January 30, 2010
China: A Very Bad Example
There’s a worrying tendency emerging in some sections of the left. I noticed it in this blog post. Today I saw it writ large. The willingness of some leftists to cite China as a positive example for the UK.
At the appalingly-titled “Progressive London” conference, Ken Livingstone gave a speech in which he declared that the proof that government investment ends recessions lies in China’s staggering rates of state spending, and enormous correlate levels of growth. (He also claimed that British kids should have fewer holidays, so that they can receive the structured educations that will make them good British citizens who are competitive with Chinese children studying “from 7am to 6 at night”. They don’t call him Red Ken for nowt, eh?).
Later, John Ross of Socialist Economic Bulletin (and Ken’s former economic adviser) took some time out from claiming that Britain’s national debt didn’t need to be repaid, that the triple-A rating is meaningless, and that all spending cuts are completely a choice and not imposed by brute economic circumstances, to cite China as proof-positive that government-led investment ends recessions. He waxed lyrical about China’s 9% growth in the last quarter, and how the Chinese government simply told banks to lend and – hey presto – they lent.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for keeping government spending as high as possible to protect the tentative recovery. But citing China as a model for UK growth is idiotic, and deeply troubling.
Firstly, it relies upon deliberate economic simplification. Why might China be experiencing such high rates of growth? The fact it possess enormous and largely untapped natural resources, which it is beginning to put to use, has something to do with it. That China is still in a stage of rapid industrialisation from what was effectively a peasant society, ravaged by the Cultural Revolution, helps too. Britain is incomparable on both these metrics.
Likewise, Chinese growth is in large measure driven by enormous government-led infrastructure projects (as a component of rapid industrialisation). It also has as an enormous manufacturing base, fuelling western demand for cheap consumer goods. Britain, by contrast, relies heavily on its financial and service sectors. The two economies are thus radically different.
So pointing at China and simplistically saying “look, they have lots of government spending and lots of growth, QED” is stupid. You might as well point to Angola and its 12%+ oil-driven growth, and it would tell you as much about the UK’s situation (we, after all, still possess some reserves of North Sea Oil). Indeed, if one wants proof that government spending leads to economic recovery, why not turn to history and take the case of America’s New Deal? That at least tells you something about relatively comparable economies and circumstances – though again one would need to adjust for situation and the complex nature of macroeconomic recovery. (h/t)
But more importantly than all that, let’s remember a key method by which China achieves its phenomenal growth: by systematically denying the civil and economic rights of its domestic population.
Chinese workers have no meaningful rights whatsoever (their right to unionize, for example, means a right to join the union which reports to the Communist Party). They are paid pitifully low wages (averaging around $0.50 an hour in 2006), and have no hope of securing anything better. That’s a key way in which China’s export-manufacturing sector booms: low wages equal low costs, after all.
Another way China grows is by doing what I observed last summer: going to places like 1000-year old Yancheng, raising it to the ground, and erecting a city the size of Chicago in its place. And what do you think happened to the people living in Yancheng who didn’t want to have their homes demolished. Do you think they were consulted nicely and offered new places to live with guaranteed legal redress? Or do you reckon they were forcibly re-located as is the Communist Party’s preferred approach?
China may have very high growth rates. But it has no democracy, no civil rights, and no effective rule of law. It is a totalitarian dictatorship, achieving “economic miracles” at a cost no desirable society would ever contemplate.
Yet when John Ross was pointedly asked why Iceland and Ireland don’t simply adopt the “Chinese approach”, he simply claimed that the political consensus in those countries wouldn’t tolerate a more state-centred economy. He made it perfectly clear that he thought this a mistake: that China was leading the way, and should be followed.
We have been here before on the left. From the 1930s to the 1980s there were many who persistently claimed that Soviet Russia was a workers’ paradise, a successful alternative to capitalism. They were wrong, and millions of graves testify against them.
The left must not repeat the mistakes of history. China is an example of what we must always be against, not what we must aspire to. We forget that at our peril.
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End Note:
The irony, of course, is that the nutty left are usually the ones blithely decrying “neo-liberalism”. If “neo-liberalism” is anything, it is usually claimed to be an economic approach which privileges growth and profit above the welfare of ordinary people.
For reasons I cannot comprehend, some of those rabidly decrying “neo-liberalism” suddenly forget those concerns about growth über alles when it comes to hailing the totalitarian dystopia of modern China.
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UPDATE
John Ross’ views on China are well laid-out at this Guardian article. You will notice that NOT ONCE does he mention China’s horrific record on human rights, or the fact of its totalitarian dictatorship.
The comments beneath his piece are almost universally spot-on in calling him out on this matter.
Also, Nick Cohen (and you know it’s bad when Nick can successfully call you out on your shit) made the following observations of this nasty neo-Soviet Apologist two years ago:
“John Ross, Livingstone’s economic adviser on £121,000, is typical. He is so lacking in economic knowledge that he decided that the Russian Communist party was a force for the future in 1991, two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. His economic advice at the time was for the ruling class to learn ‘that they will be killed if they do not allow a takeover by the working class’.”
January 29, 2010
Global Delusions
I’ve been mostly ignoring the Chilcot enquiry. Flying Rodent sets out all the best reasons why, so I won’t repeat them.
But today was a day nobody could ignore.
From 2000-2008, we British sneered at the Americans for their dim-witted cowboy President. Yet it seems the joke was on us. For whereas the yanks were ruled by a public fool, for 10 years Britain was led by a man who belonged not in Number 10, but down the rabbit hole.
Tony Blair today claimed that Saddam Hussein was a
“monster and I believe he threatened not just the region but the world.”
Perhaps Blair did believe this prior to 2003. But it now seems fairly incontrovertible that there was no evidence for Iraq possessing WMD (not least because none ever turned up). It also seems beyond reasonable doubt that American and British intelligence knew that Iraq had no WMD prior to the invasion….and that Blair knew this, misleading the British Parliament instead.
So when Blair says that he thought Saddam was a threat to both the region and the world, he’s either alluding to WMD – in which case we know he’s lying or deluded – or he’s referring to Saddam being a threat because he was allegedly a sponsor of terrorism.
The last claim isn’t necessarily insane, taken alone. It becomes so, however, if we couple it with remarks from Blair like this:
“It was better to deal with this threat, to remove [Saddam] from office and I do genuinely believe the world is a safer place as a result.”
For the world manifestly isn’t a safer place. Resentment against American power and British duplicity in the Muslim world was only exacerbated by the 2003 war, as any fool can tell. Whilst we’ll never know if the 7/7 attacks and the spate of subsequent failed terror attempts wouldn’t have happened if the Iraq war hadn’t occurred, one thing is manifestly obvious: whatever else Iraq achieved, it certainly did not make such attacks less likely. Mehdi Hasan argues powerfully that it positvely hightened the terrorist threat.
Abroad, the Iraq war drained resources and attention away from Afghanistan. Whatever you think about that conflict, it is incontrovertible that the Afghan situation was made worse by the huge diversion of resources and attention to Iraq. Afghanistan is now a major problem. Even worse, the conflict risks spilling over into nuclear-armed Pakistan, as the Afghan fuels the rise of radical Islamism over the border.
Yet Blair tells us we are safer.
Even more spectacularly, he claims that removing Saddam means Iran is now less of a threat to global stability:
“today we would have a situation where Iraq was competing with Iran” [both in terms of nuclear capability and] “in respect of support of terrorist groups”.
It’s nauseating to follow the mental somersaults Blair performs to draw this conclusion. Not least because nuclear weapons have somehow crawled back into the story.
But recall that after Iraq was invaded, given the fact Afghanistan was already occupied this meant that Iran’s immediate neighbours to both the West and East were under occupation by foreign forces, and have been ever since. Foreign forces which are statedly hostile to the Iranian regime. And Blair expects Iran to be less bellicose now?
The whopping great irony-cum-paradox is that the disaster of Iraq has however made Iran more of a threat, because the option of a US-led invasion of Iran is actually completely off the cards. In terms of human and financial cost – not to mention further regional destabilization – it’s simply not going to happen. And the Iranian regime knows this, meaning it’s hand has been considerably strengthened. If it is interested in funding terrorism, or developing nuclear weapons, it can do it with greater impunity than ever before.
Yet Blair is so convinced of his grounds that he defiantly told Chilcot that he’d do it all again:
“The decision I took – and frankly would take again – was if there was any possibility that [Saddam] could develop weapons of mass destruction we should stop him.”
It’s been much commented that Blair seems to believe that if he simply repeats the courage of his original convictions then he will therefore be absolved from blame. As though mere good intent will cancel-out the horror of the actual consequences.
After today, I can no longer subscribe to that analysis.
The truth is that Tony Blair is a man completely deluded.
He cannot differentiate between the fantasy of WMD his spin-machine fed to the world’s media, and the fact that no such WMD ever existed.
He believes he has made the world a safer place by fuelling the rise of domestic terrorism, rendering the middle east less secure and more hostile, and increasing Iran’s scope for developing nuclear arms.
And he claims he would do it all again.
Tony Blair does not belong on trial at The Hague, as many have suggested. He belongs under the permanent supervision of trained medical professionals.
January 27, 2010
Taste of the Future
2009 closed with Lord Mandelson dropping plans to part-privatise the postal service, in the process meaning that its multi-billion pound pension deficit remains in place. As a result, Royal Mail is looking to cut major costs.
Don’t, however, fall into the lazy assumption that the internet has reduced the need for Royal Mail’s services. Or that it’s a dinosaur state monolith whose role could be better fulfilled by the private sector. This article puts a stong case against such easy complacencies, pointing out that many of Royal Mail’s difficulties may stem from the activities of parasitic private companies.
Nevertheless, a couple of weeks ago Business Minister Pat McFadden announced that job losses could be expected in Royal Mail this year.
He might have added that the shedding of jobs has already started. And Royal Mail management are taking no prisoners.
Consider my former home-town of Southport. This week the local press is reporting the sacking of a local delivery worker. The grounds? He put his signature on a recorded delivery for an elderly pensioner, to save her the long trip to the out-of-town depot which is not served by any public transport. It was a first offence, but he got the sack anyway. He has two children to support, and in all likelihood a mortgage to pay.
And that’s not the best part. The postie in question was only sacked after the elderly lady rang up to express her thanks that he had been so kind and considerate. If she hadn’t done that, management would never even have known.
This is not an isolated incident in Southport. Since 2003, 46 postmen have been sacked, suspended or forced off work with stress. The majority of cases have occurred in the last three years.
In particular, two delivery workers were sacked last year for not wearing cycle helmets despite being in areas not designated “hazardous”. Neither had committed any prior offences. Another employee was dismissed – despite having worked for Royal Mail for 25 years – because he left his van unlocked as he delivered mail to an isolated farmhouse on a single-lane track.
Last year Royal Mail boss Adam Crozier Crozier has paid himself almost £1million in salary and bonuses. That’s on top of the £2.4million in performance bonuses and £3.6million in pay since taking over as Chief Executive in 2003. But it seems that pace Crozier, Royal Mail is determined to cut costs.
Southport’s MP John Pugh summed it up pretty well in Parliament the other day:
“It would be quite easy to leap to the conclusion that there is an underlying strategy to find reasons to shed experienced staff, so as to cut costs, replace permanent staff with casual or reduce pension liabilities. How else can we explain the fact that the manager who has sacked the most staff appears to be the most applauded by the Royal Mail? I do not go for easy explanations, but I am not entirely certain what other explanations I should offer in this case.”
MPs from both Labour and Tory benches concurred with Dr Pugh that the same experience is being repeated in other constituencies.
This, however, is only a foretaste of the future. As the public sector spending axe comes down, it won’t just be postal workers bearing the brunt. Today Britain officially – if only barely – pulled out of recession. But I don’t see even 0.1% of light at the end of the tunnel yet.
So strap in, because after the election it’s going to be a nasty couple of years. Just how nasty depends, of course, on just how hard the spending axe falls. And that depends, in all likelihood, on Dave and Chums.
Who’s feeling optimistic?
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Disclaimer: I used to work for John Pugh MP as a Parliamentary Researcher
January 26, 2010
Broken Heels
Inspired by the wonderful Cognitive Biases in Popular Songs festive post at Stumbling and Mumbling, I thought I’d do something similar for Alexandra Burke’s “Broken Heels”. Detractors will claim that it’s “just a song”, and nothing more. However, I’d ask you to keep an open mind before arriving at that conclusion.
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Burke’s “Broken Heels” serves to reinforce pervasive gender inequalities normal in our society. perversely, these inequalities are not simply normalised, but simultaneously turned into sources of supposed pride from the female perspective. This in turn serves to further legitimate the inequalities being normalised.
We’ll get to the main evidence for this thesis – the chorus – shortly. But first it’s worth noting these lines:
“Oh, you know we rock, we control the block/
Whatever’s going down, ladies take the biggest cut”
As far as genuine female empowerment in our society goes, that first claim simply doesn’t map onto reality. Only 5% of Britain’s largest companies have women in top jobs. 15 UK High Court judges are women, compared with 92 men. Less than 20% of MPs are female. In the UK, women do not “control the block”, unless the block is nursing, primary school teaching or secretarial work. And I don’t think Burke has those in mind.
As for ladies taking the biggest cut, well that simply isn’t true either: women working full-time in the UK in 2009 made on average 12.2% (using the median) or 16.4% (using the mean) less than men. Male university professors could expect to make 13.9% more than their equally-qualified female colleagues. Women in the financial sector can expect to make 55% less than their male counterparts.
But these lines just represent falsehood, and nothing more.
Most of the rest of the song is sheer babble, of course. But of what’s actually intelligible there are some instructive remarks about rolling-up sleeves and working hard (“I roll my sleeves up, wrap my hair up/There’s no sign on the road so I never stop”) but also being fun (“we bring the party, yeah yeah yeah/We brough the party ay ay ay”).
Most women who’ve managed to be successful in life will know all about this. The expectation that not only must women work hard, they must also be fun. Like the expectation that not only must a successful woman think for herself, she must also be attractive. That she’s got to keep up with the guys – whilst wearing high heels.
Which brings us to the crux of the song:
“All the ladies tell the fellas we can do what they can do/
We can do it even better in broken heels”
[...]
Anything you can do I can do better/
Boy, I can do it in broken heels/
Anything you can do we can do better/
Boy, I can do it in broken heels”
First, note the fact a “sex war” is being taken for granted. The uncontroversial position for a pop-song to assume is that there is a necessary antagonism between men and women. This is just standard, unquestioned, taken for granted.
Which is hardly surprising. This is, after all, what underpins our collective thinking on gender issues: men versus women, mars contra venus, girls against boys. It’s so hard-wired and internalised, you may think I’m being a nut for even pointing it out. But if so, why do you think it’s normal for men and women to be so often treated as opposing forces, and why does it seem so whacky for me to draw attention to it?
The main message of Burks’s song, however, is of feisty girls able to take the men on at their own game – and do it better. On the surface, it sounds like a message of empowerment and aspiration: “Girls! Don’t accept your place as second best – beat the men!”
But the reference to broken heels is important. It’s not enough for Alexandra and co to simply be better than the guys. She’s going to be better whilst wearing broken (high) heels.
What are high heels? They’re a type of shoe that can be extremely painful for the wearer, induce poor posture and the risk of back problems, and do so in order to make the wearer’s legs and backside look more pert than they otherwise would be. They also encourage the shoulders to be drawn back and the chest pushed outwards, because of the need to balance.
Oh, you thought high heels just came about by accident? And you never thought it strange that men don’t wear them?
Alexandra’s determination to beat the boys means not only that she’ll do it whilst wearing disadvantaging footwear which is a symbol of female sexualisation and objectification (albeit one that many politically aware feminist women choose to continue wearing, as is their prerogative), she will do it in broken heels. Rather than kick of her shoes and get on with it flat-footed like the men do, she’ll power through despite the disadvantage.
Just like we expect women to do, every day.
What’s interesting about this song (because it certainly isn’t the music) is how it normalises gender inequalities whilst lionizing the woman who accepts those inequalities. Indeed, one of the very symbols of inequality – the high heeled shoe – is itself introverted and made to assume the (false) mantle of empowerment. Meanwhile, the woman who says “why should I do it in heels, broken or otherwise? Why don’t you try wearing these things to work and see how far you get?” is nowhere to be seen.
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Appendix
I obviously don’t think that whoever wrote this song consciously planned to embed socially dominant attitudes to gender in order to somehow indoctrinate listeners. Of course not. That’s idiotic.
It’s also not how patriarchy needs to work.
The gender inequalities assumed and underlined in Burke’s song are a stock part of our society. It’s totally normal and expected to find them in a pop song. And thanks to this pop song, it will be even more normal and expected to find such attitudes in people’s heads. Because that’s how the boundaries of social legitimisation and acceptability operate. No white cats are necessary.
January 25, 2010
Policy Watch
Of all the spoof D-Cam posters, this is one of my favourites:
After all, the Conservatives are telling us we can’t go on like “this”. They’re promising to slash the deficit by imposing swinging cuts on public services. Boris Johnson has given us a foretaste of Tory priorities, hiking fares for ordinary Londoners whilst arguing that bankers’ bonuses should be left untouched and the City unregulated.
But when it comes to actual policy, the Cameron team haven’t let much be known. Despite all the 2009 dross about the Tories not having “sealed the deal” with the electorate and how it “wasn’t enough” to sit back and let Labour lose, that appears to be precisely the Conservative election strategy.
Indeed, who can blame them? Because whenever they do announce a policy, chaos ensues.
Last week Cameron and Co sought to grab headlines by getting tough on education, and tough on the causes of education: No teachers would have less than a 2:2 degree under Dave and friends! To be honest, I don’t actually object to this on its own (if you’re in the 7% of graduates that can’t do better than a 3rd, it’s unlikely that you’ll be much good as a teacher). What I thought was plain weird was Cameron’s praising of Finland as an educational beacon – when Finland is one of the most socialist countries in Europe.
Similarly, Tory plans to import the Swedish model of “free schools” (which I expressed concern about before) leave out all the stuff about Sweden being a much more equal society than the UK with a long history of social democratic redistribution. On education, it’s either gimmicks about “elitism in teaching” or cherry-picking from Scandinavia.
To round the week off, the Conservatives grabbed some headlines by promising to cut MP numbers by 10%, a piece of cynical populism making Parliament even worse at its job than it currently is.
On tax, the Tories’ two big headline-grabbers are mind-bogglingly backwards. As noted (twice) last week, David Cameron wants to give tax-breaks to millionaires by rising the threshold of inheritance tax (which at present hits just 12,000 estates a year in a country where 560,000 die). They want to do this whilst promising to slash public services, and have already mooted a VAT rise to 20% which would hit the poorest hardest.
The Conservatives are adamant they want to have marriage “recognised in the tax system” – even though this is set to privilege already-married upper-middle class households. This policy has been attacked by the Financial Times as incoherent, unlikely to work and promoting the most morally dubious of motives for matrimony. That other bastion of socialism, The Economist, has seen its UK politics columnist question how the Tories square blaming most of society’s ills on big government yet “at the same time want to extend the reach of government into the most private aspect of citizen’s lives—ie, personal relationships, via your plans for a tax break for marriage?”
Tom Harris MP recently did a double-whammy of posts, showing that Tory proposals are unlikely to either encourage people to get married in the first place, or stay married if they already are. Giles recently noted Ed Balls’ observation that divorce rates are already back down to 1981 levels, and that if the Conservatives want to send a “signal” about marriage, they should find one that doesn’t cost millions.
In other less high-profile areas, we’ve recently seen the Tories quietly U-turn on the NHS, reversing a policy that had been used to slam Labour but which would have entailed the Conservatives taking from the poorest and most vulnerable to give to the rich. A little earlier it was noted that the Conservative draft manifesto contained some absolutely whopping misrepresentations and outright dishonesty. As for the Tory “NHS Manifesto”, not only did the Spectator brand part of it as “gibberish”, but it turns out to be flatly self-contradictory.
Not that inconsistency has proved to be confined to Tory thinking on the NHS. Clear contradictions have been noted in Tory policy on schools, employment, local housing, council tenants and crime.
But why just be inconsistent when you can flip-flop? Witness the Conservative Party on the education maintenance allowance (EMA): first they were against it, then they were for it, then Michael Gove said they were a bad idea, but now the Tories support them again? Who knows.
But surely there’s one thing the Tories will always guarantee, right? The slashing of red tape! The rolling back of state interference! The indiscriminate extermination of bureaucrats! Er, no. Despite promises of a “bonfire of the quangos”, at least 3 more are to be established if Dave and Boy George take office.
No wonder the Tories resort to vacuous platitudes on their campaign posters. Even if they get spoofed to high heaven, that’s probably safer than risking any more actual policies before the election.
January 24, 2010
A Mirror to Society?
Seeing-suffer feels good, making-suffer even more so – that is a hard proposition, but a central one, an old powerful human-all-too-human proposition…
Friedrich Nietzsche – On the Genealogy of Morality
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Why do we put people in prison?
Given astronomical reoffending rates, the idea that it reforms offenders appears palpably false.
What about deterrence? This is trickier. The right, when it it’s willing to grant that crime has fallen under New Labour, will tend to argue that exploding prison rates are the causal explanation. I tend to think – on standard leftist grounds – that crime has rather more to do with poverty than prison-as-deterrence. And as I noted the other day, poverty has fallen under New Labour.
Besides, one would expect that it’s not the possibility of prison that puts people off crime, but the possibility of being caught. After all, if I expect to get caught I won’t commit my crime (unless the penalty is really negligible). But if I don’t expect to get caught, it won’t care what the potential punishments are. Furthermore, there’s a deep problem with prison-as-deterrence. Shouldn’t a person’s punishment only relate to them and their crime? But prison-as-deterrence can only work by having the individuals’ punishment being used pour encourager les autres.
French philosopher Michel Foucault argued in his seminal Discipline and Punish that prison fulfils its stated functions of rehabilitation and deterrence so poorly that in fact these can’t be its real functions at all. Rather, prison is a product of – and aims to maintain – coercive power structures in society, by instigating systems of domination, surveillance and legitimised violence. For Foucault, to say that prison’s main function is retribution is not just an understatement, it’s to only begin to get a handle on what this bizarre institution is all about.
And when society starts putting children in prison and large numbers begin lamenting that it can’t do it for longer, one does have to wonder what it says about us.
There’s no doubt that what the two young boys from Yorkshire, aged 10 and 11 and recently sentenced to a minimum of 5 years in prison, did to their victims was horrific. Reading about it makes the blood run cold.
And I’m sure I’ll get at least one comment from somebody sanctimoniously declaring that “they were old enough to know better”. Given the horrific abuse both these boys had already suffered, particularly at the hands of their father, I’m tempted to say that only a wilfully callous naivety about the complexity of responsibility could lie behind such proclamations.
But what interests me right now is what this case – or more accurately, some of the mainstream reactions to the perpetrators – tells us about our society.
The Andrew Marr show this morning ran a ticker-headline of relating to the “Doncaster Devil Boys”. The predictable Daily Mail screams of “Evil brothers given minimum 5 years”. The judge sentencing the pair made it perfectly clear he felt they should serve more than 5 years, telling the victims’ families: “I have no doubt that they would have preferred to see [the two brothers] locked up for very much longer and I know that nothing can compare to the trauma the boys went through, but I hope they appreciate that five years is the very least they will serve.”
Michelle Elliott, founder of charity Kidscape, has declared that the attackers could pose a risk to society for many years. Indeed, she demands that the two boys serve a minimum of 10 years: “I think, for them and their families, victims need to have a clear 10 years.”
Intriguingly, Dr Elliott seemed to be at least partially motivated by the thought that the two perpetrators might actually be better off in prison. As the BBC reported “now they are in an environment away from the “feckless parents” who “dragged them up”.”
There may be something in Dr Elliott’s claim. Given that the perpetrators inflicted sexually humiliating torture on their victims, there can’t be many places where 10 and 11 year old children learned that from. But the notion that prison – even for young offenders – is some sort of cosy paradise (usually argued for on the basis that some prisoners sometimes have colour televisions) is a dishonest, self-serving piece of (usually) right-wing nonsense.
Prison is hell, and purposefully so. Returning to Foucault for a moment, it’s worth bearing in mind his point that the process of systematically stripping away prisoners’ identities, their freedom of movement, their subjection to arbitrary rules and punishments, being forever at the discretionary power of others whilst placed under constant surveillance and control is a form of highly sophisticated and deep-seated psychological violence. And that’s not even to touch on the frequency of rape, assault, suicide and murder latent within all prison systems.
But we don’t need philosophers to tell us this. Anybody even dimly acquainted with the infamous Stanford Prison Experiments will recall how within a matter of days ordinary American college kids pretending to be guards and prisoners fell into cycles of abuse and violence, and that was under controlled observed conditions. Even just watching romanticised Hollywood films like the Shawshank Redemption should give people a decent enough idea of how nasty prison is.
And don’t fool yourself into thinking that young offenders institutions are somehow radically different. Suicide attempts by children in prison are twice that of adult offenders, and this summary of conditions for children in UK prisons by the Howard League for Penal Reform makes for chilling reading.
There’s no doubt that what the two boys sentenced on Friday did was horrific. The question of what society should now do with them – for the protection of others, as well as for their possible rehabilitation – is an extremely difficult one.
Nobody doubts that what they did was terrible and wrong. But here’s the rub: one minute newspaper editorials, judges, psychiatrists from children charities and the man on the street are up in arms condemning the “Devil brothers” as “evil” because of their crimes. The next, they are proclaiming that a mere five years of institutionalisation for these boys isn’t enough, that more punishment is needed. Yet that punishment is itself a form of harm, albeit one that society deems legitimate.
One need only trawl the comments sections of news websites to find frequent pronouncements that “prison is too good for them” and that hanging would be more appropriate. It’s easy to forget that the perpetrators in this case are 10 and 11 year old children with histories of abuse, such is the unmitigated outpouring of vitriol and demonisation.
No matter how heinous the crimes these two children committed – and there is no doubt that they were particularly horrific – I can’t help but feel disturbed by the readiness with which Decent Society, so horrified by these childrens’ crimes, so quickly demands retribution and (legitimised) violence against them in turn.
Anybody who leaves a comment saying “but they did wrong, so they need to be punished”, is severely missing my point. What disturbs me is precisely the deep-seated and widely-held urge to inflict punishment and harm, and in this case on children, under the guise that because those children themselves committed a horrific crime the way is now opened to legitimately inflict systems of organised harm on them. An eye for an eye, no matter how young.
The self-servingly naïve meme that prison is the life of Riley can only partially account for this disturbing collective urge to punish, so deeply embedded in our society.
January 22, 2010
Cameron’s Cynical Populism
David Cameron is threatening a bill that will cut the number of MPs by 10%. Concerns have already been raised that this will lead to gerrymandering. But even if it doesn’t, this piece of Cameron populism is a terrible idea.
Before making a blessed return to academia, I worked as an MP’s researcher for 9 months. Contrary to popular opinion – a perception worsened by the expenses crisis – most MPs don’t sit around idly scoffing caviar. Those that do their job properly (and that’s most of them) are drastically over-worked when at Westminster.
They continually race from debate, to bill reading, to team meeting, to vote, to committee hearing with barely a minute to get a grip on what it is they’re actually doing. Which is quite deliberate. It keeps control in the hands of the parties, who need MPs to be too busy to reflect upon what they’re doing and thus remaining reliant upon whips and policy wonks.
One worrying consequence is that MPs become extremely dependent upon the briefings supplied by their researchers. Whilst most researchers are industrious and conscientious, time-pressures and fatigue ensure that precocious graduates skim-reading Wikipedia play a more central role in the UK’s legislative oversight than most people would probably be comfortable with.
Even more worrying is the extent to which over-worked MPs facilitate a dominance of the executive over the legislature. It’s been frequently commented upon since Thatcher adopted the “presidential” style so beloved by Blair and Brown, but it’s true. The Government just does what it wants.
Bills are rammed through committee readings, and legislation receives the barest scrutiny from MPs who simply don’t have the time to stop, think and question. Ironically, this is why the House of Lords is so important; only unelected peers have the time to begin to properly fulfil the UK’s legislative oversight functions.
Concerns about executive dominance are serious and important, even if they are frequently founded in the wrong arguments about a golden age that probably never was. Reducing the number of MPs would be a disaster: it would further entrench the dominance of Downing Street, worsening already inadequate levels of scrutiny and further eroding the fabric of our Parliamentary democracy.
And let’s not forget that MPs are supposed to be constituency Jim’ll-fix-its as well as national legislators. We expect our MPs to deal with mounds of local casework which in the past would have been sorted by councillors. So MPs are campaigning to have dog poo removed from local playing fields one minute, and expected to sit on a complex select committee case the next. Decreasing the number of MPs is only going to make the ones that are left worse at both their constituency and national roles.
If Cameron were serious about introducing beneficial reform, he’d either propose an increase in the number of MPs, or some system of restoring meaningful power to local councillors in order to liberate MPs from what are often becoming unmanageable levels of constituency casework.
Instead, he’s chosen to play the populist card. Having fewer MPs will certainly be a vote-pleaser post-expenses scandal. Yet it will not be good for the country. Cameron is giving us a foretaste of where his priorities lie on the spectrum between self-serving demagoguery and responsible governance. Bear that in mind when you cast your ballots this spring.
January 21, 2010
Poverty, Inequality and New Labour
Q: You all know who infamously declared that “New Labour is intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” – but what was the next sentence?
A: “So long as they pay their taxes”.
Mandelson’s words have haunted him since almost the moment they left his mouth. But they reveal something fundamental about New Labour’s attitude to social justice.
History will not judge New Labour kindly. Iraq will never be forgotten. Likewise the hubris of purporting to abolish boom and bust – and the nemesis which inevitably followed.
But on the question of social justice, things are more ambiguous.
What lay behind the Mandelson remark was precisely the contention that it didn’t matter if people got stonkingly rich under New Labour, because people at the bottom would get better off too. Inequality didn’t matter, poverty did.
There’s no doubt that inequality got worse under New Labour. The Gini Coefficient, a standard measure of inequality, is estimated at about 0.36 for 2007/8, higher than at any time since the relevant records began in 1961 (Brewer et al, 2009, pp.23-24). (h/t)
What about poverty?
Dr Stuart White of Oxford University remarked at the Fabian Next Left blog last October that he “would judge any broad-brush claim that ‘Poverty has increased under Labour’ or that ‘Labour has been bad for the poor’ as risible.”
He noted that:
- Poverty, on most indicators, is lower for most groups than when Labour came to office. On poverty, the basic story seems to be…that on most measures, and for most groups (children, pensioners, etc.), poverty rates are lower than in 1996/7 (Brewer et al, 2009, pp.34-36)
and
- IFS researchers expect child poverty to fall by 500-600,000 up to 2010/11, on the basis of existing policies and allowing for likely economic changes (Brewer, Browne, Joyce and Sutherland, 2009).
but also that
- Labour’s progress on reducing poverty went into reverse in its third term. Looking across the various groups (children, pensioners, etc.), poverty rates are higher now than they were in 2004/5 (Brewer et al, 2009, pp.32-34), though still lower for most groups than in 1996/7.
What to make of this? One important thing to remember is that Labour’s record must be compared to what would have been if pre-1997 policies had been continued. As John Denham MP said at the Fabian Conference:
“If you designed a social policy to have no impact, the effect of global forces would be to make opportunity more unequal. To halt or modestly reverse trends is, because of the downward escalator effect, a significant achievement in itself. We need to be careful to argue that, though I think it is clear that we do have to go further in the future.”
Denham was talking about social mobility, but the point applies to poverty too. How bad would poverty have been if Tory policies had been continued post-1997?
Stuart White helpfully explored this question too. He first noted that in Poverty and Inequality in the UK: 2007, IFS researchers calculated what the Gini for income inequality in 2005/6 under unchanged Conservative policies would have been 0.378, whereas under Labour it was actually 0.347. “[I]t seems that Labour’s redistributive budgets were preventing inequality rising by as much as it would otherwise have done – as much as it would have done under the policy regime inherited from the Conservatives.”
Yet (as Stuart notes again) Labour has actually been successful in achieving redistributive policies since 1997. “[I]f you look at who has gained and lost from the changes to the tax-benefit system since 1996/7, the gains are biggest at the bottom, disappear in the middle, with losses at the top (Phillips, 2008).”
It seems reasonable to assume that it was Labour’s redistributive actions that prevented inequality from increasing as much as it would have done under unchanged Tory policies. It also seems reasonable to assume that the poverty-reduction achievements Labour did manage were also brought about by redistribution.
Labour has not – contra Tory propaganda – presided over mass increases in poverty. Yet the results are less than many might have hoped for (not least given the huge majorities possessed after 1997 and 2001). A natural question to ask is: “could Labour have done more to aleviate poverty if it has also aimed to reduce inequality?”
I put this question to Stuart on Saturday. His answer was that it was simply too difficult a social science question to answer effectively. But having said that, things do seem to have changed since 1997. Inequality matters again, and is very much on the political agenda.
Stuart must be right. Why else would Cameron attack Labour for its record on inequality, or recently have employed (and arguably distorted) Demos findings to claim that Labour has let down poor children by increasing inequality of outcome and opportunity?
My inclination, therefore, is to say that it’s too early to form a final assessment of New Labour’s record on social justice.
It appears to be a myth that poverty has gotten worse under Labour. And it probably would have gotten worse under the Tories. Yet New Labour’s conviction that inequality doesn’t matter – adopted wholesale from the right – has faded from fashion with the return of recession, and one will always feel that far more could have been done.
But our final judgement must be reserved until we’ve seen what a Cameron government inflicts. If poverty and inequality explode as they did under Thatcher ((Brewer et al, 2008, p.27), we may all judge Labour very much less harshly than we are inclined to at present.
Labour’s years of running up the down escalator, as Denham put it, may seem altogether venerable if the next lot spend a term or two gleefully sliding down it.
January 20, 2010
Rod Liddle: Anatomy of a Bully
…the characters of mans heart, blotted and confounded as they are, with dissembling, lying, counterfeiting, and erroneous doctrines, are legible onely to him that searcheth hearts. And though by mens actions wee do discover their designe sometimes; yet to do it without comparing them with our own, and distinguishing all circumstances, by which the case may come to be altered, is to deceypher without a key, and be for the most part deceived, by too much trust, or by too much diffidence; as he that reads, is himself a good or evil man.
- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
I was disappointed to see the normally erudite Catherine Bennett let herself down rather badly on Sunday. Coming to an incoherent defence of rightwing demagogue Rod Liddle, her piece in the Observer could be summarised as “Rod Liddle is my dinner party chum, so I’m going to defend him – despite the fact he is a noxious toad – and imply that the fault lies with everyone else.”
Bennett was eviscerated in the comments thread (an experience familiar to all CiF contributors, but for once actually justified). Sunny Hundal – whom Bennett attacked in her piece – likewise posted a devastating reply at the Guardian last night. Bennett must have felt especially silly even by the end of Sunday, however, when Sunny posted messages on Liberal Conspiracy that appeared to show Rod Liddle using the alias “monkeymfc” to write extreme racist and misogynistic tirades on a football supporters’ message board. (Liddle’s status of confirmation or denial fluctuates; at present Sunny is still posing the issue as an open question regarding Liddle’s authorship).
Prior to this, Liddle has previously used his Spectator blog, as well as his Sunday Times column, to spout offence and bigotry at every turn. Particular examples include religious bigotry, racism, racial determinism and climate change denial.
The standard defence when Liddle writes something heinously obnoxious and offensive is always the same: it’s “just a joke”, and Liddle is “being ironic”. Or as Bennett pompously put it, Liddle’s opinions have “merely been expressed in a style that is calculated, in the tradition of Julie Burchill and the late Auberon Waugh, to enrage readers who do not find him amusing”.
It can be really frustrating when the “just a joke” line is employed to defend vile nastiness. After all, it’s pretty much impossible to prove that somebody wasn’t “just joking”. Indeed there’s good reason for that, and here’s some philosophy you weren’t expecting.
It turns out to be hard enough to prove that other people even have minds, let alone establishing what the intentions in those minds were. Or for that matter, that other people even exist independently of, say, the machinations of an evil demon that controls your/my every waking moment.
Descartes (in)famously attempted to offer a proof for at least his own existence by reasoning “I think, therefore I am”.* But in the end he needed to appeal to God to get this solution going.
David Hume ended up concluding that we can’t prove that there is an external world, or that other people have minds (and aren’t just illusions, or automatons, or whatever). Instead, he concluded that we are mentally hard-wired to simply believe that other people have minds and live in a world external to our own experiences, and this is a fundamental aspect of “human nature” that allows us to comprehend anything at all. But on Hume’s picture, we can’t prove that Rod Liddle has a mind (assuming, contra-some of his articles, that he does), let alone what his intentions somehow originating in his mind are or were.
But then, the philosophical high road isn’t the best way to approach a case like Liddle’s. The issue isn’t about rationally proving whether he meant what he said as “just a joke” or otherwise. Instead, we need to take a rounded look at Liddle himself, and ask what on earth he’s playing at when he’s making his nasty little assertions.
It may be that Liddle really believes the nastiness he spouts. It may be that he doesn’t, but just likes the attention. Either way, a man of his age and experience can’t reasonably be supposed to be ignorant of the knowledge that what he says is nasty. And that other people will find it so. You just don’t get that far in life without understanding these things.
So it can’t just be a joke coming from Liddle, because he knows that his “jokes” are nasty, and hence aren’t “just” jokes at all. So why does he claim his behaviour is simply “joking”?
This reminds me of a case I heard about back at University. Some girls at another college had asked not to be referenced by name in the college’s undergraduate rag. In response, the authors of the rag described the girls as “bleeding cunt feminists”. Everyone in the college knew who the “feminists” in question were, of course. The authors claimed in their defence that it was “just a joke”.
Except it wasn’t. Because when you know somebody has been deeply offended by something, and you knew beforehand that they would be, you’re not claiming that it was “just a joke” at all. On the contrary, that phrase is used to increase offence and to augment any harm caused. It’s not only a callous refusal to admit any guilt or sorrow. It’s also an act of rubbing salt into open wounds by trivialising the victim as a whining kill-joy.
The same is true of Rod Liddle. He knows he’s not joking, because he knows what he writes, even if funny to him, is extremely obnoxious, offensive and hurtful to others. There’s no humour-failure going on with his targets. But by implying there is, Liddle gleefully turns the screw.
The “it’s just a joke” meme is a standard follow-up weapon in the arsenal of every bully in the land. Rod Liddle is no exception. He’s just got a bigger platform than most. With any luck, he’ll soon fall off it. Onto his head.
–
* Or possibly “I think, I am”. This is the famous “cogito”. Whether it includes an inference signified by the word “therefore” is a bone of centuries-long philosophical contention.
January 19, 2010
A New England
Billy Bragg – a musician dear to my heart – yesterday wrote that he’ll be withholding his tax payments until Alistair Darling imposes a bonus veto on Royal Bank of Scotland, which we as taxpayers are shareholders of.
Bragg makes some good points in his short piece.
But another he could have made is that RBS routinely withholds tax from the UK Government already. Of course, they call it “tax planning” and have an army of lawyers to create paper trails through shell corporations in offshore financial centres so as to keep their activities on the whisker-side of the avoidance/evasion line.
If Bragg really does withhold his taxes, he could face a criminal conviction. The RBS board, meanwhile, will be busy lobbying the Government over the next finance bill, whilst their avoidance pals in PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Deloitte get invited in to actually write the tax law. I know, because I saw last year’s Finance Bill at the committee stage. It was the legislative version of inviting prisoners to design their own prison.
21st Century Tax: it’s for the little people like us, not masters of the universe like them.
