St George's Day

So, St. George’s Day is upon us once more; a chance for people to do a bit of flag waving, sing Jerusalem and say, ‘England isn’t such a bad place to live, really.’ All pretty mundane, run-of-the-mill type stuff that English people are perfectly entitled to do: the Scottish celebrate St. Andrew’s Day, the Irish celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and the Americans celebrate Independence Day.

I have always felt slightly uncomfortable with expressing patriotism myself, for a number of reasons. When one talks about any belief there is always a stereotype to go with it; patriotism is no different. With English patriotism, we get the obnoxious, bigoted, couldn’t-make-it-up-PC-gone-mad idiot calling for the repatriation of whatever minority’s pissed him off and how we’re ‘strangers in our own country.’ Unfortunately, since the late 60s at least it seems to be what a lot of people associate in their minds when they hear the word ‘patriotism.’; they are patriotism’s most vocal proponents. The NF and the BNP have done us no favours in this regard.

Tied in with this is what patriotism itself entails. This concept is completely elastic and subjective – ask 3 different people what they think ‘patriotic’ mean and you’ll get 5 different answers. But in my mind at least is that is has often been tied to militarism and brutality. In the countless wars humanity has instigated, how many men and women have fought and died for ‘their country’? How many have been made homeless, destitute, widowed or orphaned but for those who did battle ‘For God, King and Country’? Like it or not, patriotism has always been a very useful tool for those in positions power to gain more power and wealth – consequently, the slaughter of the human race counts for very little. We’ve got to protect our 'interests' from Johnny Foreigner, damn it! He lives on a different patch of land, that makes him EVIL and us GOOD! Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before...

I’m not suggesting that patriotism automatically leads to the concentration camp; there is nothing wrong with having pride in the place you come from, where you grew up , or even cheering your national football team (chronic though they may be). However, the minute you start excluding people as not being ‘good enough’, the minute you adopt an ‘us and them’ mentality with someone whose only crime was to be born in a foreign field, the minute you take this playground ‘my-country-can-beat-up-your-country’ nonsense seriously, is when the nastier element of human nature creeps in. This is unquestioning patriotism – what we need is a critical one. The courage to defend your country against attack, but the wisdom to not show undue aggression to others, and when to recognise when we are in the wrong.

The other problem is that where you come from is a grand, cosmic game of Chance. No-one chose to be born in a particular country, it was a sheer random circumstance that put you where you are. Is that a firm enough foundation for one to place pride in?

I find civic pride much more palatable for some reason. Different towns, different cities, different regions, here is where I think you see real differences – histories, accents, sport, ways of thinking and ways of life, even food and drink can be radically different between two cities but 20 miles away from each other. When you think of a country, you tend to think of it as one, homogeneous block – unchanging, static, and to be honest, a bit bland. It is a large unit which the human imagination has difficulty comprehending. Regions and cities are much more personal locations, small enough that a person can empathise with it or despise it outright. I find it easy to call myself Lancashire born and bred – I find it much more difficult to think of myself as English, ‘by the Grace of God.’

St George’s Day, I think, is worthy of support, and is a generally harmless occasion – we just have to remember that we are by no means perfect, and have never conducted ourselves in an exactly saintly manner, as history bears out. All I know is, England is a fine place for ale, and that suits me down to the ground!

Eat the Rich

In The Independent I came across this real piece of work, written by one Jon Moulton. Apparently we’re in a bit of a bind with the economy as of late (this was very surprising news for me) and our Jon’s getting a bit miffed that the politicians aren’t doing much about it.

‘In the past week our politicians have put on their most serious faces and addressed the economy. They have got into a wrangle about National Insurance contributions. Labour wants to increase them; the Tories don't. A lot of heat has been generated, much ink spilt. What it suits none of them to tell you, though, is that such talk is tinkering at the margins. The debt that Britain faces is monstrous, and neither Tories nor Labour will admit it. They prefer to quibble about the small change than admit that they are taking part in, in effect, a conspiracy on the British people. To make it worse, much of the media is allowing them to get away with it, presumably because they think – as the politicians seem to believe – that the public doesn't want to hear the bad news. In short, we are complicit in a con.’

So, here we go, another ‘captain of industry’ calling for ‘belt tightening’ in terms of public spending. In other news, the sky is blue and Eric Pickles is a Big Mac away from a massive heart attack. Nothing out of the ordinary here. But what particular brand of poison is Mr. Moulton trying to sell us today?

After taking us on a whimsical journey back to the 1970s (where not even the dead were buried don’t you know), Moulton makes some comparisons of how good we had it back then compared to now:

‘Actually, quite a few other things were better in the mid-1970s: unemployment was half of today's level. The 1975 decline in the economy was only one-seventh of what happened to us last year. And the UK had much less of the largely unmentioned other debt – mostly, the pensions promises that will have to be paid by future generations, which now represents perhaps 125 per cent of GDP but was near 20 per cent in the 1976 time frame. Not a reassuring background.’

Keep that unemployment tidbit in your mind.

We’re in such a terrible predicament, Mr. Moulton, whatever can we do about it?

‘’Increasing taxes is not going to get there. We need to get £50bn plus in each year to stop the debt from rising in five years' time. Look at the bickering about National Insurance rises – try 10 per cent on VAT as a political idea to make a good dent in the budgetary hole. It's inconceivable that our current politicians would have the stomach to do this. In any case, the tax load would probably become counterproductive with businesses and people moving overseas to less taxing environments.’

Gee, that’s awfully convenient, would it be ineffective because the tax burden would probably come down hardest on Mr. Moulton and his mates? Perish the thought...

‘Civil servants do not really generate growth, so a smaller private sector has to support a larger public sector.’

Oh boy. Bear in mind Mr. Moulton is the head of Better Capital and used to be on the executive board of Alchemy, both of which are ‘private equity groups’ (I,e, asset-strippers). If I were in that position, I certainly wouldn’t talk about civil servants not ‘generating growth.’

In fact, Moulton, as with most people featured on this blog, has some interesting baggage going into this debate. Back in 2000, Alchemy showed an interest in purchasing Rover, the car company in order to rescue it from tanking. Was Moulton interested saving jobs there?

"if we get it right, we can make a great deal of money" out of the Rover deal.

Need more be said?

‘Now that really leaves the only route to stability, which is to cut the public proportion of our economy, which means reducing spending, increasing the ability of the economy to grow and reducing the number of civil servants, and probably their pay and pensions. And the numbers are large: we need to take out several hundred thousand public sector jobs. We need to reduce the vast liability for public pensions that clouds our future. The politics – and human costs – of this are not palatable. Tough choices have to be made as to what we can afford’

Not content with being obscenely wealthy, Moulton wants to tell us little people we’re due for a royal screwing. If the situation in the 1970s was better because of the smaller amount of people unemployed compared to the present day, what the hell does he think it’s going to be like if we throw ‘hundreds of thousands’ of people into unemployment? Even if civil servants do not ‘generate growth,’ they still draw a salary that is then put back into the economy. How are we to relieve the burden on the State by putting more people on unemployment benefit? Out of all the article, I think this is the section I object to most. It’s what I’ve objected to publicly on this blog all along. Wealthy, unaccountable businessmen who don’t have recourse to the welfare state telling us that ‘tough choices’ have to be made,usually in the form of job cuts. Certainly, it’s ‘not palatable’, but its what’s best for us, for the country in fact! Best be good little children and go along with what our betters tell us. Do we get any say in it? Do we fuck.

I know what Moulton’s proposing will not be a voice in the wilderness. I know there’ll be a glut of MPs who are more than willing to give Moulton and people like him a fair hearing. Meanwhile, civil servants and, let’s face it, other public sector workers later on down the line will have to take the shaft once again. But then where there will moves to try and solve this through the usual channels, with, perhaps, a lobby of parliament, it’ll be fobbed off with the same old excuses. The voices of the many do not carry the same weight as the voices of the rich few. As the old song goes, One Law for Them, and another law for us.

We did not choose to get into these levels of debt, it was the wealthiest in society that was responsible for our present precarious position. Should they not be the ones to suffer for it? Their economics have led us into this disaster - why do they still continue to exist at the top of society?

The Joys of Living in a Safe Seat, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love ‘Democracy’

As those of you reading this blog may have picked up (I know you’re out there), I’m a Wigan-born lad, living in the Makerfield constituency to be precise. Makerfield and Wigan at large are industrial areas, or at least they used to be before the pits closed. As a result, they are about as staunch Labour as as you can find in this country. I don’t think I can overstate this. To give you some idea about how safe a seat Makerfield is, we have returned a Labour MP for the past 100 years. A century of Labour rule. Let that sink in for a minute. We’ve been electing a Labour MP back when the word ‘Labour’ actually meant something!

Now, I realise people might not be interested in the details of my specific constituency. That’s fair enough. But the example of Makerfield has wide-reaching implications with the run up to the General Election. Makerfield is certainly not the only constituency to be classified as a safe seat - there are many others like it up and down the country. The obvious problem with this, of course, is how a democracy be said to exist in these areas. When somewhere can return an MP of the same party for the past 100 years, to me that says that there is something fundamentally wrong with the electoral system in this country.

In name, at least, we have a democracy in the safe-seats; we are free to vote for any party on the list at the polling station, though it’s highly unlikely your choice will get elected if it’s not the incumbent party. But here lies another problem; is there even a guarantee of choice on the ballot paper? Here are the people standing in Makerfield:

Itrat Ali (Conservative)
Yvonne Fovargue (Labour)
Dave Crowther (Lib Dem)
Ken Heslam(BNP)

...Is this some kind of joke? What kind of choice is this? Here we have the 3 wings of the ‘Fuck The Proles’ party in all their resplendent glory, as well as the joke candidate from the ‘Fuck the Foreign Proles’ party. This isn’t choice, it’s the illusion of choice, and its a poor one at that. Although nominations for candidates conclude on April 20th, (should there be a new nominee worthy of support I’ll update this post), even if a credible alternative was put forward we come back to the problem of the Labour stranglehold on the constituency. Once again, I can guarantee that Makerfield is not unique for its lack of options in this election, hailed by some of those detached from reality as ‘the most exciting in a generation.’

So what can be done by those unfortunate enough to live in safe seats? The long term goal would be to support widespread political reform, with the institution of some kind of PR system. Obviously, we can’t simply wait for that to happen, there is a sense of immediacy with the election right around the corner. People may still want to vote but have no credible alternative to support. If you are in that position, I would suggest spoiling the ballot, perhaps by writing ‘none of the above’on the ballot paper. Spoiled ballots still get counted when the results come, and that’s the best bet if you’re in an ultra-safe seat. Of course, you could always give this fella some support: