Comforting lies

You may not remember this, I might be remembering it wrong.

Tony Blair said he would restrict immigration. This was a promise he made to quieten things in the Labour heartlands, where this xenophobic stuff has been stirred up by people who should know better. I also know some immigration nuts who complain about this too.

Miliband's Labour said the same thing, even selling a mug saying they would restrict immigration.

We can't say whether or not Miliband would have done this or not.

But we do have a really good example of the New Labour project here.

Blair told comforting lies to the people he had disenfranchised to keep them on side, while he told a different set of lies elsewhere.

The exit vote is these people saying that they don't believe any party will actually address their concerns, at least in part.

Labour go way back playing xenophobic cards. I remember when I was a kid in the 70's seeing TV I didn't understand where white trade union officials were talking about differentials. Which used to be that skilled (usually) men were paid more than unskilled ones. In a modern workforce, built around flexibility, the concept is ridiculous.

In general the immigrants that came in during Windrush were unskilled when they arrived in the UK, so you can see where this is going. Defending the labour aristocracy against anything that might put pressure on their wages. Black folks are really easy to spot in that regard, and as they became more skilled the closed shop merchants started to get worried. But of course they never mention race out loud in public.

Labour was founded by the labour aristocracy and their chums in the middle class. You only have to look at their early history to see how they never attempted to rally the poorer sections and saw their mission as one of containing the dangerous and the ignorant, while maintaining their differentials. This is still part of their culture. Listen to the pronouncements of the folks on the right of the party, and the thought police laws they were so fond of passing, and you can see this tendency still alive in the here and now. There is a culture of do gooders doing people's thinking for them, and it's been there since the very beginning. Read some of Sydney Webb's racist speeches if you want an example of this.

Enfranchising the working class in England meant making sure everything happened in parliament and any dangerous radicalism was marginalised. The party was founded to make this happen.

What's needed is the supposed leadership of the working class taking a principled view on immigration and internationalism that they can explain and justify. Then getting agreement, or at least defusing it as a serious issue. But to do this, when most brits still have an unconscious empire loyalism branded in their heads by our awful education system, is very difficult. So the do gooders don't try. Instead they tell comforting lies and keep their principles hidden away (assuming they have any). So the folks who are really concerned about immigration and jobs for their kids are disenfranchised over and over again by the nice people who think their views are abhorrent.

This explains Gordon Brown's faux pas when he thought the microphone was off. Nice people like him nod and agree with the people who are scared and then do nothing to address the fear. They just chuck labels around and abdicate responsibility for what has happened and is happening. They blame the confused and lied to for being confused and having been lied to.

We have a situation where the immigration rules for the EU can't be changed and immigration from our former colonies keeps services like the NHS running. So the political class have to be honest about this, and say it can't be done. Also there is very little evidence that immigration has the negative effects claimed by the mass media. But no-one has the balls to challenge this narrative.

During the brexit debate I saw quite a lot of memes on Facebook challenging the prevailing view but I live in a bubble where folks think about these things and have a much more clear view than you get from our dreadful right wing press. I'm a member of Left Unity and we have a leaflet about immigration and migrant rights that explains our position very clearly. We aren't afraid to have the discussion, and challenge the lies being told. We also wouldn't insult your intelligence, or belittle your fears. But we have clearly articulated principles and will not tell comforting lies.

I think that Jeremy Corbyn won't tell comforting lies either, and that's what the old guard don't like. I personally can't join Labour after having spent a huge chunk of my life being disgusted with the way they've always run their foreign policy like the old empire loyalists they are. I hope JC will be different. He seems to have principles and a coherent view based on them.

Liars always get caught in the end, and pretending you can do people's thinking for them, ignoring their genuine fears, is pretty revolting.

Samsara

All

Must fade and pass away

Preserving 

   Changes

   Differentiates

That wheel

   It

   Turns

   Has turned forever

A spit

   Through

   Centre

   Bursting

   Spinning

   Forever

So you tell me

   I must believe

   In unchanging god

Can't

Sorry

Poem 56

Ah

    Shatter the glass

           of me

Shard me

    The old wound


Stumble

    Into too bright

    daylight


I

    Wish I understood

    The separation

    Blindness


Twist

    Your old knife

    The binding crusting

 

So

    That beauty

    Tears my eye


If only

    peace of pieces

    shard


If only

    join hands

The Northern Powerhouse is a big fat lie

Lie number 1 - it's about devolution

Devolving power down to local people is a good thing, right?

If it was it might be.

The money and policy is still controlled by Osbourne in London.

The group being told what to do by London are the leaders of the councils in the group and an appointed chair.

Their role is to take the blame for the cuts and dole out whatever's left.

There isn't any democratic check on them at all - so you could find things you need in your local area disappearing and there will be nobody to lobby or complain to. Your local councillor will shrug, because they can't do anything about it.

The chair is supposed to be elected, but I'm not aware of being asked to vote for anybody.

Lie number 2 - it's about protecting services

The cuts have already taken place. Osbourne has allocated a smaller amount of money, tied to doing whatever he asks.

We currently have a social care budget, that pays for services provided by the council. It has been slashed to the bone but councils still have a legal obligation to provide those services. This is typical Tory logic.

One of the things that will be happening is the social care and health services will be combined.

Social care is means tested, meaning you have to pay if you can afford it. Affording means you are so poor you can't afford electricity - it's pretty vicious.

So we're going to mix a free service (the NHS) with a paid for one (social care). 

Suddenly cash strapped councils will be able to do things with the NHS budget. How long do you think it will be before the NHS becomes a paid for service through the back door?

Lie number 3 - it's mostly about transport

See lies 1 and 2. Co-ordinating transport is a good idea. But it's by far the smallest and most insignificant part of it. And again, no local control. People you can't hold to account making decisions about the trains and buses you need while the funds are cut. What could possibly go wrong?

Untitled

Ah

Frost moon says cold tonight

We

Stumble across another year

Feels like spring in autumn

Fall

That edge, could you look

across time instead of space

See the dizzy distance toward death

Hidden behind that beautiful lump of now

Breathe

Inevitable cancellation of what you were

Are

Ice spinning

Not cold

Anymore

No breath

Labouring under an illusion

I have to say that I have an intense dislike of the Labour party - not because I'm a Tory, but because I don't believe that it has defended the rights of the majority of people, the ones we used to call the working class, for years. There's a leadership contest going on at the moment and some people in the left are getting all worked up because one of the nominally left MPs is standing. 

So what? If he wins lots of the old left will come out of the closet and say we should rally around the party and get it elected again, if he loses then the Blairite neoconservatives will carry on bleating about aspirations some more. This is code for wanting to be a middle class house owning family, which is becoming ever further out of reach if you live South of Birmingham.

I've said it before ... flogging a dead horse, and the horse is so dead and has been so long that the flogger can't even find a stain on the pavement where it used to be because the rain of decades has washed it away. They just keep getting a new whip and whipping the road.

Labour Left are part of the imperialist machine that keeps us all back by spreading the delusion that the people who hold the power in the party aren't war mongering neocons or that someone "nice" can hold the reins of power instead. But it's never worked out that way. I acknowledge  individuals who take a stand and can maybe see some hope but to me the whole project is a waste of time. We should be working with the folks on the receiving end of the neocon murder project, defending their rights and working on democratic alternatives, not lending our radical credibility to a non-existent horse.

They have always been a pro-empire party asking our betters for a few more crumbs - read Ralph Milliband's history, or more recently, Rob Clough's book.

I don't need the party of the atomic bomb and 500,000 dead Iraqi children (and don't mention Northern Ireland either) to tell me what to think, and I couldn't care less who leads them. They are in the way of any kind of progress and culpable for a lot of disgusting crimes. Being "left" doesn't let you off the hook unless you called them for it at the time and keep calling them on it. Voting for them is voting for the status quo, and how's that working out for you?

If you start saying "but how does this get rid of the tories"? Nah - how does this defend the working class against neocon lunacy, across the whole world, not just little old parochial chauvinist England. Not even a little bit. It's an irrelevant sideshow stopping us working on being the real opposition.

Labour in power in London are part of the drive to rid the place of the poor and cover the whole place with bijoux flats for aspirational middle management types who have to rent because even they can't afford to buy anything there. It's the party that bailed out the incompetent mortgage lenders and saddled the rest of us with the debt. It's the party of the old-style centralised "we know best" approach to problems like housing and social care, instead of working through the needs of the people who rely on those services.

I'm also not arguing for "purity" - I am arguing for calling a spade a spade and not attaching yourself to a bunch of folk who are literally drowning in other people's blood for cynical reasons of trying to do some kind of silly putch later - you will lose, just like Militant did, and you lend them a credibility they don't deserve.

A mass movement grounded in a decent understanding of how things actually work is needed, and you can't even begin to do that while you wait for some kind of socialist jesus to rescue you from within the ranks of the Labour MPs. It's short termism, dreaming, "if only the world was better, maybe we can pray a better world into existence". Please more doing, less praying. More testing things with people who need our help and less skipping through the forest with some kind of socialist pied piper. And remember the piper may have stolen the children but he drowned the rats.

While this diversion's going on the Tories are doing their 100 day rape the poor campaign - where are the opposition? Maybe the SNP (hollow laugh) - Labour are completely compromised by agreeing with almost everything except the bedroom tax.

Move on, please, there are vulnerable people out there who need your commitment and energy while we argue about what colour to paint the bike shed. It's embarrassing.

If you want change you need to stop wasting your time with it and get involved in the local campaigns that have sprung up against the bedroom tax and other vicious policies - forget the siren song of Parliament, and the old left's obsession with Labour.

Move on.

How can the radical, anti-austerity parties fund their proposals?

One of the things we are asked when campaigning on housing, education and the NHS is how do we propose to pay for our policies? We can get the privileged minority who have been getting richer and richer to pay more taxes, which seems fair. There are also quite a few things we can do without raising taxes at all by attacking the system that has been set up to make them richer and richer.

NHS

In their recent book "NHS for Sale" the Keep Our NHS Public campaign point out that getting rid of the the internal market in the NHS will save between £5bn an £10bn a year. Given that the paltry promises from the mainstream parties are only an extra £2bn a year to plug some of the gap this would easily resolve the funding crisis quite quickly. For comparison, before the market was introduced the NHS admin costs was around 6% of the overall budget, now they are rising to 15%. The NHS budget is huge, the estimated figure for 2015/16 is £115bn, so 15% gives us the astonishing figure of £17.25bn, 6% would be £6.9bn, which leaves around the £10bn figure they quote.

For reference in the USA there is an unregulated market controlled by a small cartel of "providers" who work together to fix prices. 30-40% of health budgets are wasted on administering claims instead of patient care. These are the companies that are buying up UK health care.

A second way of saving large amounts of money is to abolish the use of the Public Finance Initiative (PFI). This was an accounting trick used by Labour and Tory governments to make it look like they needed to borrow less money by giving away public assets like hospitals to private companies and getting them to rebuild and refurbish them. Then they rent them back from these companies, hiding the costs as expenditure instead of borrowing. As an example a hospital in Peterborough that cost about £235 million will end up costing over £1bn in total over the next 20 years. The other problem is that the staffing of the hospitals still has to be paid for and the PFI payments have to be taken out of the budget first. This is why Accident and Emergency services are being closed down up and down the country, and it's also why there has been such powerful downward pressure on NHS staff salaries. It's also why NHS trusts up and down the country are struggling to keep themselves afloat, the system is built to fail catastrophically as these charges mount up over the years.

When you see the promises about billions going into what you think is NHS care, remember that a big chunk of this will be going straight to the banks and hedge funds as "rent" on what used to be publicly owned and financed hospitals and schools because of a cynical accounting trick by heartless airheads (and Tories).

In the previous parliament there was the NHS Reform Bill, which was going to abolish the internal market, PFI and reestablish the principle that the government had a statutory responsibility to provide health services free at the point of delivery for all - we would of course fight for this. Interestingly very few MPs voted for it, even the ones that are now saying they will save the NHS.

Education

PFI has been used extensively in education as well. The same arguments about paying the banks first and driving down salaries apply, as do the ones about what you think is education funding paying rent to the banks instead of going on our children and education in general.

Housing

We promise to build 100,000 social homes. It sounds like this is impossible because it will cost so much. 

Firstly, there are huge number of empty houses up and down the country that we could probably refurbish relatively cheaply. 

Secondly, we can perform an accounting trick of our own.

Building social housing saves money, very large sums of money. At the recent Left Unity Raise the Roof for Housing conference one of the delegates pointed out that state spending on housing for the working poor is done through housing benefit. Because we have a chronic shortage of decent social housing the rents are very high and billions of pounds are going straight into the pockets of landlords. The rents on social housing are typically much lower than so-called market value. This means that people living in those houses don't need billions of pounds worth of rent paying that goes out of the system. He estimated that spending a billion on decent social housing would easily save two or three in housing benefit. This will also defuse the ticking time bomb in places like London where it is impossible for anyone under 25 to ever dream of living in a house or flat of their own, rather than a crappy room in a shared one where you pay an extra £100 a month because you have the en suite bathroom.

We will also bring in rent controls that will keep the housing benefits bill down, which will help everybody who isn't a profiteer landlord.

General spending and the infrastructure

PFI is being used for everything now, including projects like the second Mersey bridge at Runcorn. The bridge will cost around £600 million to build, but the associated long-term costs of the project will be around the £2bn mark. Originally the toll to cross the bridge was going to be around the same as the Mersey tunnels, £1.70, because of PFI it will be at least £3 to start with. Also the original bridge will become a toll bridge to support this lunacy - stealing a publicly owned asset to finance private profit, again.

We will stop using PFI - if we need to borrow money from the markets for public projects then we will, but we won't hide it in secret unaccountable schemes where the returns are inflated to make huge secret profits for racketeers and their political friends. We stand for complete transparency in public finances, and the renegotiation and abolition of this millstone around the necks of honest tax paying people.

When we ask the richest people to pay more back into the system, there is no point in giving it straight back to them as "rent" on things we already own!

Sources

NHS for sale - Chapter 2 - Myth: The NHS is inefficient and unaffordable. It can't go on like this.
How Corrupt is Britain - Chapter 9 - Politics, Government and Corruption: The Case of the Private Finance Initiative

Because of your lies

I’m tired

A hundred thousand children sanctioned

Hungry

Because of your lies

A million using food banks, swallowing pride

Hungry

Because of your lies

Homeless numbers rising

Cold out there in winter

Another body, some body

Dies

Because of your lies


Heartless must have a heart

Faithless must have faith

Liar

Only needs a paid-for mouth - don’t blink, swallow


Sell another hospital

Children must be profitable

“Throw another on the fire,

It’s cold in here.”


One gives up

Can take no more

Suicide

Hungry

Cold

Because of your lies


Thumbs up privilege patronage

“Choose to be poor?

The sentence is -

Death”

Because of your lies


See what you’ve done?

Defend your petty bubble

We’re invisible

Another pocket picked

Because of your lies


06/Mar/2015

Free speech, tolerance, respect blah blah

Background

This is me, Francis, putting his head over the parapet. Probably not a good idea, but if you feel something is important you need to get your flags out and pin them to some kind of a mast.

The first point, which is one that needs to be returned to again and again, is that offence is taken not given. A satirical magazine published crowd baiting cartoons. You don't have to be a member of the crowd - if you aren't a reader of this magazine why care what it says? Their right to publish this magazine and put whatever legal thing they like on the cover is there - so what? Denouncing the creators of the magazine actually gives them credibility, but I bet they never thought of that. This is why I disagree with the whole no platform policy - let the idiot speak! The idiocy becomes apparent soon enough.

Problem is, outside of areas we've studied at some length, we're all idiots. But leave that to once side for now.

Forcing is what's wrong. For example, if I stood outside your mosque and waved the covers of that mag in your face you would have every right to be angry - this is where the line is crossed. On the other hand, if your imam was saying inflammatory things then I don't see why I can't stand outside and gently protest. Again - I wouldn't push the mag in your face. I'd just say that nobody made you read it. If you start claiming some absolute right to take offence then the answer is - not here, not now, those days are over. 

We used to live in a society that burned witches and hung people for disagreeing with the king. At least on paper we don't any more. This is a good thing, and if you don't like it hard luck. It's a two way street, you wouldn't have been allowed to live here in those days because you wouldn't have fitted in so ... we all share the benefits of these hard won social changes, and that means we all have to be careful not to force anyone else. This is a very hard problem, but I'd rather live here and now than almost anywhere or anywhen else. Just writing this could have got me killed by a mob a few hundred years ago. If I lived in Saudi Arabia they would have beheaded me years ago for some of my mild disagreements with the way the state is run. Let's hold on to that.

Tolerance is violence in disguise

If I tolerate what you do, believe, or say then it implies I can stop you outwardly manifesting those things. You can't control what someone else thinks, but you can stop them expressing it. I choose not to exercise the violence needed to shut you up and make you look like an obedient clone of me. What a nice person I am. This is why, to some theorists, multiculturalism is sexist, racist and religionist because permission can also be withdrawn by the dominant culture, such as it is. It is contingent on everybody carrying on being nice.

It's why people get so het up when topics of sexual discrimination, race or religion are raised. This is why the ongoing discrimination against non "English" or "white" people is still an everyday reality despite all the politically correct posturing. For example, if I raise an issue that affects women disproportionately it's usually men who tweet swearwords at me - this is very amusing. Raising these topics, trying to have an honest and probably very painful discussion about them, starts to question the giving of permission and replace it with nonjudgemental ignoring of differences. We are all unintentional sexists and racists, there is a lot of unconscious judging going on, and the only way to deal with it is to talk about it when it arises. Tolerance, as given, stops these conversations. Tolerance divides us. Questioning your own automatic reactions, and being honest enough to try to change is far more difficult, and painful, than shouting people down who dare to question the false consensus. Tolerance is a tool of the oppressor, the honey on the razor's edge.

The PC agenda is violence on behalf of the oppressed to stop us talking about that oppression and trying to do something grown up about it. The oppressed don't need your permission - they want you to fucking listen and then change your behaviour, to do something about it.

You can live your life, within the law, however you choose. As long as I can live mine we can work together on things that matter - feeding our children, keeping warm, looking after the less well off in society and so on. Let us not judge each other, let us not give permission.

Easy? No. I have become extremely conscious of my own flaws, but this actually makes me judge others less often. It's also made me a lot happier because I don't compare myself any more.

Respect

This is another slippery word. The origin of the word comes from looking at someone. That is, judging how worthy they are. Again it is divisive. I was recently struck by the I am a man slogan used by native americans and people of colour when demanding equality. It's nothing to do with asking (permission again) for respect. It's a statement of fact, not judgement, not looking. It's not asking for permission.

Respect implies tolerance - be careful. 

Banning is toxic

If you ban a person or organisation you give them credibility. If you call on the state to prevent, say, a fundamentalist religious leader from coming to your country to preach anti-gay dogma, or encourage a fatwa (managed to fit both in there) then you're saying it's up to the state to decide these things. You're saying that some people should have their travel restricted depending on their professed beliefs or sexuality - this is a very bad idea. It might be you next time, have you thought of that? It might be a friend of yours running from someone trying to kill them for their beliefs or sexuality - whoops!

No. If something should be defended then you must defend it, not defer it to a court or a government minister. I personally find the childish shouting down of people who have opinions you disagree with utterly abhorrent, it's violence, withdrawing permission. But showing their arguments to be flawed, that's the way to proceed. Publicly shunning, for example people turning their backs when a speech is being made, makes the point without violence.

What next

I am against censorship and banning except for material that involves children, and that stuff is illegal anyway. There are lines that shouldn't be crossed, but there are far less of them than you'd think.

I can disagree with the tenets of your religion and point out the inconsistencies, and as long as I don't shout them in your face I should be able to to so with impunity. You can do the same for me. If you ask I will tell you, and I might write them down somewhere - you don't have to read what I write.

I can challenge dangerous ideas that I think could cause a lot of harm if they are projected from a public platform. I'd rather let you make a fool of yourself than ban you - you don't need my help for that. As long as I can disagree and be as public about it it's fine.

I give you permission to not need my permission to believe what the hell you like as long as it does no harm to others.

Offence is taken not given.

I am a human.

So are you.

Move on.

We all hate the banks - A modest proposal

The original modest proposal was written during the Irish potato famine by Jonathan Swift, of Gulliver's Travels. It's a satire where he suggests that the victims of the famine should eat their children in order to survive. It's written as if it is a serious proposal.

This proposal came to mind while I watched the BBC Panorama programme yesterday, Did the Bank Wreck My Business? Not only do they seem to have done some extremely questionable things, but then paid hundreds of thousands of pounds in bonuses to the people who did them. I also found a whole trail of articles on the Channel 4 news site - just type channel 4 rbs fraud into google.

The banks called to task of course deny any wrong doing. Well they would, wouldn't they? I was also angered by the recent clip of the Channel 4 news presenter standing outside RBS saying that he was tired of standing there saying that they had broken the law (this time deliberately defrauding customers if I remember right) and knowing that nothing would happen.

You can get angry about this, but because our country is run by a bunch of old Etonians who all went to the same schools it won't have much of an effect. There is one thing you can do though.

Buy shares. Then work with other people to bring these people to account. Fire them. Limit their pay.

If you can't afford to buy shares then I've been thinking we could start a Right Thinking Fund where we can all put a few quid in and the fund buys the shares. The fund's charter would be to hold the organisations whose shares it buys to account.

That's right - use their system against them. Call them out. Force them to have people with some moral integrity on their boards. Fire the bastards.

It only needs a little snowball. The legislators are too afraid to do anything serious - so let's go round them.