Category: Power Dynamics

Categories
Power Dynamics

Whoever wins the election it will be business as usual

I wish ballot papers had an extra box titled None of the above for I might very well be tempted to use it. None of the parties have a coherent set of policies that can deal with the fundamental stresses and strains of our overheated economy and overburdened environment, but some have policies I can at least sympathise with.

According to conventional wisdom large companies support the Tory Party, but may I suggest a better barometer to gauge which way the wind is blowing. Over the last 40 years successive governments, Labour, Tory and Coalition, have overseen a transfer of power away from local institutions and small businesses to global corporations and supranational institutions. While the media present a dichotomy between a generous Labour Party and a prudent, but stingy, Conservative Party, both have pursued different aspects of the same basic strategy. It may surprise some to hear Tory leaders defend high levels of net migration, advocate the redefinition of marriage, support EU expansion and favour more childcare subsidies rather than shorter working weeks. These are all policies New Labour fully embrace as do many business leaders. They need government to create the conditions in whch they can prosper and expand their commercial empires. So let's look at key election issues through the eyes of the CEO of a large multinational:

Policy Big Business (Leftwing Tories, LibDems) Faux Left (Labour, SNP, Greens, Plaid Cymru) Faux Right (Right Tories / UKIP)
Economy More growth, at all costs More growth, but a little more for the poor and platitudes about green growth More growth, but bigger tax breaks for the rich
European Union Love it. Let's Expand the EU to Vladivostok and then join NAFTA Love it. We're all European now. Sceptical
Military We need to secure privileged access to key global resources We may ditch Trident nuclear missiles, but we support a European Defence Force and continued interventions in foreign conflicts. Greens and Left Labour may oppose NATO and some Middle East wars, but still support the concept of interventionism. Let's spend more on killing machines. However, UKIP is sceptcal about recent interventions.
Trident nuclear missile system We should pool our resources with other key global players. Trident belongs to the old US-centred world Left labour, SNP, PL and Green want to ditch Trident. LibDems want to downscale it. We need a nuclear deterrent in a dangerous world. UKIP pretend Trident would somehow be an independent nuclear deterrent.
US-led Military Intervention in trouble zones If it's good for American big business, it's probably good for us, but let's do business with China and India too We may pretend to oppose it. Greens and Left Labour often oppose military intervention, but Labour tends to support it on alleged humanitarian grounds. Ditto. UKIP opposed recent military escapes in Iraq, Libya and Syria, but support NATO.
Energy We need more by all means, conventional, nuclear and renewables. Love renewables, hate pollution. Let's outsource nasty energy sources Climate change and peak oil are false alarms. Let's frack away and get rid of ugly wind turbines.
Immigration Love it. Good for economic growth Wonderful, we are all human beings Let's control immigration, but deregulate trade
Free trade Love it. We need more. Love it, but let's try to regulate multinationals. However, the SNP want to lower corporation taxes to attract inward investment. Love it. Let's have more. Only UKIP claim they would regulate labour mobility and protect some small businesses against global competition.
Public Healhcare We need to grow the health market and sell more medication and services, but we need government to pay for it. Spend, spend, spend until we go broke and blame the Tories for all NHS failings. Spend a bit a less and keep quiet about backdoor privatisation plan, but blame Labour for NHS inefficiency.
Debt Economic growth will pay for it Let's pay off a little Let's pay off a little more
Welfare We need welfare to subsidise mass consumption and regulate social conflicts Let's ask big business to subsidise the poor in rich countries Let's wean people off welfare dependency
More mental healthcare Love it. We need happy and loyal workers and consumers. Love it. We must expand the range of potential victim groups Sceptical
More subsidised childcare We need more female sales supervisors and project managers to drive economic growth and supervise truculent or socially inept male engineers. Let's keep children away from mothers in creches so they can consume our subtle advertising Love it, all for women's rights and blaming working class men for women's problems. Slightly sceptical, but dare not admit it

Now let us briefly consider likely electoral outcomes.

  • Outright conservative win: Big business stays in control, but must tame the traditionalist Eurosceptic faction. LibDems may offer demand and supply support in key votes with a large number of Tory rebels. However, barring a huge surge in support away from UKIP and LibDems, the Tories are unlikely to win a majority of seats except by the slimmest of margins.
  • Tory/LibDem Coalition: This remains the most likely outcome if the LibDems can muster at least 20 seats though it may rely on demand and supply support from Ulster's Democratic Unionist Party
  • Tory / UKIP / DUP Pact: Not going to happen. UKIP is unlikely to gain more than 10 seats, but if it did it would do so at the expense of both Tories and Labour and not really affect the likely balance of power. Many pro-EU tories would defect and join forces with other coalition partners and large corporations would be unlikely to support Britain's exit from the EU.
  • Labour / SNP Pact: While this may alienate traditionalist English voters, big business may just support it in the full knowledge that they will be unable to fulfil their ambitious spending promises.
  • Labour / LibDem Coalition: This is a very likely outcome if Labour can win around 35%+ of the popular and Tories fail to get much more than 32%. With Labour just 20 odd seats short of an overall majority according to UK Polling Report and the LibDems still likely to win 20 odd seats. However, they may just rely on external supply and demand support from Plaid Cymru or SDLP should the new coalition fall short of an overall majority by just a few seats. Labour can drop some of its more ambitious spending plans. An interesting outcome would be if a LibLab coalition fell 10-20 or more seats short of majority and had to reach to accommodation with the SNP. A likely concession would be to ditch Trident.
  • ConLab Coalition: This is not as far-fetched as many observers would like to believe. Big business would rather maintain the façade of a democratic choice between caring Labour and entrepreneurial Conservatives. However, if continued membership of European Union and free labour movement remain critical for large multinationals, they may do anything to prevent UKIP or the Greens from gaining any decisive influence over government. A ConLab coalition would probably see the defection of some leftwing Labour MPs to the Greens or alternative far-left groupings, but the gulf between official Labour and pro-EU Tories is minimal. They agree on defence, the EU, migration and economic growth. While the First Past the Post electoral system will probably enable Labour or the Tories to form a government with some combination of the smaller parties, it may very well happen if the SNP continue to make irresponsible public spending demands on a potential miniority Labour administration with a significantly weakened Liberal Democrat presence, or if global economic meltdown (which would adversely the UK more than most countries) forces the government to make some very unpopular decisions.

Ungreen Greens

On the environment, energy and defence, I'd instinctively vote Green. However, short of a world-wide revolution, their 2015 manifesto is not remotely viable. A Green government would simply be powerless to regulate or tax UK-based global corporations much more without effectively biting the hand that feeds them. How could they hope to increase spending on social welfare, health and affordable housing if big businesses simply move their operations abroad significantly reducing their tax base. The Green manifesto is little more than a politically correct wish list. I certainly agree with the Greens on scrapping Trident, banning hydraulic fracturing and phasing out nuclear power, renationalising railways, limiting car usage in busy urban areas and investing more in public transport. I welcome investment in renewable energy and remote working to cut unnecessary travel, but fear without changing our growth-obsessed economic model little will change and wind turbines, solar panels and wave power will fail to allow the continuation of business as usual. All other Green policies, on welfare, migration, taxation, healthcare or education, are based on the assumption of continued economic prosperity enabling us to import the required resources. In ideal world we would not need any immigration controls as a rebalanced world economy would not offer any significant economic motivation for emigration. There would just be a limited and balanced exchange of professionals, academics and tourists. However, in a grotesquely unequal world mass migration is both a symptom and a cause of much socio-economic instability that tends to favour big business much more than ordinary workers. Unlike PC Greens, I'm quite happy to make sacrifices to give my grandchildren a more sustainable future. I want better and fairer healthcare, not more money squandered on mass medication and bureaucracy. I want fairer taxation, but do not want to fund a bloated welfare state on the proceeds of greedy corporations. Indeed I want to tightly regulate big business and promote small local businesses to enable more people to play an active role shaping our technological future. I do not want more retail growth, but would rather pay more for many commodities to ensure fair wages, reduce waste and lengthen the operational lifetime of most goods. None of this can happen while we need to milk banks and global corporations to subsidise welfare dependence while requiring us to import goods from low-wage economies. More important, it will very hard to tackle any of our environmental problems unless we address another consequence of the UK's unsustainable economic growth, namely unsustainable migration-driven population growth. The Greens repeat the oft-recycled claim that immigration drives economic growth, but fail to question whether we need the kind of import-led retail expansion that a greater population in a small country inevitably causes.

Unsustainable economic policies are not only bad for the environment, but also adversely affect the most vulnerable members of society. Let us consider the likely real world consequences of the Green's current manifesto commitments. On the one hand they would impose higher tax on billionaires and large corporations, regulate big business, cut military spending and ban hazardous high-risk energy extraction and generation techniques. Such policies would shrink the economy, which is all well and good, if like me you are more concerned with long-term stability than short-term growth. However, shrinking the economy would require us to cut welfare spending and without strict import controls a downsized would see unemployment soar. Only by relocalising the many industries and services we have outsourced can we achieve full employment, while effectively deflating our economy to a level that we can sustain in the long run.

If the Greens had their way, large corporations would inevitably just transfer their activities to countries with lower taxes, fewer regulations and lower salaries. As a result millions of workers would be jobless at a time when the government would be less able to pay their welfare bill. More important bankers would be less willing to lend money to governments intent on limiting consumer demand and with it corporate profits.

We need to transition away from our reliance on cheap finite fossil fuels and an energy-intensive global economic system towards a more sustainable and regionally localised system. Likewise, if the UK were only concerned with national defence, rather than meddling in other countries' affairs or serving US foreign policy objectives, we could significantly rationalise military spending in line with Japan, Germany, Spain or Italy. Currently, the UK still has the world's fifth highest defence budget (after Saudi Arabia). Yet, we cannot cut energy consumption or scrap the US-controlled Trident nuclear missile system, unless we change our over-reliance on global trade and absurd obsession with economic growth at all costs. The only way a largely service-based economy can grow is to import more resources from the rest of the world. When retail sales fall, growth-obsessed economists start to worry. Services in the form of restaurants, supermarkets, hospitals, marketing offices or social work departments consume resources, largely for transport, building maintenance, equipment and catering. The more we consume, the more rubbish we generate. The more we obsess with hygiene, the more effluent we dump in our sewers. All aspects of our post-modern lives from healthcare to holidays, commuting to grocery shopping consume resources. Life has become almost inconceivable without washing machines, power showers, electric cookers, hairdryers, fast transportation and multimedia communication, all of which rely on elaborate infrastructure and cheap energy.

The Greens are unlikely to gain more than 2 to 3 seats (and may well lose their only seat Brighton), but they may just sway the balance of power in some strategic issues, especially if future electoral reform affords small parties more seats. However, given the key importance of economic growth to vested commercial interests, who also happen to control most of the media, very few of the Green's environmental policies will see the light of day, except perhaps some token cycle lanes in congested urban areas. They may just win local referendums on hydraulic fracturing or new nuclear power plants, but one the corporate media explain without such new sources of energy people may have to forgo the convenience of cheap motoring, air travel and affordable winter heating, the Greens may not win over the general public. However, they may sway votes on other contentious issues on immigration, welfare reform and the European Union, where ironically they may be on the same side as big business.

Coalition Record

Five years on, big business seems very much still in control. The same social trends that started under Thatcher and were rebranded under Labour have continued unabated under the Cameron/Clegg partnership. Fewer young adults can afford a house, the rich/poor gap continues to widen, the country's debt keeps rising and its population is rising at the fastest rate since the end of WW2, largely through unsustainable migratory flows. Despite initial scepticism, the government has not lost its appetite for meddling in other countries' affairs with disastrous military interventions in Libya, Syria and Iraq. Yet if we believe the raw numbers, the economy keeps growing. The Tories can blame the LibDems for their failure to bring down net migration, while the LibDems can blame the Tories for their failure to tackle inequality. Whenever anything goes wrong, the government of the day can simply blame either their predecessors or their coalition partners.

After 13 years of New Labour rule and mounting public and private debt following the 2008 financial meltdown, many greeted the new common sense Coalition with a sigh of relief. Maybe they would not commit British armed forces to foreign military intervention we ill-understand. Maybe they would deal with long-term worklessness and enable young people to learn valuable practical skills. Maybe they would regulate big corporations rather than private citizens. However, beyond the rhetoric we were only dreaming. The so-called ConDem coalition brought us more of the same NewLabourite policies. Even their cuts in public sector spending were moderate compared to much tougher reductions in other European countries like Italy, Spain, Portugal or Greece, all with comparable national debts, but much lower household debts. Despite all the empty talk of fiscal responsibility, the government continued with the previous administration's quantitive easing (QE) and reliance on property speculation and service sector for economic growth.

On the ground Labour have lost much of their traditional working class base to the SNP in Scotland and to UKIP in provincial England. Their core vote is now wishful thinking Guardian Readers, ethnic minorities and welfare dependents. However, as Tower Hamlets and Bradford West show, Labour's rainbow coalition is unlikely to withstand the rise of identity politics in Britain's disparate communities.

Shifting Alliances

Many observers wrongly assume big business simply wants to ally UK PLC with the USA and NATO. The global balance of power is shifting fast away from North America and Western Europe to China, India, Russia and Brazil. China is now the world's industrial superpower, while India's economy will soon overtake the UK. Both will need resources available in Russia, South America and Africa. Big business has always wanted one thing above all, to expand markets and maximise profits for its share-holders. It will forge alliances with any national or regional state organisation likely to further these aims. It sees the European Union as a microcosm of a future borderless New World Order. If the EU expands potentially to Turkey and Western Ukraine, it will lose its original Eurocentrism and encompass a far wider range of cultures and income levels, which will inevitably transform the welfare state from an essential component of socially cohesive society to a mere enabler of greater labour mobility and faster rates of cultural change.

In the evolving world of the early 21st century, large corporations can no longer afford to place all their eggs in one basket and will push regional trading blocks and military alliances to merge and cooperate. Thus the likes of City of London, BP, Shell, Monsanto, Walmart, Sinopec (China), Volkswagen Group, Samsung, Gazprom (Russia) and even Apple and Microsoft ( see full list ) are actually much keener on facilitating global trade than on siding with the US against Russia or China. That's why the LibDems have already indicated they want a cheaper alternative to Trident, but are very keen on the new European Defence Force (to deploy against rebels denying corporate access to key resources).

Reading between the lines

You might think the Greens care most about the environment, the SNP and Plaid Cymru care most about Scotland and Wales and UKIP care most about autonomy from the European Union, but you may soon be very disappointed for none can win the coming general election. Whoever wins, the same corporate forces will be working behind the scenes to ensure big-business-friendly outcomes in a dynamic globalised economy. Listen carefully and consider what policy decisions these small political lobbies may change one way or another. To Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP and Leanne Wood of Plaid Cymru, continued membership of the European Union seems much more important than the nominal independence of their countries. They have openly stated that any future referendum on the UK's membership of the EU must have the consent of a majority of Welsh and Scots too. The Greens see the EU as a vehicle for cultural and environmental change and imagine joining forces with green movements across Europe to challenge corporate power. All three left-of-centre parties welcome increased immigration and deplore calls for stricter controls to restore greater migratory balance. In short, rather than offer a viable alternative to Labour, the three smaller notionally left-leaning parties present a more radically universalist vision at odds with the conservative views of their electorates. They pander to low-income and welfare-dependent voters through vain promises to oppose all cuts, raise the minimum wage or spend more on healthcare, while expecting someone else, whether taxpayers in other parts of the UK or transnational corporations, to fund their social engineering projects. If you believe the SNP, we can save a bundle by scrapping Trident, approx. 3-4 billion year if we take Greenpeace's estimate of 97 billion over the missile system's 30 year lifespan. With a growing population, the UK will need to invest heavily in healthcare, education, new housing and transport infrastructure, while its armed forces are likely to join ranks with NATO and the new European Defence Agency. As a result, a future Labour/LibDem government may well opt for a much cheaper nuclear deterrent or to scrap Trident altogether. Even voices within the Ministry of Defence oppose Trident renewal. The former head of the armed forces, Field Marshal Lord Bramall, the retired Army generals Lord Ramsbotham and Sir Hugh Beach, and Major General Patrick Cordingley signed a letter to The Times that stated:

“Nuclear weapons have shown themselves to be completely useless as a deterrent to the threats and scale of violence we currently face or are likely to face, particularly international terrorism. Our independent deterrent has become irrelevant, except in the context of domestic politics.â€

However, scrapping Trident will be a pyrrhic victory if the British Isles remains integrated in a military alliance with the United States and EU in future conflicts such as a potential standoff with Russia over Eastern Ukraine. We could soon see some rapidly shifting alliances as the mainstream Western media up their rhetoric against Russia to swing public opinion in favour of rapid rearmament.

As the debt crisis mounts worldwide, we can soon expect another banking meltdown. This will provide a coalition government with an excellent excuse to scale back some of their spending plans. The NHS may simply become unaffordable. I suspect only a rhetorically leftwing coalition could privatise it, possibly by signing an international treaty for Global Health Insurance system. Expect the rich-poor gap to continue to grow and for larger and larger pockets of the Third World to take root in Western Europe. With the rise of the SNP and Anglo-centric UKIP, the UK will soon become little more than anachronism. A potential left-of-centre LibLabSNP pact may well be short-lived as a precursor to a divided Kingdom integrated with an enlarged EU / NAFTA trading block.

Verdict: The Business Party will win and the electorate will once again be bitterly disappointed as world events eclipse parochial UK politics.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Question Time on Rise of UKIP

How would members of the panel deal with the rise in UKIP support among working class whites?

Dame Penelope Guardian Reader

This may surprise you, but on my mother's side I'm of White English working class extraction myself and have some friends and relatives who still live in white working class communities. A great aunt of mine stills reads the obnoxious Daily Mail and has indeed occasionally raised uninformed concerns about the scale and speed of inward migration to our wonderfully progressive and welcoming island. Like many people in her age group she's prone to mild forms of xenophobia, which can be a very debilitating condition if left untreated.

Recent research by the University of Northwest Tescotown, has shown the same kind of recalcitrant thinking that leads some people of Middle-Eastern descent to sympathise with ISIS may trigger reactionary anti-immigration thoughts in those of white Northwest European descent. In the Enlightened Guardian Readers' Party we believe xenophobia sufferers deserve all the help we can give them. That's why my party is committed to not only increasing spending on mental health, but allocating 20% of the mental health budget to combat the kind of unenlightened thinking that leads people to vote UKIP or join ISIS in the first place. I've heard of a range of therapeutic treatments, including a new generation of Selective Critical Thought Inhibitors and intensive Equality and Diversity Training sessions.

Terry Trendy of UK Uncut
We believe the spread of evil racist views among some sections of our wonderfully diverse community is a direct result of the government's shameful cuts in social welfare and mental health services. We clearly have a massive shortage of qualified and trained multicultural awareness therapists in this country and should relax our absurdly strict immigration controls so we can bring in the right professionals to tackle this endemic disease before it's too late.
Polly Pontificator of Spiked Online
I really don't think we have anything to worry about. The previous two speakers clearly overstate the problem. UKIP support is highest among older indigenous White Anglo-Saxon protestants and is not spreading to the new ethnically diverse and internationally minded younger generations. As long as this dying breed of old-timers is kept amused through repeats of 1970s comedy shows, plenty of booze, bingo and Mediterranean cruises, UKIP will remain a minority sport.
Aaron Aardvark of the Green Monster Raving Loony Party
UKIP supporters are just a bunch of primeval climate-change-denying Jeremy CLarkson fans. We would simply withdraw their driving licences until they pass a mandatory Diversity and Environmental Responsibility Awareness Training test.
Categories
Power Dynamics

Extreme Labour Mobility

Rethinking the Migration Debate

Were we to debate the ethics of racial prejudice, the relative merits of other societies or the wonders of humanity's rich cultural diversity, I would not hesitate for a moment both to stand against all forms of xenophobia and to celebrate true cultural diversity. However, as soon as someone suggests the massive recent rise in migratory flows may cause social destabilisation and alienation, some left-branded rhetoricians play the race card. Sometimes the very mention of the word immigrants rather than the now favoured terms, migrants or international commuters, can trigger instant accusations of racism. The UK is no longer the homeland of the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish, but a dyanmic international social engineering experiment.

The real question is just why the left-leaning cosmopolitan elite are so out of touch with ordinary working class people on the issue of extreme labour mobility and job insecurity. They simply fail to empathise with the very people who until recently they claimed to champion. Interestingly, working class peoples in the most diverse countries all seem to support labour market protection, while the wealthy chattering classes everywhere seem keen to promote labour mobility allowing newcomers to outcompete their local working class. In the first phase of post-WW2 economic growth, from the 1950s to 1980s, the social democratic nation-state model prevailed in most wealthy capitalist countries. The state actively intervened to promote national industries, build skills bases and protect workers against unfair competition from markets with much lower wages. Interestingly, the two Asian industrial superpowers to emerge from the post-WW2 boom, Japan and South Korea, both adopted avowedly protectionist policies at home, while benefiting enormously from European and North American export markets. As Ha-Joon Chang points out in his 2010 book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism: The free market doesn't exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict freedom of choice. A market unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them. How ‘free' a market is cannot be objectively defined. It is a political definition. The usual claim by free-market economists that they are trying to defend the market from politically motivated interference by the government is false. Government is always involved and those free-marketeers are as politically motivated as anyone. Overcoming the myth that there is such a thing as an objectively defined ‘free market' is the first step towards understanding capitalism..

In the same short book Professor Chang describes an inconvenient truth of wealthy regions: Wages in rich countries are determined more by immigration control than anything else, including any minimum wage legislation. How is the immigration maximum determined? Not by the ‘free' labour market, which, if left alone, will end up replacing 80–90 per cent of native workers with cheaper, and often more productive, immigrants. Immigration is largely settled by politics. So, if you have any residual doubt about the massive role that the government plays in the economy's free market, then pause to reflect that all our wages are, at root, politically determined

Translated into plain English, this means that immigration controls, far from protecting the rich and powerful against the poor, are actually a form of social welfare in an unequal world. Indeed without generous welfare provision, the UK could not first have outsourced most of its manufacturing base, in the Thatcher years, and then allowed an unprecedented influx of unskilled and semi-skilled labour in the New Labour and Tory / Lib Dem coaliation years. Such welfare provision softened the blow when factories closed in 1980s, but also led the emergence of a deskilled new underclass, unable to participate fruitfully in the new service-led economy. Many people are simply not suited to academic, managerial or marketing roles, but are perfectly capable, when given the chance, of doing practical jobs. If an economy does not provide a wide range of employment opportunities for people with different skills and learning profiles, it will exclude a large section of the population.

However, until recently workers in Western Europe, North America and parts of the Pacific Rim (Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand) were relatively privileged as they could enjoy such luxuries as refrigerators, washing machines, televisions, holidays and most notably motor vehicles unavailable to most in the developing world. As late as 1990 this lifestyle was only available to 15% of the world's population. We have since witnessed not just the fall of the Iron Curtain with integration of Eastern and Western Europe, but exponential industrial and consumer growth in the world's two most populous countries, China and India. While back in 1970s some environmentalists feared population growth, itself a by-product of technological progress, represented the biggest environmental challenge, per capita consumption, measured in kilojoules of energy required to sustain a human being, is rising much faster. The critical issue is no longer whether we can feed 10 billion human beings with a modest lifestyle, but whether we can sustain 5 billion cars with all the related infrastructure of motoways and hypermarkets. There is now no logcial reason why a highly educated Indian workforce should not aspire to the same living standards as their European counterparts. While Indian workers still have a huge competitive advantage for the time-being, the rising cost of living, especially in urban areas, may soon change that. As countries open up their markets, the living standards genie pops out of its proverbial bottle. Why should British workers, who today make few goods other countries really need, continue to enjoy higher living standards than Indian, Chinese or African workers, who arguably produce much more of what we need ? Back in 1970s only a tiny minority of Indians were wealthier than typical Western Europeans. Today India's emerging middle class accounts for over 10% of its population or 130 million people, a larger market than Germany or France. The top three wealthiest UK residents all hail from countries, until recently considered poor, Sri and Gopi Hinduja, (Indian: £11.9 billion), Alisher Usmanov (Russian: £10.65 billion), Lakshmi Mittal (Indian: £10.25 billion).

The new global elite has representatives in every geocultural region of the world. Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Brazilian, Mexican and even Nigerian billionaires are now in the same league as their North Amercian, European and Japanese counterparts. Their global enterprises prefer to negotiate either directly with transnational organisations like the European Union (NAFTA, Mercosur, ASEAN etc.) or with small malleable national microstates like Singapore or Luxembourg, especially if they can legally dodge taxes. Not surprisingly the big 4 global professional services firms (Deloite, PwC, Ernst and Young and KPMG) started life as tax consultants helping their coporate clients to evade national taxes, but have recently diversified into lobbying and naked promotion of globalist policies, often hiding behind environmental and humanitarian campaigns. International big business loathes large viable nation states able to protect labour markets, impose higher corporation standards and enforce strict environmental standards. It much prefers regional trading blocs as a stepping stone to a global government. With the Chinese economy destined to overtake the US economy within 10 to 15 years and India destined to surpass the UK within 5 years, we may wonder what kind of welfare and workers' rights a future global government may protect.

Let us briefly consider the logic of free movement of labour, one of the foundation stones of the European Union's 1992 Maastricht Treaty. When first introduced, the gap between the poorest regions of the EU and the richest were not much greater than those within some of the larger members states, e.g. in 1995 Lombardy enjoyed a mean standard of living comparable with that in the Netherlands, Southeast England or Sweden. It just became a little easier for migrants from poorer Italian regions to consider Northern European destinations for temporary relocation rather than apply for guest worker status. However, for cultural reasons, most workers still preferred to move to other regions of their country or linguistic region to being set at a distinct disadvantage. In the 1990s Spain and Italy began to feel the impact of growing migratory pressure from Africa and the Middle East, while the Balkan wars helped boost emigration to Germany, Austria and Scandinavia. As the birth rate fell in most of Europe to below natural replacement level, many academics and business lobbyists began to advocate higher levels of net migration to offset a natural population decline and rejuvenate an ageing population. It seemed as long as most natives continued to enjoy the same career prospects and migration inflows remained manageable, wealthy European countries could absorb more immigrants. However, elsewhere in much of the developing world, we have seen divergent demographic trends with birth-rates still way above replacement level and a steady drift away from traditional rural communities to sprawling megalopolises. For many third world citizens, the transition from a small rural backwater to a teeming 21st century metropolis such as Lagos, Istanbul or Mumbai presents a greater culture shock, than the geographically much longer flight to Frankurt, Chicago or London. Once uprooted from traditions passed down and gradually adapted from generation to generation, it takes only a little leap of faith to risk one's life for a comfortable existence European or American urban setting. Globalisation has not only deskilled relatively well paid of European factory workers, it has driven hundreds of millions off the land to overcrowded cities with limited prospects other than other than begging, theft, drug trafficking or prostitution. The last 20 years have seen three clear trends:

  1. Long-distance travel via air, sea, rail and road has become much more accessible to hundreds of millions in developing countries.
  2. A telecommunications revolution has made it much easier for people not only to stay in touch with friends and relatives anywhere in the world, but to become aware of job opportunities. Communities are no longer constrained by geography.
  3. Trade barriers have almost disappeared, making it very hard for Western European workers to compete with low wage economies in China, Indonesia, India, Vietnam or elsewhere.

The pace of social, cultural and technological change has accelerated since the late 1990s. While this rapid rate of innovation has benefited some smart entrepreneurs and technical wizards, it has destabilised the labour market. Many old skills become obsolete overnight, unskilled and semi-skilled workers can be hired and fired more easily and employers can tap into an almost unlimited supply of enthusiastic and ready trained labour from some other region. Poorer regions lose their best and brightest and survive mainly on remittances from richer regions, and the poor in richer regions are out-competed by opportunists from poorer regions. Wealthy professionals in richer regions enjoy more affordable and dependable nannies, gardeners and plumbers, while the indigenous poor are consigned to an intellectual wasteland of welfare handouts, budget supermarkets and mass-marketed junk culture.

Ungreen Greens

Why should your electric kettle be assembled by a Chinese worker earning 20p ( £0.20) an hour rather than by a British worker earning £20 an hour ? It's a good question because the demand for electric kettles for making tea, instant coffee or soup is strongest in the British Isles. Demand in the UK alone is certainly large to warrant more than one kettle factory. Indeed until recently, this quintessentially British invention was a nice little export earner (mainly to Australia and Canada). Not any more, leading British brands, such as Russell Hobbs or Murphy Richards, simply have their designs manufactured in low wage regions. A new generation of Britons is more concerned with brands, price and convenience than supporting local workers. Some may argue that we are so busy providing media, marketing, education and entertainment services to the rest of the world, that it makes sense to help other countries grow their economies by making the things we buy in retail parks or online. Indeed as our manufacturing techniques had changed, it made perfect sense for big business to transition to a new type of high-income service economy. The only flaw in that optimistic analysis is that excluded over 50% of young people who didn't go to university and had been failed by a one-size-fits-all comprehensive education system. Nowadays very few affordable electrical appliances are made in the UK. Hoover pulled out of Cumbernauld in 2003. Only three years later Lexmark closed their laser printer plant in Rosyth. Yet all the while the UK retail sector, with a brief slump in 2008-9, has continued to bloom. People travel more on holiday and buy more gadgets, while the UK population has risen by 5 million since the year 2000. However, the country's carbon emissions have remained static despite ambitious government promises of a 20% reduction by 2010. Yet in reality, the country's true carbon footprint has risen dramatically as we simply consume and import more junk that have to be shipped thousands of miles to reach our warehouses. It may be cheaper to import kettles from Indonesia, Malaysia or Vietnam, but in addition to the pollution created by the manufacturing process, we have the environmental burden of shipping the goods over longer distances. Deceptively lower retail prices have another oft-forgotten side effect. It is now often cheaper to buy a new domestic appliance than attempt to repair an existing one, simply because compatible spare parts have to sourced from remote manufacturers and local retailers lack the skills needed to service parts that are not designed to be easily replaced. If your kettle only costs £20, why spend £20 to replace a faulty thermostat? As a result our landfill sites are replete with discarded appliances with just one faulty component. Globalisation, rather than spreading environmental burdens and maximising efficiency, leads to monumental waste, not only in terms of hyperconsumption (by things we really do not need), but also destroying the prospects of millions of potential workers, out-competed by power-hungry global corporations. If we cared about the environment, we would buy fewer manufactured goods made by well-paid workers with spare parts we can buy in a local hardware store.

A country of Immigrants?

Wishful thinking sociologists proclaim that we have always been a country of immigration. In theory, this statement is true to varying extents of any country outside of Africa's Rift Valley, but should only really apply to countries whose populations are made up mainly of successive waves of recent immigrants such as the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina or Australia. Ironically, such multiethnic countries were also built on large-scale population displacement and genocide. Australian aborigines did not invite Dutch and British colonisers to cope with a temporary skills shortage. In truth, before the expansion of the British Empire, these islands experienced only a trickle of migrants from continental Europe. The Norman invasion added 1-2% to the country's blood pool and Anglo-Saxon incursions possibly as little as 5% (Stephen Oppenheimer, Origins of The British). As late 1990, over 75% of the British population descended from the original settlers who moved to these Isles from various ice age refuges between ten and eight thousand years ago. In the imperial age, especially following the Industrial revolution, Britain became mainly a country of emigration with a few groups such as Huguenots and Russian Jews moving to the UK in the 19th century. Most continental European countries experienced greater migratory flows for simple reasons of geography. From the 1950s, Britain experienced the first large waves of immigration from its former colonies. The country was no longer populated almost exclusively by pale-skinned descendants of Celtic, Germanic and Pictish tribes. As the British had colonised much of Africa, the Indian Subcontinent, Caribbean and Oceania, this seemed only right and proper, especially as a many English, Scots and Welsh continued to emigrate to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States. Between 1950 and 1997, net migration fluctuated between -20,000 amd +50,000 a year. The UK's population grew gradually from around 50 million in 1950 to 56 million in 1980, covering the first era of mass immigration from the Commonwealth and the 1960s baby boom. In much of the 1970s and early 1980s Britain experienced negative net migration and a declining birth rate. These changes gave rise to a new multiethnic British identity as newcomers integrated and intermarried with longer-standing Britons, but Britishness itself was in crisis often associated with national supremacist groups like the BNP (British National Party) or National Front. In an increasingly interconnected world, the United Kingdom became an anachronism only temporarily rebranded as Cool Britannia, largely due to the commercial success of UK-based rock bands promoting the country's new multicultural image. Britain attempted to capitalise on its image as the birthplace of the English language and industrial revolution, but became a victim of the successful spread of its two leading cultural and economic exports. Its former engineering and scientific excellence had long been eclipsed first by the USA, Germany and Japan and more recenly by global corporations with no national allegiance. The expansion of an English-like global lingua franca and the enduring reputation of a few leading universities seemed the only consolation prizes from the country's imperial past.

However, UK support for US military interventions and the blurring of cultural boundaries between nation states destroyed a rebranded Yookay. Despite the popularity of the English language, UK entries to the Eurovision Song Contest failed to win the hearts and minds of young audiences elsewhere in Europe, while until the 1990s British Rock stars had gained a godlike status abroad. Younger Brits preferred to identify as English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish. By the late 1990s, the economy has depended mainly on abstract financial, education, Since 2000 net migration has varied between 150,000 and 300,000 a year. In 2014 over 625,000 moved to the UK by legal means, and around 330,000 left. Not only only are these figures unbalanced but very different kinds of people are moving in either direction. The problem is not, bloody mmigrants, but a global economic system that is clearly unsustainable and works against the interests of the most vulnerable members of our communities.

Categories
All in the Mind Computing Power Dynamics

What the enlightened elites really think of you

Opinion leaders love to use inclusive first person plural forms, like we, us and our, when addressing unenlightened plebs who fail to share their enthusiasm for all things post-modern and mistakenly reminisce about the positive aspects of our recent past, like greater social cohesion, more respect for age and experience, simpler rules of social etiquette and above all a lot less social anxiety.

Yet despite their matey rhetoric, the opinion leading intelligentsia look down on the masses, treating divergent perspectives, not as important contributions to a vibrant democratic debate, but as symptoms of nostalgia, stubborn conservatism, uninformed conjecture, pathological prejudice or simply a lack of enlightenment, i.e. a refusal to embrace the kind of change they see as an inescapable next step in our evolution to a higher form of humanity. To oppose the winds of change, in the eyes of the neoliberal elite, is to uphold everything that is bad about our past.

Some may look at other good things that seemed better just a generation or two ago, like an extensive railway network that connected most small towns, more countryside, higher home ownership and local shops within easy walking distance that sold everything ordinary people needed and not just booze and snacks. Instead we have motor cars, more roads, smaller houses, more out-of-town retail parks, cheap foreign holidays and a wealth of electronic gadgets unthinkable to most of us just half a century ago. In short we are increasingly disconnected from our immediate surroundings. Few of us truly understand all the complex industrial processes that underly our globally interconnected high-tech lives.

Nobody voted to close down the last television set factory in the UK or outsource the production of electric kettles to South East Asia. It just happened due to circumstances beyond the control of humble citizens. Some may have protested against factory closures or job losses, but politicians were powerless in the face of the global steamroller, a force set in motion 4 centuries ago by the then expanding Dutch, French and British mercantile empires.

Yet our liberal opinion leaders would like us to believe that everything good about our times has been won through a long democratic struggle of progressive forces against reactionary conservatism. Progressivism has come to embody the notion that all change towards a more globally interdependent world is good, and while conservative naysayers may win temporary reprieves, they will in the end be proven wrong, i.e. we may debate the pace of change, but never the need for it.

As all amateur etymologists know, democracy is just an anglicized form of the Greek δημοκÃÂÂÂαÄία or people power. Most of us like to think of it as a good thing, but know deep down our politicians have their hands tied by various external forces such as the global economy, transnational organisations, banks and various other vested interests. However, true power does not come without responsibility and true responsibility is impossible without a clear, accurate and detailed understanding of the way the world works. The elites see democracy not so much as an ideal to which we should aspire, but an effective means of change management, i.e. by consent if we can, by force if we must (to paraphrase Madeleine Albright's summary of US foreign policy). As long as popular desires can be placated through bread and circuses, the spectacle of democratic debate and elections gives people a sense of participation in the decision-making process. Indeed the global elites are sometimes quite happy for people to vote for policies at odds with their long-term plans. If a country or region happens to possess key resources, their local democratic institutions may be allowed to provide better services and defend traditional ways of life or customs at variance with the new global superculture. One may think of oil-rich countries like Norway or Saudi Arabia that in very different ways adapt the concept of global governance to meet very local needs. In Norway this means protecting the fishing and whaling communities while ensuring everyone enjoys a high minimum standard of living, while the same principle of subsidiarity in Saudi Arabia means keeping alive the semblance of a theocracy. The global elite can tolerate such diversity as long as it is manageable and its relative success or divergence can be attrbuted to local factors. However, like all ruling classes, the new global elite cannot tolerate any organised group of people powerful enough to challenge their hegemony. Thus the lucky inhabitants of Norway, Singapore or Sydney are afforded higher material lifestyles in exchange for loyalty with the New World order. However, concentrations of highly skilled and well-educated workers present a particular challenge to ruling elites. Mission-critical professionals need to be culturally separated from the masses through international professional networks and a more refined variant of global consumer culture.

Modern society depends more than ever on technology that requires a complex sequence of industrial processes. No modern urban settlement could function without electricity, a sanitised water supply, transportation links, telecommunications and raw materials extracted from mines, forests or oil wells thousands of miles away. Yet few of us have more than rudimentary grasp of the underlying sciences. We have all come to rely on technocrats, yet complain whenever technical hitch, such as a power cut, burst water pipe or congested transport network, causes widespread disruption. Our modern lives would be unimaginable without electricity, clean water and rapid transportation. In their absence we would be disconnected from the mediasphere (cinema, radio, TV and now the Internet), unable to operate most household appliances, unable to cook or wash and only have limited range of local food available in shops. City states like Singapore would become ghost towns, if the rest of the world imposed an embargo. This hyper-dependence infantilises us by both raising our material expectations and denying us the freedom to fend ourselves. Why should the labour of a Vietnamese production line worker be worth just a fraction of a London advertising executive? The latter merely promotes sales of goods manufactured by the former with technology neither fully comprehend.

The managerial classes like to ridicule the naive opinions of the masses, usually accusing their amateur naysayers of fruitcakery (applicable to all opinions outwith the range of permissible dissent), religious myopia (if someone opposes three-parent babies), racism (if they oppose extreme labour mobility), homophobia (if they oppose gay marriage) or conspiracy theorism (if someone suggests the Iraq War was really about oil) or simply ludditism (if someone opposes nuclear power or hydraulic fracturing). This marginalising technique is most effective if issues can be isolated and analysed in the context of mainstream assumptions about almost everything else. Nuclear power and hydraulic fracturing seem so much more necessary if we plan to continue our high-consumption happy-motoring lifestyle. If you challenge the very foundation of modern economics, continuous material growth, then you risk biting the hands that feed you. If retail sales decline as people stop buying superfluous consumer goods, then not only do many retail workers lose their jobs, but the banking, marketing and advertising industries suffer too.

Consider the concocted debate on unbalanced mass immigration, where the establishment poses on the internationalist left, but sometimes pretends to share the concerns of indigenous workers. Some believe public concern about extreme labour mobility is fuelled by irrational prejudice against foreigners, rather than job security and social cohesion. By dismissing opposition to mass immigration as xenophobic and reactionary, the business elites can dodge real issues caused by a massive oversupply of unskilled and semi-skilled labour, i.e. de-skilling of indigenous working classes, disappearance of stable jobs with easy hiring and firing of human resources and dwindling class solidarity. If you have a stable long-term job and are fully integrated in your local community, you may join trade union and care more about the welfare of other workers in your neighbourhood. By contrast, if you only have temporary work contract in another country your main concerns are your pay cheques and staying out of trouble. However, rational debate on the subject is often difficult because mainstream opinion leaders are committed to economic growth at all costs, which relies on a dynamic labour market and bigger profits.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Why Labour will not bring about a fairer Britain

In less than 5 years, the Labour left seemed to have forgotten the sheer treachery of the last Labour administration. Rather than focus their attention on the real ruling classes sitting in corporate boardrooms or relaxing on Caribbean yachts, they prefer to demonise the bunch of overgrown public school boys and girls in the current governmental management team. You see national governments don't really have much power these days. Big decisions are made elsewhere. More important, to any rational and emotionally detached observer New Labour and the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition are just two brands of the same product marketed at different sections of the voting public. The Conservatives like to appeal to the common-sense middle classes, a demographic that has shrunk considerably since the 2008 banking crisis. While Labour hold on to some of their core traditional working class vote in Wales and parts of Northern England, they appeal increasingly to the Guardian-reading managerial classes as well as ethnic minorities and welfare dependents who feel uneasy about Conservative rhetoric on tougher immigration controls or welfare cuts. Ironically the LibDems share much of the same demographic, but are tarnished by their support for the ConDem Coalition government. This leaves much of the tradional working and lower middle classes without a voice. Their jobs have been outsourced and their wages compressed, while their taxes fund massive corporate largesse and social engineering. For now, UKIP is filling this vacuum, but are unlikely to challenge the hegemony of the same bankers who corrupted New Labour or address the fundamental economic imbalances that causes much unbalanced migration. The Greens appeal mainly to wishful-thinking Bohemian intellectuals disaffected with New Labour, but offer an unworkable mix of high-tax and high-spending neo-keynsiansian and environmental measures that could only work in a zero-growth steady-state economy unable to fund the welfare state in its current guise. Let's just look at the some of the policies the last Labour government forgot to detail in its 1997 manifesto.

  1. Tuition fees, within months of being elected Labour reversed its previous opposition to replacing university grants with loans. The old system worked when only 15 to 20% of school leavers went to university, but the employment market now requires most office workers to have a degree. Indeed as the further education sector grows, degrees are devalued, but without a degree many young people cannot even get on the career ladder, unless they turn their minds to practical manual jobs. It would have made much more sense to keep grants for STEM and medicine students and for top-performing students from poorer backgrounds in other academic subjects, while withdrawing subsidies from non-essential degrees and encouraging more to learn practical trades.
  2. Bombed Serbia (1998). Throughout the 1990s we witnessed ongoing civil wars in the former Yugoslavia. The Western Media had decided to blame it on the Serbian leadership, which served as a convenient test case for the new humanitarian interventionism, especially as many of the alleged victims of Serbian nationalism were Muslims, whose votes Labour would later rely on. Blair could then pose as the saviour of Kosovan Albanians. We now know the death toll between rival groups was much more evenly balanced than presented in the mainstream Western media and the purported Kosovan freedom fighters (KLA) were armed and funded by the CIA.
  3. Supported US destabilisation of Middle East with regular depleted uranium airstrikes on Iraq. The Blair government remained loyal to US foreign policy in the Middle East, joining regular airstrikes over Iraq to enforce the No-Fly Zone imposed in the aftermath of the first Gulf War.
  4. Let banks issue loans to low-paid and unemployed to boost consumer spending while manufacturing migrated abroad.
  5. Sold gold when at its historical low in 2001 to boost US dollar
  6. Allowed massive expansion of retail and entertainment sector.
  7. Failed to train millions of long-term unemployed people to do all those essential jobs that any country needs.
  8. Subsidised low-pay through working family tax credits.
  9. Hid real unemployment by broadening definition of disabilities and encouraging more young people to undertake useless degrees. Since since 1997 we have seen a proliferation of pointless non-productive managerial, marketing and surveillance jobs. Few jobs are directly associated with the things people really need. If you want to have your imported washing machine fixed, in our brave New World you'll probably call a service company who will dispatch a ready trained technician authorised to identify and possibly replace an inexpensive component. For every hand-on tradesperson or engineer, there appear to be many more pen-pushers and client relations managers. Official unemployment may be much higher in Spain, but at least Spain not only exports more food and cars, but has a booming tourist industry. However, if we look not at the official jobless count, but at the number of people with a real full-time job, then over 8 million UK adults of working age are not in employment, education or training or classified as stay-at-home parents. The UK also has the highest number of part-time employed workers who rely on tax credits to make end meet.
  10. Allowed a massive rise in unbalanced immigration leading to a huge oversupply of cheap labour and a population rise of 5 million in just 13 years. Since the end of WW2, the UK had accommodated many immigrants from its former empire. However, with many Britons migrating to Australia, Canada or the USA, net migration averaged under 30,000 a year and for a few years in the mid 1970s and early 80s was subzero. Since 1997 these numbers changed rapidly, as migratory pressures and cheap travel enabled millions to seek their fortunes in wealthier countries. At the same time, British workers lacked both key practical skills such as plumbing, bricklaying or catering and incentives to accept low-paid jobs, leaving a gap in the market for keen young labourers willing to work antisocial hours on little more than the minimum wage. This set the scene for Labour's 2003 decision to allow workers from Eastern European countries the same rights as any other EU countries. Since 2004 net migration has consistently topped 200,000 a year, dipping only briefly 2008 and 2011 and the country's population has risen from 58 million in 1997 to 64 million in 2014. Whole employment sectors, especially catering, construction and food processing, came to be dominated by new migrants. Yet New Labour pretended nothing had changed. Immigration had long been a side issue. While most politicians agreed balanced and gradual migration could benefit society, they now had to defend rapid and increasingly unbalanced migration, i.e. although many Britons migrated to the rest of Europe, they were mainly skilled professionals, English language teachers or retirees. As the New Labour decade progressed, more and more ordinary voters began to realise a disconnect between politician's rhetoric about building a new global future, and reality on the ground where whole neighbourhoods were transformed and job security became a distant memory. While the metropolitan elite discussed equality, diversity and anti-racism, the marginalised indigenous working classes were more concerned with job security and social cohesion.
  11. Allowed property prices to rise exponentially to over 10x average salaries. While official retail inflation remained low, housing accounted for a growing percentage of people's outgoings. Indeed Labour continued to sell off council housing stock to housing associations. As the number of low-paid and under-employed households continued to rise, the government's housing benefit rose to over £20 billion a year. In much of the South East of England, a married couple on average wages (approx. 25 to 30k) could no longer aspire to buy a house worthy of calling home.
  12. Obsession with growth led the UK to increase its carbon footprint largely through consumption of goods manufactured elsewhere. While British consumers continued to buy cars, washing machines, furniture, electronic entertainment gadgets and other household accessories, manufacturing jobs drifted abroad as UK workers proved unable to compete with East Asia. However, the service sector, especially retail, media and entertainment, kept expanding. Every week would bring news of factory closures and supermarket openings.
  13. Supported US occupation of Afghanistan in 2001. Within months of the tragic 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, New Labour joined forces with the US to attack Afghanistan, initially to hunt down the perpetrators of this dastardly act of terrorism, but latterly to promote women's rights and democracy. While they succeeded in killing tens of thousands and capturing eventually Osama Bin Laden in neighbouring Pakistan, the Afghan civil war continues to rage with much of the country still controlled by the Taliban.
  14. Deregulated booze and gambling. While Labour banned smoking, they made it much easier for people to get drunk and gamble away their devalued salaries. Indeed, not only did New Labour allow a massive expansion of casinos, they allowed the gaming industry to advertise on prime time TV.
  15. Enforced PFI contracts in the health service. Labour has long claimed to be the party of the NHS, yet under New Labour, the preferred way to fund new hospitals and facilities was through Private Finance Initiatives, which for short-term financial gain will burden future generations with £200 billion of debt.
  16. Expanded surveillance and tried to introduce identity card
  17. Supported US occupation of Iraq. Despite the largest demonstration in British history, with some 2 million travelling to Central London to protest the imminent US-led invasion of Iraq, the Labour government sent British armed forces to
  18. Oversaw massive rise in prison population. While nowhere near US levels of incarceration, England now has the highest imprisonment rate in Western and Central Europe.
  19. Passed 2007 Mental Health Act leading to massive rise in number of adults sectioned (detained) without consent. Note how mainstream politicians of all hues have championed mental health awareness, while in reality mental illness spending has continued to rise apace with the diagnostic rate for personality disorders. Yet few have linked this trend with other forms of invasive surveillance.
Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

How to Help the Needy

At this time of year, we are supposed to turn our minds to the wider community around us, so everyone can enjoy a Merry Christmas and restore their faith in humanity. People in the UK seem to have three competing personas.

  • The do-gooder: always thankful of one's relative financial privilege and eager to share some wealth with charities or maybe with less fortunate neighbours or relatives.
  • The reveller: focused on having a good time and spending as much of their cash as possible on lavish indulgence, expensive clothes, holidays, gadgets, new cars, booze and other recreational drugs.
  • The obsessive compulsive loner: ungrateful and cynical about overhyped festivities, worried that everyone else is having a better time.

Amazingly these traits often coexist in the same person. One may buy an expensive present to keep a relative happy, get drunk at the office party and spend Christmas day barely tolerating relatives concerned only with pop culture. Why are so many people so miserable when so many others exhibit so much joy and goodwill ?

Advertisers and peer pressure urge us to max out our credit cards or contemplate payday loans to ensure nobody in our immediate circle of friends and family feels deprived of the latest fashion accessories and gadgets. Once upon a time, a young boy would cherish a brand new Meccano set, a remote-controlled toy car or, if he was really lucky, a bicycle. Today, anything worth less than the latest and greatest game console or a top-of-the-range electronic smartphone is bound to disappoint.

Yet this Christmas thousands of tonnes of uneaten roast turkey and vegetables will end up in brown recycling bins. Hundreds of thousands of unwanted presents will be sold on ebay and the same Chinese container ships that carried many of our Christmas presents will return with plastic and cardboard packaging. Most presents will have a short life span. Some gifts will last just a few months or maybe just weeks or even just days before they join a pile of assorted junk destined for some hapless charity shop customer. Yet leading economists worry when retail sales fall and rejoice when people buy more junk.

The latest craze among the better educated click-happy middle classes is to order distant friends and relatives a Christmas hamper. Back in the day, local community groups would distribute donated grocery items to old and disabled people in the neighbourhood. Now, hampers have become a multi-million pound business and recipients are often those who least need these festive treats. Apparently everyone loves more chocolate, cheese, Christmas pudding and wine with their fridge and pantry overflowing with special treats. As Christmas loses touch with its Christian roots, it has become a huge collective shopping spree of atomised individuals wrapped up in their own tiny social networks, eager to demonstrate both their outward generosity and their feigned merriment. Post-modern society frowns on frugality and sobriety.

Marketing agencies have long been aware of our dual needs to exhibit altruism and indulge our material desires. As you shop, charity workers will encourage you to donate some of your earnings to some spurious cause whose true agenda you ill-understand, but whose worthiness you dare not question. So for every £100 you spend on fashion accessories, multimedia consumption devices, branded fragrances and so on, you may allocate £1 to the marketing campaign of what sounds like a good cause, but don't really know how much of your £1 will actually help the vulnerable individuals the charity claims to help.

Charities, or the third sector as some call it, are now a multibillion pound business. They have chief executive officers just like corporations and often receive billions from very profitable businesses. In many ways they supplement the welfare state, but because of their allegedly philanthropic nature they enjoy tax exemption. How could former prime minister Tony Blair pay just 3% tax on his earnings of £12 million in 2012? By setting up a set of charities and business consultancy, he could legally claim most of revenue either as business expenses or as part of a non-profit endeavour.

However, many charities have become household names in the do-gooder brand awareness market. Most of us have relatives or friends who have died of cancer, so any charity claiming to fund research into cures for cancer must surely merit our support. However, pharmaceutical multinationals and the growing biomedical business have vested interests not so much to find a cure, but to expand their markets.

A couple of years ago I had to work on the payments gateway of the new Web site of a major UK charity, Amnesty International, an organisation I once greatly sympathised with and regularly donated to. They had outsourced their Web site redevelopment to a Central London digital agency, housed in the same building as Saatchi & Saatchi. The digital agency shared open-plan offices with a much larger marketing agency whose clients included Shell Oil, Novartis, AstraZenaca, McDonalds and The British Heart Foundation. Being associated with Amnesty International must have been a massive a PR coup for company busy marketing fast food and diabetes drugs to growing East Asian market. Amnesty had become a brand with a message barely distinguishable from other commercial brands, a kind of horror story that invited you to donate to good causes. Why would Amnesty International hire an expensive marketing agency to do something many budding unemployed Web developers could have done for a fraction of the cost? In another corner of Central London under AKQA's plush offices is the UK headquarters of Save the Children. AKQA is one of the world's largest advertising outfits. They advertise everything from booze to video-games, cars to luxury holidays. The very same marketing geniuses that urge you through clever social media campaigns to buy your 10 year old son a Sony PlayStation 4 complete with 18-rated games, also want to save him from potential child abuse. Once upon a time, child abuse meant extreme deprivation and/or negligence often combined with serious physical assault. Whether these extreme cases have become more or less common is a separate debate, but these days most parents are very mindful that any attempt to enforce discipline by overly coercive means is very likely to land them in trouble with myriad agencies overseeing their children's progress. As a result of family breakdown and the information technology revolution, children are increasingly cocooned in their bedrooms in touch with a parallel universe of youth-oriented social networks, into which the likes of AKQA have invested big time. A parent's role has been reduced to that of a breadwinner and enabler. If you don't buy your kids XYZ gadgets, you are a bad parent, unless you are lucky enough to live in an isolated community where children still socialise by more traditional means.

If you really want to help tackle the causes of misery and hardship, why not just opt out of the consumer rat race, invite a lonely neighbour around and stop trying to keep up with the proverbial Joneses.

Categories
Power Dynamics

Does Scottish Independence really matter?

As a half-Scot and half-Englishman, I never really identified as either. I grew up to believe in Britain as my father owed his career in the army and later British Aerospace to the archipelago's imperial legacy. Whenever my English mother would inadvertently confuse England with Britain, my brother would correct her. I'd support Scotland in football and in the Commonwealth Games, but Great Britain at the Olympics. Scotland remained the land of clan battles, legends, inventors, Hogmanay, Highland Games, Whisky, Billy Connolly and Sean Connery, a quaint region of post-imperial Britain. There had long been two Scotlands. Here I mean not so much the age-old Highlands / Lowlands feud, but the contrast between scientific enlightenment, embodied by David Hume, Thomas Carlyle and James Watt and later industrial decline, portrayed so brilliantly in Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting and fictional TV character Rab Nesbit. Scotland's best and brightest tended to emigrate, while the social ills of alcohol abuse, bad diet and some of the worst poverty levels in Europe blighted those who remained. Until this very day the UK armed forces draw a disproportionate number of recruits from Scotland. The country's strategic military importance greatly outweighs its relative proportion of the UK population. Then came the first oil shock of the early 70s and the prospect of black gold in Scottish coastal waters. Although by that time 300 miles south of the border in Southern England, my Scottish friends and relatives seemed determined to get their fair share of the coming oil bonanza to bring new life to the old country. Yet after the 1979 referendum on devolution failed to attract enough votes (a simple majority voted yes, but many more failed to vote), Scotland, alongside Northern England and South Wales, faired very badly as manufacturing industries moved abroad. Ironically, the Thatcherite revolution was not so much about Great Britishness, that was just rhetoric reinforced by her role in the recapture of the Falkland Islands, but about opening up markets and transitioning to a new service-based economy. A large strand of Scottish public opinion has until recently been conservative with a small c upholding national traditions, but also adhering to a strong Calvinist belief in prudence, self-discipline and restraint. Sadly, junk culture with its beguiling forms of multimedia entertainment has taken the country's most underprivileged classes by storm. Not surprisingly Scotland would later become the electronic gaming hub of Europe, while other industries, including the short-lived Silicon Glen, outsourced production elsewhere. Despite a brief industrial revival in the early 1990s, under New Labour, Scotland transitioned, like its southern neighbour, to a post-industrial economy. IBM, Lexmark, Hoover and many others moved away for good, as global retail outlets spread mushroom-like across the urban landscape.

UK as an anachronism

As Glaswegian comedian, Frankie Boyle, points out, rather than invest the proceeds of North Oil in education, infrastructure and next generation engineering, the Westminster government chose to subsidise mass unemployment and later disguise it through the redefinition of disablement . All of a sudden you could be disabled not because you were crippled, blind or deaf (though modern technology can empower even the severest cases of physical disability), but because you had succumbed to drugs, booze and all the psychological traumas so common in people deprived of a true purpose in life and forced to while away their days as mere welfare dependents. While many blame Thatcher for single-handedly destroying the Scottish soul, its policies were dictated solely by the needs of multinational corporations who owed little allegiance to ordinary British people of any national persuasion, except as consumers. Indeed rather than balance the books, Thatcher's government squandered oil proceeds on short-term priorities such as expanding welfare by letting industry move abroad and cutting taxes for the rich. Yet after 18 years of Tory rule, New Labour continued in the same vein, but rebranded as a progressive internationally minded venture. The boundaries between public and private institutions continued to blur, as bureaucracy expanded, but also outsourced services to private bidders. Former public sector organisations, like British Rail and British Steel, had been sold off and were now run by unaccountable multinationals. Power was slowly but surely slipping away from the Westminster Parliament to boardrooms and remote transnational institutions. Many on the left had initially opposed the EU, but now the new left saw it as a force for social progress, despite enforcing privatisation and fiscal restraint on all European countries. Successive treaties agreed under Conservative and Labour governments handed powers to the EU Commission. Most disturbingly New Labour supported corporate globalisation in the guise of free trade and open borders at all costs. Rather than negotiate to protect the interests of British workers, British-born lobbyists campaigned for opening up European markets to cheap goods from the Far East, thus destroying small manufacturers in much of Southern Europe, unable to compete with heightened competition. Protectionism, once supported by the labour movement, became a bad word. Only global institutions could bring about change, but the multi-billion dollar lobbying industry, with its various branches in PR, mass media and charities, can easily subvert any grassroots movements.

Rebranding Scotland as a Euroregion

However, in one important area the Scottish experience of recent social changes differs greatly from the Southern English experience. Scotland remains largely peopled by Scots. Indeed, outside a few districts of Glasgow and Edinburgh, the largest ethnic minority are the English. While the Scottish population has risen from just a wee bit over 5 million in 2001 to around 5.3 million in 2011, it has plenty of empty houses and unused land. By contrast England alone has gained over 4 million new residents in the same period with vast swathes of inner cities and market towns transformed out of all recognition. Migration has increased rapidly worldwide, more people move in all directions than ever before. As recently as the 1970s annual migration flows would see 30–50,000 people move either way, since 2001 we've seen more than a ten fold increase in migration numbers, e,g 650,000 moving to the UK (mainly England) and 450,000 moving away). Most of us on the left saw Commonwealth immigration as part of a post-colonial settlement and welcomed our new neighbours. However, in the age of cheap air travel and growing migratory pressures from the rest of the world, mass immigration can lead to social upheaval uprooting formerly cohesive communities and replacing national identities with vague and volatile regional identities. I know from my own line of work in software development, labour market instability and regular relocation has become the new norm. When young English people complain about competition from the new wave of industrious Eastern European immigrants, some politicians suggest they take advantage of open borders and migrate themselves (It seems odd to hear nothing but Polish, Portuguese, Bengali and Arabic in London, only to feel swamped by British ex-pats in Spain). Of course, many Brits do, but usually either wealthy pensioners or highly skilled professionals and business-people. If you need a plumber in Warsaw, do not expect to meet a keen Essex lad filling a gap in the handyman market, though you might meet one on an extended pub crawl. The Scottish social fabric has simply changed much less dramatically than in England. Scotland is much more Scottish than England is English in much the same way as Austria has always seemed to me much more German than Germany, which these days is surprisingly cosmopolitan.. Indeed English is spoken more widely and more eloquently in Glasgow and Edinburgh than in London, Birmingham or Manchester. In many ways Scotland reminds me much more of the Britain I once knew than modern metropolitan England.

All five main Scottish parties (SNP, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Greens and Conservatives) support open borders with the rest of the EU, although Scottish public opinion seems just as sceptical of the EU and the purported benefits of mass immigration as down south. More intriguingly, at least four of the main parties pander Scotland's recent conversion to the culture of welfare entitlement rather than self-reliance and social solidarity. The SNP would have us believe unshackled from Westminster's chains, optimistic oil revenues will reverse the current government's alleged cutbacks (in fact they have continued to increase public spending and made only modest changes to welfare provision, at least compared with EU countries like Greece, Portugal or Ireland). Labour, by contrast, reassure their electorate that the UK will continue to subsidise Scotland, presumably with funny money earned at the city of the London. Few Scottish people seem aware of the sheer duplicity of the career left. Ken Livingston has long claimed that London subsidises the rest of the UK, especially outlying regions such as Scotland. While Ken hopes City profits will fund more growth in London (whose population and economy eclipse Scotland's), the SNP places its hopes on massive oil profits.

Countries as disparate as Greece, Portugal, Finland and Estonia are powerless to go against the global flow, an unstoppable juggernaut of rapid technological change and social progress albeit with plenty of teething problems. Their economic policies are dictated largely outside their borders. Their local management teams can lower corporation taxes or pioneer new retraining programmes, but only within tight budgetary constraints. They spend much of their legislative time harmonising local laws and customs with new global or European standards. Would Scotland be any different ?

Aye, but with no illusions

Let me just set the record straight, I'm voting yes for two reasons. First because unlike globalists, I actually believe in self-determination. Ideally, I'd like to see some sort of loose federation of the British Isles. Let us not forget that over 90% of imports into Scotland travel via England. If the global economy implodes, we will need to be on very good terms with our immediate neighbours. Second, I'm curious to see how things will pan out. I'd love to see Trident nuclear submarines sail back to the USA. A rump UK would have diminished status on the world stage less able to help the US in its global policing operations.

However, I vote yes so with no illusions. Of course, a currency union would make Scotland subservient to the Bank of England, and without a large increase in oil revenues the SNP's grandiose public spending plans remain uncosted. Raising income tax will just encourage the rich to emigrate, while lowering corporation tax to attract inward investment will prompt other countries to do the same thus boosting corporate profits. Scottish education has a long way to go before it can compete with Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia. To revive manufacturing, the government would not only have to invest billions in new infrastructure and training, it would have to impose trade restrictions or drastically boost competitiveness and productivity.

The only way a nominally independent Scotland could succeed would be for global crude oil prices to rise enough to make new North Atlantic oil fields more profitable, but in such a scenario global demand may also shrink. To tap wind and wave energy to any meaningful degree, someone would have to invest billions and wait decades before reaping the benefits of such monumental endeavours.

However, I suspect life after the breakup of the UK will not be plain sailing. Global events will eclipse the rebranding of Scotland. The Euro-zone may well collapse and the EU may disintegrate into looser regional trading partnerships along the lines of EFTA, while the Chinese economic bubble may well burst, unable to access cheap resources to fuel further growth. How would a Scottish government behave without economic growth? Would it relocalise the Scottish economy and choose the post–1991 Cuban model of self-sufficiency? Would it seek closer ties with its Scandinavian and British Isles neighbours? Would it be forced to abandon welfarism in favour of the Calvinist tradition of hard work? How would Scottish voters react if a future bankrupt Scotland had to impose austerity on a Greek scale just to accept another loan from the EU? Greece too has enormous resources as does Sweden and Denmark. But none are able to stop the global steamroller.

Do the establishment really care?

40 years ago an independent Scotland seemed almost unthinkable. If the SNP could muster 20-30% of the vote, pundits would just write it off as a protest vote. Back then the Scottish intelligentsia, alongside the Unionist movement and Glasgow Rangers fans, were passionately pro-British. But the British ruling class has long joined the borderless global elite, more concerned with property prices in the south of France than the Scottish fishing industry. The only English politicians who can claim any genuine commitment to an ongoing social union with Scotland would also oppose handing more power to big business and transnational organisations. Yet I suspect they are merely shedding crocodile tears. Where will they station Trident ? Will they still help the US bomb the enemy du jour in the Middle East ? Who cares. Rupert Murdoch has already decided that his neoliberal globalist project can work fine in the SNP's Euro-region. Most disturbingly, the SNP have already agreed in principle to the new TTIP ( Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership), claiming only they will exempt the NHS from free-trade rules. If the likes of Rupert Murdoch have their way and lobby a future Scottish government as successfully as they have in other countries, Scotland could well end up as an outpost of corporate America, with as much independence as North Carolina. The Scottish Sun, which supported the 2003 US/UK occupation of Iraq, seems set to support Scottish independence or a good location for Rupert's new private golf course. If some of the latest polls are right and a majority now support the Yes campaign,the Scottish Sun may well have played key role. Tommy Sheridan's dream of socialist beacon of enlightenment may well give way to a puppet government at the mercy of big business.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

The Trouble with the NHS

How disease-mongering turns patients into customers

The closest thing modern Britain has to a unifying state religion is universal admiration of the beloved National Health Service or NHS for short, although its remit has expanded considerably since its early days when it aimed to provide essential healthcare to all irrespective of income. As a proportion of national wealth NHS spending has risen from 3.5% in 1960 to over 9% now, that's over 18% of government spending. The fastest rise occurred in the frenetic spending spree of the early years of the new millennium, indeed as recently as 2000 it accounted for just 5% of a smaller GDP, see UK Public Spending . And yet perversely many attribute the failings of the NHS to cutbacks rather than misplaced priorities, crippling bureaucracy and an obsession with targets. As a result of the pervasice tickbox culture millions of older and vulnerable patients are given immune-system-suppressing flu vaccines whether or not they want them or address any of the real medical issues a patient may have, while many real life-threatening diseases are either misdiagnosed or go undetected. It must seem ironic that elderly patients are left in death pathways, while younger NHS customers receive cosmetic surgery such as breast enhancements to combat the perceived curses of low self-esteem and depression. The growing number of clinically obese adults may be entitled to expensive gastric bands because their addiction to high-fat foods is allegedly beyond their self-control, while old people die in freezing homes because their neighbours could not be bothered to check. We have the technology to keep people technically alive in a semi-vegetative state until they are brain dead and to appease any perceived physiological inadequacy. Gender realignment treatment used to be a rather extreme measure, eligible for public funding only in rare cases of genuine hermaphroditism. Nonetheless, as surgical techniques improved many, clearly unhappy with their anatomical gender, opted for private sex change surgery. One Iraqi-born millionaire even underwent two gender reassignment operations, and many others have suffered from greater emotional turmoil because of dissatisfaction with the outcome of their life-changing surgery than they ever had when they felt trapped in the wrong body. Yet despite widespread public scepticism of its effectiveness, this invasive surgery is now available on the NHS and to suggest otherwise is now deemed transphobic, a term coined on the back of homophobic. Another growth sector is the murky domain of mental health. According a Nuffield Trust report, mental disorders cost the English NHS £12 billion in 2010, more than double the total spend on cancer. A longer term but welcome trend since mid 20th century has been longer life expectancy and a greater survival rate from diseases that would until recently have been irredeemably terminal, so one way or another health spending has risen in most wealthy countries.

The last European elections even saw the emergence of a new party, the National Health Action Party (NHA), which fielded candidates only in the London region. It has a very active campaigning team both online and among London-based NHS staff. They not only oppose privatisation, but also all cutbacks in NHS spending. This stance appeals to a large cross-section of left-leaning public opinion. However, their simplistic analysis has one small flaw. Government spending on healthcare has increased dramatically since 2001 and has continued to grow even under Conservative and Liberal Democrat alliance. The figures are publicly available. In real terms UK healthcare spending doubled from 2000 to 2010 and has continued to grow very modestly since, currently some £130 billion or 18% of public expenditure or 9.1% of GDP. To be honest this is largely in line with healthcare spending in countries with comparable living standards. But mileage or rather value for money varies. The USA has the highest level of healthcare spending in the world, but yet many much poorer countries have a higher life expectancy. Most notably Cuba and the US have the same mean life expectancy, but in US dollar terms US healthcare spending is astronomically higher. In the US an estimated 100,000 people die every year of inappropriate prescription medication, competing with Unintentional Injuries and Alzheimer's disease for the fifth most common cause of death.

Clearly if we expect our health service not only to cope with the challenges of an ageing population, but also to meet growing demand for lifestyle medicine (cosmetic or performance-enhancing treatment), we must be prepared to pay for it. The recent rise in lifestyle medicine, especially cosmetic surgery, has transformed beauty and wellbeing from gifts of nature into commodities. As a result fairly average imperfections, from misaligned noses and teeth, undersized breasts, balding hair, erectile dysfunction, once considered just unfortunate facts of life, are now treated as major causes of depression and prime targets for medical intervention.

That means we need to decide as a society which categories of healthcare we should socialise and which categories are best left to personal discretion (or in my humble opinion actively discouraged as they destroy social cohesion by emphasising the power of money to transform one's body beyond essential medical need). Certainly if someone endures a tragic accident or succumbs to a debilitating disease, it seems very unfair for their prognosis to depend on their bank balance or ability to pay into a generous health insurance scheme. Socialised healthcare means if you fall victim to injuries or illness beyond your reasonable control, then society as a whole will pick up the bill. However, by redefining physiological imperfections and emotional distress as illnesses, the multibillion pound medicalisation business has significantly boosted healthcare costs. As these costs spiral out of control, we risk throwing the proverbial baby away with the bath water. We all need essential medical care at times in our life. If we are generally healthy, this may mean just regular checkups with the odd vaccination (another controversial topic) and for women a short stay in hospital to give birth. Natural human diversity means we are not all blessed with perfect bodies or physical performance potential.

However, socialised medicine also requires social cohesion and solidarity among the different groups within society. While we delegate responsibility to medical professionals, at all times they must serve our needs, not those of disease-mongering pharmaceutical multinationals or invasive state apparatuses. We should not become mere customers or guinea pigs for medical experiments, but be empowered patients, who just want an honest diagnosis and impartial evaluation of medical options. If we expect others to subsidise our healthcare, then we have a responsibility to look after ourselves as best we can. If I decide to engage in a high risk activity for my own pleasure, it seems reasonable that I take out additional insurance. Why should others foot the bill for expensive restorative surgery, if some daredevil motorcyclist decides to jump over 10 double decker buses ? The point is as medical technology evolves, we must clearly define genuine medical needs, otherwise we will just sleepwalk into the collapse of the National Health Service as we knew it and healthcare will be just a profit-making business. Indeed this is already happening albeit underwritten by taxpayers and banks. As Professor Allyson Pollock reminds us "Virgin landed a £630 million contract for community mental healthcare, with no previous experience, while RBS, Serco and Carillion, to name but a few, are raking in billions in taxpayer funds for leasing out and part-operating PFI hospitals, community clinics and GP surgeries. A private company now runs an NHS hospital. US private medical companies are now involved in the privatisation process, such as HCA and United Health. HCA is in a joint venture with University College Hospital London, where it provides cancer treatment, but only for those who can pay. Both New Labour and the current Conservative/Lib-Dem coalition have turned the NHS into a front for a rapacious biomedical business.

Categories
Power Dynamics

Propaganda Wars

For too long an unholy alliance of North American and European media outlets, principally BBC, CNN, Fox News, but also their French, Spanish, Portuguese and German-language equivalents, ensured coverage of evolving world events reflected the message that NATO, the EU and the leading global corporations wanted us to hear.

Not only do they set the agenda, i.e. decide which news stories are worthy of our attention, they can choose how to present complex regional conflicts, exclude inconvenient voices and promote opinion leaders who support their version of events. Resource wars are portrayed as battles between outmoded dictatorships and enlightened progressives willing to participate in our globalised utopia.

The trouble is their changing stories have failed to convince everyone. Not all Europeans actually believed the Afghan and Iraq wars were really about women's rights or deposing evil dictators. Some politicians publicly disagreed with the US/UK occupation of Iraq, but then still did business with the same multinationals, banks and military alliances that pushed for war in the first place. The sad fact is to keep the illusion of democracy alive, the mass media could only convince the US and UK electorate to vote for parties that supported the war. As it happens opinion polls in the run up to the 2003 invasion show a clear majority of British voters opposed to military action, but this changed as Parliament approved military intervention. France and Germany stayed out, but only a few years later the French happily intervened in Haiti, Libya and Mali.

Now the European Union and NATO have set their eyes on further eastward expansion and have backed a coup in Ukraine, some of us are not quite buying the latest outburst of self-righteous propaganda. Why should we trust the same media pundits who sold us the Iraq occupation to promote freedom and democracy in a country whose tortuous history remains a mystery to outside observers. Why do they loathe Russia, yet fail to criticise Saudi Arabia or China responsible for human rights abuses on an infinitely greater scale? Did any BBC pundit explain how the oil-rich Saudi Arabian regime now has the world's 4th largest military budget (USD 67 billion a year ahead of the UK at 57.9 billion) and is the biggest client of UK-based arms dealer BAE Systems ?

The apparent evilness of Putin's Russia allegedly has something to do with limited free speech and gay rights. But despite a deceptively vast range of media outlets in the West, they all seem to promote the same basic set of ideas, i.e. we need more free trade, more economic growth and more social engineering to uproot us from our traditional mores.

However, the Russian Federation is now reasserting its independence, and learning to play the West's game. They have studied the techniques deployed by the BBC, CNN at al for decades and launched their own channel, Russia Today, to challenge BBC propaganda head-on. So whom should we trust? Neither, but now the BBC / CNN cabal have lost their monopoly on English-language news. On some issues Russia Today seems more balanced, but on the others as biased as the BBC. the global balance of power is clearly shifting away from the North Atlantic to vast expanses of resource rich Siberia and resource-hungry hyperactive China. I will be watching, but will trust no-one.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Dictatorship by Consent

Apparently, if we believe many opinion leaders, we fought most recent wars to spread freedom and democracy. Allegedly people across the world admire us because of our deep-rooted civic political culture. Never mind any inconvenient conflicts between personal freedom and true democracy, but what do the international ruling elites and their faithful cheerleaders actually mean by this Hellenic word for people power ?

Do they really want an open debate about issues that affect our daily lives? Are there really prepared to explain the inevitable dilemmas that arise from conflicting popular demands? Do they really understand the enormous sense of alienation and psychological inferiority that mass consumerism and an obsession with presentation and body image has created in so many of us? Given the choice, everyone would want higher wages, better working conditions, more leisure time, more green fields, cleaner water, better transport infrastructure, more affordable heating, larger houses, better healthcare, longer lives, more holidays, more fun, more friends and a higher social status. It hardly matters if we cannot have all these wonderful traits at once. However, if the mainstream media can set the agenda, stage-manage debates and isolate inconvenient critics, they can keep alive the illusion of democracy and free speech.

If we did as big business wants, we'd all halve our salaries, double our work load and triple our spending. If numbers don't add up, we can always ask banks or central government to create more money out of thin air, such is the logic of the debt-fuelled consumption-driven economy. Yet the more we are indebted and the more we rely on international trade, the more we transfer our theoretical sovereignty to unaccountable global entities. It often seems we can only debate how to boost the economy, how to attract more inward investment, how to accommodate more international commuters, how to deal with cross-border crime or how to combat terrorism. We do not debate whether any of these measures are necessary, i.e. do we really need to grow our economy?

As mainstream national political institutions become powerless in the face of tentacular transnational remote organisations, political debate is limited either to trivial parochial matters or is reduced to simple negative campaigning, blaming rivals for the collateral damage of policies that would have been implemented anyway. The recent Labour party political video, devised by the US media guru behind Barrack Obama's electoral victory (David Axelrod), may fool a few young angry voters, who'd like to blame a few convenient scapegoats for their misfortunes, but it is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black. It perpetuates the myth that in the early 21st century any difference remains between the mainstream parties on any subject of importance. The video focuses on a few safe and simplistic issues, tuition fees, rising heating costs and bedroom tax. It then blames the old guard of British aristocracy. Just because modern CEOs wear jeans, listen to rock music and no longer have posh Etonian accents, does not make their huge financial superiority any less grotesque. Indeed the gap between rich and poor had been steadily rising for over 30 years. According to the top 10% earned just 7.1 times more than the bottom 10% in 1995, by 2008 this ratio had risen to 10.1 times.

It doesn't take long to disentangle any of these claims and see how Labour offers little alternative to the two other orthodox parties. Take, for example, the much-maligned bedroom tax. It is only an issue because housing has become unaffordable without huge government subsidies. Housing benefit effectively subsidises landlords, so why should hardworking low to middle income tax-payers in areas with lower property prices subsidise special categories of people entitled to housing benefit in wealthier areas? New Labour have become the biggest defender of spiralling housing benefits introduced by Thatcher after her government sold off council houses. Moreover, thanks to a rising population, largely driven by immigration, demand for social housing has never been higher, and thus needs to be rationed. Do New Labour plan to build millions more homes and where ? Will they admit the rather obvious environmental costs of more urban sprawl in Europe's most densely populated region? I doubt it. Indeed their stance against bedroom tax is just an exercise in political point scoring. In 13 years in government they abysmally failed to increase the tax burden on international oligarchs, multinational corporations and banks, as they relied on their presence in the UK to artificially boost the economy.

Not only did New Labour introduce tuition fees in 1997 and increased them to £3000 later in 2006, they promoted a huge expansion in higher education that turned universities into businesses competing not just for corporate sponsorship, but in the lucrative international student market. As a result degrees are not only devalued, but reflect the needs of big business rather than of wider society. With so many other spending obligations and financial constraints, no government can now afford to return to the old grant system, where most students from poorer backgrounds received fully subsidised education, but until the 1980s only 15 to 20% went to university. Yet today only a minority of the nearly 50% of 18 to 21 year olds who now attend university attain degrees of any practical worth with social sciences, law, business administration and creative arts among the most popular subjects. Biology is now dominated by the needs of the burgeoning pharmaceutical, biotech, assisted fertilisation and private healthcare (cosmetic surgery) sectors. Only a fraction of medicine-related degrees produce new doctors, most prepare students for life as a pharmaceutical representative, fertility clinic lab technician or psychiatric nurse. Such professions are in greater demand as a growing proportion of the population is on prescription medication, opts to bypass nature through fertility treatment or succumbs to emotional disturbances that we have relabelled as mental health issues.

Most of us shudder at the thought of opening our electricity or gas bills, largely because back in the 1990s they were, by European standards, incredibly low because most gas still came from the North Sea. Now most gas is imported and energy demand has grown. Logically we need to either increase energy production, with all its potential environmental consequences, import more or consume less. Token gestures like unplugging your TV set at night will make little difference. By offering short-term subsidies for heating, New Labour would promote inefficiency and fail to provide a long term solution, i.e. adapting to a low consumption economy, ensuring people can live healthy lives with less waste. If you naively believe they would just tax a few fat cat energy firm bosses, just consider the real reasons behind the 2003 occupation of Iraq.

In reality although some debate still takes place even on contentious issues such as mass immigration, the hands of local, regional and national governments are tied. All they can do is present a narrow set of options and hope big business will work magic to bridge the growing gap between social and environment sustainability and economic expedience. If people really exercised democratic control, you can bet the ruling elite would change strategy, as they often do. Instead every few years we are just given the opportunity to vote for another set of middle managers. Sometime we elect mavericks, who may rant and rave in parliamentary talking shops, but all along big decisions affecting people's jobs, community, housing, transport etc. are decided in remote boardrooms and think tanks.