of pupils, and hence could be much smaller and not reliant upon the deep-pockets of wealthy backers. Rather, parents or small-time philanthropists could step in.
But I must confess, I’m cynical about the Tory’s motivations for introducing these free schools, and I’m worried about the consequences that may result.
There are already worries that introducing free schools will not decrease costs in school provision. Yesterday The Observer reporteda study from the Skolverket (Swedish National Education Agency) which found that nearly half of Swedish local education directors did not think the new schools had produced “more effective use of resources” and 90% identified “significant increases in costs”.
Furthermore, the adoption of free schools in the UK would possibly be more costly than in Sweden because the Swedes allow profit-seeking private firms to establish free schools, whereas Cameron has said that only charitable not-for-profit entities could do so in the UK. This opens the possibility of a Tory government having to shoulder more of the cost burden in a UK model than the Swedes do in their’s.
But then this was perhaps never really about costs. Michael Gove has, after all, admitted that the start-up costs of UK free schools would be large, yet has pledged to commit to this even amidst Tory rhetoric of drastic spending cuts across the public sector. (Whether this pledge is maintained post-election in the middle of major recession is something about which we’ll have to wait and see).
Rather, it seems the Tory “free school” idea is designed to deal with a specifically British education issue: the legacy of the grammar schools, the presence of the private sector and widely-held perceptions that the comprehenisve system has failed.
The introduction of free schools may in fact be motivated by a belief that it can achieve a sort of education Holy Grail for those with leanings towards the right: provide middle class kids with better educations than their parents’ perceive are available from local comrpehensives, whilst leaving the remaining grammar and independent schools well alone. This shores-up two important voting blocks: the upper middle classes and above who want to keep their selective elite schools, and those less well-off middle class parents who don’t live in grammar catchment areas and can’t afford to go private.
You can see why, looked at it this way, free schools are very attractive to the Conservatives. If they result in middle class parents believing their children are getting a “decent” education and escaping the perceived horrors of the comp system, then this will pull a whole lot of votes to the blue corner.
Indeed, the way that the free schools issue has been parsed is extremely instructive on this matter. Free schools, we are told, will help drive up standards. They will provide better educations for their own students – we are assured – whilst incentivising competing comps to up their game, thereby driving up standards across the board. But is this really the most likely outcome, or is the rhetoric about driving up standards masking something altogether more complicated?
Firstly we must note that empirical evidence from Sweden about the standards impact of free schools is hard to cross-apply to the UK. This is becasue there is mixed evidence about the impact on standards, with much of it being rooted in subjective anecdote from head teachers and parents. Yet even considering reports that indicate standards went up in Sweden, that experience is not immediately cross-applicable to the UK, for the Swedish educational legacy is entirely different to the UK’s. Before 1992 there was virtually no provision of independent education in Sweden where, then as now, it is forbidden for schools to take fees from parents. Thus there is not only no comparison with the legacy of the old politically-charged UK tripartite system (which clings on in the remaining 164 grammar schools), but also no comparison with the British system of fee-paying private schools. The educational landscape and contextual background of Britain and Sweden are very different: what worked for them may not have the same effects in a country riven by middle class anxiety over state education, which is heavily influenced by the established alternatives of grammar and fee-paying institutions, plus a great deal of myth and nostalgia about systems no longer in place.
To assess the likely impacts of free schools in Britain, therefore, we must work at the conceptual level and consider possible outcomes given the British context.
It’s worth recalling that Cameron-style free schools will not be allowed to select by ability – and yet proponents believe that they will drive up standards. This is intriguing, because selection by ability is one of the key ways in which grammar and independent schools manage to excel. The most intelligent kids (or perhaps better, those with the most pro-active parents) are cherry-picked at an early age, and put in small classes where most of their peers’ are being backed by pushy parents who want them to succeed academically. Unsurprisingly this results in lots of these kids doing very well indeed. (Witness the recent domination of private and grammar schools in the A Level results: last week saw private schools achieving 50.4% of papers sat attaining A grades, versus 20.4% in the comprehensive sector. In 2008 31% of privately educated students got 3 A grades, versus 26% at selective grammar schools and just 7.7% at comprehensives).
If the selection aspect is removed, then how will free schools improve standards? Some proponents of free schools, like Toby Young, apparently believe that a bit of good old fashioned discipline and an emphasis on competition are all that’s required. As though labelling the academically least-able as stupid by publicly ranking their ability will lead them to knuckle down and work hard, as oppose to lashing out in alienated resentment against the system that is castigating them.
But let’s be fair to the Tories and suppose their policy wonks have a slightly more sophisticated take than advocating the return of Discipline and pointing out the thickos. A plausible alternative is that free schools will do well because many of them will be small.
There is a lot of plausibility in this: small schools with small class sizes mean lots of attention for individual students. As a general rule, this drastically improves the attainment of individual pupils because increased attention benefits learning, not just in terms of the time dedicated to individual understanding but because learning is promoted by the sense that one is worthwhile and not just a faceless number in a class of 35. It’s no coincidence that grammar and private schools have smaller class sizes than comprehensives, after all.
But look where this thought about standards takes us. It assumes that many free schools will be small in scale and will thus drive-up standards for the pupils educated at them. Yet here’s my worry: that free schools will predominantly be established by pushy middle-class parents in their own neighbourhoods, as a way of avoiding sending their kids to comps that are (perceived to be) failing and which recruit widely from a local area, and where grammar and independent schools are not available alternatives. (Indeed, that’s exactly what Toby Young says he is going to do).
If such schools are small, they would presumably be entitled to restrict entry to the school by catchment area. If established in a middle-class neighbourhood, however, restriction to catchment area would mean that only middle-class kids get a look in. The result? Selection would occur in effect, but operate through the proxy of restricted catchment area covering only well-to-do neighbourhoods: small free schools would be dominated by the middle class kids with pushy parents.
So what would happen to standards? They probably would go up – at the small free schools. But what about at the comprehensives that are left alongside them? Would the competition from the new free schools drive up standards a-la-free market competition model? Or would the withdrawal of greater numbers of middle class kids and their pushy parents mean that comprehensives become dumping grounds for the working class kids whose parents may not have the time or inclination to join PTAs, let alone set up their own free schools? The kinds of parents, perhaps, who themselves may never have experienced the myriad benefits of education and who consequently don’t pass on a culture of learning to their kids in the manner of the more bourgeoisie?
Would we thus not get precisely what the Tories claim they want to avoid? A three-tier system where the wealthiest send their children private, the middle classes either use grammars where available and free schools where not, and those at the bottom are left with the comprehensives that are so widely perceived to have failed, but robbed of the ameliorating benefits of pushy middle class parents and their much-pushed kids? If standards do go up, will they perhaps do so only for the middle classes currently making the most noise, leaving the rest behind?
The risks of entrenching social inequality and immobility by ensuring that the already better-off monopolise quality education appear considerable. Now, call me a cynic, but I have to ask: Is this the price the Conservatives are willing to pay, in exchange for the gratitude of the middle classes and the votes such gratitude will bring?
August 23, 2009
Here and There
Because Global Injustice never rests, I work on Sundays.
So no proper post.
I did, however, get a sarcastic letter published in The Observer today:
Christopher Hitchens writes (My Week): “If she had been born in Russia in 1974, Ms Abram would now be living in a country that featured crony capitalism, a bent and wobbly stock exchange, a servile media, grotesque income inequality, a huge prison population, a severe Aids epidemic, endless trouble with rebellious peripheral neighbours and a healthcare system that was random and rationed by price. But I feel quite sure that this is not what she intended to convey.”
Perhaps not. But then, if one merely strikes “a severe Aids epidemic”, and replaces the words “peripheral neighbours” with “Middle Eastern conquests”, that is a remarkably apt description of the country Ms Abram is now living in, given that she was born in the USA. Funny old world, isn’t it?
Paul Sagar
London E1
Which just goes to show that if you don’t contextualise then you cannot analyse.
In other soon-to-be-closed-down-newspaper-news, Nick Cohen wrote a suspiciously sensible looking column, and citied Philip Hammond MP and his shameful attitude to the perpetuation of undeserved inequality and social immobility.
Can’t think how the hacks at the Grauniad could possibly have heard of the website Interns Anonymous.
August 22, 2009
Billy Bragg on Gender Politics
A few months ago I saw Billy Bragg play at the launch of Searchlight’s “Hope Not Hate” anti-BNP campaign. I’ve been a Bragg fan for some years, and it was a great performance.
On the way home, my girlfriend Beth and I got talking about Bragg’s songs and the strand of left-wing tradition he hails from. Beth felt that whilst Bragg’s tunes are enjoyable and it was a good performance, there was something about it all that made her feel fundamentally excluded. The reason was quite straightforward. She’s neither a man nor a trade unionist.
That might sound strange, but it really isn’t. The gig took place at the TUC‘s Congress Centre, and was directly affiliated with the trades union movement. Bragg himself talked about the importance of trade unionism, of the struggle of the workers, and of the tragedy that the grandchildren of workers who went to Spain to fight fascists might now be voting BNP. He gave performances of There’s Power in the Union, Between the Wars and a stirring version of The Internationale.
But for a woman who comes from a lower-middle class family, who is not a member of a union and whose parents were not union members, in an era where union membership has declined enormously, all this rhetoric of “the workers” – which, given the historical context, of course meant unionised working men – was all rather exclusive. So whilst she enjoyed Bragg’s songs, Beth couldn’t help feeling that this was a performance for people from another time and place and of another gender, and that she wasn’t really welcome. (Me, I enjoy pretending that I live in the 1930s and am off to Spain to kill fascists, so the dis-juncts between Bragg’s words and my identity were easier to ignore due to deeply-entrenched personal delusions).
Such issues clearly go beyond Billy Bragg. How “the left” self-identifies in an era when most of the working class are holed-up in low-grade, low-paid, non-unionised service sector jobs is an important question. What it says to women in that kind of work, as well as those who are managing to do better, is another. The question of how “the left” will appeal to wider audiences now that its traditional unionised base is a shadow of what it was is perhaps the biggest of all.
Yet I’m going to put those issues aside and focus on being fair to Bragg. For he is certainly not the macho, working-man obsessed (chauvinist?) I may have made him out to be. Indeed, one song in particular offers insights into the perceptions and applications of gender politics which are quite intriguing.
Bragg’s Greetings to the New Brunette is song-writing at its best. A catchy tune with lyrics that make points and get you thinking, the song describes Bragg’s relationship with a woman (“Shirley”) who has outspoken feminist beliefs. Some of the lines are cracking:
Sometimes when we’re as close as this/ It’s like we’re in a dream/ How can you lie there and think of England/When you don’t even know who’s in the team?
Just a clever turn of phrase and a good rhyme? Maybe. But also perhaps pointing to something more subtle: the idea that female sexual pleasure can and should extend beyond merely lying back and thinking of England – and the incomprehension of a man who cannot understand what it is about female sexuality he’s missing that’s causing his partner to lie back and think of England in the first place.
Shirley/Your sexual politics have left me all of a muddle/Shirley/We are joined in the ideological cuddle
The point about confusion inferred above seems reinforced here – but with beautiful effect. Bragg can’t understand a lot of Shirley’s politics, but rather than pushing her away they’re joined together in the ideological cuddle. It’s a beautiful example of anti-machoism; accepting his partner’s beliefs though he confesses to be muddled by them, and embracing a special intimacy which follows.
Politics and pregnancy/Are debated as we empty our glasses/And how I love those evening classes
Again, the conjoining of pregnancy with politics appears quite deliberate and going beyond mere alliteration. Along with the line
I’m celebrating my love for you/With a pint of beer and a new tattoo
there’s a definite nod to class identity, but the point of Bragg seeing these debates about politics and pregnancy with a feminist partner as evening classes is instructive: he loves to learn from this woman, who is introducing him to ideas perhaps not previously encountered, and which given Bragg’s male identity in a patriarchal society, must be something of an eye-opener.
Like all the greatest song-writing, however, Bragg’s is attuned to the ups and downs of life. A sexual and emotional relationship is not always plain-sailing, after all:
Shirley/You really know how to make a young man angry/Shirley/Can we get through the night without mentioning family?
Bragg confesses to be at times exasperated. This could, I suppose, be interpreted in at least two ways. Negatively: Bragg only indulges his partner’s politics when it suits him, and he soon tires of it and wants this nagging woman to leave him be. More ambiguously: sexual relationships are hard work, and perhaps made noticeably harder by the awareness of (radical?) gender politics. I prefer the latter interpretation, not least because it reflects my personal experience. I also like to think that Bragg feels the same way I do: that such relationships are more difficult, yes, but also infinitely more worthwhile.
It is the final verse, however, that contains the most depth and fascinates the most:
Here we are in our summer years/ Living on ice cream and chocolate kisses/ Would the leaves fall from the trees/ If I was your old man and you were my missus?
Those last two lines are wide open to interpretation. Is Bragg attempting to talk his partner out of her views, to subdue and subjugate her? I hope not. It certainly isn’t the way I hear those words: not a straightforward proposal for marriage, but rather the posing of a deeply relevant question about identity and compromise. Would the world go so much worse – would the very leaves fall from the trees? – if Shirley compromised some of her beliefs and accepted the institution of marriage, for all its glaring anti-feminist aspects and history, in exchange for the benefits such a betrothal might bring?
If that is indeed what Bragg is asking, then he opens important questions about integrity and compromise when it comes to living out one’s gender politics. Whilst many feminists (both men and women) may know themselves implacably opposed to marriage, the question for many others is not so clear cut. Bragg poses an important question – and like the best poets he leaves it open for us to answer ourselves.
In doing so he also shows that feminism and gender politics is not just for women or liberal, University-educated men with time on their hands, but also for working class lads from Essex as well. If only there were more popular artists (and Essex lads) like him.
August 21, 2009
Are we so different?
Lefties and libertarians spend a lot of time arguing with each other. The comments threads over at Liberal Conspiracy now feature regular libertarians, who turn up to argue with the lefties about…well usually about tax, actually, but sometimes about other things like the role of the state generally and the importance (or not) of equality.
In general out here in the blogosphere (stupid word) there are roughly two types of libertarian. The thick nasty ones who just shout and scream and abuse people, and the intelligent ones who want to debate. (That dichotomy can be applied to the left as well, of course, although I’d say to something of a lesser extent: the blog Harry’s Place however is certainly full of raving, bile-spitting morons who call themselves leftists).
Now I’m fairly uninterested in the nasty thick libertarians, as all they ever serve to do is disrupt interesting debates on websites I enjoy reading by trying to be smarmy or question people’s parentage. The latter, however, do interest me.
They interest me because their views are completely antithetical to mine. I’ll admit, this is because I see them as promoting a vision of “society” (if it would even to continue qualifying for the name) that I believe would be a humanitarian disaster. Yet as regular libertarian visitor to this site Dan is at pains to point out, it’s not like sensible libertarians are in favour of poverty, destitution and suffering. Most of them genuinely believe that in Libertopia, human beings would generally be better off.
(As for the nasty libertarians…well I have my suspicions that many of them are in fact simply selfish egotists who would gladly see the majority of humanity rot in the dirt so long as they did well out of it. But as I said, they don’t interest me).
Now lefties like me are fundamentally opposed to libertarians in a whole host of ways and on a whole host of issues.
Lefties tend to believe that the state can be a force for good in the lives of the downtrodden; libertarians tend to believe it is always a force of evil, interfering in the freedom of the individual with the use of unjustifiable coercion.
Lefties tend to argue back that “freedom” is not simply a matter of the state not interfering with people’s lives, but that in fact the state can actively promote freedom by increasing the capacities of the worse-off to actualise their freedoms, e.g. by transferring wealth to them. Libertarians will tend to argue that this wealth is extorted (this is their view of taxation) from others without justification, and that this is a fundamental attack upon freedom as well as perpetrating organised violence by the state.
Lefties frequently reply that this is all justified because it promotes equality, and that’s a Good Thing. Libertarians tend to reply “Why?” or “No it isn’t!”, and reject arguments that are based on ideas that if human beings should be more equal then the state is justified in making them so.
In the process, people get angry and exasperated with their opponents. Tempers flare. Each side despairs of how the other can be so utterly, fundamentally misguided about everything. Billions of words are poured into blogs and comment threads, fighting it out in an online groundhog day of frustration.
Meanwhile in the real world, the state continues to grow. Mrs Thatcher came along with her promise to roll back the state…and made it bigger whilst increasing inequality. New Labour came along and expanded the role of the state…by pouring funds not into the empowerment of the masses or the promotion of equality, but into money-burning PFI contracts, pointless quangos and hiring management consultants to cock-up civil service departments*. New Labour managed not only to make the rich-poor gap wider, but by the end of its rule appeared to have made the poorer worse-off in absolute terms as well.
Taxes will almost certainly go up next year. But not to promote equality or redistribution, but to dig Britain out of a massive hole in part caused by a gigantic bail-out of the grotesquely unaccountable multinational banking corporations that are a gross anathema to both lefties and consistent libertarians (who are some of the most vocal opponents of the limited liability constitution which now underwrites all Multinational Corporations).
Which leads to a very odd conclusion, doesn’t it? That whilst we lefties and libertarians pour our hearts and brains out into the internet until silly o’clock in the morning, the world keeps getting worse by both our measures. We disagree about virtually everything, and usually in completely fundamental ways…but actually we’re not that different, in one key respect. We’re all busy pissing into the on-line wind whilst the world goes to hell in a handcart.
Though at least we can surely agree on something: thank god it’s not going to hell in their handcart, the evil bastards.
–
* Though it did put loads of money into the NHS, and made it better, which is what lefties want. So maybe lefties have a better time of it overall than libertarians. Hurrah!
August 20, 2009
Self Promotion
Very busy today, no time to blog extensively.
However I have a short piece up at epolitix.com. It was supposed to be funny. Upon reflection, it appears to read more like boring sycophancy. And they’ve played horrific silly-buggers with lots of rather important punctuation, with the result that it reads rather like a piece of shit. Oh well, serves me right for trying to scratch up CV notches.
For those who can’t be bothered clicking links and are foolish enough not to have bought the latest Private Eye (1243), I draw your attention to this:
Hammond Begs
There’s one group that MP’s don’t mind seeing underpaid; they young office dogsbodies – sorry, interns.
Latest to advertise for some help on the cheap is the man who might soon control public spending at the Treasury: Tory shadow chief secretary Philip Hammond. He’s after an unpaid “confident, hardworking” intern, ideally for “a minimum six months” to deal with “research and correspondence relating to the Treasury portfolio”, “constituency casework and correspondence”, and “general office administration”, among other matters. Along with having rich parents, the successful candidate must be able to “learn quickly and work under pressure…on own initiative with minimal supervision”.
Experts pointed out to Hammond that this is the kind of work for which, by law, the minimum wage must be paid. His response – “I would regard it as an abuse of taxpayer funding to pay for something that is available for nothing and which other members are obtaining for nothing” – is unlikely to cut the mustard with the HM Revenue & Customs investigators who police the rules.
How interesting! I can’t possibly imagine how Private Eye might have found out about such a thing.
August 19, 2009
Is high unemployment a policy choice?
Today David Cameron claimed that the UK could default on its national debt payments unless it drastically cuts spending. Labour ministers responded by saying this was scaremongering, and that Cameron was talking in such vague terms that he couldn’t possibly be adding to the debate in a genuine way.
I don’t know enough about it to say. But I have written before that there seems, prima facie, to be a strong case for increasing spending during a recession, a-la-Keynesianism. I hedged that with a warning about increasing spending, but not at the expense of defaulting on the national debt.
For what it’s worth, it appears that the Tories want to cut spending considerably more than what would be required to prevent a national debt default. I worry that this will prolong recession. In particular, I fear that this will make unemployment worse, for longer. This matters to me, because, amongst other things, unemployment is a social ill which inflicts terrible unhappiness on individuals and families.
And last weekend The Sunday Times reported that under the Tories UK unemployment could hit 4 million. So I feel I may have a valid concern about Tory spending plans.
Today however I want to focus on the wider (or if you like, meta) question working in and around that concern: the extent to which unemployment in the UK is a policy choice as opposed to a brute fact of economic downturn.
Now many readers of this blog know far more about economics than I do. I welcome their input, from whatever ideology they hail. So let’s see where we end up.
First off, here’s an interesting graph:
(Source, who in turn claim the DWP as their source, though the link is broken but I’m sure it’s right because there’s a very similar version in Dr James Forder’s half of the book Both Sides of the Coin, which cites the OECD as its source).
It’s quite striking, isn’t it? In the popular perception, it’s probably fair to say that the 1970s invokes visions of social and economic strife: a Winter of Discontent, angry unions refusing to bury the dead, inflation and unemployment running wild.
No doubt, those perceptions in part are true. Yet it’s very interesting to note that from 1979 until (around) 1999, the lowest rate of unemployment experienced in that period was above the highest rate of unemployment from 1971-79. This was despite governments during that period re-classifying many unemployment claimants as other benefits claimants (e.g incapacity), to massage the statistics.
Post 1999 unemployment did fall below the 1971-9 peaks. Yet that period was defined by an economic bubble of gargantuan proportions which has now popped so spectacularly, sending the UK unemployment rate shooting back up towards the highs of the 1980s, and if The Times is to be believed, potentially beyond.
This is significant. For firstly, it appears to discredit what is known as the “natural rate of unemployment” hypothesis, originally advanced by Milton Friedman though later refined by others.
As I understand it, the natural rate hypothesis holds that a macroeconomy tends towards an equilibrium rate of unemployment, and that by attempting to alter this rate governments can only cause trouble .
The reasoning, as I understand it, is that if a government attempts to interfere with the natural rate of unemployment, the result will be (most significantly, but not exclusively) to induce inflation, due to the impact such government activity will have in the wider economy. And inflation was viewed by Friedman and the monetarist school of which he was a part as the worst evil of a national economy: it produces instability, disrupts markets, reduces confidence and does a whole load of bad things governments generally tend to want to prevent, let alone induce.
Accordingly, Friedman argued that because there was a natural rate of unemployment, the best thing that governments could do was to stop meddling: unemployment would achieve a “natural” equilibrium rate if left to sort itself out. Accordingly, governments should concentrate not on undertaking interventionist (typically labeled “Keynesian”) economic policies, but instead should pre-occupy themselves with tackling inflation through the use of interest rates and control of the money supply.
This more “hands-off” policy was deemed more likely to keep inflation under control. If inflation was under control, the economy would behave in a stable manner and unemployment would find its natural rate. From 1979 onwards, the Thatcher government implemented a monetarist approach to macroeconomic management, and this was largely accepted by the Labour government when it eventually regained power in 1997 and handed over power to set interest rates to the independent Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee.
From what I can tell, most of the world’s central bankers and economic policy makers continue agree that inflation is the primary scourge of modern economics, and the one to be tackled as a priority. Hence interest rates remain the main weapon of macroeconomic management in most countries, though I am under the impression that most have largely abandoned attempts to strictly control the money supply. (I may be wrong).
The problem is, the graph above – especially if we use our imagination to show the line shooting upwards again in 2008/9 – shows that the belief in a natural rate of unemployment simply looks wrong. Unemployment rose dramatically in the 1980s, with two enormous peaks separated by a trough still considerably higher than the 1970s maximum. Sure, it fell in the big bubble from c.1993-2007/8, but then it shot up again over the last year. There wasn’t much of a natural rate here, as the fluctuations and overall levels of unemployment grew considerably greater in the post-1979 period. The empirical evidence of the past 30 years implies that the natural rate of unemployment was just wrong, at least when applied to the UK.
What about inflation? It’s true that the period since 1979has seen considerably less volatile inflation experienced by the UK:
Although the early 1990s brought inflationary spikes of 7.0% and 7.5%, these are considerably tamer than the 1970s rates of 24.20%, 16.50%, and so on.
But we must be aware of how different contextual factors may have influenced these rates. The huge rates of the 1970s may have owed a great deal to the oil price shocks of that decade; the 1960s after all demonstratee much tamer levels of inflation. Conversely the period from the mid 1990s to 2006 could owe a great deal to the huge influx of cheap Chinese imports holding down UK inflation in goods and services (whilst it raced away in the assets market e.g. massive house-price inflation, fuelling the great bubble now gone pop).
Let’s, however, maintain the standard view that post 1979 monetarism has been broadly successful in controlling inflation. It does not, however, appear to have guaranteed economic stability: two major recessions in the 1980s, another at the start of the 1990s and by many accounts, one of enormous proportions right now.
But that alone is no special criticism of monetarism; Keynesianism oversaw bad economic times too, and only a hubristic fool would claim to have abolished boom and bust.
Yet what monetarism has overseen is a massive increase in the rate of unemployment the UK experiences – and tolerates. UK unemployment has now shot up to over 7.8%, after all, way above the highest rate of the worst point of the 1970s.
Which implies something very interesting: that higher levels of unemployment in the UK are in large measure a policy choice.
Now, this may in fact be a justifiable policy choice: unemployment may be a lesser evil than inflation, and so the correct one to tolerate if we must have one or the other.
Maybe. But the extent to which one a) holds it to be true that inflation is the greater evil, and b) attributes lower inflation post-1979 compared to 1971-9 to monetarist policies as opposed to factors beyond the control of government (oil shocks, Chinese goods etc) will alter the way one views that trade-off.
And finally, we must at least pose the question as to what extent a public acceptance of higher levels of unemployment (if indeed there is one) reflects the extent to which the social settlement post-Thatcher balance of power has accepted a shift of power away from labour and towards capital – and for how long such an acceptance might continue if the present recession proves to be as painful and protracted as some have predicted.
