Author: neilg63

Categories
Power Dynamics

Corporate Mercenaries

The LM Gang are back, this time advocating, in a new C4 documentary Britain's Trillion pound Horror Story, the privatisation of healthcare and education and downsizing of the rest of the public sector to reduce taxes, the national debt and stimulate economic growth.

Back in 1998 a post-modern intellectual associated with the former Revolutionary Communist Party, which later became Living Marxism and then just the LM Group and more recently Spiked Online, produced a documentary for Britain's Channel 4, Against Nature, railing against misanthropic greens. They have taken some radical and provocative stances aimed mainly at the thinking left, those of us who are not completely brainwashed by corporate conditioning and actually want to see a more caring, sharing and, dare I say, sustainable society. Since the fall of the former Soviet Union, they have argued that the socialist cause they once espoused is dead and instead they began a campaign against what they considered reactionary forces opposed to progress. To them progress was redefined as the globalisation of labour and consumer markets, rapid evolution of technology to enable constant material growth and the replacement of previous social structures such as families and close-knit communities with a shared cultural heritage with new structures based around life-style choices and special interests. The clique around Frank Füredi, a professor of sociology at the University of Kent and author of Reviews of Where Have All the Intellectuals
Gone?, have morphed from extreme proponents of a worldwide Bolshevik revolution in the dying days of the modern era, to extreme advocates of postmodern neoliberal globalisation. Back in the 1970s and 80s, most on the left opposed immigration controls and welcomed multiculturalism because of a basic sense of humanitarian solidarity with the downtrodden, the perceived victims of imperialism and irrational ethnic prejudice. That was my gut instinct until the early years of the new millennium.

Yet as I try to explain in another post, modern globalisation owes its roots in 18th and 19th century European colonisation and the expansion of the United States as a world power. The left also championed women's rights, another very noble cause, which has arguably been perverted to disempower families, as wel as gay rights, which while removing stigma against natural feelings of erotic attraction towards the members of the same gender, served similar purposes in weakening traditional family units and empowering big business and the state. Thus for many years the disciples of Frank Furedi could pose on the left. When other sections of the left opposed nuclear power and later genetically modified food, the descendants of the British RCP, championed these technologies as a means of feeding the poor.

As noted elsewhere, former RCPers have become very media-savvy, but we'd be very naive if we thought they had somehow successfully inflitrated corporate media organisations in order to promote a revolution that would see the overthrow of the today's ruling elites. Rather they serve as fifth-columnists embedded in media and organisations appealing to the wishful-thinking left on behalf of a corporate elite who owe no allegiance to the ordinary people of any country.

Smart propagandists like to build on concerns about a very real problem and then differentiate themselves from other more mainstream opinion leaders to appeal to a disgruntled section of the gullible electorate. If we sum the government debt accumulated thus far and the total commitments for debt repayments, planned public expenditure, the UK public debt is forecast to reach a staggering 4.8 trillion pounds, which as the documentary pointed out could not be repaid if every house in the country were sold at current market rates. This is obviously unsustainable, indeed so obvious that even advocates of unlimited growth admit it. The documentary rightly sheds light on the huge bureaucracy within the UK's public services. Of 9 million public sector workers, only 2 million are engaged in frontline jobs as teachers, doctors, nurses, firefighters, police officers etc... Instead most sit in offices administering and monitoring others. Many dependent services become self-serving as they only exist to service the administration of the public sector. For instance, an equal opportunities commission does not provide the underprivileged with new opportunities, but merely liaises with other employers and service providers to ensure their client groups are well represented. However, as they're in the communication business, they inevitably require IT, multimedia, printing, catering and transport services and their infrastructure relies on hardware technicians, builders, plumbers, joiners, mechanics and electricians. However, this huge waste of resources is not confined to te public sector. We not only have a huge rise in the third sector of NGOs, charities and not-for-profit foundations promoting this or that agenda, but large corporations, even those with an industrial base, have morphed into miniature states. For all the talk of lean manufacturing and streamlined organisation, most large private sector companies are chock-a-block with non-productive penpushers and people-managers. hile the public sector is undoubtedly inefficient, it is at least in theory accountable to taxpayers. The documentary completely missed the point, why would the government and its corporate masters subsidise non-productive people management on such a large scale? The previous NewLabour government, which ran up the largest deficit in the UK's history, can hardly be accused of not acquiescing to the needs of large transnational corporations. More important before the government began its huge spending splurge following its 2001 re-election, banks had begun lending irresponsibly to millions without stable employment or even on benefits. The UK doesn't just have a public debt, but also a huge private debt to the tune of £1.4 trillion. Most owners of typical 3 or 4 bedroom houses do not really own their homes outright, their bank or building society does. They are in most cases 6 months to a year away from eviction should they fail to honour monthly mortgage repayments. Worst still as property prices skyrocketed in the South East of England, hundreds of thousands took out interest-only mortgages, i.e. for an initial period, usually 1 to 2 years, they pay only interest on their mortgage, but after this period of grace, their monthly repayments go through the roof. Many believed in a era of unprecedented financial growth that 2 years later they would double or triple their earnings and once they were on the property ladder living the middle class dream, life would be sweet. In the end the government had to bail out the bankers, so a good deal of the huge £4.8 trillion debt is actually inherited from the private sector. I would suggest that both the state and corporate sectors wanted to stimulate consumer growth. Miraculously, as NewLabour launched Private Finance Initiatives and continued to transfer public services to private contractors, quangos continued to grow.


Expropriation

Most transfers of ownership from private to public and the from public back to private hands disempower locals and empower transnational corporations. In its early stages in a favourable resource-rich environment , a market economy can theoretically reward hard work and let entrepreneurs build communities around the provision of useful products and services. This certainly appeared to be the case in 19th century North America and even in prosperous enclaves of Western Europe. However, such a system relied on a working class willing to let their bosses profit from their labour in exchange for job security. As small companies grew larger to take advantage of economies of scale and drive industrial development, the proletariat became a distinct class whose interests clashed with those of their bosses. Before the emergence of capitalism, most workers were mere peasants tilling a small plot of land and handing a large proportion of their produce to their landlord as rent. Much of the British economy came under government ownership in the aftermath of the Second World War as much of the country's industrial infrastructure such the still important railways, coal mining, steelworks, health system could not operate effectively at a profit. The State left the profitable sections of the economy to the private sector. Indeed much had controlled by huge state interventions, not least through massive armaments contracts. Nonetheless after the austere 1940s, the 50s and 60s saw the longest period of economic and social betterment, as measured by rapidly decreasing infant mortality, the reduced incidence of poverty-related diseases (such as rickets) and full employment. Although the tertiary sector continued to grow, Britain still had a manufacturing base. Most cars, lorries and trains were still made in the UK as was most industrial machinery, coal and steel. While more and more women chose to pursue careers, most mothers of young children were happy to work as housewives. In many ways the 50s and 60s were the hey day of the modern nuclear family with its typical 2.3 children. Social services still played a relatively marginal role and Health and Safety inspectors were few and far between, hence despite apparent technological limitations before the advent of microprocessor-enabled information technology, public sector bureaucracy was a lot smaller.


Proponents of nationalisation or privatisation often use the democracy argument. Thus nationalisation makes an organisation democratically accountable, while privatisation frees an enterprise of the constraints and inefficiencies of state control and places it in the hands of private shareholders. In reality nationalisation merely transfers ownership to the state, which in turn serves the interests of its corporate backers and usually rewards former owners handsomely, while privatisation leads to a temporary injection of capital into the public coffers, but has always transferred ownership to monopolistic capitalists, thus failing to provide any real competition. We could even argue that nationalising loss-making industries did an enormous favour to venture capitalists as they could invest their compensation oversees, allowing other entrepreneurs to acquire the more profitable remnants when the government privatises again.


The post-war boom would simply not have happened without an advanced welfare state, a healthy and largely contented work force and the survival of strategic energy, transportation and manufacturing industries. Hence even capitalists, claiming to favour a free market, supported nationalisation in the mid 20th century. The Thatcherite revolution practically outsourced most major manufacturing and refocussed on non-productive media and banking, a trend that continued unabated under New Labour. The only segments of Britain's industrial base that remained almost unscathed were the multi-billion pound government-subsidised armaments industry (so-called defence), the pharmaceutical and biotech industries with some niche luxury and entertainment gadget producers. Manufacturing saw a brief comeback in the late 1980s and early 1990s with an influx of American, Japanese and German inward investors. However, by the early twenty-noughties factories resumed closing, replaced only by supermarkets, call centres, entertainment complexes. In 2006 Tessa Jowell promoted regional casinos as a means of job creation and urban renewal in Britain's depressed former industrial heartlands.


In 1997 I suggested to an acquaintance who worked as an advisor for the Labour Party that he'd better save up for his daughter's university education. "Nonsense", he said, "New Labour would always ensure higher education remain accessible to all". A few months later, New Labour announced the introduction of tuition fees, initially just £1000 a year, soon rising to £3000 and now, under the Con-Dem government to £9000. As a result millions of young workers will either have to accept low-paid jobs to escape repaying their loans, thus defeating the purpose of higher education, or forever be in debt. However, the true cost of higher education actually exceeds £9000 a year, but that misses the point, the whole sector is slowly but surely being primed for privatisation, relying on wealthy foreign students and failing to train the country's future generation of engineers, doctors and scientific researchers, while the relative academic value of degrees has been significantly debased. In the 1970s only 15% of school leavers went to uni, by 2010 that number is nearly 50%. Despite the Blairite mantra of education, education, education!!, class sizes have grown and student behaviour worsened leading hundreds of thousands of middle class parents, including Labour cabinet ministers, to send their offspring to private schools. When they consider the costs of a UK university degree, they might as well use their academic loan to send their offspring abroad. I suspect Indian universities will soon start offering cut-price degrees to the same disgruntled moneyed middle classes who travelled to Eastern Europe for cosmetic surgery.


The previous government pumped billions into the national health service, insisting all new hospitals be built via PFI (Private Finance Initiatives). Despite the rhetoric the NHS bureaucracy has mushroomed with billions squandered on management consultants (not doctors) and centralised IT projects, as detailed brilliantly by David Craig in his 2008 book Squandered. More disturbingly, vast sums of public money have been spent not on essential frontline healthcare, but on promoting awareness of new mental illnesses and lifestyle-related ailments ( diabetes, obesity, angina, high blood pressure etc..) hugely boosting demand for pharmaceutical products. Amazingly, the new Con-Dem government, depsite a massive debt, has committed itself to maintaining the previous administration's spending plans. In real terms public health spending has doubled since 1997, yet the nation's health patently hasn't as any gains in prosperity have been offset by culture of hedonism and a growing rich-poor gap. Any recent gains in life expectancy have more to do with improvements that occurred 30-40 years ago (i.e. your life expectancy is largely determined by your health in your 30s and 40s) than multi-million pound anti-smoking campaigns. The US probably has the world's most wasteful healthcare system with 16% of GDP devoted to public and private healthcare. This compares with 10 to 11% in France, Canada and Germany and 8.9% in Italy, 8.7% in Australia, 8.4% in the UK and just 8.1% in Japan, while life expectancy is highest in Japan, France, Italy, Spain, Greece and Iceland, probably more down to diet and lifestyle than provision of drugs. The US Model is to boost public demand for healthcare services persuading more people that they need long-term medication and cosmetic surgery (not included in the above figures), creating a huge comsumer market. In my humble analysis the UK health system is being primed for privatisation in all but name. It has become such a monster as to be completely unsustainable and the corporate elite will rely on a knee-jerk reaction to reports of waste and inefficiencies to soften public opposition to the removal of universal provision of healtcare free at the point of delivery. Nadeem Waylayat of

Market Oracle

has detailed the almost inevitability of the failure of the NHS project ( see

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article23744.html

), however, he seems to welcome its downfall. I hasten to add, when the NHS collapses, millions will suffer the consequences.


Martin Durkin's documentary is just the latest salvo in a war against common sense, i.e. a rational world in which education and healthcare serve the needs of taxpayers rather than those of multinational corporations and are not allowed to become unsustainable. Apparently he has the government on his side as they have now allowed the cloning of animals for human consumption and given the green light to transgenic farming and quiely announced the privatisation of the Royal Mail.

Categories
Computing

Old Browsers

If the main body of this page has rounded corners and subtle drop-shadow effects with a stylish Diavlo font face instead of Arial / Helvetica / sans-serif, chances are you are already using a modern browser. If you see square borders and a default sans-serif font, then you should be aware your browser doesn't support the latest Web standards making the life of Web designers rather difficult. This site looks great on Android phones and tablets, iPhones and iPads, but will look rather dated in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8.

Modern browsers such as recent versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and Microsoft's upcoming Internet Explorer 9 support CSS 3 meaning effects that previously required a complex maze of background graphics and endless hours of testing of different variants of major browsers can now be achieved with a few lines of code.
Newer browsers also render javascript much faster, making it easier to develop Web applications that look and feel like native applications.

Still using Internet Explorer 6?

Here are just some of the reasons you might want to upgrade:

  • It does not support W3C standards.
  • It is not compatible with CSS3 and only partially supports CSS2.
  • It has a very low score in Acid 3 test.
  • It is insecure and slow.
  • Several movements against this browser have sprung up: IE Death March, Dear IE6, Stop IE6.
  • Google has officially stopped supporting it in its Web applications.
  • A funeral has been celebrated
  • Microsoft has discontinued support, focussing on its next generation IE9
  • The browser lives on in intranets reliant on dated and inherently insecure Active-X technology and unpatched versions of Windows XP. IE7 was released in early 2006.

We strongly recommend that you download one of the following browsers:

Bad Boy Browsers

When the Internet took off in the mid to late 90s, most sites were, by today's standards, rather basic pages, often handcoded and uploaded via FTP.  Tim Berners Lee invented HTML as a medium for linking a web of related text documents. Indeed the image tag was added almost as an afterthought in HTML 2. However, as the World Wide Web expanded, the two main browsers of the era, Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, added a plethora a style tags and designers began to use tables, originally intended only for tabular data, to implement complex pixel-perfect designs. By the late 90s most commercial sites were a maze of nested table, tr and td tags with reams of inline style information. When Internet Explorer won the first round of the browser wars, its quirky implementation of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) HTML 4.0 and CSS1 became the de-facto standard and Microsoft didn't see fit to update its IE6 browser released in 2001 until 2006. While innovative in its time, IE6 is simply ancient in terms of Web evolution. HTML is only 17 years old and IE6 over 9 years. For more advanced behaviour Microsoft introduced its own proprietary scripting language, Active X, integrated with its proprietary operating systems Windows 95/98/200/XP. While this faciliated the development of Web applications and their interaction with native WindowsTM programs, it was a security nightmare outside firewall-protected intranets. As Web usage expanded exponentially post 2002 with the advent of broadband services, demand grew for better integration of images, audio and video as well as cross-platform Web applications, but mainstream browser technology clearly prevented further progress without resorting third-party plug-ins such as AdobeTM
Flash or more recently Microsoft Silverlight. This means not only purchasing proprietary software (Adobe Flash Studio, Illustrator and/or Photoshop or M$ Visual Studio), but also hiring expensive AS3 developers instead of letting a Web designer accomplish the same ends. While such third-party solutions can provide impressive results for some games and special effects, they are not integrated with other Web standards such as HTML, CSS (Cascading Style-Sheets), Javascript and the little-known SVG standard (Scalar Vector Graphics). It has largely been the open-source community, the Mozilla Foundation and more recently a rather ironically, Apple Inc., to insist on Web standards for multimedia. HTML5 now supports not only more advanced style effects, but also video, audio and canvas elements enabling videos, sound clips and vector-graphic animation to be embedded into your browser natively and directly manipulated by Javascript. Recently we've seem huge gains in browser performance with Chrome, Safari and Opera regularly claiming the top spot with Firefox 4 catching up fast. Even Microsoft, with its new IE9 browser (only compatible with Windows Vista and 7), has shifted its focus from Silverlight to HTML5.


For once we have good news for Web Developers and bad news for vendors of proprietary solutions.

Categories
Power Dynamics

Migration Myth Busting

It looks like the globalist growth lobby has been busy copying and pasting its Migration Myths all over government-sponsored Websites and many run by spurious NGOs. Hint if someone is providing information free of charge in a glossy format, it's probably not very reliable. As always first-hand fact finding goes a long way. I live in a small single room in London, am not entitled to housing benefit as I have a job and my kids do not live with me. I've visited many former council estates around Inner London and my observations on the rapid socio-ethnic transformation should surprise no-one with their feet firmly on the ground

Government Migration Myths exposed

Original source: Fear of Migrants: a Myth

Myth: Official reports are objective.
Fact: Government-commissioned reports select skewed statistics to suit their agenda.
Myth: Objective population realists suggested 98% of all new jobs go to immigrants.
Fact: As stated above, around 50% of new jobs in the UK as a whole go to immigrants. In London that percentage is bound to be significantly higher, but in the UK as a whole recent immigrants still account for fewer than 20% of the population. More important, many natives have lost their jobs and are simply not re-employed.
Myth: Immigration does not boost unemployment within the indigenous population.
Fact: Only as long as continuous economic growth can keep producing new jobs. (See next item).
Myth: Economic and population growth are good
Fact: We live on a finite planet with finite resources. The UK is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Indeed England alone is now more densely populated than the Netherlands. To sustain London's population, we need on area of land larger than the UK. The UK imports 40% of its food, most of its manufactured goods, is now a net importer of fossil fuels and exports pollution created by domestic consumption.
Myth: Unsustainable migration has not caused a housing crisis in London.
Fact: Most indigenous workers in London commute from the home counties or beyond and have been effectively priced out of London. For someone on the min wage, an average rent of £150 - £200 per week is simply not affordable. People can only afford to stay in London in acceptable accommodation on low wages if they receive housing benefit, i.e. if they are subsidised by other tax payers...
Myth: Population realists are racists:
Fact: Any peaceloving human being abhors racism, but the consequence of more unsustainable growth will be internecine warfare... The country is hugely indebted and entirely dependent on services nobody really needs.
Myth: There is a skills shortage...
Fact: Only a small minority of newcomers can offer engineering, IT and medical skills. Most offer the kind of skills that use to be very common in the UK before the demise of manufacturing and the rise of a benefits culture. Anyone can serve lattes.... provided they have sufficient food and shelter. Maybe newcomers can fake smiles better... There are 8 million Britons of working age not in employment or education. An estimated 5-6 million of these are perfectly capable of working, if motivated and trained, and coming off incapacity benefit.
Categories
Power Dynamics

You’re just a customer!!

Many of us have been so beguiled by corporate speak encroaching on everyday conversations that we have failed to notice how previous categories of people such as travellers, passengers, users, taxpayers, citizens or just plain people have morphed into customers, worthy only because of our purchasing power. Yet just 10 or 15 years ago, the word customer would have sounded creepily corporate in many everyday circumstances. Thus council taxpayers are no longer simply citizens paying their due, we have become customers. Likewise passengers on public transit systems are no longer human beings, but only valued as revenue-yielding customers or subjects.

Instead of saying "Please let other passengers off the train before boarding", staff are trained to announce "Please let customers disembark from the train before boarding". However, passengers and customers are not the same. At least in theory most passengers these days are technically fare-paying customers, but the term's meaning has now been extended to include anyone with whom a service provider has to deal, i.e. the client in the client-server system, a mere consumer of services whether or not the former has any choice over the matter or any commercial transaction is involed. When I recently had my passort renewed, I was not referred to as a citizen or as a British subject, but as a, wait for it, customer. Housing associations and loal authortities refer to recipients of housing benefits as customers because they receive a service. Even former convicts on probation are customers. A few years ago mental health service users were known as clients, but have since become customers. The term has become devalued to such an extent, we might as well just say subjects.

The term customer defines a business relationship. If I buy a laptop from a computer retailer, I am indeed a customer. They rely on my payment to stay afloat financially, purchase goods from manufacturers, pay bills and staff. What's more if I am not satisfied with the product sold or the retailers' service, I can take my custom elsewhere. The notion of a customer makes sense in a free market when you have choice. However, if I use a computer in a public library, I am not a customer of the computer supplier, the library is and if I pay taxes and participate in the administration of the local council, I might in a very indirect way be a customer, but in reality powerless to affect the purchasing decisions of large organisations who can usually only source hardware from a select set of preferred suppliers. As a citizen I might use my vote to support a party wishing to expand the provision of computing facilities in local libraries and I might campaign to urge the council to switch to a more cost-effective supplier or adopt open-source software to save money, but if I called their supplier as a private citizen I would not be treated as a customer, but as a disgruntled powerless member of the public. Their only concern would be public relations.

Likewise if I need to travel within Central London, I have a limited set of practical choices. Forget cars, as the average speed of vehicular traffic is down to around 10 mph and even then you would need to contend with congestion charges and parking fees. Buses are often slow, unreliable and overcrowded. The best choices for rapid transit are bicycle, if you're fit and have somewhere safe to lock it up at your destination, moped, usually a larger investment with parking restrictions in a busy city, or tube. Neither bicycle nor moped are ideal if it's raining or you need to carry luggage or any other bulky objects such as a laptop. So when you travel from say Kings Cross to White City, and have a choice of braving chaotic pedestrian and vehicular traffic, sweating in a bus for over an hour or taking 15 minute tube journey, the tube is the only viable choice. You cannot take your custom elsewhere as alternatives simply do not offer a comparable service. London's rapid transit network would never have seen the light of day without significant public sector investment, and while it may have been semi-privatised, it operates as a monopoly and relies on huge subsidies. Your fares simply subsidise the service and restrict access to those prepared to pay or entitled to special passes. You are just a fee-paying passenger expected to endure chronic overcrowding in peak hours.

Categories
Power Dynamics

The Keynsian Dream is Over

None of the major parties in the UK have had the courage to tell the electorate the unpalatable truth. They act as mere middle managers or public relations officers, somewhere between their masters in global banking, energy cartels and military-industrial establishment and the hundreds of thousands of minion bureaucrats in the UK`s non-productive public and private sector institutions. It takes relatively little research to expose their presumed facts and figures. Indeed what should surprise us is not their apparent disagreements on issues such as Britain`s adoption of the Euro or immigration controls, but their agreement on the continued need for economic growth by injecting more virtual cash into an economy that has long ceased to produce more than a small fraction of what it consumes.

Over the last 13 years Britain has experienced its biggest collective spending spree in history. We may look back nostalgically at the monuments and urban infrastructure of Victorian Britain, erected over a period of some 70 years when the country`s industry not only led the world, but could exploit the resources of a huge empire. Yet the UK`s national debt didn`t really figure until the great depression of the late 1920s. In the aftermath of the seconds world war, the US had amassed such a large surplus it could easily bail out much of Western Europe to fuel growth and give rise to a new age of mass consumerism. It may seem ironic, but without huge government intervention through fiscal stimulus packages, direct subsidies, nationalisation and social welfare, mass consumerism would never have spread beyond the affluent upper middle classes.

Unlike previous splurges, Britain has gained little in lasting infrastructure. We have literally squandered 1.3 trillion of the country`s personal debt on holidays in the sun, property trading and 60" plasma TV screens. Most recent extensions to the country`s rail and rapid transit network were planned back in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, yet owing demographic growth in the Southeast of England and increased commuting as people are forced to buy houses further and further away from their place of work, road and rail networks are bursting at their seams. To accommodate a rising population and smaller households, property developers have littered the countryside with suburban sprawl composed of compact houses designed to last 30-40 years requiring more roads, plumbing and wiring. Superficially, much of the country still has vast expanses of greenbelt, farmland and pastures. In reality it relies on natural resources from abroad to temporarily support current levels of aggregate consumption. Everything from vegetables to bottled water, electronic gadgets to coal, timber to steel, plastic utensils to fridges or cars to ships are imported to the birthplace of industrial revolution, in effect exporting pollution. Arm-chair human rights activists may bemoan the working conditions and exploitation of the Chinese, Indonesian, Vietnamese or Eastern European labourers who actually produce the goods we consume, but would they get out of bed for less than £5 an hour, let alone the derisory pay packets of the millions of virtual slaves who enable us to party like there were no tomorrow? Left-leaning Guardian-readers tend to live in a bubble, in which their non-productive service-sector earnings are exchanged for real goods labelled fair-trade, organic or environmentally-friendly and inspected by wishful-thinking corporate compliance officers.

The same government that bleats incessantly about climate change promotes economic growth and the globalisation of production. They may talk about investing in public transport, but rely on advertising revenue from automotive multinationals. The Blair years will be remembered as the final act of a 60 year experiment in mass consumerism, the age of 60" Plasma TV screens, people carriers and 4x4 off-road vehicles in suburbia, cheap Ryanair flights ferrying young Brits to stag or hen nights in Eastern Europe as well as for the commercialisation of the Internet and a national obsession with re-enactments of warfare and gangster violence. An age when absurd thought-suppressing political correctness coexists with disrespect for the uncool and widespread moral depravity, drunken binges and deregulated gambling.

Rather than champion Blair as a great democrat or human rights activist, future historians will view his fervent support for US/NATO military intervention in the context of depleting fossil fuel resources. Whether the recent consumption binge will trigger catastrophic climate change or not, sooner or later we will be confronted with the harsh reality of limits of growth on a finite planet and will need to readapt to a more humble localised existence. New Labour left future generations with a cultural vacuum, unsustainable material expectations, a huge debt and a woeful shortage of practical hands-on skills.

Categories
Power Dynamics

Metamorphosis of the Labour Party

How the Party of workers came to represent a bunch of non-productive consumers

Little divided the main political parties in the run-up to the 2010 UK General Election. They all support the supremacy of transnational corporations, the banking cartel and the Euro-American military-industrial complex. The Liberal Democrats and Conservatives may voice their theoretical opposition to some of the grandiose projects championed by New Labour such as the multi-billion pound ID card system, but they remain firmly wedded to the cause of global corporatism and, more important, relentless economic growth. Since the demise of large-scale British manufacturing, economic growth has largely been consumption-led, meaning to thrive big business needed a huge of army of happy consumers supported by a sophisticated welfare system. To generate revenue to fund imports of material goods and resources, we presumably offer services, related to banking, people management, surveillance, marketing, education and health. Every real worker with hard skills,driving the country`s high-tech sector, requiring the application of brainpower, is supplemented by a plethora of project managers, coordinators, pen-pushers and assistants. Yet even skilled service sector jobs attract a steady influx of workers trained abroad.

If anything the May 2010 general election revealed a growing geographic chasm. On the one hand New Labour receives most of its votes from inner cities with large migrant populations, and former industrial areas with large sections of the population dependent on welfare or public sector jobs. On the other the Conservatives and Liberals dominate middle England. One can travel from Penrith in the North of England to Devon without ever encroaching on Labour-held territory. Yet Labour still holds a majority of Scottish seats and Gordon Brown received 64% of the vote in his home constituency of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, despite betraying his roots and future generations by bailing out bankers to the tune of £600 billion and supporting an oil-soaked war in Iraq. In Fife over 1 in 5 workers are employed by the council, 1 in 8 adults are on incapacity benefits, school kids are more likely than anywhere else in the UK to be diagnosed with ADHD and thousands of jobs dependent on defence contracts. As they say, "better the devil you know". In the recent Glenrothes by-election New Labour saw off a challenge from the Scottish National Party by denouncing the SNP-led council`s move to reduce subsidies on home-helps, and presumably divert such handouts to the provision of other services. New Labour thrives where people feel helpless without the guiding hand of the state or the omnipresence of friendly corporations. A loyal New Labourite shops at Tesco, buys National Lottery tickets, subscribes to Sky TV, only uses genuine Microsoft software and supports our troops fighting for freedom and democracy abroad. If state largesse faded away, people would have to get real jobs.

As late as the 1970s skilled workers, whether miners or automotive engineers, could bring the country to its knees, for within weeks it would be without power or a viable manufacturing base. Fast-forward to the early 21st century and any group attempting to exploit their collective professional bargaining power, are readily dismissed as overpaid troublemakers who can be replaced at a drop of hat, largely thanks to the atomisation of skilled professionals and the globalisation of labour markets. Instead a small elite of highly specialised and generally well-remunerated technicians are shunted around the globe, often as temporary contractors, owing little allegiance to their fellow workers or geographic community, and focussed entirely on advancing their career for personal gain. It might seem rather ironic, but the remnants of the trade union movement have steadfastly opposed all restrictions on immigration, presumably to show their solidarity with workers abroad, yet rendering settled workers powerless to take any action against their bosses. Few workers today see the fruits of their labour with their role reduced to that of teamworkers, dependent on other professionals to produce any good or service of worth. Life skills, which every family needs, have been transformed into professional specialisations. Everything from childcare to nutrition, emotional wellbeing to safety precautions or learning to entertainment has been professionalised, while such services were all once provided by one`s extended family and local community. Instead of childminders, child psychiatrists, nutritionists, health and safety inspectors, learning assistants, television sets and game consoles, we had mothers, fathers, siblings, cousins and other members of our local community. If all childminders went on strike, an unlikely scenario because they are one of the least well organised professional categories, parents would have to give up their jobs and become full-time parents. However, as so many are single-parents this would often mean no income or dependence on yet more state handouts. In the real world, it often makes little for single parents to take up an offer of employment unless they stand to earn much more than the combined cost of childcare and transport. In this context working family tax credits encourage couples on low to middle incomes to substitute parents for childminders. Yet such while incentives have benefited the middle classes, they habe been relatively unsuccessful in attracting a huge reserve of home-grown dropouts, by which I mean not just neets (not in employment, education or training), but a wider group of average intelligence who simply lack a combination of specialised skills, experience and motivation to compete in the labour market, especially when confronted with a deluge of eager newcomers, often recruited proactively because of their alleged work ethic. Modern British culture, as promoted by TV, seems to encourage wanton consumption, brand awareness and dependence more than creativity and hard work

Hence we witness the spectre of benefits claimants watching Top Gear on their 60" plasma TV screens, while their offspring indulge in virtual first-person shooting or online dating in their bedrooms, all subsidised by the country's still buoyant private service sector who in turn depend on the marketing and consumption of goods produced somewhere else. Even the most deprived neighbourhoods are replete with mobile phone and video game shops, often flanked by betting shops and pawn brokers. In a consumption-driven economy it matters little whether consumers are paid to perform a niche task in the ballooning people-management bureaucracy, or are simply paid to stay at home and raise the next generation of benefits claimants, either way they are slaves to debt and consumption, whether they owe that debt to banks or the state

New Labour`s spin doctors love to emphasise their achievements such as the national minimum wage, working family tax credits and huge injection of funds into the national health service as well as the extra 3 million jobs their policies allegedly helped create. On closer analysis the number of jobless adults of working age has actually increased from 7 to 8 million, while the official unemployment count is just 2.5 million. According to some estimates as many as five million adults of working age are perfectly capable of performing the huge range of uninspiring and menial, but very necessary jobs, now dominated by an army of recent immigrants. Yet despite millions poured into bogus employability and disability awareness training schemes, Britain`s employers still seem to prefer to well-motivated, presentable and amenable newcomers to emotionally insecure, relatively workshy and often rude homebred Brits. Of the 5.5 million jobless citizens, not officially unemployed, only a fraction have debilitating conditions that would prevent them from performing a whole range of practical and useful jobs. It may seem paradoxical, but the recent rise in the diagnosis of personality disorders, has been exploited to justify some people`s inability to compete in a labour market that relies increasingly on soft rather than hard skills. We keep hearing about alleged skills shortages in key sectors, such as health care, engineering and IT, yet such shortages are not unique to the UK. From personal experience I know talented software developers are actively headhunted. It seems ironic to work on a contract basis in London alongside developers from other European countries, only to receive a call about a contract in Germany or France because one has some magic skill unavailable locally. Recruiters will often suggest relocating for as little as 3 months. Britain`s best and brightest are often found not in old Blighty, but abroad enjoying the sun in Dubai, Australia or the US, heading up international teams in Spain, teaching English in Eastern Europe, or working remotely from their Bulgarian mountainside chalets. Sociologists explain this heightened labour mobility as a positive sign of a new era of globalisation and cultural exchange, yet cultural trends everywhere show a narrowing diversity between countries, but growing gap between the internationalised professional classes and the lumpen proletariat, the huge underclass of unskilled or in some cases de-skilled consumers

Endless economic growth is an illusion, destined to end in failure. Rather than harness technological innovation to let people work less, reduce stress and strengthen families and communities, consumption-led growth has produced an army of support workers attempting to alleviate the side effects of our over-indulgence. The Keynsian Dream is well and truly over and the next generation will have to readjust to a lower material standard of living. True progressives, those of us who want to reduce social tension and promote social harmony, should support the relocalisation of our economy. Nobody should pretend such a transition will be easy. The cuts introduced by an incoming Tory and Liberal Democrat coalition may be a bitter pill to swallow, but they will in a way soften the blow. If you rely on state handouts, you have in effect relinquished your personal freedoms. Let us return to our previous role as a proud working class, struggling to gain a fair share of the fruits of our labour.

Categories
All in the Mind

Oil Discovered Off the Falkland Islands?

Are all wars ultimately motivated by Greed?

How very convenient, by mere coincidence around 60 billion barrels of oil has been discovered within 150 miles of the Falkland Islands. Before you conclude this will save our economy from the effects of peak oil, that's approximately 2.75 years of global consumption and as in the North Sea would have a low EROEI (energy return on energy invested), i.e. it would require expensive oil rigs drilling hundreds of metres below the bottom of the Southern Atlantic Ocean. For more read Falklands oil prospects stir Anglo-Argentinian tensions

So far the UK government has spent tens of billions reoccupying and defending the largely desolate windswept Falkland Islands and its 1500 inhabitants. Why bother? Why did the Thatcher government not rehouse the inhabitants in the Hebrides back in 1982? It would have been much a cheaper option and saved several thousand lives.

I grew up in the 1960s and 70s, when the UK was at its least interventionist, at least outwardly. British soldiers struggled to keep peace in Northern Ireland and elsewhere seemed to be only deployed in multinational policing operations such as Cyprus. After public opposition to the Anglo-Israeli-French attempt to recapture the Suez Canal in 1956, The UK had amazingly refrained from deploying its troops in territories over which it had no jurisdiction. Notably Harold Wilson's 1964-70 government kept the UK out of the Vietnam War. Of course, that was just a façade, as the UK arms industry and military were fully integrated with NATO and the US military industrial complex and Britain continued to service colonial outposts such as Gibraltar and Hong Kong as well as deploying tens of thousands in its sector of West Germany. Yet despite relatively recent memories of the Second World War and the perceived threat of the Soviet Union, back in the 70s the British public were generally against the new mantra of preemptive interventionism. 30 years later British troops are stationed in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Balkans, Cyprus, Sierra Leone and numerous other outposts in official or unofficial capacities. And all along we are led to believe official pretexts for their presence.

Categories
All in the Mind

The Daily Motorist Mindset

The recent cold snap over much Western Europe with temperature lows not seen since infamous winter of 1963 has prompted Daily Mail columnists and their avid readers to deny any human effects on our eco-system. Yep, just because we are gripped by Arctic weather, does not mean 800 million motor vehicles and 6800 human beings have zilch effect on the environment.

Climate is unpredictable as are weather forecasts or for that matter the side effects of the exponential rise in human activity over the last 60 years. Global warming was always a gross oversimplification, climate destabilisation is much more accurate. Switch off the Gulf Stream, and the British climate resembles that of Newfoundland. The Daily Motorist mindset is driven by the belief in a green conspiracy to stop them driving their cars 40 miles to work everyday and doing the weekly shop at Tesco with food trucked in from thousands of miles away. The whole economy, including service-sector-led boom of the late 90s and early to mid 00s, is fuelled by consumption, consumption, consumption. Can we continue to consume at this rate along with 2.5 billion Chinese and Indian consumers eager to emulate a Western European standard of living? We've been on a huge consumer binge. It has consequences. Only time and science will tell exactly what those consequences are.

Categories
All in the Mind

BBC Drama Promotes Schizophrenia Myths

TV programmes promote agendas behind of smokescreen of wishful thinking. Waterloo Road is no exception.

Over the last three years Waterloo Road has sought to raise awareness about certain social issues with varying degrees of success and misinterpretation. Considering the programme's main appeal is to teenagers, it comes as a shock, but sadly not a surprise, that the last episode focussed the attention of millions of youngsters on one of the most poorly misunderstood psychiatric labels, schizophrenia, a dated term that should really be replaced by something more specific like psychosis. However, it is commonly referred to, in polite circles, by the euphemism "mental health" (shouldn't we all aspire to good mental health?"). Thus if this programme has done nothing it has instilled in people's minds that when teachers and social workers talk about "mental health", they really mean "schizophrenia" or plain English "madness".

Not only was the portrayal unrealistic, it perpetrated the myth that psychosis just bedevils someone out of the blue. As misfits are increasingly labelled with Aspergers and ADHD (and often diagnosed by the same so-called professionals), this excuses the behaviour of bullies against weirdoes. In the not too distant past, weirdoes were just kind of different, but nonetheless valid human beings. Now thanks to psychiatrisation, their deviant behaviour is considered pathological. If many teenage kids did not know what schizophrenia means, they do now and it will, thanks to the BBC, become the latest playground term of abuse.

In the vast majority of cases of real psychosis, either drugs, whether recreational or indeed prescribed, have been involved or there have been significant environmental factors, such as physical and emotional abuse, traumatic events, bullying, poor diet, exposure to hallucinogenic chemicals or, minor brain damage after an accident. In many cases psychosis represents the final stage in a downward spiral of alienation and rejection.

It seldom appears in well-balanced teenagers with a good diet, not into drugs, with a stable family background and plenty of friends. Out in the real world, over 50% of cases of psychosis in London are related to skunk, yet in the mythical world presented by the psychiatric/pharmaceutical lobby it is a hereditary "endogenous" disorder that merely has environmental triggers. Sure, some people may be more susceptible to manifest psychotic behaviour, but the potential is there in all of us. Everyone is a potential psychopath and all men are potential rapists.

In all likelihood you sought advice from so-called charities that promote the biogenetic model of madness.

In all honesty programmes like Waterloo Rd should steer well clear of "personality disorders" and focus on real social problems, not least the alienation of uncool children who fail to fit in with an increasingly conformist dumbed-down hive mentality. We are not disordered as individuals, society is...

Response:

Dear Mr Gard[e]ner

Thanks for your e-mail regarding 'Waterloo Road'.

I understand you had concerns that the programme focused on mental health issues and schizophrenia. I note you feel that this is an area that the programme should avoid.

As you are aware the programme focuses on its teachers and students, and confronts social issues, including affairs, abortion, divorce and suicide.

The show has been designed to be entertaining but at the same time we do hope that it has some real things to say about the experience of teaching in an inner city school, the barriers to that being an easy place to work and how hard teachers work to change the lives of some children.

Nevertheless, feedback like your own helps to inform the discussion about a programme's tone and content and the reactions of our audiences are closely studied by our producers and senior management to ensure the right judgement is being made about what is acceptable to the audience in general.

With your complaint in mind I can assure you that I've registered your comments on our audience log. This is the internal report of audience feedback which we compile daily for all programme makers and commissioning executives within the BBC, and also their senior management. It ensures that your points, and all other comments we receive, are circulated and considered across the BBC.

Thanks again for taking the time to e-mail us.

Regards

name withheld for legal reason

BBC Complaints

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Reality Denial

When do we let our political judgements be swayed not by a rational analysis of the facts, but by self-interest, wishful thinking, superstition or just plain irrational prejudices? Whether rapid climate change is taking place and is caused by human activity is surely a matter of scientific analysis, on which I suppose you may hold different perspectives. You may return from an unusually mild southern Greenland only to witness subzero temperatures in Madrid. Your objective analysis during a Spanish chill may sway you against the global warming hypothesis, but if you used a weather event selectively to discredit much more voluminous evidence to the contrary that would be bias. Supposing, as a mainstream newspaper pundit, I wished to prove most Iraqis supported the US/UK liberation of their country despite all the trouble, with sufficient funds I could easily arrange for a group of pro-occupation Iraqis to acquiesce to a little public relations. I could simply choose my sample in an area renowned for its support of the US/UK invaders, such as the Kurdish north. What I'm alluding to is our ability to construct a reality that matches our aspirations and prejudices by picking the facts that suit our agenda,

Some of us might like to think only others are prone to biased constructions of reality. We may accuse others of prejudice often as a rhetorical weapon against an argument we cannot empirically refute. This often follows fuzzy logic, e.g. "You claim there are too many people in London. The BNP (xenophobic British National Party) makes the same claim. The BNP is irrationally racist. So are you. Only a warped racist could believe London is overcrowded" or consider this "You claim we should take action to cope with climate change. So does the mainstream media representing big business, so you must be wrong". Well let's consider these assertions. First the portrayal many tend to exaggerate the arguments of their adversaries. A statement like "Planet Earth cannot support six billion human beings at current rates of consumption in the long term" soon becomes simplified to "We'd better start culling excess human beings now, so the rest of us can continue enjoy the same standard of living". Next comes a bold assertion about a common bête noire, an extremist grouping or demonised tyrant with whom is simply not done to sympathise. Sometimes media may have been so successful at marginalising dissident idea that the bête noire in question may actually present rational ideas, but the existence of genuine extremists and assorted nutters serves the establishment`s mind control agenda very well. Suppose a small radical Islamic sect called for the liquidation of all US millionaires.

The Problem Reaction Solution and Counterreaction

The basic difference between the infamous Italian Mafia, Camorra and Ndragata clans running protection rackets and modern states lies in their size, influence and control of the mainstream media, but the former often act as immature micro-states within states often offering many of the same services as the latter. Paying a pizzo or protection money to your local Mafia boss may seem extortion, but it's basically what we do when we pay taxes. Sure, to some extent, government money trickles back to the general populace providing many of us with jobs and redistributing wealth in an inherently unjust corporate economy. Here are just a few examples of classic problem reaction solutions:

  • We have rampant crime, therefore we need more police, more surveillance and tougher sentencing.
  • We have terrorists and political extremists in our midst, therefore we need more monitoring of people`s everyday lives and clamp down on hate speech.
  • We have unsustainable immigration, therefore we need tighter immigration controls, more police, more social workers, more new houses, more money spent on integration etc.
  • We are facing an environmental crisis, therefore we should trust our leaders to impose greater controls on our irresponsible behaviour as private citizens.

Thankfully many of us don't buy this logic. Why should we accept greater hardships because of macro-economic decisions taken by remote business leaders and politicians? All the above problems, if indeed they are problems, are created by an absurdly unsustainable and unbalanced economic system hooked on perpetual growth. Instead of asking "how should the state combat crime?", "how should the state deal with troublemakers?", "how should the state control the migration of human beings in a never-ending rat race?" or "how should the state and big business address climate change?", we should ask "Why do people turn to crime?", "Why do people resort to violence and hateful ideas?" or "Why are we facing an environmental catastrophe?". These more rational questions do not negate the existence or perception of real problems, but turn the questions raised by the mainstream media on their heads.

Nevertheless many of us react by negating the reality of the problems. A common notion on the liberal left is that "We don`t need Draconian legislation" (a conclusion I agree with) because crime has not risen recently and may have actually declined, a perception only possible if you live in a leafy suburb somewhere. Likewise we should value free speech, again a view I wholeheartedly agree with, because everyone is so tolerant and nice in these enlightened days, a perception only possible if you genuinely believe in the benefits of over twenty years of neo-liberal economics and social engineering. Next consider the conclusion that "we should not deport illegal immigrants, (and I would be loathe to trust the state to do so in anyone`s interests but their own), because we need more immigrants to boost our dynamic economy and do jobs we don`t want to do and besides this country can host tens of millions more (as long as we can continue importing cheap food)". Once again this conclusion tends to appeal to those who are doing fairly well and can afford to steer clear of the adverse side effects of unplanned economically driven migration. We see two sections of the mainstream media engaging in a phoney debate over immigration with both sides supporting the unsustainable model of perpetual growth that drives immigration in the first place. Some on the left are simply incapable of admitting that overcrowding will exacerbate the very socio-economic tensions we wish to eradicate, hiding behind a façade of cultural diversity, interethnic tolerance and international solidarity while relying on a globalised economy controlled by a small number of supranational corporations.

We see the same fuzzy thinking behind the looming environmental catastrophe, except here we see a distinct trend towards outright denial or downplaying of the evidence before us. To some extent it would be easier to argue with some left-leaning climate change deniers, if the mainstream media denied its reality. Why should we rely on former Vice President Al Gore to warn us of a pending disaster caused by human hyperactivity in large part due to his own country`s grotesque overconsumption?Yet we have let TV, Cinema and commercial Web services dominate our lives to such an extent, some of us only ever believe something when Hollywood-style edutainment movies endorse it.

The Rense Dot Com Mindset

Personally I`d treat many articles promoted by rense.com with the same degree of scepticism as I reserve for the Daily Mail, the favourite newspaper of Britain's disgruntled middle classes. They remind us of some home truths, correctly identify some social problems and then pursue their own agenda. Rense Dot Com has recently featured numerous articles challenging the notions of Peak Oil and manmade climate change, while simultaneously providing a platform for one of the US`s most vehement anti-immigration crusaders, Frosty Wooldridge. That unsustainable immigration is driven by unsustainable overconsumption does not really occur to a narrow conservative American mindset that just wishes to conserve their uniquely prosperous way of life threatened by low-paid immigrants and politicians attempting to increase fuel taxes.

The Greg Palast Mindset

I've covered the strange case of the Frank Füredi sect (RCP => LM Mag => Spiked Online) with their characteristic form of technocratic polemicism. However, much more commonly on the left we encounter an ideological refutation of environmental hard truths to support an unremitting optimism for the human progress. Such social optimists are willing to identify and expose the reactionary or unprogressive nature of today`s ruling elites. They rightly participate in the rhetorical crusade against Bush, Blair, the IMF/World Bank and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, but somehow deep down still believe in the enduring myth of Western enlightenment capturing the hearts and minds of an oppressed underdeveloped world. Many on the left view the world in terms of good causes and are thus very susceptible to the emotional arguments of mainstream pundits promoting hidden agendas. Few could pretend life was easy for Afghani women under the infamous Taliban. I certainly would not like to live in a society in which women become little more than the property of their husbands kept in ignorance and under veil, but what right do we have to impose our worldviews on an autonomous community. Human rights is very relative concept with many trade-offs. When the warlords of the Northern Alliance gained power before the Taliban imposed its variant of Sharia law, women were regularly raped and many actually welcomed the protection these drastic laws claimed to provide, possibly in the same way many people in this country welcome the installation of CCTV cameras at every street corner, e-mail snooping and lynching of suspected paedophiles. The spectre of extreme misogyny served to dampen opposition to the invasion of Afghanistan and steer attention way from the true geopolitical goals of the exercise. Likewise leftwing immigrants rights campaigns fail to address the true causes of socially and environmentally unsustainable migration, often acting against the immediate interests of their own native working classes,

The Immigration Conundrum

The traditional difference between the left and right, at least in my simplified way of thinking, is that the former stands up for the rights of common people in general and the downtrodden in particular, while the latter defends the status quo often appealing to the forces of reaction against subversive and destabilising elements. In the fantasy world of the radical left working class British workers struggling to pay their mortgage or rent, forever in debt with their bank and doing overtime to settle bills and loan repayments, will, once politicised and enlightened, unite in struggle with the oppressed masses of the not-so-prosperous world. While we can cite many examples of Western European striking for better pay, improved working condition or against cutbacks or privatisation, we can cite few in which the same workers have taken industrial action in solidarity with much lower paid workers elsewhere. Indeed all evidence shows working class Europeans flocking to retail outlets to buy the very consumer goods whose deceptively low prices are only permitted only by favourable exchange rates or rather an injection of virtual money by banking cartels into high consumption economies. Whether you like it or not migration nearly always flows from economically and/or environmentally disadvantaged regions to more prosperous or more environmentally sustainable regions. The British didn't colonise Australia just to get a suntan or enjoy a more outdoor lifestyle, but because by the late 18th century the growing population of Britain's newly industrialised regions had become too much of a burden, so the excess population either died early through hunger or disease or emigrated. The same is happening today, except we see a movement away from countries currently undergoing structural readjustment to countries with plenty of virtual money, most of which have been or still are colonial powers. At the same time we see a smaller movement by the propertied classes away from the bustling metropolises of the wealthier countries to the greener and sunnier pastures of low-income countries. So while Poles, Romanians and Bulgarians flock to London, many Londoners are buying up properties at knock-down prices in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Qatar, France or Spain. However, in both cases we see the resurgence of 19th century divisions between a servant class and their professional masters. This is just fine, if you happen to own a house in London (currently a modest four-bedroom semi can fetch around £500,000 in many boroughs) and you don`t mind retiring or relocating. Many opt simply to move to the surrounding home counties and rent their London property. Indeed whole residential streets are now rented out to London's new migrant classes with several families often sharing a Lilliputian three-bedroom house. The new immigrant classes fill two key gaps in the labour market, traditional hands-on skilled jobs that fail to appeal to young Britons and low-paid service-sector-servicing roles. The latter category encompasses anything ranging from bartenders, childminders, care assistants, bus drivers to newspaper distributors, but the apparent gap in the labour market would cease to exist if the clientele had less expendable cash and more indigenous young people were prepared to do these jobs as they did until recently. Currently a high proportion of home-grown fruit and vegetables are harvested by migrant labour. If we paid home-grown farm workers a decent wage and sourced all crops suited to our climate locally, prices would inevitably rise even more than they are now as a result of fuel crops and soaring oil prices, but we`d adapt by consuming less junk. The immigration wave of the early 21st century has in effect enabled an unsustainable consumer-led service-oriented economy to stay afloat. In one extreme case a Polish family doctor flew every weekend all the way from Poznan, Western Poland, to Glasgow, hired a car to drive all the way to remote area of Aberdeenshire to earn £2000 as a weekend general practitioner owing to a temporary shortage of qualified GPs willing to work in the area. As budget airline Ryanair announce cutbacks following recent rises in oil prices, we may wonder how long this absurdity can continue, burning umpteenth barrels of fuel to cope with the consequences of unsustainable hedonism and a rat race that attracts the best minds away from their provincial to the citadels of power and corruption.

The Sick Man of Europe

Back in the 1970s Britain, as we then called England + Wales + Scotland, was known as the sick man of Europe, strike-prone, inefficient and basking in the glory of a bygone era of imperial and industrial might. Thatcherism proved a very bitter pill to swallow, with unemployment rising officially to over 3.5 million and unofficially to over 6 million with millions of manufacturing jobs gone forever. The economic resurgence of the mid and late 1980s saw mainly the growth of services. While the early years of the Major government saw a brief resurgence in the manufacturing sector through inward investment and a low pound, the current administration has overseen the almost complete outsourcing of what remained of Britain`s manufacturing base. Besides services, three industries dominate UK industry, military hardware, energy and pharmaceuticals, all relying on imported components and raw materials. In an idyllic past each community had the right mix of professional farmers, manufacturers, craftspeople and service providers. We all need and expect housing, furniture, plumbing, electrical power, domestic appliances, food, restaurants, roads, public transport, schools and healthcare, yet for some reason the professions essential to the provision of these goods and services do not appeal very much to young Brits, by which I mean anyone who grew up mainly in England, Scotland or Wales. As a result numerous essential professions were by the mid 1990s severely under-resourced. People management, sales, media and leisure-related professions tend to appeal much more to a generation raised on TV, pop music, movies and now video-games and the Internet. However, on a structural level we can observe that many traditional professions only exist as human resources within a larger organisation rather than self-employed workers and small tradespeople offering services to their local community. Rather than encourage entrepreneurism, the gradual takeover of a handful of supermarket chains and retail outlets of not only the food supply, but also furniture, clothing, DIY and commodity appliances restricts the scope of small businesses to essentially franchisees or minor service providers, or rather contractors, of larger corporations. If you grew up in a sprawling suburban housing estate, went shopping once a week at large supermarket, while your parents worked as loyal enforcers in a state-corporate system to earn credit to buy readily available goods, you may be tempted to opt for the easiest and least stressful means of making money. Thus the prospect of becoming a baker or plumber only becomes attractive, if the potential earnings offset the enormous effort required to learn the tricks of the trade and other members of one's extended family or local community serve as professional role models. Instead too many people in this country have grown to consider such tradespeople as simple low-end and easily replaceable human resources or possibly quaint characters portrayed on TV sitcoms or seen in exotic backwaters. TV chef, Jamie Oliver, recently took his healthy school meals campaign to the wilds of rural Lincolnshire, only to discover school catering staff unaware of local vegetable suppliers literally a stone`s throw from the school grounds preferring instead to visit their nearest supermarket. Yet down on the ground farmers are compelled to hire cheaper migrant labour in order to maintain the low prices that the big supermarket chain impose. As always there are two sides to a story. Polish smallholders have been driven off their land because foreign food chains like UK-based Tesco and the French Carrefour group have taken over large sections of the distribution chain preferring to buy from a smaller number of large agribusinesses rather than from thousands of smallholders that had until recently dominated Polish farming. The resulting conglomeration and restructuring inevitably caused rampant unemployment and a huge pool of cheap labour. Not surprisingly many Polish newcomers to the British Isles consider the natives here lazy, spoilt little brats.

Would it not have been better for the English, Scots and Welsh to relearn the skills we need to fend for ourselves, and leave Eastern Europeans to develop independently and sustainably rather than emulate the ultimately soul-destroying and unsustainable Anglo-American neo-liberal model.