Hitler's Posthumous Triumph
The prospects for a long-term solution to the Palestine-Israel 'issue' are zero.
This is not for the reasons stated by the anti-semitic EU commissioner Karel De Gucht.
Mr De Gucht fails to distinguish between Jews like Gerald Kaufman and Zionists like Avigdor Lieberman.
In parallel with the opening of talks in Washington, Hamas wounded two Israelis in an attack on West Bank settlers, who responded by continuing to defy the freeze on construction.
Just as the Protestants treated the Catholic minority as pariahs, so the Zionists treat Palestinians as worse than second-class citizens.
The recent report on school funding is emblematic:In a Knesset debate this year, representative Jamal Zahalka claimed that educational provision for Palestinian children in East Jerusalem was worse than anywhere in the Palestinian territories, including Gaza, or in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.
The Jerusalem municipality runs classes in the eastern sector of the city in unsuitable rented buildings because of a shortage of purpose-built schools, according to the report.
"Rooms are small and crowded and often unventilated," it says. "These rented buildings do not have integrated classrooms, teachers' rooms, libraries or laboratories, nor do they have playgrounds." Many have inadequate toilet facilities.
Many Palestinian children are forced to travel long distances to school. The report quotes Jamal Khalil, who lives in the Shuafat refugee camp and whose 10-year-old son spends four hours each day travelling to and from school, crossing two checkpoints at a monthly cost of 500 shekels (£85). Another son does a three-hour round trip to a different school.
The crisis is resulting in low academic performance and a high drop-out level among a population with an "alarming" poverty rate, according to the report.
This can be seen in the "dozens of high-school-age Palestinian boys working in the markets and the warehouses ... to the dozens of grade school-age children scrambling between the cars at some of the city's main intersections selling various goods to drivers."
According to the Jerusalem municipality education budget for 2008-9, an average of 2,372 shekels (£400) was spent on each child in the Jewish elementary school system, compared with 577 shekels on each child in the Arab elementary system ... [GDN]This is Northern Ireland circa 1972, writ large, but with a huge destabilizing impact, regionally and globally.
The similarities with Northern Ireland are closer than might at first sight seem to be the case.
The Protestants were 'planted' in Ulster in Elizabethan times to counteract the threat to England-Britain from Spain using Ireland as a springboard to attack the Protestant regimes across the water.
The Jews returned to their old homeland, in quite different circumstances, because of the long-standing anti-semitism in Europe which found its nadir in Hitler's holocaust.
Nor, as the case of Karel De Gucht illustrates, did such anti-semitism die with Hitler.
Readers of Richard Z. Chesnoff's book - Pack of Thieves - will be appalled to read of the moral indifference shown to Jews after the end of the war, when they returned to look for their properties.
The case of Gerald Durlacher seems pretty typical:The late Dutch sociologist ... returned to the family's pre-war home in Arnhem to find trangers living in it.The current conflict is fed both by the 'never again' reaction of Israelis to European anti-semitism, and the very real grievances of the Palestinian people.
Embarrassed and bewildered ... he knocked on a former neighbours door and asked if he knew what had happened to his family's belongings.
"I know nothing," said the neighbour, whom Durlacher quickly noticed was now wearing a suit of clothing that once belonged to his father ...
page 98, pbk edition, 2001
Into this mix comes an absurd millenarian fantasy emanating from the 'Christian' neocon right in the USA: Rapture.
Preston C. Enright's review - American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America - exposes this nonsense as a key driver of the 'war on terror'.
That war moves closer to the opening of its third 'front': Iran.
A key promoter of this new 'front' is none other than ex-PM Tony Blair, who used his appearannce at the Chilcot Inquiry and his interview with Andrew Marr, to bang the drum for further aggression, rather as the vacuous Ribbentrop encouraged Hitler's aggression solely to promote his own place in the Third Reich's hierarchy.
Like most politicians caught up in this febrile neocon venture, Blair is more concerned about the end of times than the end of oil.
The latter might, as Der Spiegel's writer makes clear, take the road of realpolitik and start being a lttle more friendly to nations which export oil. Peak Oil
Which brings us back to the only long-term solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. It's the same as the one pursued in Northern Ireland: reconciliation.Netanyahu and the one-state solution
Hopes for peace deal fade as US abandons settlement freeze talks
The Holocaust survivor ...
Peacework: to love a stranger
An 'asymmetrical' peace process
One-state solution
Brit Shalom and the bi-national solution
Sailing aboard Britain's RMS Titanic Economy
The Indie's Sean O'Grady bemoans Labour leadership candidates lack of any 'big idea':
As you might expect from the consummate policy wonk and former head of the Number 10 policy unit, it is David Miliband who boasts the most substantial economic platform. Scrapping the charitable status of private schools to pay for free school meals combines cleverness and social justice; reviving the Lib Dems' mansions tax to pay for investment allowances for manufacturing industry (also a Lib Dem priority) is also smart. There isn't, though, a "big idea".Independent 22 Aug 2010It shouldn't surprise us that there are no 'big ideas' around, since if you examine your navel for them, you'll only find fluff.
Commentators - like Sean O'Grady - aboard Britain's current 'Titanic Economy' are only debating how to manage it differently - or, if you prefer, to shift the deckchairs - but have little idea of the magnitude of the iceberg which is right bang in the centre of the TE's line of travel.
First, economic power has now swung to the BRICs countries, and, as Britain learned after WWI, the loss of economic power is followed by the loss of political power, though a certain 'special relationship' deceives us even to this day.
Second, the financialised-Ponzi-housing-market-led recent boom is unlikely to be granted a re-run, as interest rates will have to rise at some point, unless we prefer inflation.
It's Hobson's choice, because either path will further reduce living standards. [BBC]
But the real iceberg is energy.
Thanks to Thatcher's insane privatisation of energy supplies, we are now being held to ransom by a nationalised French firm which will not build nuclear power stations unless government rigs the market and, presumably, takes on the cost of dealing with the waste. [EDF]
This is the price of neoliberalism morphing into the corporate state.
Finally there's the little matter of peak oil.
Can you see any multi-tasking, cheapo, alternative that will fuel the vehicles, shipping and airlines of the 'just-in-time' global economy?
AND supply the artificial fertiliser that feeds a booming world population?
I suggest reading Bryan Ward-Perkins book "The Fall of Rome" which details the collapse in living standards when the Western half the empire ended in the fifth century CE.
It's not pretty reading, but the upcoming iceberg will be much worse, because local economies have been hollowed out.
So Labour have not offered alternative policies, because either (a) they are unaware of the iceberg, or (b) don't want to alarm the passengers.
Remember, there are not enough lifeboats.
You'll only get a place on one if you are not Steering Class - aka a member of Sir Alan Budd's 'Reserve Army' - for they are the one's who will get the blame when the TE hits the 'berg.
BTW, bankers will be first into the lifeboats.
It's called social Darwinism.
The Fall of Rome
Ian Tomlinson
The announcement that Pc Simon Harwood is not to be charged with any offence in connection with the death of Ian Tomlinson in April 2009 represents the tip of a very sinister iceberg. [ITD]
Not for the first time, the police have been seen to target "domestic extremists" - as lawful demonstrators are now labelled - as though confronted by terrorists. [JCD]
This, of course, dates back to the tactics used against striking miners in their 1984 confrontation with the Thatcher Government.
New Labour's anti-terror legislation - ostensibly enacted to pursue the 7/7 bombers, and their ilk - moved the police, er, 'service' further away from confronting criminals towards intimidating people who the current power élite find threatening solely on the grounds of their opinions.
In the minds of the police - a job which appeals to the more 'convergent' type of thinker, if that's not an oxymoron! - the distinction between demonstrators and terrorists is probably very blurred.
Add to the mix an officer with a highly dodgy record, and you have a cocktail for disaster. [SH]A Bizarre Decision
Several disturbing points emerge from the fiasco surrounding PC Simon Harwood's attack on Ian Tomlinson.
The Telegraph's account of his, er, police 'career' leads one to ponder why he was on the streets of London at all, never mind wielding a baton.
Furthermore the CPS's reliance on the evidence of patholigist Dr Freddy Patel is totally bizarre in view of the fact that doubts about his other work have led to an investigation by the General Medical Council. [DFP]
The suggestion that a conviction would not be obtainable implies that either the CPS doesn't have much faith in the courts, or that some other agenda is at work here, like covering up the fact that the Met re-appointed a police officer facing serious accusations which are, as yet, unaddressed.
Tomlinson police officer to face manslaughter trial
Ian Tomlinson unlawfully killed
G20 Pc faces misconduct charge
Third Tomlinson post-mortem 'withheld from coroner'
G20 pathologist guilty of misconduct
G20 pathologist 'unfit to practise'
Tomlinson pathologist 'irresponsible' in earlier cases
Police officer faces disciplinary hearing
Advice to charge police officer over Ian Tomlinson death ignored
Ian Tomlinson death: police officer will not face criminal charges
Fury over police 'culture of impunity'
In the Absence of Accountability
The astounding 'revelation' that Tony Blair had a less than positive view of Gordon Brown has no doubt helped sell more copies of The Times today - 14 July 2010 - and provided much entertainment among those with a less than positive view of all three participants in the current bout of nostalgia for the good old days when boom was never again going to turn to bust.
However, as blogger crinklyoldgit in The Guardian rightly points out, there is a deeper issue of accountability involved:We need to ask the question: How did two such deeply flawed individuals rise to their respective positions?
They have conspired, and inflicted monumental damage on our country, in undermining the rule of law and our attachment to principles of justice and the democratic processes of representation ... GDNWe have been reminded of Blair's notorious WMD scaremongering by Mr Carne Ross's testimony to the Chilcott Inquiry:
"This process of exaggeration was gradual, and proceeded by accretion and editing from document to document, in a way that allowed those participating to convince themselves that they were not engaged in blatant dishonesty.
"But this process led to highly misleading statements about the UK assessment of the Iraqi threat that were, in their totality, lies." INDIn the absence of checks and balances, Blair - who, we are told, managed to stifle any debate in cabinet - was able to make a series of blood-curddling assertions which went unchallenged.
Concurrently, the BBC reports the case of Martin Mubanga, held in Guantanamo Bay for three years.
Mr Mubanga is one of a group of six ex-detainees currently suing the British Government for damages.
The lengths to which they have had to go to get this far are detailed here.
My concern, however, in this instance is with Tony Blair's misuse of his powers in the case of Mr Mubanga:Tim Otty QC ... told the court that an additional document ... raised questions about Downing Street's involvement in the case of Martin Mubanga ...
Mr Mubanga was arrested in Zambia in 2002 before being taken by US forces to Guantanamo Bay, where he was held for three years.
Mr Otty said: "The PM's office is apparently countermanding a desire of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to intervene on behalf of Mr Mubanga in circumstances where it could have led to his release." BBCOld fashioned nostrums, like trial by jury, are deeply unpopular with UK and US governments where 'terrorists' are concerned.
Here, procedures similar to those used in Hitler's Third Reich are the order of the day.
It is only necessary for some shadowy spook to have suspicions, for the suspect conerned to end up in Guantanamo Bay, Bagram Air Base, Belmarsh Prison, or under virtual house arrest via a 'control order'.
People who support these abuses on the grounds that all Moslems are potential terrorists, and the powers-that-be are protecting us from another 7/7, base their beliefs on very uncertain grounds.
As we have seen, laws brought in to aid the security services can - and have - been turned on people like John Catt and his daughter, who regularly attended lawful demonstrations, only to learn that in the eyes of the police, they were "domestic extremists".
More recently, Poole Council received a well-deserved b0110ck1ng for using anti-terror legislation to spy on the Paton family over school admissions.
(A spokesperson for the council on ITV News didn't even bother to apologise.)
The label 'domestic extremist' is based on no law or statute, having been concocted by that private police body ACPO, for the purposes of harrassing people with unpopular views. It is not necessary to have broken any law to get plod on your back in 2010.
For many other instances of such intimidation, and worse, please visit this link.
It's not necessary, however, to focus solely on the so-called 'war on terror' to find examples of broken forms of accountability.
Two stand out:Pension timebomb – Brown defied advice
Questions for Chancellor over gold salesIn both cases Gordon Brown ignored advice, ministerial power being such that - in the absence of separation of executive and legislature - no challenge to his diktats were possible.
Under the US system the President would ask Congress to pass legislation, which it could legitimately reject.
Finally, there's the issue of the banks' role in the wider economy.
Given the revolving door between the government and the City, the banks have obtained the sort of influence over policy only rivalled by the alcohol lobby.
In reality the banks' contribution to the wider economy is not only exaggerated, but in one important respect positively dangerous.
Nils Pratley reports that Stephen Hester, CEO at the RBS, claimed that:"It is a popular myth to believe that banking and financial services dominate the British economy and should be cut down to size," he told readers of The Times.
"Banks account for a far smaller proportion of the economy than manufacturing – 7.7% compared with 12.8%. Everyone wants to see growth in the manufacturing sector, but we need growth in banking too."
Curiously, this argument was omitted from Hester's related speech to the British Bankers' Association.
It is nevertheless a strange claim. Once upon a time, and for a very long time, the banking sector was about 3% of the economy.
If you are going to applaud the fact that it is now 7.7%, you must answer the charge that banks have simply sucked up talent and capital from elsewhere (like manufacturing) and become a drag on growth in general ... GDNBanks are carrying on while the rest of us pay the price
FSA chairman backs tax on 'socially useless' banks
The socially useless City
The argument that the impact of bankers' emoluments are positively dangerous is made by Gao Xiqing, the man who oversees $200bn of China's dollar holdings.
He told The Atlantic:
I have to say it: you have to do something about pay in the financial system. People in this field have way too much money. And this is not right.
When I graduated from Duke [in 1986], as a first-year lawyer, I got $60,000. I thought it was astronomical! I was making somewhere a bit more than $80,000 when I came back to China in 1988.
And that first month’s salary I got in China, on a little slip of paper, was 59 yuan. A few dollars! With a few yuan deducted for my rent and my water bill. I laughed when I saw it: 59 yuan!
The thing is, we are working as hard as, if not harder than, those people. And we’re not stupid. Today those people fresh out of law school would get $130,000, or $150,000. It doesn’t sound right.
Individually, everyone needs to be compensated.
But collectively, this directs the resources of the country. It distorts the talents of the country. The best and brightest minds go to lawyering, go to M.B.A.s. And that affects our country, too!
Many of the brightest youngsters come to me and say, “Okay, I want to go to the U.S. and get into business school, or law school.” I say, “Why? Why not science and engineering?” They say, “Look at some of my primary-school classmates. Their IQ is half of mine, but they’re in finance and now they’re making all this money.”
So you have all these clever people going into financial engineering, where they come up with all these complicated products to sell to people.
The Atlantic December 2008
Having abandoned control of the economy to the Invisible Hand, it turns out that the IH is a very irrational phenomenon, driven mainly by greed, and aided
by the Fiat Currency regime which has existed since President Nixon abandoned the link between gold and dollar
in 1971.
The last word should go to Thomas Jefferson, a man who had seen
what the abuse of power could do:
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.
"The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."
Without the separation of the legislature and the executive ...
- without fixed term parliaments;
- without time-limited office holding;
- without servere restrictions on ex-ministers taking up corporate appointments;
- and without economic democracy;
... the antics of the likes of Blair, Brown and Mandelson are almost certain to be endlessly repeated, whichever party is in power.
"The Legislative Power is that which has a right to direct how the Force of the Commonwealth shall be imploy'd for preserving the Community and the Members of it."Of the Legislative, Executive and Federative Power of the Commonwealth.
"But because those laws which are constantly to be Executed, and whose force is always to continue, may be made in a little time; therefore there is no need, that the Legislative should always be in being, not always having business to do.
"And because it may be too great a temptation to human frailty apt to grasp at Power, for the same Persons who have the Power of making Laws, to have also in their hands the power to execute them, whereby they may exempt themselves from Obedience to the Laws they make ...
" ... to their own private advantage, and thereby come to have a distinct interest from the rest of the Community, contrary to the end of Society and Government ... "
John Locke: Second Treatise of Government, para 143.
Poor in UK dying 10 years earlier than rich
Reading between the lines of this report it's difficult to know whether to laugh or cry.This utopian fantasy is not only not going to become even the long-term ambition of government policy - quite the reverse - the line of travel illustrated by Philp Blond and Oliver James suggests that Britain has been moving in the opposite direction since May 1979.
First we have an assumption that quality of life is the province of the NHS; and, second, we have minister Anne Milton informing us that:
"We want the public's health to be at the heart of everything we do, not just in the NHS but across government."
Were this wholely laudable ambition to be realised there would have to be policies focussed on achieving:
- Full employment as we knew it in the 1950s;
- Regulation of hours worked and working conditions;
- A minimum wage, and tax policies, based around the Minimum Income Standard;
- Choice of childcare for parents with children under eleven;
- A Citizen's Income to replace welfare.
Furthermore, despite the talk of 'fairness' and 'we're all in it together' from Cameron and Osborne, Robert Chote - director of the IFS - told The Guardian:"Osborne and Clegg have been keen to describe yesterday's (budget) measures as progressive in the sense that the rich will feel more pain than the poor.Far from adopting any semblance of egalitarian measures, the sole purpose of government is to facilitate the workings of the market.
"That is a debatable claim. The budget looks less progressive – indeed somewhat regressive – when you take out the effect of measures that were inherited from the previous government, when you look further into the future than 2012-13, and when you include some other measures that the Treasury has chosen not to model." ...
... "Perhaps the most important omission in any distributional analysis of this sort is the impact of the looming cuts to public services, which are likely to hit poorer households significantly harder than richer households."
[GDN]
In so doing government's task is to make us fit to work with the markets, and not against them:The state is called today to play a crucial role with respect to the supply-side of the economy and, in particular, to take measures to improve competitiveness, to train the working force to the requirements of the new technology, even to subsidise export industries ...
The abandonment of the state’s commitment to full employment and the subsequent rise in unemployment and poverty, as well as the crippling of the welfare state, have led to the present, sometimes called “two-thirds” society”, which has taken the place of the “single-nation” society ...
Takis FotopoulisThe notion that the NHS - however well funded - can counteract the baleful effects of a policy which effectively condemns a notional "third" of the nation to exclusion is so risible as to make one wonder if this not another manifestation of Steven Lukes' Third Face of Power.
Crackdown on Benefit Scroungers: Enhancing The Third Depression
The attack on the welfare budget is, superficially, a reaction to the sovereign deficit built up - in the UK - before the credit crunch, and added to as part of the Keynesian response to the banking crisis.
(Strange that, no one in government attacks the banks for mega-scrounging.)
However, it provides a cover for the enhancement of populist policies which were first introduced by Peter Lilley as long ago as 1992.
The Freud Report of March 2007 kick-started New Labour's use of private firms incentivised to get people off welfare and back to work.
It was predicted that 1.2m incapacity claimants could taken off benefits.
There was no suggestion, however, as to where 1.2m new jobs were coming from in a market-led economy.
(Stalin, of course would have had no such constraints, his unemployed would have most likely died digging a canal, but his methods have not, so far, found any favour even with Mr Duncan-Smith.)
Now employment-related projects like the Hoover Dam - and Sheffield Forgemasters - are off-limits in a market-led economy.
The 'new consensus' is now confined, as Takis Fotopoulis puts it, to the 'supply side' of the economy:... the new consensus does not imply that the state has no more economic role to play.
One should not confuse liberalism/neoliberalism with laissez-faire.
As I mentioned above, it was the state itself that created the system of self-regulating markets.
Furthermore, some form of state intervention has always been necessary for the smooth functioning of the market economy system.
The state is called today to play a crucial role with respect to the supply-side of the economy and, in particular, to take measures to improve competitiveness, to train the working force to the requirements of the new technology, even to subsidise export industries ... [TF]The 'new consensus' has nonethless created what Robert W. Fox's calls the 'excluded' - the bottom 'third' of the globalised economy:
The abandonment of the state’s commitment to full employment and the subsequent rise in unemployment and poverty, as well as the crippling of the welfare state, have led to the present, sometimes called “two-thirds” society”, which has taken the place of the “single-nation” society. [TF]This is the 'third' who, as Zygmunt Bauman puts it, are in the full sense of the term 'redundant':
To be redundant means to be supernumerary, unneeded, of no use ... The others do not need you; they can do as well, and better, without you.
There is no self-evident reason for your being around and no obvious justification for your claim to the right to stay around.
To be declared redundant means to have disposed of because of being disposable ... Redundancy shares the semantic space with 'rejects', 'wastrels', 'garbage', 'refuse' - with waste.
The destination of the unemployed ... was to be called back into active service.
The destination of waste is the waste-yard, the rubbish heap.
'Wasted Lives' page 12, pbk ed 2004.It's worth pausing to reflect on the Third Reich's 'solution' to the problem of unwanted human beings - 'life unfit for life' - to shudder at the potential line of travel as the global market economy creates more and more 'redundant' people.
Welfare crackdown begins
Currently, the coalition has the same ostensible aim as New Labour - to get people off benefits and back into work.
But this is a non-sequitur in the context of the abandonment of the pursuit of full employment, since such a pursuit would undermine the workings of the market.
Given that unemployment is currently somewhere between the official figure of 2.47m and the 'inactive' figure of 8.19m, it is not easy to match the hypothetical number of, er, 'scroungers' to the number of vacancies: 492,000.
Mr Iain Duncan Smith's latest idea, parachuting the unemployed from, say, Rochdale, to the top of a council house waiting list elsewhere in the UK, suggests that there are unfilled vacancies - and empty properties - waiting for those trapped 'up North' to fill vacancies in, say, the South East - [Tel] - but it comes up against the same problem of the mismatch between the numbers unemployed and the number of vacancies.
It also carries the implication that some communities should be allowed to wither with the concomittant increase in population densities in more fortunate areas, again, like the South East.
In passing, the failure of such nostrums as John Prescott's 'Northern Way' to raise living standards in the North to those of the South East, is also a similar warning against quangocratic 'solutions' to the problem Mr Duncan Smith is trying to solve by other means.
Given the popularity of the coalition's 'crackdown' on benefit scroungers, it is very difficult to foresee an alternative - the Citizens' Income - getting a fair hearing.
This is particularly regretable since such a proposal should be bureaucracy-lite in comparison with the current system.
However, as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has suggested that a minimum income standard - as of July 2009 - is £13,900 it's impossible to envisage such a level of benefit being paid for by a market-led economy reliant on low taxes - and loopholes - to enable the richest to avoid such irksome demands from their failed brother and sisters.
The entrenchment of the libertarian ideas of Robert Nozick, who rejected John Rawl's Theory of Justice, which argued that ...inequalities can actually be just ... as long as they are to the benefit of the least well off ...... reinforces pessimism as to the treatment of the bottom third, as such a concession to inequality would demand a Citizens' Income along the lines of a minimum income standard.
The utopian nature of this suggestion can be demonstrated by the fact that, on the current minimum wage of £5.80 per hour, it would take 46 hours work every week to achieve a wage of £13900, and NO tax deducted!
The coalition's determination to slash the welfare bill in the face of the manifest lack of jobs available will probably be its biggest test.
If it fails, taxes will have to rise, and the coalition will then have to consider seriously the impact of tax avoidance schemes, and offshore loopholes. TRUK
It should also, and in any case - if it seriously wants employment to expand - reconsider its attitude towards the sort of projects like the Sheffield Forgemaster's loan which it was so quick to cancel.
In this one symbolic act of stupidity, the coalition is travelling down the road which Paul Krugman calls:... the revival of the old-time religion ... where officials seem to be getting their talking points from the collected speeches of Herbert Hoover, up to and including the claim that raising taxes and cutting spending will actually expand the economy, by improving business confidence ...
And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy?
The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.
The Third DepressionPunishing the Jobless
The Third Depression
It's 'negflation' that Britain really needs to worry about
In Ireland, a Picture of the High Cost of Austerity
Food Vouchers
Shirking fathers should lose their benefits
Welfare crackdown begins
A new model of welfare
A sadistic attack on the jobless
A new model of welfare
Budget cuts mean the coalition charm offensive is over
Only Labour Can Save the Coalition
Osborne's budget cuts will hit Britain's poorest families six times harder than the richest
Coalition to tell unemployed to 'get on your bike'
Tackling the poverty that Labour ignored
Budget will hit poor harder than rich
Flawed benefit system ...
CAB
Dulce Et Decorum Est
David Cameron's call to the people of Britain to get behind the war in Afghanistan comes at a rather inconvenient time.'Public must do more to support armed forces'
"Patriotism: The last resort of the scoundrel"
Concurrently the cost of the war has been put at a minimum of £11.1bn - plus £9.24bn for Iraq - this at a time when the coalition is supposed to be 'cutting the deficit'.
Yet Cameron was dismissive when this point was put to him by a Labour MP in the House of Commons last week.
Cameron has bought into the 'security' theory of the war in Afghanistan: it's making the High Street safer for all of us; a contention which is highly controversial.
The UN argues that the UK presence is actually making matters worse:... the former UK counter-terrorism chief, Richard Barrett, told the Observer: "Most people reckon there's a deterioration." Barrett's analysis coincided with an official update to the UN security council yesterday which recorded a dramatic escalation of violence in Afghanistan during the first four months of the year. Roadside bomb attacks rose by 94% compared with the same period in 2009 ... [GDN]... assassinations of Afghan officials jumped 45 per cent, mostly in the ethnic Pashtun south, which has become the focus of the war ...As casualties to British forces approach the 300 mark ...
Suicide attacks occurred at a rate of about three per week, half in the restive south. The increase in complex attacks - using a combination of suicide bombers and small-arms fire - pointed to Taliban groups linked with al-Qa'ida ... [IND]The rate at which British soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan is almost four times that of their US counterparts ...Cameron claims concern about the treatment of the wounded:
During February and May, the death rate of UK military personnel reached 9.9 per 1,000 personnel years compared with 2.7 for US forces in Afghanistan.
During the four previous months, the UK rate reached 12 compared with 3.9 for the US and between May and October last year it peaked at 17.3, twice the figure of 8.4 experienced by American forces during the period ...
The average age of British casualties is 22. Two hundred soldiers have been killed in their twenties and 31 teenagers are among the death toll ... [GDN]Mr Cameron ... also promises better treatment for veterans, particularly “those who gave years of their life to mental illness, alcoholism or just a persistent feeling of alienation once they get home”.Sounds good until you visit Veterans in Prison where you find that:
Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, is trying to ensure the NHS and the Ministry of Defence work together to better co-ordinate services for ex-Servicemen with mental health problems. [TEL]... 95% of the 8,500 ex-servicemen in the prison population are ex-soldiers and that they are the ones most likely suffering combat related PTSD ...Mr Lansley might find that 'co-ordinating services' between the MoD and the NHS does not quite meet the needs of ex-squaddies suffering PTSD, given that prisons - which are not mental hospitals - are now also the default, er, 'treatment' for civilians with severe mental health problems.
A scandal even during the years when boom had yet to turn to bust. [BBC]
Time to bring the troops home: save lives, save money!The Taliban's New Target
U.S. Said to Fund Afghan Warlords to Protect Convoys
Afghan war claims 300th British victim
Soldier killed by blast is 299th to die in Afghanistan
Death rate of UK soldiers in Afghanistan 'four times higher' than US
British advances in Afghanistan have escalated conflict
Security in Afghanistan has not improved
Iraq car bombings leave dozens dead
Cost of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan tops £20bn
Afghan Officials Elated by Minerals Report
Dulce et Decorum Est
Perhaps you never believed it in the first place.We are NOT all in it together
Several concurrent reports indicate that you were right.
Two overlapping groups of people have had the thumbs-down from the coalition today: tenants and students.
Apparently offering tenants greater protection would involve "too much red tape", and its time for students to pay more for their time at uni.
Mr Willetts - a neanderthal relic from Maggie's time - tells us that the current system is "unsustainable", in other words it's lined up for cuts.
The CBI, in the shape of Richard Lambert, is of the view that the upcoming "years of pain" most definitely do not apply to his members.
They have five demands:Points one, two, and three are crystal clear: bosses want to pay less tax while workers have a pay "curb".
- reduction of the top rate of income tax back to 40 per cent;
- 'water down' proposed 40 percent CGT rate;
- control workforce costs through curbs on pay;
- more public sector outsourcing;
- treat more patients at home, its cheaper.
Point four: CBI members want more of the public sector cake via outsourcing, it boosts profits, and workers switch to worse pension deals as well as the pay "curbs".
Point five: services like the NHS should close hospitals - like they did in Canada.
Finally, there's the small matter of the war to protect us from getting bombed in the High Street.
It seems it's OK to promise that country's corrupt central government further goodies - out of the Treasury's 'reserves' you understand - in order that we can pull the troops out next year.
(That's an aspiration, not a commitment, BTW; 'next year' - like tomorrow - never comes.)
The coalition appears not realise that (a) Afghnistan is Vietnam Mark II, and (b) when the Iranian sanctions don't deliver the required results, the hawks in Washington and Tel Aviv - who have been itching to pull the trigger for some years - will finally get their war on Iran.
Are Cameron and Hague the guys to say 'No' to Washington?
And what would war with Iran cost the country? More than savings from student loans, you can be sure.Landlord regulation proposals scrapped
David Willetts ... students ... higher fees
These cuts will feel savage
David Cameron ... visits Kabul
UN sanctions on Iran
"Good Cop, Bad Cop"
I'm indebted to blogger NyeBevansghost for this pointful header.
In the Sunday Times Cameron plays Bad Cop, the one who wants to cut 20 per cent off the DWP budget.
And that's just for starters. Worse is to come.
Maggie's favourite neoliberal policy wonk - Sir Alan Budd - is to be in charge of the Office for Budget Responsibility.
He is expected to scale back on Labour's "wildly over-optimistic" growth forecasts, with a knock-on effect on the task of debt reduction.
On the other hand, Good Cop Clegg seems very confident that all can be sorted without a return to the 1980s.
Clegg's role as Good Cop is somewhat undermined by the contents of the The Orange Book to which he made a contribution.
William Podmore's insightful comment on this book, and Clegg's role in the coalition, rather confirms NyeBevansghost's argument.
There might appear to be a much-looked for 'split' in the coalition, but the 'good cop - bad cop' routine was always an agreed strategy to a common end.
In this case persuading us that Clegg will apply a kindly, caring brake on Cameron's 'years of pain'.
Don't count on it.
With the budget of the Department for Work and Pensions set to face cuts of up to 20% over the next five years, ministers are hoping for large savings from schemes to force claimants off incapacity benefit and into work.Cameron: 'Years of pain ahead'
More draconian measures are also on the table.
Freezing all benefits for 12 months next year would raise £4.1 billion. Executing a Liberal Democrat pledge to axe child credits for couples on a joint income of more than £26,000 could save more than £1 billion a year. It is understood that ministers have ruled out means-testing child benefits and winter fuel payments.
All public sector workers earning more than £18,000 a year already face a pay freeze next year, but it is understood that curbs in wage rises beyond 2011 are likely to be unveiled in the budget on June 22.
Cameron said he had not seen the report being prepared by Sir Alan Budd, the head of the government’s new budget watchdog. MPs expect that Budd will scale down the current growth forecasts to somewhere nearer the average predictions of independent economists, who believe next year’s growth will be a sluggish 2%.
The prime minister insisted the figures that the coalition had inherited were wildly over-optimistic.
“There were two levels of optimism in what the [Labour] government was forecasting,” Cameron said. “One was trampoline growth of 3% and above, and the second theory was that interest rates would always stay low.
“One of the most shocking things is the extent of the interest we are paying on our debt. If we don’t do anything about it, it is going to be £50, £60, £70 billion ... " ...
Times 06 June 2010
• Deputy PM pledges to protect poorNick Clegg vows no return to savage cuts of the Thatcher years
• 'We won't allow north-south divide'
"It is important that people understand that fiscal retrenchment does not mean a repeat of the 1980s. We're going to do this differently," said Clegg, in a move that risks angering MPs on the Conservative right, many of whom admire their former leader.
The deputy prime minister said he would use his authority "ruthlessly" to make sure coalition commitments were met ...
He promised that while his party was part of the coalition there would be protection for the country's poorest areas, including his own constituency in south Yorkshire.
"We're not going to allow a great north-south divide to reappear," he said, in an effort to allay fears triggered by the prime minister during the election.
David Cameron named the north-east and Northern Ireland as regions too dependent on the public sector.
Critics have attacked Clegg for changing his position on the deficit.
Before the election, his party warned that £6bn of immediate cuts risked pushing Britain into a double-dip recession.
But Clegg said he had been convinced by Bank of England governor Mervyn King and the situation in Greece.
The £6bn was a small part of the deficit that gave "breathing space" and provided a necessary "signal" to the market that the government was willing to act ...
Observer 06 June 2010
On the progressive side of politics, there is an assumption that fiscal retrenchment is, by definition, a regressive and right-wing activity.Nick Clegg sets the test
The Lib Dem leader puts that down to "folk memory" of the way in which the Tories went about it in the 1980s.
Actually, it is something stronger than that.
There are still deeply bitter memories of what the Thatcher period meant for large swaths of Britain.
Places such as Sheffield, the city Mr Clegg represents in Parliament, still bear scars from that era of the north/south divide and sink-or-swim economics.
He sets a huge test for both himself and the coalition when he promises: "We're not going to do it the way it was done in the Eighties." ...
Observer 06 June 2010
NyeBevansghost
6 Jun 2010, 2:00AM
It's good cop/bad cop government.
Whilst Nick Clegg is telling the Observer this won't hurt much Cameron is putting on his hob nail boots and telling the Sunday Times that "massive welfare bills, public sector pay and the bureaucracy that has built up over the past decade" needed to be addressed" and (suprise surprise) revealed that welfare and public sector pay would bear the brunt of budget cuts.
The argument is that we can't wait for growth - we have to make the cuts now, but if we don't wait for growth to bring jobs we are just adding to the spending.
DWP are said to be facing cuts of up to 25% over the next 5 years - so the question is do you cut the staff to pay the benefits, and put them onto the benefits bill, or do you cut the benefits themselves.
The answer is they will freeze the benefits for at least the first year. The government are hoping to get some efficiency from new schemes to "force" claimants off benefits and into work, but as yet have no idea what form these new schemes will take and how much they will cost, in terms of capital and staffing to implement, or how long it will take to implement them.
Child tax credits are likely to be abolished for any couple earning above £26,000, a much lower figure than both parties indicated during the election.
IDS is muttering about people not being incentivised to work if the job pays less than £15000. As an example, the lower civil service grades (admin assistants and admin officers, such as those who work in the benefits offices and man the courts and tribunals) earn on average between 13,500 and 18,000. It will be they, along with those on benefits, who are going to be amongst the people who will pay for the financial crisis most.
Public sector pay above £18000 will be frozen for at least the next year, and probably beyond. Meanwhile inflation is running at 3.5% and likely to rise. So the threshold for being "deincentivised to work" will be higher.
Looks like the 80s to me. Observer 06 June 2010
"The Orange Book"
A review by William Podmore
In 2008 when Cameron dropped his pledge to keep to Labour's spending plans, Nick Clegg said, "David Cameron has learned nothing. It's exactly what the Conservatives did in the 1980s ... To simply slash public spending when we are heading into a recession - there's no case for it whatsoever."
So, what is he doing now? Slashing public spending when we are heading into a recession when there's no case for it whatsoever.
David Laws, this book's editor, has been found to have cheated on his expenses, just before he fronted the Tories' attack on public benefits.
In this book, the LibDems propose to replace the NHS with `a system of competing insurance schemes'.
No wonder they have joined the Tories!
Amazon.co.uk 02 June 2010Get ready, the pain is coming
The title of Anthony Sampson's last book is a fitting header for this blog.Who Runs This Place?
For Xavier Rolet has spelled it out.
The central fact of political and economic life in 2010 is that nation states can no longer act alone: the market is bigger than they are.
Quietly, and with stealth, the free marketeers hi-jacked the world's economic life, leaving politicians to stand in the shop window and create the impression that nothing has changed.
Concurrently with Chancellor Merkel's failed attack on 'shorting', the rating agencies have attacked the Spanish government by depriving it of it's AAA rating, and in London the City came close to vetting David Laws replacement as Chief Secretary to the Treasury.
It all makes the recent election look increasingly irrelevant. Which it was.
Since one way or another, 'the cuts' would have been forced on whichever party had obtained 'power'.
The evidence from Spain confirms it.The chief executive of the London Stock Exchange has launched a stinging attack on the German government's unilateral decision to ban so-called "naked" short-selling in some financial stocks and bonds.LSE chief attacks short-selling ban as 'misguided' and 'counterproductive'
In an interview with an Italian newspaper, Xavier Rolet described the ban as a "mistaken decision that risks having an effect which is the opposite of what is desired".
He continued: "I would, in fact, suggest to eliminate the ban. And then to construct market infrastructure that helps investors. Markets are global: you can't think of acting unilaterally because it would be counterproductive." ...
Independent 31 May 2010Danny Alexander personally negotiated with George Osborne the deficit reduction clauses at the heart of the Con-Lib coalition agreement, government insiders revealed on Sunday, in a bid to quell any City doubts about the new Treasury number two.Fight to quell City doubts on Alexander
"You can't think of acting unilaterally"
City to vet ministerial appointments?
Mr Alexander’s meteoric five-year rise from press officer for the Cairngorms National Park to chief secretary to the Treasury has already occasioned some sniping at Westminster.
Critics seized on the 38-year-old MP’s lack of City experience, relatively short parliamentary career and earlier job as a lobbyist for Britain to go into the single currency ...
FT 30 May 2010Richard Lambert, the CBI’s director-general, has said that Danny Alexander must show “toughness and judgment” in his shock new role as Chief Secretary to the Treasury ...Opinion divided over Danny Alexander
Why not replace Parliamentary oversight with a City committee?
Howard Archer, chief UK and European economist at IHS Global Insight, said: “While Mr Alexander is a rising star in the Lib Dems, he is nevertheless pretty inexperienced, and this new role is a massive ask of him.” ...
Telegraph 30 May 2010• Markets set to fall after ratings agency Fitch strips Spain of AAA scoreEuro under new pressure after Spain's debt rating is downgraded
Debt rating down, interest rate up! Bonuses up!
• French debt rating also threatened, says budget minister François Baroingrumpyoldman
30 May 2010, 11:04PM
If the credit rating goes down, the rates charged for loans go up.
The banks are currently borrowing at 1% and lending to downgraded Greece at more than 8%.
They are going to do the same to Spain.
Can you smell the scam?Oregon
30 May 2010, 11:45PM
... who the hell sets the risk? Is this the same 'agency' that turned a blind eye when the subprime crap was all the rage? Is this the same noble ratings firm that has never stood in the way of predatory lending, hedge funds, CDS's, derivatives, and CDS's?
My oh my, how easy it seems to be to topple governments and economies by simply pronouncing them insolvent.
How easy it is to declare a currency second rate.
First the banks devised a clever way to obtain real estate through heavily marketing second and third mortgages and equity loans to the elderly and unaware punters (see "Capitalism: A Love Story).
Then those same banks got a hold of a shitloard of taxpayer bailout dough to rebuild their capital (and pay out huge bonuses).
Now, credit ratings agencies (always the friend of the banksters) are trying to fan a flame of freaky fear so that entire populations become subservient debtors to whom?
Those same clever lever-pullers, the banks.
Ah, when does the revolution begin?FrederickL
31 May 2010, 12:29AM
I feel that it cannot be said too often. The ratings agencies are clients/agents of the same banks whose grotesque activities in the US housing markets led to the present postion.
They give these ratings, in practices, at the behest of the same banks who can now charge Spain higher interest rates as a result of this downgrading of Spanish debt.
In other words by an amazing coincidence these agencies gave toxic/fraudulent CDOs based on subprime mortgages a AAA-rating and the banks earned (at the outset) huge sums on them and now they give Spain a lower rating and the banks earn huge..........
I do not feel that one is being unduly cynical in pointing out that these ratings agencies are paid to provide ratings that are to the financial advantage of the institutions paying them. The whole thing functions in practice as a very nasty and corrupt scam.ratherbehappyGuardian 30 May 2010
31 May 2010, 12:35AM
In Dickens time he (it WAS Dickens wasn't it?) lampooned those that made money out of others making things so they didn't have to soil their hands with mere toil or industry.
Said parasites simply bought shares, then when they felt they were not performing enough, they pulled them out and stuck them in something more profitable, in the course of which, destroyed whole companies and livelihoods, no matter the true value and worth.
The beginnings of the new aristocracy.
That new aristocracy has created its kings and emperors, they are now controlling money supply.
A few megarich bastards and their footsoldiers at computer screens that one day are going lead us all to war just as the crowned heads once did in their empire games.UK coalition must cut budget deficit faster, Fitch ratings agency warns
FTSE 100: how London's leading share index lost touch with the rest of Britain
I fear politicians are given to grossly exaggerating their influence/control over entities like "the economy" - it gives them a shot of that most dangerous drug - power - and is intended to create a sense of awe in what they fondly imagine is a credulous and gullible public.Hamish McRae: It's the economy, Mr Cameron. It can't suddenly be 'transformed'
The reality, of course, is quite different.
It's difficult to believe that Cameron is not up to speed on the theory of neoliberalism, since it was his party who bought into it in the seventies.
His job, as a neoliberal, is to remove barriers to the workings of the invisible hand, not to tinker with it.
That way lies the road to that fabled utopia in which wealth will cascade downwards and outwards until the day when there is no more poverty or unemployment.
This, er, 'optimistic' world-view is also based on the widespread belief that the planet will provide an infinity of fossil fuels, to fund the doubling of growth every twenty years - another favourite shibboleth of Gordon Brown's.
Wealthy Romans dwelling in Londinium, circa 360 AD, presumably had similar fantasies.
A hundred years later their world had vanished.The Prime Minister's assertion that the Government will "transform" the economy carries the danger that it will sit alongside his predecessor's boast that he had abolished "boom and bust".Independent 30 May 2010
Governments do, over time, have the power to nudge the economy one way or another, and they certainly have the power to muck up the public accounts.
But to transform the economy sounds over the top: ministers can pull the levers of power, but they will discover, as did their predecessors, that there is nothing connected at the other end ...
It's important to offer IDS full marks for realising there's a problem, even if he cannot bring himself to recognise it's one his predecessor - Margaret Thatcher - made infinitely worse when she took the country on a journey to neoliberalism. (Pinochet with strike-breaking police rather than air force jets.)We must not 'park' people on benefits, says Duncan Smith
IDS's speech to The Heritage Foundation in March 2009 provides many clues as to where he is coming from.
Britain is 'broken' - in social terms - and needs:... a strong family, a completed education, good employment opportunities and freedom from drugs and other addictions ... [CSJ]Only one problem: there aren't the 'good employment opportunities' any more because, as Thatcher's chief economic adviser Alan Budd admitted:
"' ... the 1980s policies of attacking inflation by squeezing the economy and public spending were a cover to bash the workers ... (to create an) ... industrial reserve army' which would undermine the power of labour ... The result: wages stagnated." [DH]The implementation of article six of the Washington Consensus since the 1980s has been so successful that IDS has the brazen cheek to inform us that he will be "addressing the root causes of poverty at every level".(!)
So there's going to be full employment under the coalition, is there, Mr Duncan-Smith?
I don't think the IMF and the guys from Davos will be onside with that one, it would seriously damage profits.
The creation of unemployment is policy. Attacking benefit 'scroungers' is simply another deployment of the third face of power.[IDS] wants to transform his Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) from one which pays out benefits to one with a mission to reduce poverty and remove the barriers to social mobility and equal opportunity.
He will promise to tackle a "culture of dependency" by addressing the root causes of poverty at every level ...
Independent 27 May 2010Frank Field to head poverty review
IDS ... a worrying ignorance about welfare
Tax credits scheme may be scrapped
Iain Duncan Smith declares war on 'bust' benefits system
Coalition government sets out radical welfare reforms
IDS: I will tackle root causes of poverty
Plan to link retirement age to life expectancy
'Standortkonkurrenz'
'Precarity' Rules OK
The German word means "locational competition" and refers to what Zygmunt Bauman calls the "pedlar/beggar" role of government within globalisation.
This explains why the coalition will both reduce corporation tax - in order to lure foreign investment into Britain - and at the same time cut benefits in the certain knowledge that few will stand up for a group who are pilloried as 'scroungers' week-in, week-out, by the right-wing press.
George Osborne announcement that a corporation tax rate of 10 per cent ...... would be introduced on profits generated from new products generated and developed in Britain ... [Tel]The larger picture is the pressure to privatise public services, and the switch away from 'progressive' taxation on income, to 'regressive' taxation on spending. The rich prefer it that way.
Three years ago, FTSE directors' complaints about corporation tax came with the warning that business would 'emigrate' if the UK tax regime was not made more, er, 'competitive':The UK's 100 largest quoted companies have seen their tax bills leap 16 per cent on average over the past year, heightening fears that an increasing number of British businesses will move their headquarters abroad during 2007. [IND]The case of the merger of Northern Foods and Greencore also demonstrates the trend.
It's setting up HQ in Dublin. Inspite of the banking crisis, Dublin's corporation tax a mere 12 per cent.
Given that 'locational competition' is a fact of life in a globalised world, it's easy to see that the coalition has little room for manouevre.
The cuts will fall hardest on those least able to bear them: the old, the sick, deprived children, and the unemployed.
And as new ministers - like Vince Cable - turn out to be market-friendly, market-unfriendly alternatives will remain unexamined.
Nor will those in jobs be spared.
Just as Royal Mail's workers have found that the markets expect a shrinking workforce to do more for less, so British Airways cabin staff will learn in due course that, win or lose, market-friendly Ryanair's conditions of employment await them and many others.
A more dramatic example of the grip of the markets on governments is currently unfolding in the Eurozone.
Chancellor Merkel's ban on 'shorting' exposes the problems which action taken by one country - however well intentioned - is punished by markets waiting - like some troop of rabid hyenas - to pounce:The eurozone needs to borrow hundred of billions over the coming years. It cannot afford to alienate private investors. Until now we thought the eurozone was rallying, albeit slowly, behind a plan to enforce budget discipline — but we now seem to be heading down a rocky path to another destination where few investors will want to follow. [Times]All of which casts notions such as democracy, and the, er, 'will of the people' in a strangely quaint old-fashioned light.
Do as the market tells you, or its operators will make a killing 'shorting' your currency.
And don't fall by the wayside: don't get jobless, don't grow old, don't get sick, and above all don't succumb to mental illness. [VV]
The Invisible Hand only works if the buyer is in possession of the same information as the seller: [IA]Hyenas Rule O.K!
Investors must take care when playing in the Street
[Lessons] ... piled up over the years. Another involved the initial public offering of ... Petrochemical.
Goldman aggressively marketed it as a “can’t miss” vehicle that would deliver large cash dividends over time, which appealed to me as I was then managing an income fund.
The stock went down 50 per cent in the first year, earning it a disparaging nickname and Goldman a black mark as far as I was concerned ...
Though my firm generated a lot of trading business and those on the sell side were adept at acting like intermediaries, their actions were often those of adversaries.
The firms ... often knew facts I didn’t or figured the odds better than I did.
I expected that to be the case, since they were full of talented, well-paid hard-chargers placed perfectly at the centre of the flow of ideas and money.
What I was slower to understand was that, even as a big client, they were not going to tell me the whole truth if it meant extra profit for them ...
... the culture laid bare by the allegations is starkly familiar. It is the way business is done; it is in the DNA of the animal that brought us to the brink of disaster not that long ago and which continues to run amok ...
FT 19 May 2010Stressed teachers are 'ticking time bombs'
IMF raises fresh concerns ...
Prison population reaches new peak
Hedge Funds: London's Lobbyists Prepare to Return Fire
900,000 young people classed as 'Neets'
Agency Orders Use of a Less Toxic Chemical in Gulf
Deepwater Horizon survivor describes horrors
Dave's Big Society: RIP
Big tents don't have room for all
Whatever the differences, Cameron and Osborne still behave as if they are the heirs of Blair. They both prefer the choreography of politics to the details of policy ...The deeper point which emerges from Steve Richards' commentary is that politics is, well, just not political any more.
Independent 18 May 2010
Nor should this surprise us.
The details of the lead item today - 'Coalition to rush through £6bn of cuts' - reveal that the new government is failing to think outside the box.
Government is now a managerial job, struggling to make a grotesquely over-large centralised state function, if not well, then without too many crashes.
It must be a great feeling if you get to play with the levers for the first time, as Blair did in 1997, and the Dave 'n Nick duo are currently.
Later on, however, "stuff happens", which is also what we should expect since it is vanishingly unlikely that such a massively shambolic sprawl could ever be effectively controlled. But the coalition is not there just yet.
The rush to cut £6bn suggests an operation akin to the Captain of the Titanic not just shifting the deckchairs, but throwing them overboard in the hope that a lighter ship might stay afloat.
The opportunity to make a sea change, by both localising the management of the public services, and injecting real grass-roots democracy into that managment, could both widen Blair's very narrow concept of 'stakeholders' to include all of us, and also result in shed-loads of bureaucats getting well-earned P45s.
The difficulty, of course, is that democratic management of schools, hospitals and the police would run counter to the commodification of services, and offend the supremacy of the market.
So, moving government from Plato Mode to Ivan Illich Mode is not at all what politicians and the commentariat have in mind.
The commentariat's symbiotic relationship with politicians - alternately massaging or trashing their fragile egos - would lose it's purpose; and the politicians ... well, they might just have less to do, like ensuring that differing local authorities have equality of funding.But what if the Big Society doesn't work?
Coalition to rush through £6bn of cuts
What are the Duties of Government?
Consider Oliver James' answer to this question:
... Apart from enabling a basic level of economic success, sufficient to pay for food, health and education, the purpose of government is to minimise the amount of mental illness by creating a benign society ... Blatcherism has done the opposite ... [OJ]
Oliver James' concern as to rising levels of mental illness is confirmed by the LSE Report, which has ramifications for the bi-partisan policy of Welfare to Work
This policy is predicated on the widespread assumption thatSo, if the first duty of government is to avoid policies which cause stress, its first aim would be to work for the end of neoliberalism, and a return to full employment - more widely defined to include communal activity funded by a citizens' income.
- people with mental illness are workshy scroungers, and
- that there is no connection between incidence of mental illness and the increasing precarity of the workplace under the terms of the Washington Consensus.
However, New Labour has pursued a range of policies designed to promote the Washington Consensus.
First, it has facilitated libertarianism, as instanced by cheap alcohol and 24-hour drinking;
Second it has used the cover of the so-called 'war on terror' to viciously degrade free speech, free assembly, and to introduce - or enhance - a range of surveillance techniques which can be used by an assorted collection of snoops and jobsworths to pursue minor anti-social behaviours, and finally it continued the politicization of the police, which began with Thatcher's war on the miners.
The latter was undertaken in pursuit of the destruction of trade union power without which the flattening of wage rates would not have been possible. This objective has also been pursued by unrestrained immigration.
You might wonder how a party that took on the mantle of Pinochet, Reagan and Thatcher would be able to 'renew' itself in the hope of obtaining re-election to office when the coalition breaks up.
An examination of its candidates to succeed Gordon Brown answers the question.
With possible exeception of outsiders like Dianne Abbot and John McDonnell, the 'mainstream' candidates are all tarred by their subservience to Blair and/or Brown, their failure to nationalise the banks when the opportunity present itself, and their introduction of welfare-to-work programmes imported from Republican America.Systemic Fiscal Reform
What lies behind the financial crisis is massive moral failure. We have a few very wealthy individuals and institutions but a whole nation massively in debt.It's not just the economy, stupid
The Rt Rev Dr Michael Nazir-Ali is the retired Bishop of Rochester
Instead of a culture where making more and more money is the main criterion of success, we ought to be encouraging a culture which sees working in finance as just as much of a vocation as working in the caring professions.
The best of British commercial practice was rooted in the Bible's vision of our responsibility for one another and for the rest of God's creation. The experiment in selfishness has not succeeded ...Michael Gove's upcoming expansion of the bipartisan policy of stripping local authorities of their role in education is, arguably, a key indicator of the trend away from social/ethical policies, and towards the triumph of autonomous individualism.Guardian 15 May 2010
'Choice' is one of those camouflage words used to get people on side to the further degredation of society.
A Good Society is one which agrees that access to the best health care comes on the basis of need not wealth.
It is also one which wants, if I can paraphrase the 1931 Hadow Report, an education for all our chidren as good as that which good parents wish for their own children.
We continue to move further away from such social/communal ideals.
'Choice' in education is predicated on the assumption that only competition can drive up school standards.
(The same argument is made in regard to foundation hospitals.)
It's a notion ground in the atomistic - nihilistic - view of human relationships: the cash nexus is all that matters.
Such a regime rules out most of what used to be considered vital to educational success - what James Porter calls "the Reflexive school" - to be left only with the requirements of the global economy, and the need to be adept at what Patrick Fitzsimmons calls "the constant reinvention of the self", and the development of an "independence ... gained at the expense of discarding social obligation for the other members of the community".
Since both reflexive education, and social obligation are barriers to the commodification of all aspects of life, it is only to be expected that the current neoliberal forms of education would make strenuous efforts to marginalise them, since they are unwanted by the norms of the market.
That the outcomes are those of an ethically barren milieux has been recently demonstrated by:
- the EU's massive efforts to place the needs of a bogus currency - the Euro - above the needs of ordinary people; and
- the fact that our needs for oil come above the needs of the environment in general, and that of the Gulf of Mexico region specifically; and
- finally, to prove the point, banker's 'earnings' are returning to pre-crash levels.
An Exxon Valdez every four days
Bankers' earnings surge towards pre-crash levels
Education overhaul gathering pace
Radical Pedagogy
Reschooling and the Global Future
The importance of knowing how
Who Shall Crash and Burn? Nick Clegg's Dilemma
It seems the LibDems are split, judging by rumoured responses to Clegg's near-deal with Cameron.
The free marketeer wing - led by Clegg - lean to the Tories, and the older LibDems lean to Labour.
Both are improbable alliances. Labour - Old or New - is of the Douglas Jay school of government:"... in the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves."The Liberals never belonged there, certainly before Roy Jenkins et.al. broke away in the eighties, and eventually became the modern LibDems.
The old Liberal Party also never belonged with the pre-Thatcherite Tories and their motto:"God bless the squire and his relations, and keep us all within our proper stations."The C.F. Alexander party is still there, it's hierarchical beliefs morphed into Thatcher's ruthless free market individualism.
The bottom line is simple: the LibDems are the heirs to Gladstone, he of the balanced budget, and anti-imperial foreign policy.
They should sit on the sidelines, as should the post-Brown Labour Party, watch and wait for Cameron to crash and burn.
Which he will, left to his own devices.
The alternative is the end of the LibDems at the next election.Preparing for Government
Liberal Democrats behaving like 'every harlot in history'
Conservatives' anger at Nick Clegg's 'double dealing'
It's decision time for Lib Dems says Cameron
Tory patience begins to run out after Clegg's 'act of betrayal'
Stalemate looms in a game of political chess
The Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism
Tread carefully, Mr Obama. You need big oil
Two concurrent reports illustrate the dilemma we all face. The Times reports the threats to ...... Joe Plumber and every American who objects to $3 gasoline ...It ends by telling us that ...... the big issue for Mr Obama is not safety but energy. He will set out his aims — clean, safe energy — but he knows, deep down, that there is no such prize.That's self-evidently true, as the ongoing attempts to block the Gulf oil spill confirms. Quite how such spillages keep gasoline below $3 is not explained.
However, the BBC report - of the same date - raises the bigger issue of threats to biodiversity.
It's easy, of course, in a world where most of us no longer have much contact with nature - apart from the weather and the odd volcanic eruption - to lose site of the fact that we are not onlookers standing outside biodiversity, but intimately - to slightly misuse John Donne's phrase - 'a part of the maine'.The relationship between nature loss and economic harm is much more than just figurative, the UN believes.Like the rest of us, some time this century 'Joe Plumber' will have to face up to the fact that we should only extract from the planet that which can be renewed, whereas currently what we extract is that which cannot be renewed, as 'peak oil' will confirm.
An ongoing project known as The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity is attempting to quantify the monetary value of various services that nature provides for us, such as purifying water and air, protecting coasts from storms and maintaining wildlife for ecotourism ...
TEEB has already calculated the annual loss of forests at $2-5 trillion, dwarfing costs of the banking crisis ...
"Humanity has fabricated the illusion that somehow we can get by without biodiversity, or that it is somehow peripheral to our contemporary world: the truth is we need it more than ever on a planet of six billion heading to over nine billion people by 2050."
In the meantime, the current efforts to put off a confrontation with the facts of peak oil/coal/gas/uranium will continue the degradation of the biosphere.
Make Wealth History
Peak Everything?
Planet Green
Prosperity Without Growth
Prosperity without Growth?
Sustainability and substitution
EU leaders announce €70bn plan to protect euro
Messrs Merkel and Sarkozy might do well to reflect on the time Britain took on the international speculators and lost.EU leaders have agreed a financial defence plan in an attempt to protect the eurozone countries from speculative attacks in the wake of the Greek debt crisis ...
The day George Soros made a killing shorting the pound; the day the Treasury spent £27 bn trying to prop up an overvalued currency. [BW]
Is this the, er, 'thinking' behind the empty sub-Churchillian rhetoric from the corporate lackey in charge of the EU Commission?
The EU's leaders should be taking their cue from John Palmer and Joseph Stiglitz, and go back to the drawing board: the anti-IMF/WTO drawing board.
The one that puts people before the likes of Goldman Sachs.
The European commission president, José Manuel Barroso, said: "We will defend the euro whatever it takes. We have several instruments at our disposal and we will use them." ...
Guardian 08 May 2010It's time the EU had a new economic philosophy
The current system for running the euro structure is ... toothless ... that ... the Greeks are now paying a heavy price in social injustice for so-called Greek national sovereignty ...
The EU leaders ... the EU as a whole must accelerate plans for tough European wide regulation of financial markets, banks and speculators something which whoever forms the next British government would do well to support ...
In truth, the very foundations of the global neo-liberal system ... is now discredited.
The EU as a whole also needs a new economic philosophy based on green and sustainable growth and which encourages social cohesion ... and which actively promotes greater social equality.
Guardian 07 May 2010Britain must fend for itself
Lessons that Europe failed to learn
Eurozone crisis is 'postponed'
Darling denies €750bn EU bailout exposes UK taxpayer
EU ministers offer 500bn-euro plan
Darling rules out British support for euro
IMF has one cure for debt crises
Control the jackals
Greek Debt Woes Ripple Outward
Reform the euro or bin it
David Cameron urges public to choose hope over fear
This dishonest headline just about sums up the bogus - 'third face of power' - election campaign now, thankfully, drawn to a close.In a final rally in Bristol (Cameron) told supporters:
The allusion to Tony Blair compounds the deceit, since, as became clear, the Blair-Brown regime intended to follow closely in the foosteps of Thatcher-Major in taking its policy cues from the Washington Consensus.
Among the issues hidden away during three weeks of bogus, er, 'promises' the 'D' word finally surfaced - far too late to be fully discussed - thanks to the IFS.
Others remaining out of sight included:
- the forthcoming energy crisis, the safety of nuclear power, and the role of renewables in a post-carbon world;
- New Labour's 'security' agenda, and Britain's fourth Afghan War;
- the means by which cuts could be implemented by dismantling the Stalinist mode of managing public services; the PFI debt, and the future role of the private sector in providing public, er, 'services';
- and - second only to the 'D' word - the rebalancing of Britain's defunct, house price-driven, fantasy economy. Or to put it another way: the recreation of the many jobs lost since May 1979.
“In this election, don’t let fear triumph over hope. A Conservative government can get our economy moving again, can tackle our social problems, can make politics accountable.”
And in an attempt to temper the optimism of his vision with humility, he appeared to echo Tony Blair’s 'promise' – when addressing Labour MPs after the party’s 1997 victory – that his party would be the “servants of the people” ...
Telegraph 05 May 2010An Economic 1940
Filling the hole
Gulf oil spill could be unprecedented disaster - Obama
What a difference an oil spill makes.Mr Obama said his government would do whatever it takes to clean up the oil, adding that BP was responsible and must pay. He said the focus was now on preventing any further damage to the Gulf coast.
Back in the dim and distant - 31 March 2010 to be precise - blogger okubax told The Guardian that the US had 'the right' to drill for oil 'in it's own offshore locations' following Obama's decision to overturn a 20-year ban on drilling off the coast of Virginia.
The President's assertion that the catastrophe was the fault of BP ignores the claim made by a spokesperson for the Gulf Restoration Network that BP would not have been allowed to drill in European waters without installing “blowout preventers” which shut the well down in an emergency.
She further claimed this is not a requirement under US regulations, though the Times report suggests that these failed rather than they were not fitted.
Hindsight, of course, is a wonderful thing.
Perhaps, however, it might occur to Presidents, Prime Ministers, and energy chiefs, that the money spent on causing - and cleaning up after - this catastrophe, might have been better spent on searching for ways of extracting hydrogen from water in a way that does not use more energy than it recovers. [EROEI]
BP says it will be at least a week before temporary measures to stem the leak are in place. But it could take up to three months to drill relief wells that could fully contain the spillage, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar warned on Sunday.
BBC News 03 May 2010Gulf Restoration Network
Deepwater Horizon oil spill sparks calls for ... drilling ban
Oil spill disaster is now 'out of control'
BP profits jump after oil price rise
'Dead Man Walking'
"I got the big calls right"
In 2003, just at the time of a previous Mansion House speech, the Worldcom accounting scandal broke. And I will be honest with you, many who advised me including not a few newspapers, favoured a regulatory crackdown.Watching Gordon Brown being interviewed by Jeremey Paxman was an uncomfortable experience.
Paxman began by putting Brown on the wrack over the Duffy affair. It seems that Mrs Duffy was referring to foreign students.
This was painful viewing in itself, but when the interview progressed to the matter of a 'big call' - banking - we learned that Brown had always been in favour of global regulation, as he did not tell his listeners in 2006:
I believe that we were right not to go down that road which in the United States led to Sarbannes-Oxley, and we were right to build upon our light touch system through the leadership of Sir Callum McCarthy - fair, proportionate, predictable and increasingly risk based.
I know Sir Callum is committed to reducing regulatory administrative burdens and the National Audit Office will now look at the efficiency and value for money of our system.
The city of London is showing us that Britain can succeed in an open global economy, a progressive globalisation, a Britain that is made for globalisation and a globalisation that is made for Britain ....
Guardian 22 June 2006In Boom Bust, I trace land values over four centuries.This was, of course, a time when Brown regularly referred to "the end of boom and bust", or, "the end of Tory boom and bust".
In 2003 Brown had - single-handedly - ended a cycle which dates at least as far back as the South Sea Bubble.
The year before Brown's 2006 Mansion House Speech, Fred Harrison told The Observer:
They move in 18-year cycles, identifying a clear pattern of turning points in the economy.
Embedded in this process is a 14-year house-building cycle, terminating in feverish land speculation.
During the last two years of the construction cycle people recklessly expose themselves to the Winner's Curse.
In the land market, a rise in demand cannot result in an offsetting increase in supply in places where people want to live and work.
So prices are driven to dizzying heights by speculators, who outbid each other with offers for tracts that cannot yield an economic return.
The market stalls and the house of cards comes crashing down.
The timetable is dictated by a financial mechanism, at the heart of which is the rate of interest on mortgages.
From 1714, this was pegged by the markets at 5 per cent.
Today, the MPC is contemplating raising its rate of 4.75 per cent in response to inflationary pressures.
The return of the rate to 5 per cent will mark the final phase of the property cycle.
Many house buyers who think they are about to pull off great deals this Easter will pay a heavy price in the recession of 2010.Brown was seemingly unaware of this systemic feature of capitalism, and like a Toyota with a defective accelerator, carried on inflating the bubble, with results which are rippling through a society now being showered with dishonest promises, during a deceitful election.
Brown's pursuit of the wholly laudable goal of ending child poverty was not the only victim of his parallel pursuit of 'light touch' regulation for bankers.
Keith Marden's obituary for Brown's period at the top of British government remains the most damning summary of the period.Battered Gordon Brown finds his voice
Labour needs to admit what it got wrong
Brown Helped Cause the Crisis
An Economic 1940
It's an economic 1940, only the difference is this time we will be fighting each other.
Years of consumerism, the 'celebrity', er, 'culture' and the import of the USA's "kick-ass" attitude to other people has prepared us not at all for this moment.
Years of flogging off the family silver - including much of the media - have turned the country into what The Guardian's Ruth Sutherland has rightly dubbed "Branch Office Britain." [BOB]
And we all know what Head Office does when times are tight: it closes the branch offices.
The country has been destroyed by a combination of market fundamentalism and it's 'cultural' flip side: a louche, libertarian "F*** You Buddy" dystopia.Borrowing £177.6bn
Britain 'could lose cherished AAA credit within 12 months'
It was a Budget for the many
Libertarianism
The triumph of political mendacity
'The Trap'
'Britain on the Moon'
Britain is already on another planet.
Alongside the announcement of a UK Space Agency by the Business Secretary, David Cameron seems to be making uncosted promises in respect of currently unavailable cancer drugs and tax breaks for married couples.
From these various initiatives - and the ongoing verbals re NI - you might be forgiven for believing that the UK is not borrowing £500m a day to close the gap between spending and tax revenues. Jury Team
For this is the 'elephant in the room' at this election: deceiving voters into believing that the current level of government spending is sustainable, and that the consumerist party will drive the recovery.
Behind the facade, however, are the stresses and strains associated with globalisation on the one hand, and what Max Hastings has dubbed the 'greedy obese ten-year-old': the product of corporate-driven consumerist infantilism.
The injuries sustained by 10 police offices trying to control 'scuffles' between shoppers at a fashion sale in Brick Lane was paralleled by arrests in Dudley during clashes between the English Defence League and Unite Against Fascism confirm. Neither event is a one-off.
The nature of the Global Labour Market is not explained to voters, as Brown's on-going dishonesty on the subject of immigration confirms. GLM
Such storm and stress will get worse as future governments reduce the borrowing gap. The search for scapegoats has already begun. IND
The Third Face of Power kicks in, as Brown and Cameron pursue the electorate with fantasy promises, while parties like UKIP and the BNP exploit the very real concerns of the economically and politically marginalised.
David Selbourne's perceptive analysis - now five years old - grows more valid by the day: 'It's far too late'.Britain may need IMF bail-out, warns David Cameron
"As long as the disruption is not too long" the 'just-in-time' mode of business could manage. But what if Katla were to blow? The 1918 eruption lasted for 24 days; that of 1755 over 120 days.Volcano illustrates world's interconnectedness
In a wider sense, however, the events of April 2010 might well be regarded as a preview of a world where oil is no longer able to 'fund' 28,000 European flights a day, plus road and sea transport, plus Harber Bosch, and the manufacture of a wide variety of plastics.
The Invisible Hand will have developed the substitutes when the time comes.
Won't it?
Good luck with that.Volcano illustrates ...
Small business impact
Volcano forces BMW plant in US to cut production
Iceland volcano ... crippling Kenya's flower industry
'A major business headache'
Iceland volcano: why we were lucky ...
A nation of obese ten-year-olds
Max Hastings follows a hallowed tradition at The Dacre: supporting Thatcherism, but attacking its results as though they are unconnected phenomena.
Hastings believes that politicians are too scared to tell us the seriousness of the country's problems because the 'national psyche' is now that of a greedy
'obese ten-year-old'.
But in a consumerist milieu, the greedy behaviour of the 'obese ten-year-old' is exactly what drives corporate profits.
It also drives bank profits, since - in the absence a win on the Lottery - debt is the only means by which the lifestyles - the 'conspicuous consumption' - of
the very rich can be emulated.
Hastings expects people caught up in this dystopia to look in a mirror, despise themselves, switch off the barrage of 24/7 advertising, and accept a much lower
standard of living.
This might have been possible during the Second World War, but the culture which sustained such sacrifice has long gone.
The culture of the 'obese-ten-year-old' has replaced it.
Max Hastings and Paul Dacre played a leading role in that cataclysmic change when they supported Thatcherism.
What does it say about the national psyche that opinion polls suggest Labour still has a chance of forming another government?Britain is a nation in denial ...
Gordon Brown led this country into its worst economic predicament since World War II. We have an unprecedented scale of national debt that threatens a sterling crisis and will burden the country for years to come.
During 13 years of power, Labour has failed abysmally to reform public services, above all education, or to equip Britain to earn its living in the 21st century.
The Government's latest initiative threatens higher education, the country's only hope of creating a skilled workforce to meet the challenges of the next generation.
Universities are threatened with more than half a billion pounds' worth of funding cuts. The money is presumably needed to finance more NHS cosmetic surgery, asylum seekers' housing benefit or - most likely - to pay the interest charges on Gordon Brown's horrendous national borrowings.
Yet against this background of incompetence, fiscal recklessness and neglect of real priorities, millions of people seem willing to give Gordon Brown another chance.
Their motives, I suggest, say more and worse things about such voters than about the shortcomings of the Tories or LibDems.
They reflect the sort of thinking to be expected from an obese ten-year-old grabbing for the sweetie jar.
As a society, we have become so soppy and resistant to hard choices or sacrifices that many embrace whichever party threatens them with the least personal pain ...
My trade, the media, devotes acres of print and countless hours of broadcast time to discussing what is wrong with our politicians.
Certainly there is plenty to criticise, exemplified by the parliamentary expenses scandal. But it seems right also to consider what is wrong with us, the voters, the people whom the wretched politicians are trying to govern.
Instead of speculating interminably about where the Tory leadership is going wrong, we might usefully take a look in the mirror ...
Daily Mail 20 March 2010Kick-Ass
.
Wars, crimes and political stunts
This piece of doublethink was written for The Guardian by Blair's old pal, Charlie Falconer.
He opens up with an attack of Radovan Karadzic, apparently without realising that the former PM is at the same end of the moral spectrum as the
Serbian monster:
The application of the criminal law to the conduct of governments and their agents will, over time, reduce the commission of heinous war crimes such as genocide, torture, serious breaches of the Geneva conventions and crimes against humanity.
For every Radovan Karadzic who is put on trial there is another homicidal head of state who will realise there are personal consequences if he or she breaches those international criminal standards.
Like Blair, the case of Israel is another exception to Karadzic Rule: you're only a war criminal if you are on the other side.
Unlike Iran, Israel is exempt from any international inspection of its
nuclear weapons programme.
With the support of the US and the UK, Israel was also able to ignore the
Goldstone Report - and it's support at the
UN - in respect of Israel's criminality during the Gaza War.
Blair's toady goes on to justify a change in the law based on the failure to arrest ...
... two Rwandans who were living in the UK demonstrated the need for the change. There is evidence these two Rwandans had participated in the Rwandan genocide.
The English courts would not extradite them to Rwanda because the criminal justice system in Rwanda does not sufficiently accord with our standards of justice.
The right course therefore is to try them in the UK. However, because they were not technically resident in the UK, the English courts had no jurisdiction over them. A presence test – making it sufficient that they be in England, even if only as a visitor – would have removed that obstacle.
As a result of our amendment, changes were made to the residence test for genocide that will give the English courts jurisdiction over the two Rwandans, though the test was not removed.
For some of these crimes, including torture and grave crimes against the Geneva conventions there is already a presence test in the UK ...
So actually no impediment against arraigning an ex-foreign minister for war crimes committed in Gaza, Charlie?
It will be argued, of course, that Palestinians firing rockets into Israel should also be tried.
Fair comment.
However, as far as we know, none have been 'present' in the UK.
But, we should remind ourselves, that arresting members of an
aid convoy on the M65 was
a fiasco because that's all the convoy was: aid for Gaza, which the partial
BBC -
in the shape of its Zionist Director General - refused air time.
Guardian 17 Dec 2009
John Forbes Nash and the Death of Child Peter
New Labour's brutalist top-down managerial systems
An "over emphasis on process and targets"
"The public-sector reform that is most needed is the one that is never talked about - that of the regime itself, the vast pyramid, hundreds of thousands strong, of people engaged in regulating, specifying, inspecting, instructing and coercing others doing the work to comply with their edicts."
John Seddon's "Systems Thinking in the Public Sector"; page 193; Triarchy Press; 2008
The use of Stalinist coercion ("targets") by a neoliberal state is not the paradox which it might first appear.
Using a theory of human nature developed by head-banger John Forbes Nash,
a particularly distorted and dystopic view of human nature has taken over government and the delivery of what used to
be public services.
The appalling death of Baby Peter
has brought this system into sharper focus.
First, here's Adam Curtis's take on John Forbes Nash's
Game Theory:
The programme traces the development of game theory with particular reference to the work of John Nash, who believed that all humans were inherently suspicious and selfish creatures that strategised constantly ... He invented system games reflecting his beliefs about human behaviour, including one called "Fuck You Buddy" (later published as "So Long Sucker"), in which the only way to win was to betray your playing partner ...
The Trap
Tax and Spend: Brown's Failure
Two reports today - 10 June 2009 - point to both the current problems with the underfunding and mismanagement of the public services, and the growing
mismatch between taxation and spending.
Writing in The Guardian, ex-probation chief David Scott exposes New Labour's hopeless management of offenders like Dano Sonnex.
[GDN1]
[GDN2]
Just as the death of Child Peter exposed the overload of social workers, the same set of circumstances apply to probation officers. (Oops, sorry, 'offender managers'!)
Just as the death of Child Peter exposed Ed 'Macavity' Ball's 'Pontius Pilate' approach to crisis management, so David Scott exposes Jack Strawman's
feigned innocence when faced with a catastrophe caused both by New Labour's democratic centrist managerialism, and misuse of frontline staff.
[NOMS]
[BPM]
The second report, from the NHS Confederation - [BBC] -
exposes Gordon Brown's failure as Chancellor.
Deluded by the belief that He had ended capitalism's inherent 'boom and bust' cycles, the Saviour of the World's profligacy during the China-financed boom -
The Atlantic - coupled with the subsequent bank bailouts - has created a situation in
which NHS spending - along with the rest of the public sector - will almost certainly have to be reined-in.
The warnings on future NHS spending - [GDN3] -
are both timely, and serve to remind us that vouchers are on the edge of the political radar.
[BBC]
Nor should this surprise us.
Hamish McRae points out that whilst spending "will hit 53.4 per cent of GDP" taxation last year was 36 per cent of GDP, and falling.
Clearly such an imbalance will have to be addressed sooner or later, and it seems likely that a Cameron government would cut spending rather than raise taxes.
[HMcR]
What is not on offer is a full public debate about tax levels and spending priorities.