The Future Now

Brown survives

As Jonathan Freedland says in today's Guardian, in the end Gordon Brown survived the various attempts to unseat him, and the worst election result for decades because,

the plot to replace Brown lacked two essentials: an alternative candidate and an alternative programme.

And this statement pretty well sums up the state of UK politics.  There is widespread dissatisfaction with the state of the country, indeed the world, and the failure of politicians to provide a lead.  None of the main parties have a credible way out of the current crisis - a crisis which is economic at it's root, but which infects all branches of society and culture - because none of the main parties understand, or are willing to admit, the underlying causes of this deepening malaise.

But then the electorate is not much better.  What do they do after the economic order imposed by politicians of the right brings the world to its knees and they get chance to vote in elections to the European Parliament?  Most stay home, and those who do bother to vote give their support overwhelmingly to parties of the right.

It's surely time for a radical new poltics of the kind espoused in the UK by the Green Party, or by Compass on the 'left' of the Labour Party.  But how we get this imperative to register with the majority of ordinary people, or with mainstream politicians, I really don't know.

We get the government we deserve?  You bet we do. 

A first step to understanding

A final post on the Baby P affair.  This excellent article by Anne Karpf should be required reading for everyone who thinks more could be done to prevent child abuse and filicide.

The Crooked timber of mankind

Further to yesterday's post about the tragic death of Baby P, Simon Jenkins has a very good summary of the case in today's Guardian.  As he says:

The implication must be that Baby P died for the same reason that street crime rises, educational performance stagnates, and mortgage debts go haywire. When the human element in any frontline service gives way to quantifiable process, something crucial is lost. The belief has long been bred in the bone of the children's minister, Ed Balls, that any computer can solve the world's ills at the click of a mouse. It is a dangerous lie.

Not shocked

There is much one could say about the horrific neglect and murder of Baby P in Haringey, North London last year; a case that has only now come under the media spotlight because of the legal requirement to await the outcome of the trial for murder of the child's mother and two other men.

What irritates me most, however, is the way politicians and pundits alike talk about how shocking it all is.   When I hear those words I know immediately that nothing will be done to address the underlying causes of the happily very rare instances of extreme child neglect and abuse.

Then there's the blame game.  Someone must always be responsible and held to account.  For David Cameron, it is the government.  For the lamentable Jeremy Paxman (whom Minister for Children, Beverley Hughes, dealt with admirably on Newsnight, I thought) it is politicians in general.  No one, of course, lays any part of the blame at the state of a society in which people like the parents who murdered this child can aspire to parenthood without having first learned the fundamentals of humanity.

The reason, I suspect, that people are so shocked by these dreadful events, is that they have a the false impression that the world is, bye and large, a good, safe, warm and  comfortable place.  For the majority of citizens globally, and for sizeable minorities even in the rich countries, this is palpably not the case.  If 30,000 children under five die each day from preventable causes, then we've got some considerable way to go before we can be proud of the world we have created.

It is probably impossible, ever, under any conditions, to keep all infants safe from the actions of psychopathic parents.   It is however possible to create social and economic conditions in which more young people grow into adults and undertake parenthood with the a level of emotional and psychological maturity that would minimise the possibility of abuse or neglect.

It would also be possible, if we chose not to fix society, to properly fund, invest in and motivate social services departments and people who work in them, to sort out the mess that inevitable follows without on occasion, failing to act in time.

If we really want to protect every single child from parental abuse we have either to change society beyond all recognition, or massively increase social services funding.

We could settle, on the other hand, for being thankful that such events are so rare, and remind ourselves, as Professor Colin Pritchard noted yesterday,

that children in England and Wales are less at risk than in most developed countries. The baby murder rate is highest in the US and only Greece, Italy, Spain and Sweden have lower rates than England and Wales.

But please, let's be a bit more grown up about the warts-and-all reality of human existence.  Dreadful thinks happen, thankfully not that often; and unless we are really prepared to address the underlying causes, at huge cost, we really should stop pretending to be shocked.

Mandelson to the rescue?

Whatever one may think of Peter Mandelson, he still show signs of being a top-rate political operator.  He has today called on the Prime Minister to save the threatened UK post office network arguing that in the current financial crisis, the Post Office's trusted brand could become the focal point for renewed confidence among savers and borrowers.

If the post office were to be decimated, as has been the likely upshot of current government policy, it would represent a hammer blow for hundreds of rural communities.  In suggesting, not only that they should be saved, but by coming up with a commercial rationale for saving them, Lord Mandelson might be doing both the government and the country a massive favour.

Broken Society

Playwright David Edgar has an excellent piece in today's Guardian in which he reminds us it is the Tory policies of the 1980s that are responsible for the current crisis and for many of today's social problems.  He argues that Cameron's new Tories should not be allowed to escape responsibility, even if new Labour could have done much more to repair the damage.

A new model of the economy

I have a new piece up at Comment is Free this afternoon.  It takes a look at possible long term solutions to the financial crisis through the ideas outlined in an excellent new book by Brian Hodgkinson.  As the Guardian summarises in its standfirst:

Left and right, economists have been suffering from a shortage of new ideas. But that may be about to change.

I think this book could make a major contribution to building a more just and equitable society.  I recommend it wholeheartedly, and am pleased to report that the publishers, Shepheard-Walwyn are making it available to readers of this blog at a considerable discount.

Click here to take advantage of this offer.

The benefits of class

There's an excellent piece by Andrew Martin in today's Guardian on the consequences of the assault on our previously class-based society; many of which are negative.  As Andrew points out, when the only measure of success in life is wealth, many of the more noble values held by the privileged classes of earlier generations are lost.  Without class, it seems, we are all less classy; and that is not a good thing.

A civilised society?

Last night's Channel 4 documentary on adult illiteracy was shaming.  More than 5 million adults in the UK cannot neither read or write, victims of an education system which has clearly been filing a sizeable minority of those who pass through it for decades.

While it was exceptionally moving to see remarkable teacher Phil Beadle make real progress with the adult students who enrolled on his course, the damning discovery that the materials on offer from the government  to help with adult literacy were woefully inadequate, gave even greater cause for despair.

An educated population is the cornerstone of a civilised society, and literacy is the foundation of education.  On the basis of last night's first episode of Can't Read, Can't Write, we have no right to call our society civilised.

Until we are adult enough ...

These words from the concluding paragraph of Rachel North's excellent piece on knife crime in today's Independent could, of course, apply to all manner of social problems. 

We need, collectively, to outgrow the assumption that life and society is necessarily competitive and, therefore, inevitably sometimes violent, before we can successfully address the pointless waste of young people's lives on the streets of London and elsewhere.

None of them get it

Works and Pensions Secretary, James Purnell, today attacks the Tories for misunderstanding the causes of poverty, and therefore having no chance of tackling it, if and when they form the next government.

I think he's right about the Tories, but his claims for his own party ring a little hollow after ten years in which the Labour government has set out to reinforce precisely those aspects of the economy which are guaranteed to encourage a growing gap between the haves and have-nots, and leave those at the very bottom with no hope of improvement.

I’m not sure politicians from any the main parties are genuinely interested in creating an economic context conducive to poverty reduction; if they were, they would surely take notice of the evidence that  putting all your economic policy eggs in the basket of economic growth doesn't lead to any reduction in poverty given the way the economy is currently configured.

Redistributing money from rich to poor was only ever a sticking-plaster on the open sore of endemic poverty. Only a redistribution of access to economic opportunities and the assets (land and capital) that make them viable, will bring an end to poverty. No politician, anywhere, is prepared to accept this simple truth.

After Henley

It was fascinating, after such a long break, to hear Tony Blair on the Today Programme this morning.  AS you will know I'm no great fan of his, but this morning he reminded us of the qualities a politician needs to survive. Qualities he was able to acquire in spade loads, while his successor, presumably, had his head buried in books.

Blair was typically diplomatic when pressed on what Gordon Brown should be doing to turn his fortunes around. He wasn’t going to be bounced into giving advice over the airwaves; though it's difficult to imagine quite what advice he could give, even in private.

He was at pains to point out that Brown is to some extent the victim of circumstance. If Blair had had to deal with Northern Rock, the credit crunch, record oil prices and the prospect of stagflation in his first year in charge, he too would have found his honeymoon rapidly curtailed. But he would also have made a better fist of persuading the electorate to trust him, and that things would turn out alright in the end. And, however unrealistic those assurances might have been, they would have satisfied enough people to stave off the kind of unprecedented electoral meltdown that Labour suffered at Henley last night.

And, of course, Blair could have sacked his chancellor. One of his cleverest tactics as PM was to spread the idea that he had little understanding of economics; and that it was therefore sensible to leave responsibility for the economy entirely in the hands of the man next door.

Blair’s grasp of economics may have been patchy, but I suspect he was at least aware of one enduring truth: that in economics, what goes around comes around. While Brown was boasting that he had achieved what none of his predecessors had managed, and cracked the secret of the boom-bust economic cycle – an idiotic claim that sections of the media and academia were grossly negligent in their failure to question – Blair kept his counsel.

As I wrote here just before Brown became prime minister, with his rather unbelievable apparent naivety of  economic realities, he spent most of his time at the Treasury setting himself up for a massive fall. Nonetheless, Blair is correct to suggest that his successor is to some extent a victim of circumstance. That circumstance is globalisation, or rather the way in which the process of economic globalisation has removed from politicians most of the traditional tools of economic policy. Their hands are now tied in ways that those of earlier generations of policy makers never were.

According to Blair, therefore, we should cut Brown some slack. But whenever politicians talk of the new global economic context it's as if that context has mysteriously emerged from undetectable cosmic dust particles, and been foisted upon governments while their backs were turned. Nothing could be further from the truth. This new and troublesome context is the direct result of a purposeful project that began with Reagan and Thatcher, and has been consolidated, largely by governments of the so-called centre-left, in the years since.

That process of consolidation continues each time a senior minister makes a speech calling on us to celebrate the growth in the number of millionaires. And it continues each time the former prime minister ask us to look kindly upon his struggling successor, while conveniently ignoring the fact that neither of them have ever seen fit to question any aspect of the economic revolution of the last three decades.

Brown is a poor politician; and while the electorate is unlikely to forgive him that, I can. What lost him my support was his failure to understand that a just society can never emerge until governments recognise the social consequences of the economic changes of the last three decades, and have the courage to strike out in a quite different direction.

The dangers of ideological equality

I have reservations over much of what Daniel Finklestien writes over at Times Comment Central - he and I are clearly cut from quite diifferent philosophical cloth - but today's piece about the absurdity of disabled campaigners arguing for the right for deaf  IVF parents-to-be to choose a deaf child over a child who can hear, is right on the mark.

I generally don't have much sympathy with those that blame 'political correctness' for so many of society's problems; such complainants are usually deeply conservative and, in their eagerness to condemn attempts to make people think about the harm that can be caused through unthinking use of language, reveal their own deeply entrenched prejudices.

This story, however, is a clear case of political correctness gone mad.  Addressing the deaf activist who has made this ludicrous assertion, Finklestien says,

It is courageous to refuse to lie down and be a victim. I can only admire that. But it is one thing to be strong, almost heroic, about his own misfortune, quite another to want it imposed upon a child.

13 March Update:  Daniel has just posted again on this topic; an excellent reply from a deaf person.

Meaningless choice

This article by Deborah Orr is spot on.   It exposes the utter lunacy of addressing the falling quality of education provision in the UK by giving parents 'choice' rather than figuring out why schools are not helping so many children to reach their potential, and doing something about it.

As Orr begins,

Long ago when the concept of parental choice was introduced into the state education system, it was done under the assumption that this would somehow create a market in which schools would compete with each other and standards would be raised. A couple of decades on, I think it has become apparent that this theory has not worked. The worst schools are not compelled to improve because of parental choice. They just end up populated by the children of the parents whose choices are fewest.

It never ceases to amaze me how educated, thinking people like Andrew Adonis and the school's Minister, Jim Knight (both, incidentally, beneficiaries of top-notch private educations) believe they can improve education for the masses through such a misguided strategy.

If I am not for myself

I have always liked Mike Marqusee.  Apart from being one of the finest writers among contemporary journalists, the fact that he is American, and is a cricket-lover and exceptional observer of, and writer about, that beautiful game has always appealed to me.

His memoir has just been published, and there's an extract in today's Guardian.  In it he talks about the time, as a teenager, when he began to question the requirement of Jews to support the cause of Zionism.

As he writes,

Whenever Jews speak out against Israel, their motives, their representativeness, their authenticity as Jews are questioned. We are pathologised. For only a psychological aberration, a neurotic malaise, could account for our defection from Israel's cause, which is presumed to be our own cause.

Of course, the tribalism he cites is to be found on both sides of the Isreal/Palestine conflict (and indeed of most disputes between competing groups).  It takes courage to take a stand against extreme and unthinking views within your own culture or community.  Like Daniel Barenboim, Mike Marqusee does the cause of justice a great service.

Are the kids alright?

Alice Miles had a very good piece in the Times this week, prompted by the Children's Society Report into how children are being harmed by relentless exposure to advertising.  She asks,

...why is it in a child's interests to be treated like a consumer? It has yet to be proven that giving even adults a wide range of choices improves their lives.

Further to my previous post about the importance of finding a viable strategy for bringing about social change, one thing we can be sure of is that the future depends almost entirely on the values, perceptions and attitudes of the current generation of children.

What Miles' piece makes abundantly clear, is that the social and cultural enivoronment in which our kids are growing up today is quite different from the world we (Alice land I are both in our forties) inhabited as youngsters.  And this is bound to have an impact on the kind of adults they turn into.   

Already, too few adults are aware of, or care about, the commercialisation of culture and its impact on people's lives.  Given the messages now being pumped into malleable young minds, we can be reasonably sure that, as adults, their generation will be even less aware of the links between increasing consumerism, people's psychological and spiritual wellbeing, and the wider impact on society and the prospects for building a more just and inclusive global order, than most people are today.

There is so much evidence that ever-increasing consumer choice does not lead to increased psychological wellbeing or happiness.  It is, however, the only way our dysfunctional economy can sustain itself, and therein lies the problem.

Vulnerable arteries

Yesterday, the corner of the world I inhabit hit the news after an accident in the Blackwall Tunnel caused it to be closed all day.  Deisel leaked from a lorry and caused a mile and a half of road surface to melt, necessitating the closure of the north-bound carriageway, and resulting in traffic chaos for the whole of south-east London.

For those of you who don't know the area, the Blackwall Tunnel is the only high-volume river crossing between Dartford to the east of London and Tower Bridge.  If it has to be closed, massive disruption inevitably ensues.

Of course accidents happen, but one conclusion I draw from this is that it is ill-advised to put all your economic eggs in one basket.  London is getting too big, it is becoming too densely populated, and doesn't have the infrastructure to deal with incidents like yesterday's.

As currently configured, the economy causes steady centralisation of economic activity and populations, when what the country needs is decentralisation and for economic activity to be better spread around the country.  Not only would this reduce the widening prosperity gap between different areas, it would also mitigate the impact when, as they inevitably will, things go wrong.

Surveillance society?

David Aaronovitch has this reasonably balanced piece on the arguments for and against a national DNA database in today's Times.

My gut instinct is to oppose such a database; I suspect the disbenefits would outweigh the advantages, and I'm not sure government, the police or any other public body are up to managing it effectively or cost-effectively.  At the same time, I struggle to fully identify with what Aaronovitch terms the 'intelligencia default position'  that we are 'sleepwalking into a surveillance society'.

As I wrote last year, my biggest concern about such initiatives is that by using technology to address the symptoms of deep social problems, rather than tackling the roots causes, the incentive to build a better society is steadily diminished.

There's currently a rather scary vision of what society might look like a few years hence on BBC1 each Sunday evening, in the thriller The Last Enemy, in which the government is trying to introduce a system called TIA (Total Information Awareness) which would enable the powers to be to track our every move. 

It's going to be a while before the technology makes this possible, and even when it does, I'm not sure how the state would fund the necessary investment.  Although if things continue as they are, and society and the economy continue to morph into a mechanism principally geared to the consolidation of minority wealth and privilege, then the state would presumably have no problem finding private backers for such an Orwellian scheme.

There are worrying problems of crime and insecurity facing society today, but would we not be better advised to examine and address the roots causes, rather than using technology to mitigate the symptoms.  The current BBC drama does not make for comfortable Sunday evening viewing.

A fair chance in life

When a young person has something to look forward to, something to aspire to, something he really wants to hold on to, then keeping within the law and avoiding the gangs might just become the rational choice.

The wise, but common sense, words of the excellent Ally Fogg over at comment is free now.  One of the best pieces I have read about why kids are drawn into gang culture, and what needs to be done to reverse that trend.  You should read it.

 

Brazil: where economic growth is meaningless

There is probably no better example of the consequences of our failing and morally bankrupt economic system, and the way it has infected every corner of the planet, than Brazil, the most unequal country in the world.

When I visited back in 1994, I was struck not only by the physical beauty of the place, but, in cities like Rio de Janeiro, the visible sores of a society being torn apart by growing inequality.  By all reports, things have got markedly worse since I was there, with rocketing crime, desperate poverty and little hope for those who inhabit the favelas, some of which overlook the glitzy suburbs which are home to their more fortunate compatriots, from less than a mile away.

Brazil is the perfect example of how the standard measure of economic success (GDP growth) is pretty useless as a measure of positive changes in wellbeing across populations.  Brazil's economy has grown 3.4 per cent on average since the millennium, but few of the benefits have been felt in the hills around Rio.  The only growth areas in the favelas is drug related crime and murder.

Conor Foley touches on this issue in a piece over at comment is free, where he reviews the film Tropa de Elite, which, he suggests, has completely missed the point of what is going on in Brazil.  As he concludes:

Brazil's violence is a symptom for a wider set of social problems, for which Brazilians need to take responsibility. Most middle-class Brazilians have never set foot in a favela and talk about them as if they are another country. Films like Tropa de Elite are helping to keep them in denial.

Time for prophets

Neal Lawson had a very honest piece on comment is free this morning, in which he came down unequivocally on the side of those who despair at the lost opportunity of a three-term Labour government, and the way new Labour has exchanged principles for power to no end other than re-election.

He quotes Lord Tebbitt who said recently:

These days, I find myself saying, 'Chaps, there are some things which should not be privatised'.

There is no chance whatsoever of new Labour changing course now.  They will have to lose the next election and be dragged back to the centre by a Conservative government (perhaps kept on the straight and narrow by the Lib-Dems).  We will then see if they have the guts and the soul to re-reinvent themselves as the party of social justice.  I'm not hopeful.

As Lawson concludes, and as I have written elsewhere recently, it's a time for prophets; but there's no sign of anything ressembling a prophet in the modern-day Labour party.

The continuing collapse of a once great culture

Edward Lucas of The Economist has a good piece in today's Guardian in which he concisely appraises the state of democarcy, society and the economy in Putin's Russia.

I'm glad he is able to find words to describe the magnitude of the catastrophe overtaking the Russian people because, quite frankly, I can't.  He begins,

Capitalism is amoral, verging on the immoral. What makes it tolerable is constraint and redress. Voters, consumers, shareholders, public officials, lawyers, legislators, journalists and pressure groups are counterweights to the ruthless and narrow pursuit of private profit. That doesn't work perfectly in the west, but it doesn't work at all in Vladimir Putin's Russia, where the fusion of political and economic power is complete.

He goes on to make the point that because the left has been targeting its ire on the Bush administration, and the global impact of its policies, it has taken its eye of the ball as far as Russia is concerned. 

At least the British government has taken a firm stand over the Litvinenko affair, but it will take a coordinated international effort to bring sufficient pressure to bear on the morally bankrupt regime in Moscow. 

It's very difficult to see a way forward.  A first step must be to ensure the next US administration is not encumbered by hawks for whom a strong and corrupt Russia provides a ready excuse for continuing with the outdated policies of the cold war.  Beyond that, let's hope large numbers of influential people get hold of Lucas's new book, which looks like an essential read.

Meacher fundamentals

Michael Meacher may be struggling to regain credibility having joined, a little too enthusiastically, in the 9/11 conspiracy theories a few years ago, but this week on comment is free, he reminded us what progressive politics is supposed to be about, and why the Labour party has lost all credibility in the minds of those who believe there's a proper role for government in creating the conditions from which a more just and inclusive society might emerge.

Meacher opens by saying that

as the position of the two main parties becomes increasingly intertwined and the differences between the Blair and Brown variations of neoliberalism become increasingly difficult to detect, the debate about the political fundamentals has dwindled almost to invisibility. Never was ideology more needed, and never was it more lacking.

While I disagree with him that we need a return to ideology, I do think the left/liberal/progressive movement (call it what you will) needs to focus on ideals, and have a debate about values.  Until more of us can agree about what is wrong with society (and the global economy) and how we got to this point, we will struggle to know what to do about it, and fail to come up with a viable strategy for change.

Meacher concludes by saying:

It will not be easy for any government to begin to move away from the privatisation, deregulation, unfettered market tenets of neoliberalism which have governed western political economy for the last three decades and to establish again a much more healthy relationship between the market and society. But the gathering international crisis, where money and power have so clearly over-reached themselves, offers a real chance. And re-inspiring the Labour project in the runup to the next election may leave little choice.

I'm afraid that particular task is quite beyond the capacity of the Labour Party in its current state, but the idea of establishing a more healthy relationship the market and society is one that should be taken up by all progressives, within and without the party system.

Changing health

As ever, an interesting piece from Michael Tomasky on the importance of the debate over health care in the battle for the Democratic nomination.  It sounds as if Clinton is gaining support by having a policy that can never be implemented, and Obama is losing support because it's just too difficult to explain to the electorate why the Clinton plan (mandatory insurance) is a non-starter. 

The comment below Tomasky's piece by Don Reynolds, who appears to know a thing or two about this, is at once the most enlightening and depressing thing I've read during during the campaign.  Reynolds says,

There are no politicians, including Hillary and Obama, that are able to stand up to the physicians, hospitals, nursing homes, and pharm corporations (and their lobbyists). The only one that honestly wanted to try was John Edwards and he is no longer in the race. (I doubt he would have met with any success either.)

The USA is clearly unable to deliver on the promise of universal health care, which puts it way down the league table in terms of social progress among the rich nations.  But this should send out warning signals to other countries about the problems to be faced over the coming decades, as science races ahead, the population gets older, and we find ourselves unable to fund the quality and quantity of health inputs we would like in an ideal world.

Parenting: too much and too little

A couple of interesting pieces about the problems of over-parenting, first from Will Hutton in yesterday's Observer, and today by Johann Hari in The Independent.  Both lament the modern tendency for parents to over-protect their offspring.  I was particularly struck by Hutton's concluding paragraph:

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that the existential freedom to make and remake one's life could only be achieved by rounded adults and that adulthood required rupturing the bonds with one's parents to reconstruct them later. Parents setting out to cosset their kids surely have a greater obligation: to help them become adults in the best sense of that term.

Both blame the effects of growing affluence among the wealthier strata of society, and Hari considers the psychology of over-parenting:

The Californian child psychologist Dr Madeline Levine has produced the most detailed studies of the consequences after she stumbled across something that seemed paradoxical in her treatment of teenagers. "I found that kids from the wealthiest families had the highest rates of anxiety and depression and substance abuse, more than poor children," she says. "It just didn't make sense at first blush." Why would privileged kids be more miserable than poor kids?

They are both worth a read, even though they concern themselves entirely with the crisis in parenting as it relates to middle-class families.   Neither mentions the even greater crisis among families at the bottom end of the social spectrum, where tens of thousands of kids are failing to get the minimum of support and security needed to have a decent chance in life.

It's not a question of which crisis to address first.  Instead we should be focusing on the common causes of each.   If wealthy parents are trying hard but getting hopelessly wrong, and if many poor parents are struggling to give their kids a decent launch pad for life through neglect rather than too much attention, then might it not be that both problems are the result of a cultural malaise which is effecting every strata of society?

Hari says that his

parents were from the old working-class hands-off school of parenting – 'Let him walk! Leave him be! How else will he learn?'

I'm not sure his parent's approach is exclusively working class.  A few decades ago, most parents would have taken the same approach.  My parents certainly did and they were first generation middle-class professionals.  Sensible parenting seems to have survived the immense social upheavals of the post-war period and even the 1960s; indeed it may have been improved by it.  But it seems to have been undone by the cultural changes of the last couple of decades.  Until we reconsider our wider social and economic objectives, I fear things will get steadily worse.

Stop stop and search

If you want to understand why cross-party calls for extending stop and search powers are wrong-headed, and why the policy won't reduce crime, you should read this excellent short piece by Deborah Orr over at the Independent's new Open House blog.

Public sector fat cats?

Council Tax up to pay Fat Cats £50,000 a year.  That's the headline on the front of today's Daily Express.  It's up in arms because there are now 30,000 middle managers in local government earning twice the national average wage.

It fails to mention why these people command such salaries.  It's because pay rates are largely determined by the labour market which applies as much to the non-profit and local government sectors as it does to the profit-seeking commercial sector.

The public sector puts a great deal of effort into working out how much to pay its staff in order to ensure it can attract people of sufficient calibre to manage large, complex organisations that have to deliver a multitude of services.  Salaries have to be paid at these levels because that's what people doing similar jobs in the private sector are earning.  Cut the salaries and the best people will leave.

Now, I'm sure there's a great deal of waste and inefficiency in local government, but much of the private sector is similarly troubled; consider the train operating companies, for example.

Express readers would no doubt argue that there's a difference, in as much as we are paying for public sector inefficiency through our taxes, but then we also underwrite private sector inefficiency via the prices we pay for the goods and services produced by private businesses.

It's certainly true that the salaries of middle managers in local government are much higher in relative terms than they once were, but the gap gap between the highest and lowest paid has been stretched as a result of private sector pay awards.

The science of suffering

Further to my post yesterday about the need to come to terms with our mortality, Colin Blakemore signs off an illuminating article in today's Independent with the following observation:

Paradoxically, the spectacular success of medical science in prolonging the function of the rest of the body is amplifying the burden of brain disease.

There may be no limit to what, ultimately, we can understand and control through science, but there are still centuries of work to be done.  While science catches up, growing numbers of elderly sufferers of Alzheimer's and similar diseases are having their lives pointlessly lengthened as a result of our obsession with the sanctity of life regardless of its quality, and our failure to make value judgments about when and when not to apply scientific discoveries.

Kenya and Rwanda: differences?

A rather confused piece, I thought, by Richard Dowden, director of the Royal African Society in yesterday's Independent.  He argues that there will be no genocide in Kenya, because the Kenyan situation is quite different from that of Rwanda in 1994 when up to a million people were murdered in four months.  Instead of explaining the differences (which are considerable), he ends up highlighting the similarities between the two countries' situations.

Rwanda was, and Kenya is, a product of a flawed modern political system being imposed on a society where tribal allegiances still figure prominently in consciousness of many people.  Not because people are innately tribal in a way that westerners are not, but because the colonial and post-colonial history of each country has seen one group assuming power over, and restricting the economic opportunities of, others. 

The Rwandan genocide was a political act, planned and commanded from the highest levels of government.  Kenya's current violence may not be a result of explicit instructions from senior political figures (although the murder yesterday of opposition politician Mugabe Were looks to be more than a random killing), and it has certainly not been planned in advance (in Rwanda hundreds of thousands of machetes were imported from China in the year before the genocide) but the warning signs are there, which is why every possible effort must be made to avert a further escalation in the violence.

Dowden may be right to argue that whatever happens in Kenya it will not be genocide, but we should hardly draw comfort from this.  Unless the violence can be brought to a rapid end, many thousand could die, to add to those already being displaced.

The only solution is to hold new elections under the supervision of an international  body (perhaps the African Union).   A date should be set some months ahead to allow for proper organisation of an election which produces a legitimate and unchallengeable result.  It is hard to envisage any other solution while President Kibaki remains in power on such a dubious mandate.

Dowden concludes by saying:

This is going to be horrific and puts Kenya and the entire East African region at risk of economic collapse.

Although a stolen election was the catalyst, surely it's the perception of economic injustice among certain ethnic groups and the total disregard for those perceptions among politicians that underlie this conflict.  And that's inevitable given the level of cultural development in Africa, and the overly competitive, scarcity-based western economic model under which all Africans are now forced to live.

A happy death

Dominic Lawson has a very sensible piece in today's Independent in which he points out just how pointless and unproductive our growing obsession with longevity has become.

Everybody is entitled to a happy and healthy retirement, but there is no merit in extending life ever further past the point at which it ceases to have any positive value to its possessor.  The economic costs of a severely age-imbalanced population are obvious, but Lawson outlines several other practical and philosophical reasons for coming to terms with our own mortality.

History and literature are full of examples of how the desire for immortality is generally the product of a damaged mind - Lawson chooses Gulliver's Travels to illustrate his piece:

The Luggnuggians soon correct Gulliver's wide-eyed excitement. He is told how, by the time they are 80, the Struldbruggs had "not only the Follies and Infirmities of other old Men, but many more which arose from the dreadful Prospect of never dying". In their nineties, they "can never amuse themselves with reading, because their Memory will not serve to carry them from the beginning of a Sentence to the end; and by this Defect they are deprived of the only entertainment whereof they might otherwise be capable."

Much of the blame for the current obsession must lie at the door of those scientists whose personal ambition outstrips their sense of social and moral responsibility.  And of course, those parts of the media that, on a daily basis, encourage the belief that it's possible to remain young forever.

Buttocks are not a sexual organ

This unbelievable but true story from Fred Foldvary over at The Progress Report provides another reminder of why the world, and growing numbers of Americans, are so looking forward to George Bush's departure from the White House and his likely replacement by a Democrat, be it Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

The cultural impact of such a seismic change in the corridors of power will be considerable.  Although neither has yet made any reference to specific parts of the human anatomy in their campaign speeches (as far as I am aware), I'm sure Obama and Clinton would both take a much more sensible approach to uncovered buttocks on national television.

Last of the radicals

A very good piece in Saturday's Guardian by Martin Kettle, lamenting the passing of Peter Hain from the government.  Kettle reminds us that, whatever you may have thought of his permanent sun-tan, there was something different about Hain.  He was pretty much the last survivor of a quite different political era.  A time when politics offered hope, and exhibited rather more ambition than it does today.

Kettle goes on to say,

He regularly managed to get the message out that he believed in more redistribution, that trade unions were important, that the voting system should be reformed, that civil liberties should not be dismantled and that Britain's place was in Europe. You can say he did not do any of this effectively enough, or that he should have opposed the Iraq war - or even that he was wrong. But you cannot say that Hain was just a technocrat.

Well worth a read.

Reasons for remembering

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day.  Stephen Smith, who chairs the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust wrote eloquently in yesterday's Guardian about the importance of remembering the Nazi genocide.

Each year the day brings new opportunities to hear from some of those who lost loved ones, and others who managed to survive the extermination camps.  But many of the survivors are now nearing the end of their own lives.  It is crucial, therefore, that their recollections are preserved and retold for future generations.

One of the reasons I am so committed to the idea of a more just and inclusive world is that the potential to fall into fascism (indeed totalitarianism of any kind) lurks not very far beneath the surface of even the most civilised and superficially democratic of societies. 

Its return remains a distinct possibility in an increasingly uncertain world, especially as perceptions (correct or otherwise) of injustice among certain groups continue to grow.  This is why it's so important that as many people as possible are encouraged to Imagine, remember, reflect and react, the tagline of this year's commemoration.

If you're much younger than I am, and don't know much about the holocaust, I would recommend you get hold of a copy of Stephen Spielberg's 1998 film, The Last Days.  It's not easy to watch - I first saw it at the cinema soon after it's release; as the auditorium emptied many of those present still had tears streaming down their faces - but once you've seen it you'll never forget why it's important to remember.

Buried Treasures

Simon Jenkins was at his best in yesterday's Guardian, recording for us his thoughts on a sneak preview of the new exhibition of Russian and French masterpieces at the Royal Academy which opens next week.

Although a a fully paid-up 'friend' of that venerable institution, I don't seem to have received my customary preview invitation.  But it sounds so fabulous, I shall heading down to Piccadilly at the earliest opportunity for a look, and will report back.

Towards the end of his piece, Jenkins laments the fact that so many great works are permanently hidden from view:

Sooner or later the professional museum fatwa that treats these places as private curatorial archives and denies their governors freedom to trade collections must crumble. The crude chauvinism that says that a work of art must be "saved for the nation", even if then buried by the nation, is the most arrogant of imperial leftovers. Art should be displayed. Russia has more works of global appeal than it can possibly handle, yet desperately needs money to look after a fraction of what it has.

Art has no purpose unless it can be seen and appreciated by art lovers.  Let's hope the crazy state protectionism that restricts access to so many fine works, will soon be a thing of the past.

Mega-Fraud

There will doubtless be much wringing of hands at the news that a Societe General employee has committed the largest fraud in history, effectively costing his (now former) employers a cool £3.7 billion.

Readers of this blog will know that I'm no fan of the globalised financial system, which I think has mutated into a morally fraudulent mechanism for further lining the pockets of the already wealthy.  These days it has very little do with with the legitimate business of channeling investment capital into genuine economic enterprise; the sort that employs people, or makes things that ordinary people need and want.

That said, I suspect this fraud has less to do with the system than the culture of greed and aspiration that marks the times we live in. 

Jerome Kerviel might, had things gone differently, have made a pretty packet out of his devious scheme.  Given that he'd acquired the nouse to circumvent SocGen's control systems, had he not begun to play the markets only a year or so before things started to go pear shaped, he might conceivably have got away with it.

Apart from greed, and of a course psychopathic dishonesty, he must also have suffered a severe case of that peculiar gamblers' belief that, if you keep rolling the dice for long enough, things will come good.  Of course, that's an attitude commonplace in today's financial system.   

Call this government?

Alice Miles has a brilliant piece in The Times this morning,  Ostensibly an attack on the poorly thought through plans to reintroduce cookery lessons in schools, she ends up illustrating how feeble media-driven government in the UK has become.  It's almost unbelievable:

And so it was that I turned on the television yesterday to see the Prime Minister's special farewell to Konnie Huq, the children's television presenter. Yes, the Prime Minister. In between his world tour and not appearing in the House of Commons while his Chancellor announced the effective nationalisation of a bank, Gordon Brown made a little film to commemorate the retirement of a Blue Peter presenter.

The Prime Minister appeared after Basil Brush, who is a stuffed fox, and a couple of comedians. “Thanks for everything you've done,” Mr Brown said to Ms Huq, with that strange television smile of his. “You've done brilliantly. Thank you.”

I still can't get my head round the idea of David Cameron in No 10 (and I struggle to see how it will be any better) but New Labour's time is surely up.

(Afterthought: Surely even Times readers know that Basil Brush is a stuffed fox?)

Our feudal society

Chris Dillow has a typically stimulating post at Stumbling and Mumbling.  He points out that by all the established criteria, the economy is currently run more along feudal lines than capitalist ones.  I agree with much of his analysis, but, suggesting that the expropriation of labour by force is one of the indications of our continuing feudalism, he says,

The average worker expends more surplus labour working for the state than he does for capitalists; tax takes in advanced economies are around 40% - much higher than profit shares. Feudal-type exploitation is therefore greater than capitalist exploitation.

If I'm reading him correctly, he's implying that the take home wage of the worker (after tax is paid) represents fair payment for work done.  He assumes the market generally pays a fair wage, and that the tax take and the proceeds of profit shares (if they exist) represent the payment for surplus labour. 

However, in both a feudal and a capitalist economy, in the absence of free land, the wages of labour are kept artificially low by the fact that the non-landowner has no option but to work for whatever rate of pay s/he can obtain.  There is no direct relation between the take home pay of the wage earner and the value of the work actually done.   Much of the value generated by the application of what should be surplus labour is taken by the employer in dividends drawn on profits or via inflated executive salaries.

I agree with Chris that our society has more in common with feudalism than text-book conceptions of capitalism; after all, access to the means to secure a living is still controlled by a small proportion of the population.  But he could have made an even stronger case.

Bag a bargain today

Those nice people over at Amazon have discounted my book, so if you haven't read it and would like a copy, you can buy it here.

When it was published, The Possibility of Progress garnered one or two positive comments.:  Tony Benn thought it "a deeply moral and intellectual book".  James Robertson called it "important, impressive and readable".  Tony Vickers suggested that it might be "the book that Henry George would have written if he'd been alive today."

At the book launch Tony Benn, Clare Short and Susan Kramer all turned up to give their backing to the book, more information about which you can find here.

I'm currently working on another book which explores similar themes from different angles, but while that one is in production, The Possibility of Progress should keep you going.

If you're in the United States, you can order it through amazon.com by clicking here. (Sorry, no discount).

Of course, if you can afford it, and have an independent bookshop nearby, why not get them to order it in for you?  It'll cost you the full price (£14.95) but you'll be supporting a small business, rather than a corporate giant, and contributing to the cause of progress in a tiny way.

Happy reading!

Mark