July 31, 2010
Meet The Markets
We hear a lot about The Markets. Nick Robinson’s Five Day’s That Changed Britain recently invoked these spectral figures. Apparently they hovered over Greece in early May, threatening to turn on “rudderless Britain” if a coalition deal wasn’t quickly secured. More widely, a key part of the Tory cuts narrative has is that immediate and severe fiscal retrenchment is necessary or The Markets will punish us.
Given the frequency of such rhetoric you’d be forgiven for forgetting that “The Markets” refers to the uncoordinated collective actions of many thousands of unconnected individuals, working within enormous and extremely complicated financial sectors across the globe. Uncoordinated actions, moreover, which are buffeted about by millions of constantly-changing factors, which themselves have different meanings and imperatives for different agents in different situations.
On the contrary you might understandably come to think of “The Markets” as, in effect, people. As conscious, reflective, decision-making agents, taking stock of situations and acting rationally to pursue specifically chosen ends and means. (Note: some economists argue that markets act “rationally” in the sense of efficiently processing information and moving in a calibrated direction accordingly. This may or may not be completely true, but either way it’s different to what I’m getting at, which is the idea of conscious, reflective, deliberating agents making decisions to act in certain ways).
Indeed what we appear to have ended up with is a popular conception – amongst media pundits, politicians and voters – of markets as persons. This interests me, for these reasons.
Firstly, the idea of “fictional persons” has been explored at length by historian and political theorist Quentin Skinner. Skinner claims that Thomas Hobbes originally conceived of the State as a “person by fiction” 350 years ago, a conception that deeply influences how we think today. The “fictional person” of a State stands distinct from the specific agents of government. It takes on a personhood of its own, and is able to act and bring about events in ways that are highly analogous to the actions of a real (physical, human) person. Think, for example, of when we say “the state imprisoned him for 47 years”, or “the state’s defences were mobilised to repulse attackers”.
As a consequence we operate with an extremely useful fiction (that perhaps even ceases to be wholly fictional when enough people believe in it). An entity which deliberates, chooses and acts – but exists over-and-above its constituent parts. Something that pre-dates and outlives governmental administrations; that is more than the mere sum of politicians, the judiciary, the army and police.
Indeed it is hard to imagine the modern world without such useful fictions. Permanent presences across the globe, fighting wars, meeting at the UN, signing trade agreements and all the rest. Fictions can be extremely useful. If believed in by enough people, they can do crucial work in ordering societies and making them function.
Secondly, the process of personation lends The Markets an air not just of consciousness, but also of conscientiousness. That The Markets will respond favourably to the right incentives, the right actions – or, if you like, the right offerings. By making The Markets into (fictional) persons, a space is opened up in which to treat them as, in effect, capricious gods. The ancient Greeks and Romans followed systems of polytheism within which deities had (eerily human) character traits, and especially flaws. This allowed the ancients to construct world-views within which it made sense to try and appease certain deities. By pleasing them or attempting to pander to their prejudices – for example, by making the right sacrifices. Anybody who reads the Old Testament will know that the Judeo-Christian tradition did not leave this view of sacrifice behind. Apparently, we carry it with us still.
Which raises the question: by conceiving of The Markets as fictional persons are we creating mythical entities which we seek to appease by dramatic fiscal austerity? Are we telling ourselves a collective fairy story that although the gods that decide our economic fates are capricious, they can nevertheless be bargained with?
Thirdly, we must ask the Foucauldian question: if the above musings have any truth to them, who is this process of fictionalised personation benefiting? Which power-interests are being served?
Let’s hypothesise. Imagine you’re a right-wing administration determined to slash the state for ideological purposes, or a right-wing media outlet disposed to promote said state-slashing. How useful would the notion of such deified but capricious entities be – especially if such entities could allegedly be placated only by the kind of fiscal austerity you already favour? Thought so.
July 30, 2010
When Reality and Presentation Diverge
Boris Johnson’s (or rather Barclays’) London cycle hire scheme goes live today. Personally I’m not convinced of the virtues of having 6,000 Japanese and American tourists atop wheels thrown into the chaotic mix of London traffic.
But that’s not what interests me today.
Responding to (and anticipating) criticisms that the new hire-bikes have no cycle lanes to be used on, Johnson’s administration has recently been unveiling so-called “Cycle Super Highways”. Or – to you and me – large strips of (Barclay’s) blue paint, plonked on the sides of existing roads.
So far only two such “super highways” are open. One runs from Barking to Tower Gateway, the other from Merton into the City. Note that these are not exactly tourist-heavy routes, so any benefits they bring will be for existing cyclists – not least because the hire-bikes are all located in central London anyway.
But I’m an existing cyclist, so that should suit me. Except I tried out the latter of these two “super highways” the other week, and was distinctly disappointed.
If I was building a “cycle super highway” I’d seek to do one very important thing: ensure that only bicycles can use the cycle lanes. An obvious way of achieving this is to put a substantial curb in between cycle route and main road (like they do in much of Europe).
But Boris’ CSHs lack this essential feature. As a result you can look forward to sharing your blue strip of paint with motorbikes, lazy taxi- and white van-drivers, and last (but certainly not least) buses. Because there are bus stops in the middle of the cycle super highways. And as any Londoner who cycles will tell you, buses are The Number One Way To Die. Still, the blue will make for artistic contrasts with Cyclists’ Super Insides.
Yet it would be spurious to launch an attack on Johnson. Ken Livingstone was a big proponent of these cycling schemes (though Bo-Jo has typically stolen the glory). And given the money, space and logistical constraints, I’m not convinced Ken would have done things any differently.
The cycle super highways illustrate an important fact about politics: that often relatively crappy outcomes are the (apparently) inevitable outcome of politicians having to navigate competing interests and demands, yet also having to talk-up an end product even when it’s actually a bit naff.
I think, however, that there’s also a comparison with markets. Or more precisely, with marketing.
Environmental sustainability and global warming are much higher in consumer’s priorities than even 5 or 10 years ago. There is thus a selling-point and marketing imperative for many companies to promote their products as environmentally friendly and sustainable.
The problem, however, is that there can be a big disjunct between marketing as being sustainable and environmentally friendly and actually being so. What’s imperative to firms is to make consumers think they are buying green – even if that’s not strictly true.* Think of Honda’s adverts extolling the glory of their “clean” petrol engines a few years back. Or of Sainsbury’s own-brand bog-rolls, whose packaging proudly declares that by buying them you have helped save forests. Dubious claims, to say the least.
I’ve argued before that market solutions must be at the heart of finding answers to questions of environmental sustainability. But the disjunct between consumer belief and reality worries me. It takes a lot of effort to consistently expose dishonest or misleading corporate activities to the point where they stick in consumers’ minds. Plus big multinationals assiduously protect their reputations, lobbying hard to keep inconvenient truths hidden.
Which gives the lie to the naive free market fairystory that naughty firms just pretending to be sustainable will be swiftly abandoned by consistently conscientious consumers. Indeed (focusing more widely than consumer behaviour) you may have noted that BP’s share price recently rose. Which indicates that even being a certified planet-wrecker is no guarantee of abandonment by the forces of capitalism. (Though see Tim).
With democratic politics the structural situation that creates the oft-observed crapiness of decision-making outcomes (for further illustrations see The Wire, Season 3) also contains its own (partial) solution. When elected leaders produce decisions that go too far down the road of rubbishness, we can kick them out and thus keep crapiness within reasonably tolerable bounds.
It’s not entirely clear that any comparably neat solution lends itself to the problem of marketing dishonesty. And as the planet warms, forests shrink, and resources run out, that may turn out to be a very serious problem indeed.
–
*Hence as with politics situations can arise where something is presented as being one thing, but in reality is substantially less good, or at least significantly different.
July 29, 2010
Abolishing ASBOs
The Coalition is abolishing ASBOs. This is a good thing. Not (necessarily) because ASBOs are frequently ignored, or allegedly worn as “badges of honour” by feral yoofs. But because they exemplified some of the worst aspects of New Labour.
As I’ve previously commented much of New Labour’s approach to society was rooted in American-style communitarian thinking, in part due to emulating Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” strategy. This was clearest in Blair’s (then Brown’s) rhetoric of “rights and responsibilities”.
As previously argued the NewLab approach to society was deeply opposed to a philosophically liberal (and I’d say, preferable) view of citizen rights.
For (philosophical) liberals, citizens have rights just because they are citizens. These rights act as checks and constraints on state power. Rights certainly correlate to duties and responsibilities – but these duties and responsibilities fall incumbent upon other agents apart from the right-holder, including the state. So for example if I have a right to association, the responsibility is on you to not stop me freely associating.
The communitarian Blair-Brown view was different. It held that you only had rights if you proved you were “responsible” enough to deserve them. With “responsible” defined by the state. Rights were things only good boys and girls had; naughty boys and girls refusing to play nicely alienated or failed to achieve their rights. New Labour’s much-commented-upon authoritarianism and distrust of the individual arguably stemmed from this basic picture of the state-citizen relationship.
This all fit extremely well with media-management and centre-ground squatting designed to steal Daily Mail and Sun votes from under the Tories’ noses. Implying that pikeys, chavs, gypos and other undesirables shouldn’t get any rights until they behaved nicely was certainly a vote winner. That a mentality which made citizens dependent upon the state quickly led to the mass erosion of civil liberties didn’t particularly bother the New Labour leadership. Which was unsurprising, given that their dominant philosophy implied that they were personally doing ordinary people a favour by allowing them to have any rights at all.
Into all this ASBOs fitted perfectly. For a start, look at the name: anti-social behaviour order. Under New Labour you no longer needed to commit a full-blown crime to attract the attention and chastisement of the state, your behaviour simply had to be anti-social. Anti-social, defined by who? By “the community”, or rather its dominant power-wielding individuals and their dominant prejudices, wherever it was you happened to be acting “anti-socially”.
There’s no denying that ASBOs were often meted out to particularly unpleasant and problematic individuals. But their creation signalled the institution of a new form of quasi-crime that could be usefully applied against (typically) the working class poor. In sum: a Daily Mail crowd-pleaser that exemplified New Labour’s worst communitarian attitudes towards the status of the individual in society and his or her relationship to the wielders of organised power.
Commentators have been arguing that something needs to fill the gap between “a stern telling off from the local bobby” and a criminal conviction, which ASBOs allegedly achieved. Apart from pointing out that the police can already administer cautions, I’m really not sure I agree.
As a squealing leftie, I reckon a more effective long-term solution than slapping people with resentment-inducing punishments is to remove the poverty, desperation and boredom that underlie the vast majority of low-level crime and nuisance-making. You know, “Tough on the Causes of Crime”. That second part of their clever slogan which New Labour so quickly forgot when scraping the bottom of the barrel for votes.
July 27, 2010
Being Careful What You Wish For
I’m too young, and too new to blogging, to have participated in the acrimonious debates over the Iraq war. Similarly I wasn’t fully aware of the rise of the Decent Left until well after it had happened.
In 2003 (at the tender age of 16) I opposed the Iraq War, and even went on anti-war demos. I was aware that Nick Cohen’s articles in my dad’s copy of The Observer were getting very odd, and I didn’t agree with them at all. That David Aaronovitch guy seemed to be progressing to the logical conclusion of being David Aaronovitch. I was aware of Christopher Hitchens, too, and aware that he was, well, Christopher Hitchens. More generally I thought it very odd that the supposedly left-wing Observer was supporting a war clearly based on disinformation, lies and what somehow passed for Bush-era American “strategising”.
When studying as an undergraduate Cohen’s What’s Left? was released. I read it, and thought the arguments based around Iraq were conspicuously bad. As I got older and more aware, I realised that Cohen’s depiction of the British left was a deeply deluded fantasy, apparently cooked-up for the purposes of subconscious self-vindication.
Fast forward three years and I’m blogging regularly. I know about Harry’s Place and Johann Hari’s turnaround. I appreciate the genius of the Flying Rodent. I can even happily accept that Norman Geras possesses some bonkers views but writes a very good blog.
But thus far I’ve missed the battles between The Decents and the anti-war left. Yesterday’s news of the leaked Afghan war logs changes things.
I could go for that nauseating holier-than-though, sitting-on-the-fence, not-picking-sides type blogging. This could be done by, firstly, pointing to the failings of The Decent left. So when Aaronovitch tweets (and Richard Kemp repeats) that:
“The stuff that recent Russian spies managed to filch won’t have been 1,000th as damaging to security as the Wikileaks material. Big moment.”
I could point out that this is hyperbolic nonsense. Because in case Dave and Rich haven’t noticed, we’re not only badly losing the war in Afghanistan, but the pashtun tribesmen and Taliban we’re fighting already know this. And furthermore, the war in Afghanistan is going so badly precisely because it is being waged against loosely organised guerrilla forces. The idea that the War Logs somehow reveal top-secret military strategy to a rival centralised intelligence source is not only stupid, it entirely ignores the dynamics of the situation.
Of course if I was doing the whole rise-above-it blogging thing, I’d then go on to criticise Sunny Hundal, arch-enemy of The Decents. In yesterday’s Pickled Politics blog Sunny criticised the Decent Left for its hypocrisy over approaches to free speech, human rights and so forth. I could easily castigate Sunny for being allegedly immature, and refusing to acknowledge the complexities of the enemy positions he’s outlining. Some boring blogging could ensue.
But y’know I’m a factious sot of guy, so to emulate the Decents and adopt an Americanism, fuck that shit.
The Decent Left has egg on its face, and there’s one overwhelming reason why (and it’s not getting the airing it deserves). Namely, that the War Logs are deeply embarrassing to the Decent Left precisely because this is what they wished for.
Oh sure they didn’t want a war that would go so catastrophically badly. But they did want war. They did want a world where American and British military power charged around the globe, stomping into countries re-ordering them for Democracy and Freedom overnight. As if history never happened in any of these places. As if interventionist foreign policy with no forward planning but chronic under-funding would be as easy as A,B,C.
The logs are war, laid bare and cold in all its macabre glory. And you know what the rub is? That if our military forces had focused singularly on the messed-up conflict in Afghanistan, concentrating resources and personal there, the situation being faced today might not be such a catastrophic clusterfuck. Instead we also went to war in Iraq – and promptly opened up two fronts which will now surely be looked back upon as military disasters far outstripping Suez not least by drastically heightening the domestic terror threat.
And the gains to the people of these places are what, exactly? Hundreds of thousands dead and mutilated? Power in the hands of gangster regimes and tribal warlords? Social destabilisation, economic devastation and ethnic violence? No doubt the history books will proclaim Blair and Bush the great liberators of our age.
In future The Decents ought to be more careful what they wish for. For who knows when inconvenient reality might spring forth in such public manner to show them the horror of their own deluded ideals.
July 26, 2010
Liberté, égalité, fraternité?
If I were to assume the mantle of the perennially dim, I might urge British civil liberties campaigners to get some perspective and calm down.
They squealed about proposed 90 day detention for terror suspects, and now moan about the removal of the democracy village outside Parliament. But (the dim-witted might continue) campaigners should appreciate that Britain is one of the most liberal nations in the world. Streets ahead of a regime which, for example, imprisons suspects without trial, denies them access to legal support, and does it all irrespective of numerous condemnations from the European Court of Human Rights.
I’m talking, of course, about France. Across the channel French lawyers are currently battling to gain the right to accompany suspects in police interviews, a basic legal right that the ECHR has affirmed repeatedly.
At present if you are arrested in France under suspicion of normal crimes you can expect to be held for 24-48 hours. If you are suspected of involvement in organised crime (which in effect is assumed for any drug-related offence, even just personal-use possession) or terrorist activity, it will by 96 hours. You can expect to see your lawyer once. For 30 minutes. Before your interrogation begins.
Your lawyer will not have access to any police documents on your case. They will probably not know you, or why you’ve been arrested. Much of the 30 minutes will be spent explaining your situation, and receiving the most basic general advice in return. You will then be left in the company of police officers trained to manipulate you into admitting your guilt – whether you’re innocent or not.
If you are unfortunate enough to be charged, especially for a drug-related offence, don’t expect bail. Reforms spearheaded by President Nicolas Sarkozy have introduced a tougher-than-tough approach. French citizens charged with petty offences are now currently held in prison cells whilst they await court dates. Yet because of backlogs in the French legal system the wait can be literally months.
A distant relative of mine was arrested on a minor drugs charge (what we’d call possession for personal use). He spent 6 months in jail, waiting for his trial. Let’s repeat: 6 months, in prison, without having been tried. In France, the idea that you are innocent until proven guilty is something of a bad practical joke. My distant relative eventually went to court and was given a slap on the wrist. A slap, of course, without any recognition that he’d lost half a year of his life in jail, unsurprisingly costing him his job and his home.
Which brings me back to the perspective of the dim-witted boor I began with. Britain’s civil liberties campaigners are quite right to kick and scream whenever the government proposes new measures designed to clamp down on individual liberty whilst increasing police power. Being a western European democracy is no guarantee that the relationship between state and citizen must remain a healthy one. Our French cousins offer proof positive of that.
July 24, 2010
The CPS and the Liberalism of Fear
In his later political writings Bernard Williams advocated an approach to political thinking that he called – following Judith Shklar – “The Liberalism of Fear”. At its root this approach prioritises an issue which is taken to be the fundamental problem of politics: that of controlling, limiting and ordering violence between individuals and groups so as to allow peaceful relations to exist, and human achievement to flourish.
For Williams the modern liberal western state is a particularly successful – though by no means unproblematic – solution to this basic problem. The modern state, via army, police and other controlled institutions successfully monopolises legitimate violence within a given territory (to borrow Max Weber’s famous definition).
By establishing these controlled agencies as the sole permitted users of coercive force, the modern state creates a realm of space within which other human agencies, institutions and individuals can interact in heightened security to pursue projects, goals and endeavours. Often these will conflict, but this is permitted so long as force is refrained from and legal channels are maintained. Should violence be employed, the state steps-in to assert its dominance and restore its preferred order to a situation.
However, Williams was acutely aware that the state, although in successful cases the solution to the fundamental problem, can and often does become part of the fundamental problem – with disastrous consequences. Some modern examples can be plucked from thousands to illustrate: Mugabe’s reign of terror in Zimbabwe; the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia; Pinochet’s neo-fascist thuggery and murder in Chile.
We in the democratic post-war West are generally very lucky. Our states broadly desist from becoming part of the fundamental problem, and out of the liberalism of fear great social and cultural achievements are made possible. But sometimes things go wrong.
When a police officer struck Ian Tomlinson with a baton from behind, before pushing him to the ground at last year’s G20 protests, things went badly wrong. Recall that a police officer is literally a personification of the state’s monopoly of legitimate coercive force, charged with using violence to control other human beings. In this case, the human being in question died very suddenly after what can fairly be described as an unprovoked assault.
A year later, the Crown Prosecution Service has ruled-out the possibility of bringing any charges to bear on PC Simon Harwood. I’m willing to be more lenient than I actually feel, and concede that because of the complexity of the law a charge for manslaughter may not have been likely to succeed after the early bungling of the Met’s tame pathologist.
The first autopsy of Tomlinson’s body performed by Freddy Patel returned a verdict of coronary heart failure. It’s worth noting, however, that Patel is currently before a serious disciplinary hearing at the General Medical Council on charges of giving questionable verdict on four causes of death (not including Tomlinson’s). Two further autopsies on Tomlinson’s body, however, found that the cause of death was internal bleeding.
Yet because only Patel saw Tomlinson’s body in tact – and did not keep crucial blood samples – a legal ambiguity hovers over the case. This might have prevented a successful prosecution for manslaughter, on the grounds that it cannot be proved that the assault on Tomlinson caused his death. One might, of course, still be inclined to believe that this should have been decided in an open court of law, not behind closed doors.
Yet that Harwood is not to be charged precisely with assault is little short of the CPS and Police spitting into the face of the British public. Anybody who watches the video of the attack on Tomlinson can see instantly that this is a case of unprovoked assault, by a police officer, on an innocent man who later died. The CPS excuse that there is a 6-month window of prosecution for offence is at this stage a cruel joke adding insult to injury.
Most of the justifiably outraged comment on this matter is focusing on the insult and injury to Tomlinson’s family, the manifest injustice, and (the evident lack of) police accountability. I’ve no intention of undermining any of that. I simply want to draw attention to what might be termed the underlying political philosophy of what’s gone wrong.
The CPS was faced with a choice over charging Harwood. Given the extent of media attention this case was always going to receive, that choice went to the heart of the relationship between the police and the general public in this country. The CPS could have decided that police in riot gear attacking innocent people is a manifest instance of the state becoming part of, rather than the solution to, politics’ basic problem.
Accordingly, the CPS could have moved to atone for the attack on Tomlinson by seeking to hold Harwood to account in a way which would show that the British state does not license hostility against its citizens, and that the attack on Tomlinson was a regrettable rogue incident. Similarly, by seeking the prosecution of Harwood, a meaningful attempt to (re)build a relationship of trust and respect between state and citizens could have been attempted. Instead, the CPS coolly and in retrospect decided to effectively support Harwood’s actions, and retroactively license them and have the state claim them as its own.
Of course we must not lose perspective. It is obvious that Britain is still a vastly safer and more desirable place to live than all those times and territores where the state has wholesale become the fundamental problem of politics. But here’s the rub: although it is a cliché, one of the hallmarks of civilisation and advanced desirable society is that the state does not attack innocent citizens. Yet in cases where such attacks do take place, they must be retrospectively disowned, apologised for, and meaningfully regretted. Measures must be taken to prevent their repeat occurrence, and justice must be delivered to victims and survivors.
By refusing to prosecute, the CPS has effectively degraded the relationship between the British state and its citizens, and done so by official mandate. And to end with suitable hyperbole – suitable because it is in an important sense true – thanks to the CPS’ decision, Britons should consider themselves living in a land that is less civilised and desirable than they might otherwise have thought. Not, however, that all this should come as any surprise. Britain already possesses a long and ignoble history of unaccountable violence and murder of citizens at the hands of the state’s agents. The liberalism of fear, indeed.
July 23, 2010
The Big Society Exists – But Not Where Dave Thinks
I doubt David Cameron was watching Channel 4 last night, away as he is in America. But his aides ought to save the 4OD link for him.
I’m talking about Undercover Boss, which followed Kevan Collins – Chief Executive of Tower Hamlets Council – as he became “Colin” and met people doing frontline services in his borough. It was remarkable.
There was Chris, who delivers meals on wheels to the elderly. She used to stay for a cup of tea and a chat, but now finds it hard because cut-backs mean she has more deliveries in fewer hours. It breaks her heart – especially at Christmas – because most of the elderly are alone and she is the only person many see all day. Yet she meets them all with a smile, a kind word, and a parcel of food which literally keeps them alive.
There was Malachi, who works with those about to be made homeless who desperately need help. He’s only on a temporary contract, but he would like to do this permanently and gives it his all. “It’s important to treat the people who come in with respect” – he says – “because after all they are human beings, and it could be you on that side of the counter one day”. Malachi has seen a lot of his friends turn to drugs and drink, but because he personally sees things through he says the best he can do is help others.
Or what about Tim, who works in pest control. Not a glamorous job, killing rats. But Tim does it and he does it well, seeking out the holes and drains that are off his beat but also the real sources of infestation. “A private company wouldn’t do this extra bit” he notes off-hand, “they just go for the profit”.
Shazz works the Whitechapel street market – where he grew up as a kid – daily ensuring the regulations are kept to. But in his own time he and some friends have been designing plans for the Olympic area renovation, which they have dreams of putting forward. They’d like to look back and know they’ve made their area a better place.
Even Del and Mark – the somewhat overzealous community enforcers who hand out £40 fines for dropping fags down drains – hit the streets every day for 10 hours. They try to bring order to one of the most socially deprived, and sometimes chaotic, boroughs in the country.
Perhaps Channel 4 has an agenda. Perhaps it paints an overly rosy picture, leaving out the idle, feckless bureaucrats eating public money whilst gleefully swimming in needless red tape. But perhaps not: last week there was no compunction in exposing the lazy hotel manager.
Which got me thinking: if there is a “Big Society” it looks suspiciously like it resides in places like Tower Hamlets Council and its frontline services. The Conservatives tell us that the state gets in the way. That by hacking away with enormous spending cuts spontaneous voluntary work will make Britain into a modern Shangri-La. Well Channel 4 neatly showed what a load of bullshit that is.
The “Big Society” is already here. It’s Chris squeezing a few extra minutes to chat to a lonely pensioner. It’s Tim going the extra mile to keep people’s homes vermin free. It’s all the countless other unsung heroes we never hear a word about. Professionals providing public services, adding the human touch that makes the extra difference.
But the Big Society is under-resourced, over-worked and operating above-capacity. If Dave and Co.’s rhetoric was anything more than a front for an ideological agenda, they’d be getting ready to reverse that. Instead, they’re deciding to make it worse.
July 22, 2010
Calling Spades Spades
One of the best things about blogs is the opportunity they afford for glimpses into world’s one wouldn’t otherwise see, especially when people blog from behind institutional walls. Hence the anonymous (until needlessly outed by The Times) Night Jack was an extremely interesting read, whilst Prisoner Ben and Just Another Soldier also provide fascinating windows into normally inaccessible situations.
But often blogging tells you about authors themselves, not just the worlds they report on – and the result isn’t always pleasant. Hence today I’m going to pick a fight, with no less than the anonymous author of the 2010 Orwell Prize-winning blog.
I’ve read WinstonSmith33 on-and-off for a while, and I may as well emulate the author and be blunt about my prejudices: I find that only two things go on over there, neatly illustrated by the latest post, and neither of them are pretty. Indeed, I’m of the opinion that this blog won the Orwell Prize more because it’s “edgy” and written anonymously from “within the system” than because anything especially commendable can be found there.
Allow me to substantiate.
The first thing that goes on over at WS33 is a regular, repetitive and boring mantra about how bleeding heart liberals know nothing of the realities of dealing with children in care. We are informed that the little monsters are redeemable (if it all) by nothing but hard discipline, rule-enforcement, and top-down authority. Any explanations about difficult circumstance and complex life-experiences are dismissed (with varying degrees of non-subtlty) as sanctimonious chatter from privileged middle class know-nothings who don’t understand the truth of these “feral” adolescents.
Typically the author plays a variant of what I dub The Double Demon Manoeuvre: liberal lefties sit in detached houses with the luxury of security and make excuses for the responsibility of the evil brats our poor Narrator must daily control. If these liberal lefties had any idea of the Real World – the world our Brave Narrator inhabits – they’d soon change their sheltered tune and recognise the “unsocialised brats” for what they really are. (You’ll see why it’s the DDM by the end of the post).
Accordingly, any suggestion that “responsibility” may be a complex concept – or that top-down hard discipline designed to put a youth in his/her place via overbearing power might exacerbate rather than quell anger and violence – is dismissed as the guff of middle class idiots lacking “a more realistic understanding of the remedies that need to be taken to deal with anti-social youths.”*
This alone is fairly bog-standard right-wing, “I know because I’ve seen, your ideas mean nothing you pointy-headed idiot” drivel. And indeed the comments threads are filled with people who appear to have hoped-over from the Daily Mail.
What makes this blog actually disturbing, however, is what comes through when the author starts gleefully – and that is the right word – describing his confrontations with the adolescents he’s charged with supervising. This is the second thing that goes on at WS33. Let’s take a look at some extracts from the recent post:
“A few seconds later he picked up the broom and started spinning it around. It almost hit me so I asked him to be careful and stop fooling around. Instead, he shoved the bristles of the dirty broom in to my face. Not a nice experience I can tell you. I took a few paces back and again Wayne lunged the brush towards my face. Only this time I wasnt going to passively accept his bullshit behaviour. As the brush came towards me, I grabbed it by the handle.
“Listen Wayne. Im not going to stand here idly whilst you try to humiliate me with that brush. It’s just not going to happen. Im a good ten inches taller than you and several stone heavier as well as extremely physically fit so it will take you some effort to get me to relinquish my grip on this brush and if you get too violent about it I will not hesitate in restraining you.”
My little speech was like a red rag to a bull. Teenage boys like Wayne rarely encounter male authority figures, any males in authority they do encounter are usually emasculated figures who have been indoctrinated in the mantras of the ultra-liberal apologist brigade for anti-social behaviour. Therefore, when the likes of Wayne encounter the likes of myself it becomes a power struggle as they are usually used to getting their way.
Wayne spent a good ten minutes with all his might trying to pull the brush from my grip. He was livid with anger, but at no point did he lash out violently which surprised me as these power struggles often escalate. However, the battle for the brush was quiet physical and aggressive as he pulled and swung me around the kitchen with all his might, but to no avail. In the words of the reformed bigot the Reverend Ian Paisley there would be ‘no surrender, never, never, never!’.”
Let’s call these passages what they are: bragging.
“Winston” is quite obviously describing a victorious subjugation of his enemy. Look at the language:
“I wasnt going to passively accept his bullshit behaviour. As the brush came towards me, I grabbed it by the handle”; [the thrill of battle]
“Im a good ten inches taller than you and several stone heavier as well as extremely physically fit so it will take you some effort to get me to relinquish my grip on this brush and if you get too violent about it I will not hesitate in restraining you”; [boasting of physical prowess and superiority]
“when the likes of Wayne encounter the likes of myself it becomes a power struggle as they are usually used to getting their way” [..."but not this time!!!"]
“However, the battle for the brush was quiet physical and aggressive as he pulled and swung me around the kitchen with all his might, but to no avail” [victory is the narrator's!]
The blog ends, however, with a twist: cowardly Wayne gets his revenge (a more reflective author might consider that the seeking-out-of-vengeance illustrates that Wayne has not learnt a healthy lesson about anger-management at all) by throwing dirty water over Winston.
But that’s OK, for Winston’s final victory takes place on a higher level. He is able to rise above – unlike the “feral” brute he has physically conquered, if not spiritualy subdued – and write a wistful public lamentation of this poor soul who could be so much more if he just accepted The Victor’s authority.
Well, I may be a liberal lefty but to borrow an expression beloved of the right, I’m happy to call a spade a spade: these are the writings of a bully.
Here is a man who publicly glories in his physical dominance over children, and forestalls any hard thinking about the complexities of the situation by dismissing anything other than a vindication of (his) top-down authority as lilly-livered blubbing from cowards who could never stare into the abyss as he does.
Some blogs remain anonymous so that their authors can tell us truths from behind the wall. This one purports to do just that. But in truth it’s a vehicle for the nastiness of its author. And if this is what “Winston” feels happy writing for public consumption, I’m troubled to think of what he leaves out of his tales, knowing that one day he could suffer the fate of Night Jack and his actions be pinned to a real name.
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*Note: I’m not saying that no authority or discipline is required (that would be mad, and stupid) but I am saying it’s surely much more complicated than a matter of just needing to bash kids into line with a steel fist, especially if many of them already suffer histories of violence and abuse.
July 21, 2010
The Moral Hazard Paradox
On Monday I attended a New Statesman Q&A with Alistair Darling (thanks to the generosity of Paul Cotterill). I was impressed by Darling, a man of extremely sharp intellect yet also of balanced modesty; if he leaves Parliament it will be a big loss to Labour.
Amongst the dozens of things discussed one in particular caught my attention: Darling’s declaration that he realised in autumn 2008 that “moral hazard” arguments for letting big financial institutions fail simply were not sustainable when it came to a crisis-point like the one he witnessed from the inside.
I think Darling had two reasons in mind, and both seem to me correct:
- If you let big financial firms fail at present, it’s not just inadequate board members and even employees that suffer, the knock-on effects to ordinary people are enormous and usually unjustifiable; it’s simply intolerable if (say) thousands of people lose their mortgages and pensions because of the board of X are incompetent and had secretly been bending the rules or using financial instruments they didn’t understand.
- In a crisis like 2008’s, a let-them-fail attitude threatened to bring down the global system entirely; look what happened when Lehman’s was allowed to go.
The problem, however, is that there’s a lot of sense in moral hazard arguments: namely that the motor of capitalism is competition, and the benefits of capitalism – efficiency, higher production and economic advancement – only arise if competition is serious, i.e. if unsuccessful firms fail. Furthermore, if big financial firms can rely on the state to bail them out whenever they get into trouble then they will adopt a too big to fail mentality whereby they do whatever the hell they like with impunity – and that’s likely to lead to a lot of bad decision-making at the expense of the little people whose tax dollars pick up the pieces, as well as worse economic functioning all round.
Which leads to a paradox.
We need moral hazard to play an active part in our economic arrangements, including especially big financial institutions. (A balance can be struck, however, so that the situation with 1. above is alleviated e.g. by attempting to ensure that “consumers” of products are protected from mass failure by institutions – think Equitable Life – whilst ensuring that managers are punished for failure).
At present, many financial institutions are so big that allowing them to fail would be disastrous, and furthermore the people running these institutions know this and can bank on a 2008-style bailout should history repeat itself. What needs to happen is for these institutions to be broken up so that they are not “too big to fail” and the benefits of moral hazard in general economic competition are secured.
However, as Alistair Darling was keen to stress on Monday the momentum for reform is now all but gone in the global system. Yet it was precisely at the point of collapse – the same moment when moral hazard arguments had to go out of the window to save the system – when reform was most possible. For in calmer times big financial institutions are not on their knees at the mercy of bailing-out states, their lobbyists can get to work, and the political appetite for the long-struggle of regulatory reform wanes as public demands for reform recede.
Thus, paradox: we need moral hazard to play a role in our economic arrangements, we don’t have it at present, the only time we probably could have introduced reform to secure it was during the 2008 crisis, yet crisis points are precisely when moral hazard arguments go out of the window so as to save the entire system.*
The result: mega-corporations, propped-up with tax dollars/pounds/euros, that are too big to fail, and are aware of it. It’s capitalism Jim, but not as anybody before has known it.
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* Perhaps an über-longsighted statesman might have seen in October 2008 that this was the closing window of opportunity for major reform across the system. But given that the most pressing issue was simply to stop the system collapsing completely, it’s hard to imagine that even such a far-sighted politician would have had the time and ability to co-ordinate the global reform required.
July 20, 2010
Ireland and Lib Dem Soul Searching
Having just managed to crawl out of a two year recession, the Irish economy was recently branded the sickest of all advanced nations by the IMF. And despite the Fund making noises that Ireland will not default on its debt, its credit rating has just been downgraded regardless, to Aa2 according to Moody’s.
As the New Statesman’s Mehdi Hasan put it:
“Ireland, of course, cut like crazy to appease the gods of the bond markets but evidently it didn’t work out for them. Please note Mr Osborne.”
But the Lib Dems need to look in the mirror too.
That Ireland has just had its rating cut blows away the fig leaf which has so far been covering the ConDem cuts: that severe retrenchment of public finances is essential if Britain isn’t to lose its AAA credit rating and see the cost of borrowing soar in the long term. This talk was always highly dubious in itself – not least because Britain’s situation was always far healthier than Ireland’s (or Greece’s) – but it now looks ridiculous. Plus there is the very real risk that cutting too hard and too soon will cripple economic recovery.
The attack on Britain’s public services is ideologically-driven Tory opportunism; slashing the state in ways the Conservatives have always wanted, but previously lacked the pretext to carry out. Which raises the question: what on Earth are the Lib Dems getting out of their Faustian pact?
Pipsqueak Gove has merrily taken the axe to Britain’s education system – whilst protecting funds for his Free Schools experiment which will advantage the upper middle classes, if it manages to help anyone at all. Osborne’s hard-cutting emergency budget is going to impact disproportionately on the poorest in society – and the biggest cuts are still reserved for the autumn.
Yet all we’ve had out of the Lib Dems is a front bench minister resign over financial impropriety, and a welcome but ultimately timid and non-committal suggestion of a graduate tax. In truth, you’d be hard pressed to know this was coalition government at all.
The downgrading of Ireland’s credit rating should now serve as a moment of reflection for the Lib Dems regarding their future path. I see three options:
- Use greater influence within the coalition to rein-in the Tories
- Quit the coalition and have no more to do with the Conservative assault on public finances
- Remain in the coalition and continue to facilitate the Tory programme.
Option 1 looks an obvious non-starter; as junior partners the Lib Dems appear to exercise virtually no significant influence over the Tories.
The problem with 2, of course, is that whilst it might be highly principled the Tories will quickly accuse the Lib Dems of destabilising the country. They will then have a good chance of returning a Conservative majority in a fresh election which the Lib Dems (and Labour) probably can’t afford to fight anyway.
But as for 3, the long-term risk is that when the Tory cuts really start to bite the Lib Dems will take the flak as the enablers of a vicious programme which hurts ordinary people’s lives.
So although Ireland should be a prompt for Lib Dem soul-searching about the bed they’ve chosen to make, whether or not they continue to lie in it may end the same: that they are held accountable for making possible a political programme of pain that wasn’t even their own.
But if you’re tempted to sympathy it’s worth remembering that the history of Lib-Con coalitions is very much one where Tories gain and Liberals lose. The warning signs were there, and if the Lib Dems had bothered with a bit of self-knowledge they might have hesitated before putting themselves in this mess. And it definitely is a mess, even if it will only become fully apparent as the post-election honeymoon fades.
