Categories
Computing Power Dynamics

Am I Left or Am I Right?

Once again we return to the superseded left vs right spectrum or is it good vs bad, collectivism vs individualism, state control vs private enterprise, equality vs meritocracy or ecological responsibility vs economic growth? Few real world issues can be simplified on a one-dimensional scale.

Some would now describe some of my opinions as embarrassingly rightwing, an epithet often applied to outmoded ideas. What would I have thought 30 to 40 years ago if I had realised that later in life I would ascribe to fiercely reactionary views on topics as diverse as transgender rights or immigration. Back then I supported sexual freedom between consenting adults and recognised the benefits of cultural exchanges and sustainable migration. I always defended immigrants from the irrational prejudices of angry natives who considered themselves superior to their neighbours recently arrived from far-flung former British colonies. I've consistently argued against imperialism, especially that of my own country and its most powerful allies. So what's changed? Have I suddenly become a gay-bashing xenophobe, intolerant of any divergence from the mainstream British culture of some mythical golden era? Not quite. In truth my core values haven't changed at all. Society has. Since my adolescent activism in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the neo-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and my brief flirting with the Revolutionary Communist Party, now regrouped as Spiked Online, I may have lost confidence in the ability of a command economy to deliver a socialist utopia. Nonetheless I have steadfastly opposed all military, economic and social policies that I believe will disempower commoners, destabilise functioning societies or strengthen the power-hungry elites who run the military-industrial complex. In essence I've advocated environmentalism, anti-militarism, decentralisation and mixed economy social democracy, a practical recognition that only private enterprise is versatile enough to develop the kind of technological innovations we will need in the coming century, but left to its own devices capitalism will always tend towards oligopolies. While I've fluctuated from periods of techno-pessimism to cautious techno-optimism, I've only recently grasped the true relationship between rapid advances in informatics and biotechnology on the one hand and an unprecedented rate of societal change on the other. I had mistakenly anticipated that a global economic meltdown would have reversed the seemingly unstoppable process of economic and cultural globalisation and with it the growing dominance of mass consumer fetishism. Alas I have to report global cultural homogenisation shows no signs of abating any time soon, but is fast leading us into unchartered territory.

For the life of me I cannot recall any debates back in the 70s and 80s on gay marriage or using limited public resources to allow single parents or gay couples to procreate without an opposite-sex partner through state-subsidised fertility treatment, initially only available for married couples unable to conceive for medical reasons. Before the turn of the millennium the idea that a child is best raised with a loving mother and father was uncontroversial. For most of us it was just the received wisdom of thousands of years of human civilisation. Of course, it's not always possible for children to grow up with their biological parents. They may not have had a steady relationship at the time of conception, the father may have died at war or at work or the mother may have met an early death through an incurable disease. In some dysfunctional families the children may well have been better off if the abusive parent left, but surely we should investigate the socio-economic circumstances that may engender such troublesome behaviour. However, until recently we always tried through our extended family and local community to recreate as far as possible the ideal of a mother and father team. My mother spent the first three years of her life in an orphanage before my grandmother, working as a chambermaid, married my step grandfather to form a viable family. When things go wrong, as they inevitably do in life, how should society intervene to give everyone the best chance in life? In just 40 years we have moved from debating sexual freedom to redefining not just marriage but the whole concept of families, who when deprived of their biological foundations become little more than temporary guardians monitored by the state. We've transitioned from trying to understand why people may have sexual urges towards others of the same sex to laying the foundations of a brave new world in which procreation is outsourced to fertility clinics.

Do any of these concerns suddenly make me a rabid rightwinger? Certainly not by 1980s standards. I do not want the state interfering unduly with people's private lives, but believe we should respect natural procreation and biological distinctions.

Nothing disgusts me more than the classic ex-pat mentality, the idea that you can live in a country with a different culture to your own, but expect the locals to adapt to your ways rather than making an effort to learn their language and respect their customs. In some countries British ex-pats form parallel communities and see locals as mere servants. To some extent the British are lucky for many are eager to learn or practice their English with native speakers. You can visit some Spanish resorts and barely hear any Spanish or Catalan. Until recently I would have dismissed such cultural arrogance as a byproduct of Anglo-American imperialism and may have felt at least in part guilty. Yet today ordinary citizens of nearly all affluent countries feel increasingly alienated by the fast pace of social and cultural change. It doesn't matter if you're Swedish, English, Spanish, French, German, Italian or North American, your community and cultural landscape are being socially engineered out of all recognition.

Shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed, Francis Fukuyama wrote the End of History and the Last Man. Western Liberal Democracy had triumphed and the American Dream of personal freedom, entrepreneurialism and civic pride would gradually spread around a peaceful global community of free and independent nations. Yet history has not stood still. The core conservative values of most North Americans and Europeans now appear rather outdated as the liberal elites promote an increasingly illiberal agenda under the false pretexts of multiculturalism, social justice and economic growth. The more they talk about equality, the greater the educational and monetary divide between the new upper classes and the dumbed down masses. The more they talk about diversity, the more cultural homogenisation and migratory flows suppress centuries of gradual cultural evolution, diversification and exchange. The more they talk about social justice, the more they create new categories of people unable to fend for themselves and completely dependent on state handouts. Indeed Professor Fukuyama's historical stasis lasted little more than a decade. Back in the 1990s it seemed the European Union and North America would gradually converge on the kind of liberal social democracy I could live with and we only had to contend with environmental challenges and regional conflicts that we viewed as hangovers from an intolerant past. However, the emerging transnational elites did not seem content just to make our existing nation states work better in the interests of their citizens, they wanted to replace nation states, the very bedrock of liberal democracy, with regional superstates that would eventually merge into a one world government. This is not some wild conspiracy theory either, mainstream social scientists now openly advocate a borderless world (See the Nation State is an Outdated Concept ). Their only concern is how to sell their postmodern vision of a homogenised world run by enlightened technocrats to the underclasses, still inconveniently attached to their traditional ways.

Parallel Visions of the Future

In the back of my mind I've long had three dystopian visions of our future. One is an Orwellian future of absolute state control. Orwell certainly learned much from his experiences in the poverty-stricken European cities of the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War and working in the BBC's war propaganda department during the 4 short years of the Anglo-Soviet Agreement. Orwell saw how the Soviet system merely empowered a new ruling class and perhaps by 1948 had concluded that the Western World would soon emulate the Soviet model. Yet his dystopia lacked sophistication and relied on rather conspicuous means of social surveillance. Aldous Huxley's 1931 Brave New World seemed for many years little more than a far-fetched sci-fi dystopia that the forces of democracy and liberalism would avert long before the necessary technology became available. Aldous Huxley's techno-optimism would be blunted by another world war, the 1970s oil crisis and apparent limits to technological progress. My third dystopian scenario would involve no hidden agendas or conspiracies, merely systemic breakdown as technology fails to meet growing demand. James Howard Kunstler is probably one of the most outspoken technopessimists on the planet. He's written extensively on the myopic idiocy of suburbia (Geography of Nowhere) and the coming energy crisis (The Long Emergency). Others such as Richard Heinberg, author of the Party's Over and exponent of the peak oil theory, are a little more upbeat as long as we transition to renewable energy, cut consumption and stabilise our population. However, their dire predictions of economic collapse have yet to materialise. The global economy may be built on debt, but the Chinese, Indian, Brazilian and Nigerian economies have continued to grow as have the number of cars, refrigerators and mobile phones. Our enlightened elites may talk about the dangers of climate change, but they are going literally full steam ahead with their global economic growth plans. We may not see it quite that way in the formerly affluent West, but Nigeria's largest city Lagos is now a sprawling metropolis with over ten million inhabitants and multilane superhighways while India now has nearly as many smartphones as it has inhabitants.

Infantile Left and Paranoid Right

Before the Internet age had begun in earnest, environmental depredation and techno-totalitarianism presented only challenges that transcended traditional political divides. Environmentalism, to me, meant a concern for the long-term sustainability and wellbeing of our society, rather than short-term economic growth. Likewise concern about techno-totalitarianism appealed to traditional liberal values of free speech and individual freedom. I first became aware of political correctness in the early 1990s. Honestly, it just seemed a joke. I really could not see anything wrong with saying chairperson rather than chairman, and never approved of disparaging ethnic markers. Little did I know that hackneyed politically correct speech would soon usher in an age of Orwellian language police and a new concept of hate speech that could suppress viewpoints that would have been mainstream only a couple of decades ago. Today feminists such as Germaine Greer are silenced for expressing honest opinions about transsexuals.

The 1990s may have been a relatively tranquil era for Western Europeans and North Americans, but peace was a short-lived illusion. Civil wars continued to rage in the former Yugoslavia and more catastrophically in the Congo, Rwanda, Somalia and much of Central Asia. Under Boris Yeltsin former KGB apparatchiks made billions by taking over former state enterprises, while millions of ordinary Russians starved or froze to death. As bad as the Soviet Union may have been, since the famines of the 1930s and the devastating death toll of the Second World War, the state had tried to provide all citizens with food, shelter and heating. Only the allure of mass consumerism and greater trade with the outside world prevented Russians from voting their former communist masters back into power. Vladimir Putin seemed the natural successor to an increasingly unpopular and alcoholic Boris Yeltsin. As Russia regained confidence and Putin cracked down on the worst abuses of the country's gangster oligarchs, many of whom left Russia for the US, UK or Israel, Western leaders would wine and dine him for Russia remained a mere shadow of its former self, while NATO had expanded as far as the Baltic States with US military bases in neighbouring Uzbekistan and Mongolia. However, Russia today has turned its back on top-down state control and ironically is more closely aligned with the kind of conservative mentality of strong families, patriotism and minimalistic government common in 1950s USA, while the United States is moving in the opposite direction towards more state and/or corporate control. In 2014 the Russian State account for just 35% of its GDP compared to 48% in the UK, 56% in France and 41% in the US.

Many on the left, or notional left to be more precise, failed to understand the true purpose of New Labour. We criticised it for being too neoliberal and not radical enough. Neoliberal had come to refer to a strand of free market capitalism that wanted to dismantle the welfare state and empower global corporations. At least that was how it seemed in the Thatcher years. To the left, neoliberalism was rightwing and only liberal in terms of the freedom it afforded big business. However, the role of government never really shrank, not even under Margaret Thatcher's premiership. Welfare and social services continued to grow throughout the 1980s. Inefficient nationalised industries such as steel, coal and car manufacturing were privatised as were later telecoms, railways, electricity and water suppliers, but this masked the growth of transnational organisations responsible for managing every aspect of our lives. Contractors such as Serco, G4S, Capita and Veolia began to run public services as diverse as prisons, refuse collection and accounting. A growing proportion of workers did not make anything or provide any essential services, they just micromanaged a hypercomplex system. More startling has been the growth of the third sector and a vast maze of awareness raising pressure groups and charities who fill a void left by the demise of traditional family and community support structures to cope with permanent social insecurity. Neoliberalism has not led to a new era of individual freedom and small-scale private enterprise, but rather to a steady transfer of power away from traditional nation states, who may intervene to defend local small businesses, to global corporations. Today most small businesses are effectively freelance service providers or skilled workers whose contracts with big business can be terminated at short notice.

However, on lifestyle issues the neoliberal intelligentsia seem perfectly aligned with the trendy left. I only became active on Twitter in 2014, but one of my earliest followers was one Andy Woodfield, who heads up the diversity team of Price Waterhouse Cooper. His tweets are uncomprimisingly positive about all aspects of globalisation and social engineering. I think the PwC language police are in the process of phasing out the adjective ungood as it might trigger the occasional critical thought. Why would an audit firm such as PwC, founded to help large corporations avoid tax, be so concerned with promoting the misnamed Equality and Diversity agenda? Shouldn't PwC just focus on its core business of accounting? Besides how can they afford such plush and spacious offices in some of the world's most expensive cities? I used to walk past their shiny office building sandwiched between the Houses of Parliament, City Hall and Ernst and Young's London HQ. The truth is tax consultancy is only a small part of their operations. Their true role is the creation of a new world order that serves the long-term interests of their corporate clients. They're in the change management business, overseeing the suppression of traditional cultures and their replacement with a global culture of socially engineered psychoanalysed individuals. Big business has now coopted the language of the old anti-establishment left. They claim to want a fairer, greener, more egalitarian, more inclusive and simply nicer world. Monsanto wants to tackle hunger through biotechnology. Starbucks wants to help African coffee growers through its fairtrade brands. Facebook wants to combat racism, misogyny and homophobia by monitoring social network posts, while HSBC helps young people set up small businesses. Happy consumers can help by choosing brands that reflect ethical responsibility and positive change. Indeed in the mindset of the metropolitan elite, the only bad guys are those who want to limit the freedom of our benevolent global corporations, such as Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump or Bashar Al-Assad. These are the Orwellian Emmanuel Goldsteins of our era, people every progressive person should hate.

Most on the left have long ceased to oppose global corporatocracy. They still rant and rave against greedy energy companies and CEOs, but their main gripe these days is that corporations do not pay enough tax. Translated into English this means the do-gooder left worries that some branches of the global mafia do not sufficiently subsidise local branches of the global mafia. As it happens it's not in the interests of global retailers such as Amazon for Europeans or North Americans to be so poor that we can't afford to buy their goods online any more. They are perfectly cognisant of the fact that the next wave of automation will render most jobs in manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, food processing and even catering obsolete. Big business needs big government not only to subsidise its customers, but also regulate their behaviour through education, social services, psychiatry and policing. The tamed masses need do be given the illusion of democratic control. Whenever a local government reaches a new social engineering milestone, the progressive classes give themselves a pat on the back as if a grassroots movement has just achieved a breakthrough. Likewise whenever a new technology enables a new service or consumer experience, big business can present itself as a force for social progress. Manufacturers no longer need us as workers, only as loyal consumers and marketers. We should have seen it coming. Right through the first decade of the millennium I marvelled as manufacturers continued to outsource production and lay off workers, while retailers expanded. How can we have an economy in which people only sell products and services, but don't make anything? I wondered. In a traditional capitalist economy my observation would be perfectly correct. The retail economy relies on wealth ultimately generated by the productive economy, which is increasingly in the hands of global corporations. So why should the likes of Amazon pay more taxes to subsidise consumption in the UK if its real wealth comes from all over the world? Why should it not subsidise Kenyans or Peruvians? Why should it not support social engineering to encourage more people to flock to regions where consumer culture already reigns supreme?

The real political divide is no longer between left and right. It's between conformists and anti-conformists, globalists and nativists, establishment cheerleaders and anti-authoritarians. If you trust the new coalition between statists and corporatists, your rhetoric may sound progressive but you are unmistakably conformist. I, on the other hand, remain a free thinker and support whatever policies seem to redress the balance of power away from unaccountable elites to people like you and me and more important lead to the kind of sustainable society that can best safeguard the future of our descendants.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

On the Brink of War

As we stand on the brink of World War Three over Russian involvement in the Syrian quagmire, our mainstream media feeds us with a steady diet of disinformation about the true causes of death and destruction in the Middle East while entertaining us with juicy stories of sexual misconduct of US presidential candidates. In one of the most controversial elections in recent American history, US voters face a choice between a flamboyant billionaire entrepreneur and a puppet of billionaire bankers and autocratic oil sheiks.

Sometimes in life you have to choose the lesser of two evils, make a pragmatic choice to prevent an outcome that could literally kill tens of millions and enslave billions. As the saying goes: better the devil you know than the devil you don't. The trouble is which candidate is more likely to lead us to unchartered territory? I've probably spent much of my adult life opposing the military adventurism of the world's strongest superpower, the United States of America, as well as the wasteful mass consumerism that its leading big businesses promote worldwide. In other ways, I was glad to see the demise of despotic Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the temporary triumph of the liberal values of intellectual freedom and personal liberty. It's hard to reconcile the apparent fairness of collectivism with the freedom of individualism, i.e. the right to keep the government out of your private life, a kind of personal or familial right of self-determination. A minimalist state simply ensures free people can conduct business in a peaceful and respectful way, namely it enforces property rights and outlaws obvious evils such as murder and theft. In practice Adam Smith's concept of a laissez-faire free market has never existed. Capitalism, as Marx correctly observed, tends towards oligopolies. Nonetheless, in theory at least during the Cold War years of my youth, Western countries allowed individuals, families and small communities greater freedom to do their own thing, provided they did not infringe the rights and privacy of others. If you want to live in a vegan naturist hippy commune, that's fine as long as you respect your neighbours' wishes not to hear your loud music or see you frolicking around your front garden stark naked. If you want to roam the countryside on your motorbike, that's also fine as long as you respect other people's privacy and lifestyle choices. A prosperous country with plenty of open space and resources can more easily afford to grant its people greater personal freedom and that includes freedom of religious and philosophical expression. My ideal world would maximise social justice, individual freedom and environmental responsibility. But only a fool would pretend that pursuing one goal, such as social justice, does not have trade-offs.

Some may wonder what the world would be like today if the Soviet Union had won the great battle of ideologies over Western Capitalism, as we called it. In truth it could not have won, because its inflexible command economy and coercive state administration stifled the kind of competitive technological innovation that spearheaded the micro-computer revolution and led to previously unimaginable levels of industrial automation and efficiency. Whatever its comparative advantages, the Soviet Union simply failed to deliver the goods. Mysteriously the Communist Party of China remained firmly in control as it embraced one of the most virulent forms of free market capitalism that has enriched a growing class of billionaire entrepreneurs reliant on a massive oversupply of obedient loyal workers accustomed to very low wages. Since the late 1980s, China has retained its status as one of the USA's most favoured trading partners. Big business positively loves the Chinese model with fewer inconvenient environmental regulations, but a much more compliant workforce. All the big North American and European players from Microsoft, Apple, Monsanto, VW, General Motors to Siemens have a big presence in China.

I've long remained largely agnostic about most US presidential elections. Both Democrat and Republican administrations have pursued the same meddlesome foreign policies. The Clinton Administration continued to enforce a no-fly zone over Iraq and impose sanctions that cost as many as a million lives during the 1990s and pursued disastrous interventions in the Balkans under the pretext of humanitarianism. I seriously doubt if Al Gore had won the 2000 Presidential Election, that hawks in the State Department would not have driven the US to invade and occupy Afghanistan and Iraq. Any disagreements between mainstream Democrats and Republicans were strategic, not substantive. In the event both Tony Blair and Hillary Clinton supported the invasion of Iraq. Then 6 years later when Hillary became Secretary of State, she oversaw the destabilisation of Libya and Syria by arming and funding rebel militias to unseat stable, but admittedly, autocratic regimes, with whom the West used to do business. The 1993–2000 Clinton administration successfully sold the concept of humanitarian bombing as part of a new era of global harmony, in which transnational corporations and supranational organisations would come together to build a better future. We need only look at their marketing campaigns. Barrack Obama simply campaigned on the need for change, without specifying just what such change might involve. Eight years later Hillary Clinton has seemingly recycled a slogan for the EU Referendum “Stronger Togetherâ€. In hindsight I suspect historians will rate Barrack Obama as ineffectual half-hearted president who let lobbyists make all his key policy decisions. He had to placate the strong strand of conservative opinion in his country while promoting a radical agenda of socio-cultural change that clearly suited other lobbies.

The first thing that caught my attention on my first visit to the States in 1994 was the country's unabashed nationalism. Patriot is not a boo word in America. Everyone claims to be a patriot and flies the Stars and Stripes with pride unconcerned about its possible association with a global empire. To an outsider the USA may be a hegemonic commercial and military superpower intent on projecting its influence on all other countries and cultures. To others it may be the ultimate bastion of freedom. Yet ordinary Americans, who often take great pride in their hyphenated heritage from other continents, seem pretty unconcerned about the rest of the world. The further you venture away from cosmopolitan metropolises, the more you become aware of the quaint traditionalism of many rural Americans. Do they want to bomb Syria to the stone age to impose a new regime that will allow multinational businesses unfettered access to new markets and spread the kind of consumer fetishism and narcissism that many religious Americans have learned to despise? The short answer is no, but they can be persuaded to support military action against the enemies of freedom, not least because many Americans are the descendants of those who fled autocratic regimes. These are the Americans who hesitated to support their government's entanglement in the European wars of the first half of the 20th century, but seemed to happy to support a vast expansion of the military industrial complex to defeat the Soviet Union. Most conservative Americans support policies they believe will keep the government out of their lives, except to maintain essential infrastructure such as roads and schools. Yet it saddens me to report that the great American Dream of personal freedom and civic responsibility is dying and fast yielding to a new culture of rampant corporatism that works in tandem with big government to bring the entire global populace under its yoke.

As I watch hardly any mainstream TV, Donald Trump meant very little to me until late 2015. He comes across as an arrogant showman entrepreneur, often appealing to the lowest common denominator. Clearly his rhetoric talks to vast swathes of American public opinion that have lost faith in the mainstream liberal media, but lacks depth and panders to numerous lobbies and entrenched American prejudices. I instinctively distrust anyone who promises miracles without explaining how they intend to bring them about. In American English the adjective liberal denotes what we might call leftwing or even socialist on this side of the big pond. American liberals may theoretically support sexual freedom, especially if it promotes non-traditional family structures, but they also advocate greater government intervention and social regulation to pursue their goal of social justice and build a new society liberated from anachronistic prejudices and social attitudes. Invariably American liberals support higher levels of immigration. The USA is genuinely a country built on migration, but also on ethnic cleansing, partial genocide, slavery and unsustainable levels of consumption. If Making America Great Again means returning to the 1950s heyday of Middle Class prosperity, stable families and gas-guzzling automotive freedom, resembling the innocent hedonism portrayed in Happy Days, then millions of Americans will be very disappointed whoever wins the presidential election. Those times ain't coming back folks, but one of Trump's slogans does strike a chord, “Americanism not Globalismâ€.

In the early noughties alternative media widely reported Donald Rumsfeld's Project for a New American Century. As we progress into the latter half of this century's second decade, the balance of global power has shifted away from the United States to China, India, Russia and a new emerging global world order. The 20th century saw the demise of the British and French empires and the rise of North American commercial and cultural power. Despite fluctuating commodity prices, every year the USA's share of the global GDP has declined. While it accounted 27% of the world economy in 1950, by 2020 the USA will have just 14% of the global GDP despite a fast-growing population. While the top 5 to 10% have grown richer, the great middle class has been squeezed. Tens of millions of US citizens depends either on social welfare or on low pay, as traditional manufacturing jobs have fled abroad. While once America seemed to have an unlimited capacity to share its natural treasures with new waves of immigrants, it now relies on imported resources to sustain growing demand that has to sustain more people. Yet the country's liberal elites do not care about defending the interests of working class Americans. They did not benefit from the three trillion dollars squandered on nation building in Iraq, except by delaying an inevitable transition away from fossil fuels to more renewable sources of energy and greater efficiency. They certainly will not benefit from the destabilisation of the Middle East and the never-ending flow of economic migrants and refugees desperate to experience the American Dream, only to be engulfed in a 21st century welfare ghetto.

Were I a US citizen, my conscience would probably tell me to vote for the Green candidate Jill Stein. While she opposes US military adventurism and overconsumption, like her European partners, she favours relaxed immigration and panders to the vacuous agenda-setting politics of social justice (which basically means more social workers and greater social surveillance). I sincerely hope she takes more votes from idealistic Sanders supporters who might otherwise support Hillary Clinton.

George W Bush did not represent the true American conservative tradition. He may have pandered to this constituency by delaying social engineering milestones such as not allowing embryonic stem cells or gay marriage (both were just a matter of time), but he oversaw record immigration levels while recklessly attempting to impose neoliberalism on the Middle East. Ever since the 2008 banking meltdown the US economy has been powered largely by a mix Keynsian quantitive easing and the creative accounting of its high-tech multinationals, whose operations are now global and thus not affected with the parochial concerns of unemployed blue collar workers.

Meanwhile Hillary Clinton's handlers, such as banking billionaire George Soros, are much more concerned with neutralising strong nation states. The new bogeyman is Russia's Vladimir Putin. The same media that sold us wars in various Central Asian and Middle East countries have found their new Hitler, who some conservative leaders are accused of appeasing. If you believe the CNN, the Guardian or countless books bemoaning a resurgent nationalist Russia, then Putin is set not only march into the Baltic States and Eastern Ukraine, but to conquer the Middle East via an alliance with Iran. Except Russia has no need of privileged access to their resources. It already has vast territory and natural resources as well as a highly educated citizenry and very low population density. Corruption may well be rife in Russia, but it is hardly absent from North America or Western Europe. If you're concerned about grotesque human rights abuses, such as murdering gays or stoning adulterous women, look no further than Middle East or the Islamic parts of Africa and Asia. Why should American workers support their government's obsession with deposing the secular regime in Syria by funding terrorists and potentially triggering a nuclear conflagration with a regional superpower, Russia, that does not threaten the security of American citizens ?

Which presidential candidate is most likely to lead the US to an all-out war with Putin? None other than George Soros' s puppet. Whatever his faults, Donald Trump would be more likely to strike a deal with Russia to protect the US from the very real threats of Islamic fundamentalism and China's growing economic dominance. Whoever wins, the era of American exceptionalism is over. The global elites support Clinton, but I doubt they have the best interests of ordinary American people at heart.

Categories
All in the Mind Computing Power Dynamics

Universal Welfare vs Individual Freedom

Cybernetic servant

Would global corporations bankroll a universal welfare system without seeking to control our lives?

Imagine a society that not only provided all your existential needs, but also gave you wide-ranging lifestyle freedoms and did not compel you to hold down a mundane job just to afford the necessities of life. This usually means clean water, food and shelter, but nowadays we could probably add a few more goods and services to our list of bare essentials. In Western Europe a minimum viable standard of living would include a cooker, fridge, washing machine, a shower with hot and cold running water, heating and last but not least telecommunications devices to enable everyone to stay in touch and enjoy 24/7 access to the world's media. In the not too distant past many ordinary Western Europeans had to make do without all the latest mod cons just so we could afford the basics, like food. If you couldn't afford a washing machine, you could always take your dirty clothes to a laundrette. If you couldn't afford a television set, you could always listen to an inexpensive radio or read a book borrowed from the library. If you could not afford to buy or rent a place of your own, your employer might provide temporary digs. Indeed the whole concept of a universal right to a minimum standard of living via state welfare is relatively recent. Until the early 20th century the church would have provided emergency accommodation for the respectful needy, but by and large the destitute only had two escape routes. They could find casual work at the going rate or, in the case of attractive young women, seek an affable husband. In either case the underlings had to show deference to the hand that would feed them. The only way to free oneself from the tyranny of bosses or financially dominant spouses was, and I suggest still is, to have the means to feed oneself. A smallholder may own just a few fields, work long hours to raise livestock and tend crops, but at least he's his own boss and, in a country that respects personal freedom, may lead his life as he chooses provided he respect the privacy and freedom of his neighbours and adheres to common etiquette of decency and courtesy when engaging with the wider community. I use the third person male pronoun here because historically women from humble backgrounds would aspire to motherhood rather than self-sufficiency without a husband. Nonetheless, most smallholdings were family concerns. Husbands and wives worked as a team and although men tended to work longer hours outdoors and do more of the heavy lifting, few could doubt the pivotal role that women played in raising the next generation.

For most of human history, unless you inherited considerable wealth, your only route to greater personal freedom was through hard work and dedication. All most people expected of their state was to safeguard their acquired rights and protect them against raiders who may seize the fruits of their labour. Before the industrial revolution the greatest liberation for most peasants was to unshackle themselves from the burdens of slavery or sharecropping and to cease being in debt to a feudal master. However, with the advent of capitalism and the growth of a working class wholly dependent on their employers, the downtrodden embraced the appeal of collectivism. If technological progress demanded extreme specialisation, growing interdependence and massive infrastructure that only large organisations could conceivably provide, then our future freedom logically depends on our ability to control the levers of power for our collective good. Most early workers' struggles focussed on bread and butter issues of survival, primarily working conditions and wages. Workers demanded the right to withdraw their labour and called on their governments to enforce minimum health and safety standards. Nobody denied that everyone had a duty to pull their weight and contribute to wider society by working to the best of their ability. Few anticipated that the underclasses of the future would not be 8 year old boys sent down coal mines or 13 year old girls working as chambermaids, but workless welfare claimants trapped in a cycle of psychological dependence on external authorities who may regulate every aspect their lives. While workers may always withdraw their labour to reassert their rights, welfare dependents are at the mercy of their benefactors.

Extended Childhood

Traditionally two main groups of commoners were exempted from the onus of work: the very young and the very old. While children have to mature physically and mentally and learn some core skills before their induction into the adult world, the elderly have earned their keep through a life of dedication to their family and community. Even in primitive societies young children play and the old relax and share their wisdom. As the industrial age progressed, businesses began to rely more on technical and intellectual skills and a less on sheer muscle power. Capitalist countries expanded mandatory schooling not just to appease demands for greater social justice, but to equip industry with a literate workforce better able to meet the challenges of greater technical complexity, which even in relatively low-skill jobs involved reading and understanding detailed instructions. Not until 1921 did the UK implement the Fisher Act raising the compulsory school age to 14. It took another 52 years for the school leaving age to rise to 16. Today over 90% of British teenagers remain in education or training at least until the age of 18, while those advancing to further education, has risen from around 10% in 1970 to 45% today. While the needs of business have changed, the UK has a massive undersupply of engineers and technicians and an oversupply of graduates in people management, marketing, psychology, law and humanities in general. Yet employers still complain about graduates with poor writing or number-crunching skills. Not surprisingly we've seen a fair amount of grade inflation and degrees from all but the best universities have been greatly devalued. As a result most graduates do not pursue their desired career. Not everyone can be a sports journalist or an equality and diversity training officer. Long gone are the days of secure permanent jobs where one could progress from an apprenticeship and work one's way through the ranks to attain well-remunerated senior role. Now many university graduates find themselves in a similar position to that of schools leavers only 30 years ago. They have to try their hands at a series of uninspiring low-paid jobs before they find an opening in a role vaguely related to their degree. Many may have to retrain in something more practical, such as nursing or plumbing, once they become aware of the limited commercial value of their sociology degree. Only a small minority of graduates, and it's hard to quantify just how few, have acquired the kind of scientific excellence we will need in the coming artificial intelligence revolution. We now employ more people to manage other people or to create ephemeral media campaigns than to develop and produce the technology we will need to survive and overcome environmental constraints on human development in the coming century. Today we have more persuaders than doers or more talkers than walkers.

The future of work

Much of Britain's manufacturing base has migrated abroad since the 1970s. Today's factories are more automated and mainly assemble or just repackage components made elsewhere. Owing to rapid technological innovation, product lines tend to have short lifespans and production facilities are regularly retooled along with their workforce, who are now viewed as expendable free agents. This helps explain the rise of agency workers and employers' preference for itinerant workers without local roots. As soon as advances in robotics can automate operations in a cost-effective manner, management can lay off most human workers. Driverless vehicles are already a reality. We merely need to perfect artificial intelligence to ensure their reliability in challenging and unpredictable traffic conditions. The writing is on the wall for long distance truck drivers and for millions of other skilled workers, whose monotonous occupations follow a programmable set of routines and respond to a predictable range of environmental stimuli. I suspect in the not too distant future smart vacuum cleaners will be versatile enough to climb stairs and automatically adapt to different floor types, reach into nooks and crannies and potentially call another robot to move furniture. In all likelihood most robots will not resemble human beings at all, but will be polymorphic with a multitude of attachments and tools for different tasks. Unlike human beings they will be easily serviceable and reprogrammable. Even the world's oldest freelance profession, often not so euphemistically categorised as sex work, now faces competition from lifelike erotic dolls.

However, the main stumbling block to the adoption of robotics is not the theoretical feasibility of artificial intelligence and nanotechnology, but the collapse of our underlying industrial infrastructure due to our gross mismanagement of finite resources and our inability to develop safe renewable energy able to meet our growing demands. We have probably already passed peak oil and over the coming 50 years we're likely to hit a peak human population of 10 billion. If we factor in the threats of climate change, clean water shortages in the areas of fastest population growth and insatiable demand for cars and other consumer goods in the developing world, we clearly face unprecedented environmental challenges that can only be addressed by taming human behaviour or significantly boosting industrial efficiency. Short of colonising other planets, the alternative may well be a world war over control of mission-critical resources.

Work and Society

Many think of work as drudgery we endure to earn a living. We would rather relax or pursue hobbies that inspire us. Few of us would enjoy getting down on our hands and knees to scrub the kitchen floor or crawling through narrow underground tunnels to mine coal. Yet during the early industrial revolutions millions of working class women and men had to endure these conditions just to fend for themselves and their children. When millions lost their jobs in the great depression of 1930s, the fledgling welfare state offered little consolation. Without work millions felt completely unfulfilled and would go to extraordinary lengths to relieve themselves of the shame and stigma associated with joblessness. The Jarrow March of 1936, ironically as the economy was picking up again in Britain, exemplified social attitudes of the era. Workers did not expect luxuries or endless charity, they just demanded a chance to earn a living to restore their dignity. The post-war boom of the 1950s and 1960s was built largely on a skilled working class whose earnings and leisure time rose as technological advances began to favour intellect and proficiency and over muscle-power and perseverance. It was a short-lived age of full employment, stable families and a narrowing social divide, unfortunately reliant on state subsidies and trade barriers to protect workers from unfair competition and unregulated market forces. Big business soon realised it could no longer boost its profits and expand markets in such a protectionist environment, holding it often at the mercy of militant trade unions. By the early 1970s UK industry had become both outdated and notoriously inefficient compared to their German, Japanese or Korean competitors. As the pendulum swung from protected markets and state-subsidised industries to free market economics, much of British manufacturing moved abroad. While some former manufacturing workers moved to the growing service sector, many were left behind. While material living standards have continued to grow, since the 1980s we've seen a widening gap not just in terms of wealth, but in education and personal attainment. The emergence of the trendy professional classes as the mainstay of our economic and cultural activity may well be but a harbinger of things to come. By 2012 over 60% of workers were tax-negative, i.e. received more benefits and direct services than they paid in tax. If we take into account indirect services consumed, the situation is even more unequal and this disparity is growing. By 2014 the top 25% of earners paid 75% of income tax and the 1% alone paid over a quarter. The only way of closing the income gap is to close the education gap, not in terms of nominal qualifications or years of formal schooling, but in terms of ensuring a much larger proportion of the population acquire the kind of intellectual and social skills we will need in the cybernetic age.

Today the descendants of the old Labour movement not only champion welfare rights, but assume a great many working age adults will never be gainfully employed owing to mental or physical disabilities, concepts which are now much more loosely and widely understood than in the recent past. In the future most work will be either intellectual or social, requiring us to focus our creative and emotional skills and effort on endeavours that serve the wider social good rather just satisfy personal desires. An ideal job is one that you both enjoy and can help others. Your material or financial reward for your effort is a direct measure of its utility to the current socio-economic system. If you possess a rare talent the reward for your creative endeavours may be substantial. Thus an elite of sportspeople and entertainers can earn a fortune simply due to the inertia of market forces. While Premier League footballers may have to train regularly and exert themselves for 90 minutes on the pitch before chanting fans, a hospital cleaner will typically exert much more effort for a fraction of the income. Yet people's lives may depend on clean hospitals, but not on the outcome of a soccer match. Your salary is mainly of a function of your expendability. To what extent is your role mission-critical to your employer? If your employer is a major football club earning tens of millions of pounds in advertising revenue, broadcasting rights and ticket sales, their main concern is your ability to help win games and keep their investors and customers happy. While millions can play football, only a few hundred in the whole wide world possess the kind of rare talent that can make or break a sports entertainment business and a handful can command eye-watering sums, such as the record £89 million Manchester United paid for French international, Paul Pogba. That figure could employ around 4700 hospital cleaners on the national living wage and is a staggering 280 thousand times greater than the mean GDP per capita of Paul Pogba's parental homeland of Guinea. A hospital cleaner can be replaced literally at the drop of a hat, while a world-leading football striker cannot. Gone are the days when hospital cleaners could go on strike for more pay. These services are now predominantly outsourced to agencies. Back in the 1960s and 70s public institutions saw it as their duty not only to provide public services, but also to employ local workers who might get a much worse deal in the private sector. These days a hospital does not employ cleaners, it has a contract with an agency, which in turn procures the best human or technical resources for the job at hand. I recall working in the BBC's plush open plan offices in London's White City. At 7pm every weekday evening when most staff had left, a team of mainly Portuguese speaking cleaners would mop up the mess left by higher-paid BBC staffers. I know this because on one occasion their supervisor had to impart bilingual instructions to accommodate an agency worker from Ghana, who didn't speak Portuguese, but this was in the heart of English speaking world. Yet the same BBC struggles to admit the impact of globalisation on lower-skilled native workers (most of whom deserted the capital decades ago and could not afford to return). Currently machine-assisted human cleaners are still more cost-effective than robots, but as robots become smarter and more versatile human workers will focus more on supervisory and engineering roles. That leaves very little for those of us who do not possess exceptional analytical, creative or people management skills.

Most of us are what social researchers might call semi-skilled, i.e. we've acquired many practical skills through hands-on experience, but lack outstanding talents that set us apart from the crowd. In the recent past some semi-skilled labourers, without formal qualifications in their line of expertise, honed their skills to such an extent as to become invaluable to their employers or clientele, but with outsourcing and automation we've lost much of that traditional skills base for good. Many semi-skilled workers may well have much more experience than a someone who has been formerly trained, but their skills can be easily learned not just by millions of other workers, but by machines. Millions of us enjoy cooking from fresh ingredients, but it's often much more cost-effective just to buy a ready-made meal. Once we rely supermarkets to supply food, it makes little difference if a machine prepares an elaborate recipe from fresh ingredients or we do it ourselves from separately purchased ingredients. In many practical instances ready-made meals are both cheaper and healthier as otherwise you'd have to buy much larger quantities of the source ingredients, which may well go off before you have a chance to eat them. Fast food outlets have already automated most aspects of food preparation. In the near future human chefs will be a luxury available only to the affluent professional classes, but with more leisure time many will still prefer to engage in a little culinary therapy.

More disturbingly the two dominant narratives of public debate on economics and employment could both prove wrong. Global optimists keep reminding us how our growing economies, reliant on extreme labour mobility, can provide new opportunities for all, while identitarian populists from Donald Trump in the USA to Marine Le Pen in France pretend manufacturing jobs can somehow be repatriated. In reality outsourcing menial tasks to low-wage workers is just a stop-gap solution until robotics becomes more competitive. However, if big business no longer needs semi-skilled labour and only requires a select group of engineers, creatives, managers and entertainers, who is going to buy their products?

Universal Welfare

The answer, so the wishful thinking trendy left tell us, is a universal basic income. I fully appreciate its appeal and take on board the argument that by guaranteeing everyone a basic income we remove not just the stigma associated with joblessness and the humiliation of holding down low-paid non-jobs (burger flippers, shelf stackers or call centre operatives), but we also greatly reduce the immense administrative costs of our current welfare system. Essentially the government would just give everyone a basic income that guarantees a minimum standard of living. If you want more you can undertake paid employment or may be inspired to volunteer in the ever-expanding third sector (charities, campaign groups, NGOs etc.), a great CV-booster when you do decide to get a real job. If you just want to take it easy, you can still survive on your basic income with no questions asked. It would also prevent people from claiming disability status due to some perceived relative handicap, which is really just a natural variation in the human condition or the result of acquired behaviour. However, short of a global revolution bringing all multinationals into public ownership and guaranteeing full transparency and accountability of all organisations responsible for our wellbeing, I think we need to take into account human nature. The strongest basic income evangelists insist it would allow people to unleash their creative minds without fear of losing their salary. Such idealists imagine the world as an extended high-tech hippie commune cum university campus. Were we all sandal-wearing bicycling vegans taking time off to write a book on the history of Mesopotamian basket weaving the basic income would be a great idea. Alas deprived of any motivation to focus one's creative efforts on something useful, most adults will succumb to a blend of junk culture and social gaming, no longer competing on skills, but on personality and worthiness. Our aim in life will no longer be to provide for our family through hard work, but merely to ensure we can gain the same emotional privileges. This helps explain the rise of social justice warriors with a bloated sense of entitlement. The great struggles against real injustice of the past (against slavery, imperialism, starvation wages, misogyny, racism etc.) will descend into a farce as most citizens will become mere beneficiaries of corporate welfare enjoying an extended childhood and just like children, their freedom will be at the mercy of their guardians, the technocratic and managerial elites. If the masses remain blissfully unaware of the activities of the regulating classes, they will be lulled into a false sense of security and treated like children, i.e. rewarded for good compliant behaviour and penalised for antisocial behaviour. Until the late 20th century most societies relied on the labour of the underclasses. Without ordinary workers, crops would not be harvested, houses would not be built, machinery would not be maintained, food would not be processed and distributed, infrastructure would crumble and people would starve. If the underclasses cannot produce a surplus of food, housing and tools, the ruling classes cannot accumulate the wealth they need to maintain their power and privilege through a network of administrators and security forces. In theory the working classes could hold their rulers to ransom. If their rulers failed to allocate enough resources, the underclasses could either rise up and overthrow their masters or switch allegiance to a rival faction or neighbouring fiefdom, especially if they possessed superior technology. Parents care for their children not only through strong emotional bonds, but also because of their future role as purveyors of the family's wealth for they would soon become workers and parents themselves. By contrast in the age of robotics, the workless underclasses will be mere consumers whose only duty will be to conform to social norms. We may well retain the illusion of democratic control via online elections for the most affable middle managers, but effectively we will be beholden to a technocratic upper caste responsible for programming and administering our cyberservants. Over recent decades we've seen a steady transfer of responsibilities from viable two-parent families to a maze of service providers. If something goes wrong, we tend to blame external agencies whether they are suppliers, manufacturers, safety regulators, doctors, nurses, social workers or teachers, because we have learned to accept that many aspects of our lives are out of our direct control. We have internalised the notion that one has to have special training to perform any task not deemed safe for laypeople. We have lost touch with mother nature to such an extent we are unable to accept its limitations. As robots evolve to undertake forever more complex tasks, we can expect the range of safe jobs to narrow to all but a few closely monitored human activities performed in controlled environments, such as eating, drinking, exercising, relaxing, playing or making love. For years officialdom has tended to discourage the old do-it-yourself attitude, while encouraging people to seek specialists. This may be preparing us psychologically for a future when robots replace technicians, decorators, builders, cleaners, nurses, police officers and other social surveillance officers. However, if only the gifted intelligentsia have any understanding of the inner workings of our high-tech world, how will the rest of us hold them to account? The people of the future could well split into distinctive castes along the lines the dumbed-down Eloi and Morlocks in H.G. Well's Time Machine. Slowly but surely we seem to be sleepwalking towards a Huxleyan future of human beings genetically engineered to assume different roles in a chain of command that only members of alpha caste understand.

Visions of the Future

The current rapid pace of technological and economic progress could lead in two apparently divergent but equally dystopian directions. One the one hand technology fails to meet the insatiable demands of a growing number of consumers either through limits to growth, such as peak oil or climate change, or through cataclysmic technical failures such as nuclear power plant explosions, or indeed a combination of both. Such a scenario may kill hundreds of millions of people, but may also forestall a cybergenetic dystopia of complete submission to technology out of the control of ordinary global denizens. On the one hand technology may evolve so fast to control the excesses of human behaviour and thus render both itself and humanity compatible with our planetary life support system. In other words technology will determine our living standards and, indeed, our procreative potential. Arguably it already does. Only last week the London Telegraph reported that Motherless babies are now possible as scientists create live offspring without a female egg. As always the neoliberal press presents the next step in human genetic engineering as a great advance enabling more couples, such as gay dads, to conceive. The next logical step is an artificial womb, whose development is no longer mere science fiction (See Men redundant? Now we don't need women either ). No doubt artificial uteruses will liberate women from the pain and responsibility of pregnancy, but soon biological genders may become obsolete binary categories that belong to a past age of primitive dependence on messy and inconvenient organic procreation. The affluent cyber-managerial classes will inevitably be able to afford better fertility treatment leading all too predictably to the emergence of a super-race, meaning the underclasses will simply lack the intellect to outsmart their rulers, whether humanoid or not.

The Alternative to Basic Income

If you thought the basic income sounds too good to be true, you're probably right. That's what a majority of shrewd Swiss voters concluded earlier this year. They understood that unless you contribute to the functioning of society, you cannot expect to have any meaningful say in the way it's run. You may well have the illusion of democratic control, but it will more like children choosing which flavour of ice-cream they want or which games they want to play during their birthday party. If they misbehave their true masters will drug them or confine them to their bedrooms. If their life support system fails, all they can do is follow instructions to wait for cybernetic technicians to repair the faults. However, a Huxleyan dystopia is not an inevitability if we wake up to its very real likelihood early enough and ensure all working age adults are directly involved in developing and regulating human-friendly technology. In other words robots should serve us and not vice versa and bioengineering should only ever assist natural human beings as we've evolved over eons. This means preparing the next generation for a high skill future where everyone will have a part to play in the development of our engineered environment. We must be fully aware of the consequences of new technology as the toys of today may become the prison wardens of our near future.

Categories
Power Dynamics

Labour has lost the plot

Labour Logo

The British Labour Party could soon split into a pale imitation of Tony Blair's New Labour and an economically illiterate student protest movement. Jeremy Corbyn's transition from a lifelong backbench rebel to leader of Her Majesty's opposition surprised me. I had admittedly underestimated the popularity of the new wave of leftwing activism. For a short while I rejoiced as at long last we had a Labour leader who would oppose military adventurism and nuclear weapons. Alas Jeremy Corbyn had little choice but to let Labour grandee, Hilary Benn, humiliate him in the debate on bombing ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

First let me lay my cards on the table. My heart clearly lies with the Green Left as, given a choice, I'd favour environmental sustainability and social justice over consumption-led prosperity. I'd rather invest in better public transport and more cycleways than build more motorways or enable more people to buy cars. I'd rather have full employment with most working 10 to 20 hours a week on modest wages than a growing divide between the underclasses on welfare or insecure low-paid jobs and the professional classes. I'd rather cut consumption than rely too much on imported resources. I'd also rather allocate some of my wealth to help people in poorer countries help themselves than live with the consequences of continued economic and environmental instability. Yet my brain recognises that we cannot change our lifestyle overnight for we might well throw away the baby, our cherished liberal society, away with the bathwater and end up in a dystopia with even worse human misery. The problem with the idealist left is its utter failure to recognise that we have to face choices at all, except a fictious battle between the reactionary old guard and our progressive future. They fail to see the contradiction between morbidly obese welfare dependents on mobility scooters in the UK and Zambian children walking 2 miles with a bucket to fetch potable water. To the infantile left, they are both victims with a common enemy, global capitalism, and a common solution, global welfarism.

Britain's vote to leave the European Union revealed the true gulf between public opinion and the predilections of the trendy affluent metropolitan elite. The latter group believe we are on a one way journey to a new brighter tomorrow with more opportunities for all. Their unrelenting optimism is dented only by reactionary conservatives and noncompliant local leaders. Their pet peeves are angry natives, especially those of paler complexion, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and anyone opposed to their dream of a borderless multicultural utopia managed by benevolent NGOs, global corporations and supranational governments.

Yet although Conservative parliamentarians were split down the middle on the EU referendum, they remain one party, largely because they all support variants of crony capitalism within a mixed economy. While Owen Smith calls for a £200 billion British New Deal, the new Tory Chancellor, Phillip Hammond, is actually pursuing Neo-Keynsian quantitive easing with a vigour not seen since Gordon Brown's short-lived administration in the aftermath of the 2008 debt crisis. Tory MPs only really differ on the minutiae of strategy and international alliances. The so-called Eurosceptic wing of the Tory Party actually reflect a large body of conservative public opinion disenchanted with the rapid pace of social, cultural and economic change that has left behind many of the most disadvantaged communities in this country. Recent opinion polls have miraculously favoured the governing party despite a temporary fall in the British pound and much hype about jobs moving abroad as the UK prepares to leave the EU. Labour's share of the popular vote has now fallen as low as 28%, and if it splits, I fear it could fall much lower leaving a vacuum, which the Liberal Democrats rejected by the electorate in 2015, are unlikely to fill. UKIP may have spearheaded the EU Referendum campaign and given voice to widespread public disapproval with unbalanced mass migration, but it offers no coherent policy platform on economics, ecology and defence that can either meet the challenges of the early 21st century or set the party apart from the Tories. While UKIP wrangles over its leadership, it appears too often just to react to cultural changes rather than propose any new solutions other than a few half-baked ideas from Tory think tanks. If we're not lucky, the UK could well have another ten years of Tory rule, probably with an increased majority with the SNP as the only viable opposition. The European Dream is fast fading too as Southern Europe struggles with high unemployment and unsustainable government debt, France teeters on the brink of civil war, Germany grapples with mass immigration from culturally diverse regions and Turkey looks set to unleash another wave of refugees that native Europeans seem unwilling to accommodate.

On the other side of the Big Pond it's often hard to distinguish the idealistic marketing spiel of large high-profile corporations such as Walmart, Coca Cola, Apple, Facebook, GSK or General Motors from the upbeat universalist rhetoric of mainstream Democrat politicians like Hillary Clinton or Barrack Obama. Just as Coca Cola, responsible for much exploitation and ill-health, can champion multiculturalism through its yearly Christmas ads I'd like to Teach the World to Sing, Hillary Clinton can preach social inclusivity before an audience of Africans and Latino Americans. They all seem to sing from the same hymn sheet. Just as Apple may win favour with its customers by railing against authoritarian cyber-surveillance measures, the establishment left may try to score points with the electorate by promising to clamp down on corporate tax evasion. Yet once the left-branded middle managers are in office, they inevitably collude with their big business friends to entrench the hegemony of a planet-wide corporatocracy. However, many observers make a fundamental mistake in assuming only nominally elected representatives have a vested interest in maintaining social peace. While small business owners may only be concerned with their bottom line and their family's wellbeing, big businesses take an active interest in their customers' wellbeing and social stability. As a result the former tend to dislike regulations and punitive taxes, while the latter often help draft these regulations and fiscal regimes to maintain their market dominance and client base. In short big businesses act and behave just like states with multiple tiers of management, surveillance and security forces and complex systems to handle internal conflicts. New Labour hoped to bring about greater social justice in partnership with big business. Tax credits, Gordon Brown's flagship social justice policy, boosted consumer demand and allowed corporations to keep hourly earnings just above the new minimum wage, while property prices and the real cost of living soared.

The two wings of the Labour Party, if we exclude a few old-timers such as Dennis Skinner or Kelvin Hopkins, share the same basic universalist worldview, tend to read the same newspapers and support the same social media campaigns. They only really differ in their romanticism and willingness to openly support the nastier aspects of the military industrial complex. Under Tony Blair, Labour rebranded Western interventionism as humanitarian peacekeeping. While the Parliamentary Labour Party wants to work alongside big business and support the UK's involvement US/NATO military action in the Middle East, Central Asia and elsewhere, the infantile left imagines it can tax the same global corporations that rely on the US military might to secure privileged access to strategic resources and destabilise uncooperative regimes. They somehow imagine they can bring about a fairer and more peaceful society by taxing and regulating the very corporations that generate the immense wealth on which our high consumption economy depends. The infantile left are always the first to oppose cutbacks in welfare provision and defend the general culture of entitlement that underlies their politics of identity and victimhood. Were someone to suggest the NHS should not give psychologically unstable sufferers of gender dysphoria hormone treatment and invasive gender realignment surgery, social justice warriors would be unable to grasp that the same resources could be better used to ensure everyone has access to clean water or to provide meaningful training and employment opportunities for all. Yet such extravagance can only survive thanks to the proceeds of global capitalism. While sufferers of severe emotional distress may be classed as disabled in Britain and thus entitled to disability benefits, in most of the world such people would have little choice but to work, beg or starve. The naive left may paint the Tory government as heartless for withdrawing benefits from hundreds of thousands of long-term recipients of incapacity benefit deemed fit to work, but in most of the wider world they would have never gotten any state subsidies in the first place and could have only relied on their extended family or community support structures.

Personally I think Owen Smith is little more than an opportunist keen to build on his charisma and Welsh background. His employment history with a pharmaceutical multinational, Pfizer, and the BBC as well as his past support for classic Blairite positions merely confirm that he's just an establishment stooge. Yet sadly Jeremy Corbyn, despite his growing fan base among social justice warriors, is unlikely to win back the traditional working class vote haemorrhaged to apathy, UKIP or the Conservatives over the last decade. Voters in Labour's heartlands were more motivated to vote against the European Union than they were to approve of Labour's Neo-Keynsianism. They may well agree with Jeremy Corbyn on renationalising the railways or keeping the NHS in public hands, but they do not trust his clique to provide the economic stability essential to deliver better public healthcare or transport.

For over seventy years, since the watershed of the post-WW2 settlement, not a single social democratic government has successfully challenged corporate power, while delivering its people greater prosperity. The great social democracies of Northern Europe, most notably Sweden, relied on technologically advanced industries and a highly educated homogeneous working class to engineer probably the best compromise between the highly competitive capitalism of the United States and the inflexible command economies of the former Soviet Union. Globalisation, extreme labour market flexibility and rapid technological innovation have undermined this model. Sweden developed its welfare system to give all citizens equal opportunities and a chance to thrive in a high-skill and low-unemployment economy. That seemed to work while labour market protections remained in place and migratory flows were manageable. However, today Sweden hosts large parallel communities of welfare-dependent immigrants who are neither culturally nor economically integrated into mainstream Swedish society. 41% of residents of the city of Malmö now have a foreign background, 31% born abroad and 11% born in Sweden to non-Swedish parents. This represents a seismic demographic change in little more than 20 years. In 1990 the city was overwhelming ethnically Swedish.

Venezuela marked the final nail in the coffin for socialist reformers. Many leftists placed their hopes in Hugo Chavez and later Nicolás Maduro to exploit the country's immense oil wealth to bring about prosperous social democratic society. Indeed in the early years, with record crude oil prices, Chavez's United Socialist Party scored some major successes in redistributing petroleum profits to the country's workless underclasses and expanding education and welfare provision. However, Chavez failed to address the country's lawlessness, its high murder rate and its dependence on oil exports and automotive culture. Rather than invest in economic diversification and infrastructure while oil prices were high, Chavez chose to lower fuel prices, a populist act if ever there was one. When oil prices crashed and profits plummeted, Maduro's government was powerless to prevent a run on the Venezuelan Bolivar, which made imports prohibitively expensive leading to massive shortages of basic foodstuffs and goods. In truth the Socialist Unity Party has never had a monopoly on power and the fiercely anti-socialist opposition controls the national assembly sabotaging much of the government's efforts to steer the country through the crisis. Venezuela's Opposition: Attacking Its Own People. However, the Venezuelan experience should clearly show us that within the confines of global corporatism, there is no alternative other than to steer a middle course by attempting to milk the system, i.e. capture a greater slice of the corporate profits pie to fund a welfare system that essentially supplements corporate rule. Jeremy Corbyn's does not propose nationalising the commanding heights of the economy, but merely returning to public ownership a few loss making services such as the railway operators and water companies. Most of the wealth required to fund public services and welfare would have to come from taxation. Large corporates will always find loopholes to minimise tax while at the same time ensuring compliant governments can provide a minimum level of public services. As a result governments have little choice but to work with major corporations. Failure to do so will result in disinvestment and job losses. In an era of rapid technological innovation, governments can seldom provide the most efficient solutions, but can at best provide the most reliable tried-and-tested conventional technology and prevent the private sector from abusing their power. We'd have to choose a radically different model of development that would require an enhanced state of human solidarity to break free from our reliance on big business.

Unholy Alliance

Labour represents little more than a brand, built around a set of appealing ideals that others have coopted. The electorate is smart enough to realise that big business really runs the show and is just choosing middle managers to negotiate with big corporations and special interest groups. Today the party is an unholy alliance of 4 to 5 disparate groups:

  1. Traditional Blue Labour, patriotic but committed to representing their own people. Today this faction is best embodied by Frank Field, one of the few Labour MPs to oppose the EU and mass immigration, while campaigning for welfare reform that would empower the underclasses. This small clique sees itself running in the footsteps of Clement Attlee, Hugh Gaitskell, Harold Wilson and Denis Healey. Socially conservative, pragmatic, cautious and pro-NATO, they seek the best deal possible for ordinary working people, but have become a bit of an anachronism.
  2. Traditional Red Labour, best embodied by Kelvin Hopkins, Kate Hoey and Paul Flynn MP, critical of big business, keen on international solidarity but also supporters of economic protectionism and aware migration must be both balanced and sustainable. This group is unlikely to ever leave Labour unless it becomes electorally insignificant. Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell may have once seemed part of this group, but have preferred the politics of idealist posturing over the more classic positions of the Bennite left. The late Robin Cook made a historic compromise with New Labour by supporting NATO intervention in the Balkan Wars, but soon grew critical of their misdemeanours over Iraq. Were he still alive today, he may not just have saved Labour in Scotland, but may have helped Labour steer in a new direction, that is neither trendy left nor neoliberal right.
  3. The Populist Left: A small clique at Westminster, but with wider support among leftwing activists nationally, this group believe government has the power to instruct big business to pay more taxes and subsidise their vision of a welfare utopia, international solidarity and open borders. They somehow see no contradiction in welcoming more migration from Islamic countries and the championing of gay rights or the preservation of greenbelt from either more housebuilding or hydraulic fracturing. Their politics are as impractical as Natalie Bennett's Greens and would sadly hurt some of the most vulnerable communities in the country.
  4. Neoliberal Fabian Wing: We once called this clique, probably a majority of the parliamentary party, Blairites, but their pedigree stretches back to the Fabian Society, focused on social reform within a corporate free market economy. Blairism can trace its origins to Roy Jenkins, founder of the short-lived Social Democratic Party in the 1980s, former Chairman of Fabian Society and Britain's first President of the European Commission. Their adherents basically worship global corporations, the EU, NATO and are broadly supportive with the current US administration's military adventurism. They tend to support high levels of net migration, multiculturalism, rapid socio-cultural change and greater surveillance. In the US this faction would throw their weight behind Hillary Clinton. However, their practical stances are today almost indistinguishable from the Cameronite wing of the Tory Party, who have long abandoned the more socially conservative positions of many former Tory politicians. If their electoral base really understood their true agenda, they would never have won three elections. Tony Blair did not campaign in 1997 to facilitate higher levels of immigration, outsource manufacturing or send British troops to war zones. Rather, New Labour presented itself as a credible centrist compromise between the Thatcherism of the 1980s and the social democracy of 1960s. They could only win under the Labour brand provided they could keep the first two groups, Red and Blue Labour, happy by throwing them the occasional bone, which mainly meant expanding welfare provision. The Growth of Welfare Spending in the UK
  5. The Muslim Faction: Most modern Labour activists would broadly agree on issues such as women's equality, gay rights and cultural diversity, as would most Liberal Democrats and Conservatives these days. Yet Labour depends increasingly on the electoral support of an ethno-religious community that, to put it kindly, has different views on these matters. While affluent Asians have long lost faith in Labour as the sole defenders of their interests and many have pursued careers in other parties of government, Muslims have special needs that require an alliance with the party most likely to provide generous welfare and lighter immigration controls. Wealthy British Indians of the Hindu faith seldom expect special treatment. Indeed their interests fall in line with other settled communities in the UK. While official statistics show just 5% of the UK population is currently Muslim, this proportion is clearly higher among the younger generation due to a much higher fertility rate and continued immigration through family reunions, arranged marriages and other channels. When Labour has failed to cooperate with local Muslim community leaders, we have seen the election of George Galloway of the proto-Corbynite Respect Party, and most disturbingly Lutfur Rahman. The former Mayor of Tower Hamlets not only brought Bangladeshi levels of corruption to the heart of London, butfavoured his own people over other newcomers and the dwindling Cockney community. If Labour continues to lose votes outside metropolitan districts with large immigrant communities, it will either have to acquiesce to the growing Muslim lobby, by allowing Sharia law in Muslim majority areas, or it could lose another significant chunk of its electoral support. A recent Channel 4 survey found 50% of Muslims in the UK want to ban homosexuality. Moreover many Muslims believe in a very strict dress code that prevents women from exposing their natural bodies for fear of being viewed as sluts. Labour-run Luton Borough Council has now authorised segregated male-only and female-only swimming sessions. Until recently this would be condemned as a regressive move, but to win Labour has to bow to pressure from its most loyal supporters.

Labour activists clearly back Jeremy Corbyn. Social media has undoubtedly played a major role in the surge of support Corbyn's brand of right-on virtue-signalling politics, at least judging from my Twitter feed. Influential Guardian columnist Owen Jones may have expressed heartfelt doubts about Corbyn's ability to beat the Tories, but Owen Smith is likely to gain support only from the PLP, longstanding moderate members and some Trade Union affiliates. In all likelihood Owen Smith's team only hopes to win among the remnant core of Labour loyalists, enough to justify a later declaration of independence from the Corbynite Momentum movement, possibly with the support of a major Trade Union and the Daily Mirror. Labour's membership has grown from a low of 170,000 in 2008 in the late Brown years to around 600,000 today,a by-product of the kind of online activism that helped the Scottish independence movement win the support of nearly 45% of Scots voters. I think Labour's newly enlarged membership represents the bulk of trendy Guardian-readers, who have probably switched their news-gathering preferences to the openly globalist Huffington Post. However, I seriously doubt they could win the general election. Recent polls suggest a breakaway Fabian Labour party might attract around 13 to 14% of the vote with a Momentum-led party gaining little more than 20%. Left Labour may well join forces with the Greens to gain a maximum of 23 to “24% of the vote. With a First Past the Post voting system that would spell electoral disaster. It then remains to be seen, which way the growing Islamic lobby will side. Why would they urge their followers to back a party that stands little chance of forming a government? Would they not be better off forming their own party and winning a few seats in areas with large Muslim populations? The latter move would deprive the successor Labour parties of at least a fifth of their vote share. Left Labour would probably win in trendy urban areas like Bristol and Brighton, Right Labour may still do well in parts of Wales and Northern England, but face stiff competition from UKIP and Conservatives for the hearts and minds of traditional working class voters and welfare dependents.

Until the aspirational green left can unite around a viable political platform with proposals that will improve people's quality of life, I think the best we can do is to campaign for electoral reform.

Is another Labour Party possible?

While I may rant and rave against the policies and institutions that Labour politicians have supported, many Labour activists still have their hearts in the right place. I blame Tony Blair's clique for making the party unelectable by alienating first Labour activists and then traditional Labour voters. The former often defected to the Greens, while the latter group either abstained or voted UKIP at the last general election. How could New Labour, often accused of being too rightwing, have pushed some Labour voters towards a party that is allegedly even more rightwing? It all depends on your definition of rightwing, but the answer clearly lies in New Labour's relaxation of immigration controls and its failure to address the skills gap among its core electorate. The voters of Sunderland did not want Labour to tackle unemployment in Poland or provide job opportunities for Indian nurses, they wanted their government to provide their sons and daughters with the skills they will need in the 21st century. Instead they got temporary jobs in call centres before they too were outsourced. I don't pretend Real Politik is easy but here are just some ideas for a true 21st century alternative Labour Party:

  1. Skills for the future: Invest heavily STEM education and training. Reorganise further education around the real needs of future workers. Reintroduce full grants for students from low income families on STEM courses, while urging others to opt for vocational training rather than university. Plan for a high skill / high wage economy rather than short-term growth based on high retail consumption and low wages.
  2. Balanced migration: Reassert Britain's sovereignty over migration in the best interests of the current population. Migration policy should aim to stabilise the population, enable professional and cultural exchanges and family reunions and allow newcomers time to integrate into mainstream British society.
  3. International solidarity: Target international aid at sustainable development to enable people in poorer countries to prosper in their native communities and prevent a damaging brain drain. We should target aid at countries or regions that lack basic infrastructure such as clean water supplies or reliable electric power and such aid should be conditional on progress towards sustainable birth rates and womens' rights.
  4. Strong Nation states: Campaign for a looser community of independent European nations that cooperate over key environmental and security issues, but retain susbstantial autonomy over economic and social policy. Should the European Union prove beyond reform, Labour should support Britain's negotiated exit from the European Union. Since the Treaty of Lisbon it's become clear the EU is indeed beyond reform. Had Labour led the Leave campaign in the 2016 EU referendum, not only would this referendum been won by a much larger margin giving the UK a stronger bargaining position, but it may well be in power to negotiate a settlement in the best interests of ordinary workers in this country. We want Europe to remain free trade zone, but support the rights of national governments to support their native industries against unfair competition.
  5. Fair foreign policy putting our interests first: Consider first and foremost the interests of British citizens at home and pursue an independent foreign policy in cooperation with our European neighbours. Britain should only intervene militarily in self-defence or when a foreign militia directly threatens the security of our citizens and only then with the clear agreement of the United Nations and only against military targets. Britain should not use miltary force to depose foreign governments or occupy foreign territory. All territorial disputes must be resolved through diplomacy and respect of the democratic wishes of the inhabitants.
  6. Invest in public transport: We will renationalise the railways and increase subsidies for public transport and cycleways in urban areas by raising fuel duty and vehicle excise duty. We will also promote car sharing to give town dwellers greater flexibility. People in rural areas where public transport is not feasible will pay lower vehicle excise duty and be entitled to special fuel discounts.
  7. Invest in sustainable housing for a stable population: Once we can stabilise our population, we will build affordable high density housing for younger people in major cities to prevent urban sprawl.
  8. Invest in sustainable energy: While we recognise the first generation of renewable energy may be more expensive, we want Britain to be at the cutting edge of innovative clean renewable energy solutions, especially offshore wind farms and tidal power.
  9. Phase out nuclear weapons: Britain's Trident nuclear defence system was built for another age when the biggest threat seemed interballistic missiles launched by the former Soviet Union or China. That threat is negligible today, except in an apocalyptic scenario of mutually assured destruction. We oppose renewing Trident submarines and will only retain nuclear warheads until we can negotiate multilateral disarmament with other major nuclear powers. We should prioritise conventional defence and advanced reconnaissance systems. Our duty is to protect our citizens, not to act as a superpower.

Corporatism vs Capitalism

On a side note it would be tempting to replace the adjective corporate with the much maligned descriptor, capitalist. Unlike small businesses, corporations are much more concerned with expanding their empires of influence than short-term profits. Corporations work alongside banks, venture capitalists, marketing agencies, law firms, lobby groups and governments to conquer markets and suppress competition from small players by setting standards and regulations.

If you just want to sell a coffee-drinking experience, you can set up a family-run café, work hard, refine your services to appeal to your customers and find the right price point to cover your expenses and earn a small profit. If you employ bar staff, cleaners, maintenance workers or decorators, you may in theory be an exploitative capitalist, but you do not behave like a corporation or a crony capitalist. The latter would employ a market research outfit to identify demand for a customised coffee drinking experience and analyse the competition, open themed cafés in half-a-dozen prime locations of a major city replete with affluent and socially connected young adults and launch a clever social media campaign to spread the word before expanding rapidly to other cities. However, to accomplish such a feat they'd need to run at a loss for at least a year and would thus require a massive injection of startup capital. That how the big corporations such as Starbucks and Tesco behave. They do not set out simply to pursue a creative passion and make a living, but to conquer a large chunk of a market segment with global ambitions and in the process destroy local competition.

Categories
Computing Power Dynamics

Would a sane Commander in Chief ever deploy Nuclear Weapons?

nuclear bomb

The British Parliament is about to vote on the renewal of the country's US-built and US-controlled nuclear missile shield. In case you didn't know, these nuclear warheads are launched from submarines based in Faslane on the Firth of Clyde, just 20 miles from Glasgow, Scotland.

I've long realised pacifism, while an ideal we should all aspire to, is not a viable option in a dangerous and grotesquely unequal world. Pacifism makes as much sense as open borders without any police surveillance. It might work once we have overcome the dark sides of human nature and established a truly egalitarian and peace loving society in which not only do we all care for each other, but we all trust each other. If you can justify self-defence and accept the need for public institutions to protect us, you have to recognise we need some form of defence, especially in the wake of recent terrorist attacks and attempted coups d'état.

The biggest threats to the security of the British people do not come rival superpowers intent on destroying our infrastructure and killing millions of people, but from unstable militias and unhinged local despots who retaliate against UK involvement in military operations in their neck of the woods. Britain is a prime target of foreign aggressors not because we have failed to destroy their power bases, but because our government's actions in supporting US and NATO interventions has greatly destabilised much of the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. A major military power such as Russia, with vast territory of its own, would have little reason to attack the British Isles, unless we became directly involved in a future conflagration with Russia over Ukraine. In such a scenario, were Russia to deploy nuclear warheads against a densely populated country, without the military and economic might for total world domination, the fallout would permanently shatter its international reputation and almost certainly invite disastrous military and/or economic retaliation. In a globally connected world destroying your customers' countries doesn't make much sense unless it&rrsquo;s the only way to gain control of mission-critical resources only available there in abundance.

A quick look at military spending figures for 2015 reveals a changing world. With the notable exception of the United States, which account for over 40% of the global military spending, the countries with the most successful economies have rather modest defence budgets. Even Russia, with around 145 million, only spends 10 billion more than the UK. Most of its military budget is invested in land forces and a large personnel of 771 thousand. Russia is also surrounded by US bases in Eastern Europe, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Mongolia and Japan. Of greater concern should be Saudi Arabia's massive $88 billion defence budget.

Rank Country $ Billion
1 United States 597.5
2 China 145.8
3 Saudi Arabia 81.8
4 Russia 66.5
5 United Kingdom 56.2
6 India 48.0
7 France 46.8
8 Japan 41.0
9 Germany 36.7
10 South Korea 33.5
11 Brazil 24.3
12 Australia 22.8
13 Italy 21.6
14 Iraq 21.1
15 Israel 18.6

Source: Wikipedia: List of Countries By Military Expenditures

What would happen if some madman launched a nuclear attack against us

While NATO's military planners may be fixated with Russia, the real threat comes from an unstable Middle East, especially in the event of a popular uprising in Saudi Arabia and the ascension to power of an anti-Western regime allied with countries such as Pakistan and possibly Iran. They might, at least until the development of viable alternatives, hold the world to ransom through their control of cheap oil, and fight regional wars of conquest just as Saudi Arabia is currently engaged in bombing campaigns in Yemen. However, any nuclear strikes against European cities would kill hundreds of thousands of Muslims too. Nuclear weapons are useless against strategic military targets, unless such targets are conveniently located in remote sparsely populated regions. Indeed to be effective a nuclear attack would have to annihilate enemy territory. A large superpower, like the USA, could wipe out a geographically constrained enemy, albeit with cataclysmic human consequences, but a small militias linked to an ad-hoc state such as Daesh would only succeed in killing people before inviting immediate retaliation against an ill-defined target. A nuclear strike would be the ultimate act of extreme terrorism that no sane commander in chief of a stable country would contemplate even in the event of nuclear attack on their territory, by which time the damage would have been done. The only logical defence would be an advanced anti-nuclear defence shield that could intercept and destroy nuclear warheads before they reach major population centres. Our priority would be to minimise human deaths and neutralise the enemy. Oddly the huge projected £100 and 200 billion budget for the new Trident system over 30 years would be much better spent on more intelligent satellite reconnaissance and surface to air missiles launched from existing submarines but without nuclear warheads. Mail On Sunday columnist Peter Hitchins supported Trident in the cold war days when most of us on the left opposed it, but he rightly says now "To spend all your money of a nuclear weapon for a war that won't happen is like spending all your money on insurance against alien abduction and then neglecting to insure your self against fire and theft."

Deterrence theory relies on convincing your potential enemy that you'd actually deploy your warheads, which would have no tactical advantage. Nuclear weapons are good at two things: mass destruction and complete humiliation. It's what the US did to the Japanese towards the end of Second World War. They could only get away with it because of their massive technological and economic superiority. That's no longer the case. Nuclear war would lead to mutually assured destruction. Keeping nuclear weapons only encourages rogue states from following suit.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Expertocracy: the political Elites don’t trust you

Unless you believe their experts

Today people power, or democracy if your prefer a more Hellenic term, means little more than mood management. You may express your feelings on a range of options that other presumed experts and high-profile opinion leaders offer you. However, you are not supposed to have any original thoughts or seek alternative sources of information that have not been given an official seal of approval or at any rate deemed authoritative. In debates on scientific issues orthodox pundits love to reference peer-reviewed research, because obviously any findings that challenge agendas essential to vested corporate interests can be easily weeded out or toned down in the peer review stage.

Expertocracy, the power of establishment experts, affects all controversies, whether on scientific, environmental, historical or geopolitical matters. The establishment bias pervades not only news media, but entertainment, drama and above all educational programmes. Popular soaps regularly push agendas and reinforce our preconceptions on a whole range of issues so that highly disputable contentions become generally accepted truisms. I've tried to highlight some of these in previous blog posts. Some questions are loaded, i.e. they only make sense if we internalise a mainstream assumption, such as we need economic growth and therefore any policy that might hinder economic growth must be bad. If we realise we don't actually need economic growth and merely better, more rewarding and less stressful lives, we might reach radically different conclusions on many topical issues.

Two recent events in British media circus have highlighted the public's growing distrust with the establishment media and their preferred experts. First the EU Referendum showed much of public opinion shunned the overwhelming pro-EU bias of the liberal intelligentsia and academia. The BBC and Guardian reminded us every day that leading economists believed continued membership of the EU is essential for job security and extreme labour mobility is just part of our wonderfully dynamic 21st century globalised economy. Their message was clear: Stop asking silly ill-informed questions and leave big questions such as economic management and migration control to the experts. The subtext was even clearer: If you question the rationale behind unbalanced mass migration you must be racist.

Then on Wednesday 6th July another shock unsettled the Westminster establishment. Sir John Chilcot's long-awaited report admitted major failures in the intelligence, justification and planning of the 2003 US/UK-led occupation of Iraq, but naturally fell short of identifying the real reasons for war or accusing any politician of intentional mendacity. I use the word occupation because in the event Iraqi forces loyal to the Baathist regime offered only token resistance. The US-led military coalition easily conquered Iraq and effortlessly overthrew Saddam Hussein's hated regime. Yet three trillion US dollars and over 1 million dead Iraqis later, they have clearly lost the peace. Iraq descended fast into civil war and now much of the Sunni-dominated and oil-rich Western region is under ISiS control. In the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war most establishment experts, at least those favoured by the BBC and UK government, agreed that Saddam Hussein posed a real threat to world peace and failure to overthrow his despotic regime would not only lead to more deaths in Iraq, but would allow an unhinged Saddam Hussein, always referred to by first name in the Western media, to destabilise the region. Of course, if Iraq really did have functioning weapons of mass destruction it would have deployed them in self-defence. Alas in the invent of the US invasion the Iraqi military could barely muster a couple tank divisions. While it was never hard to find Iraqis who welcomed the deposition of their former dictator and Western sanctions had already made most Iraqis poorer, attempts to rebuild Iraq as a vibrant peace-loving democracy along the lines of West Germany in the aftermath of WW2 failed dismally. The rest is history. By any account the region is much more unstable now than it was before the ill-conceived occupation. Other interventions in Afghanistan and Libya have had equally disastrous results. They have made nobody safer and have unleashed a tsunami of refugees on neighbouring countries and Europe.

Yet had we listened to the warnings of specialists that that our mainstream media either ignored or dismissed as mavericks or wild conspiracy theorists, we could have foreseen the likely outcome of these military operations. The UN's official inspector in the run-up to the occupation, Hans Blix, failed to find any evidence of new WMDs, except for remnants of chemical weapons labs from the 1980s when Britain and US exported arms to Iraq. There is nothing the public learned in the Chilcot Report that had not been predicted in Scott Ritter's 1999 book Endgame, in which he suggests a way out of the Iraqi quagmire but warns of the danger of outright invasion. However bad Saddam Hussein might have been, he was far from alone in the long list of tyrants and mass murderers that the US once supported. Iraq is largely a creation of Anglo-American imperialism in the aftermath of the First World War. Lines in the sand were drawn with little consideration given to a territory's viability as a country. The US and UK were happy to support a dictator like Saddam Hussein to suppress Islamic fundamentalism and as a bulwark against Iran. Just as Western governments tolerated Saudi Arabia's human rights' abuses and Turkey's suppression of its large Kurdish population, they turned a blind eye to the Baathist regime's crimes until Saddam Hussein authorised Iraq's 1990 occupation of oil-soaked Kuwait. Those with a long enough memory and an inquisitive mind will recall Saddam Hussein felt it safe to occupy what most Iraqis of the era regarded as their 19th province after former US Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie said "We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America".

In a complex society nobody can reach logical conclusions on most subjects without deferring to the experience and technical competence of others. The challenge we all face is to judge whether or not to trust experts that appear regularly in the mainstream media or to seek alternative views. Dissident experts are not necessarily right just because the establishment shuns them. They may be pursuing another agenda, possibly funded by dark forces that do not have our best interests at heart, have deep religious convictions at odds with modern scientific theories or may simply retain faith in outdated beliefs that have lost favour with our new internationalist elite. However, all these charges are equally applicable to the status quo, except we might replace religious zeal with an unswerving belief in technological progress. The establishment does regularly change its mind, which is partly why some apparent dissident experts cling to the old consensus, but has to manage public perception in such a way as to not discredit its authority. When irrefutable evidence proves a product, once favoured by powerful lobbies, such as cigarettes to be harmful, many reputations are tarnished. Yet the marketing of tobacco products played a major role in the promotion of consumer hedonism. Cigarettes have arguably lost their usefulness as effective means of mood management. Modern technology has better alternatives.

Should we let our government build more nuclear power stations? Should we allow hydraulic fracturing in our neighbourhood? Are mercury amalgam fillings safe? Should all girls be vaccinated against human papilloma virus? These are all reasonable questions that affect the lives of millions. Yet which experts should we trust on these matters? Fortunately on all these bones of contention you can still find a diversity of well-researched expert opinion. The mainstream media bias, at least in the UK, is still broadly supportive of nuclear power with all the usual caveats about safety and security. The NHS still defends the use of mercury amalgams and will readily point you to copious peer-reviewed abstracts dismissing the concerns of anti-mercury campaigners. However, opponents of mass vaccination are often dismissed as little more than uninformed quacks likely to believe the scare stories of a few renegade clinicians. Just consider the vast sums invested in the vilification of Dr Andrew Wakefield, apparently personally responsible for each outbreak of measles. In truth Dr Wakefield has only ever advocated safe vaccination and only questioned the safety of the triple vaccine option. I don't want to revisit the MMR controversy here, but it surely highlights the problem with expertocracy. Once we silence dissident experts in the name of public safety, we then effectively only have a narrow set of sanitised policy options.

One of the most dangerous political currents is universal progressivism. Its adherents believe that despite many transient hurdles and occasional setbacks, we are on a one-way journey to a global utopia. In the words of D:Ream's 1994 hit that accompanied Tony Blair's upbeat 1997 election campaign "Things Can Only Get Better". For this illusion to appear true we have to keep rewriting the past and often the very recent past. Moreover, we have to keep discovering new perceived problems that require some form of proactive intervention. We no longer accept our natural limitations. Consider the sad fact that some women cannot bear children. In the recent past if a woman learned she could not procreate successfully for medical reasons, she would have probably felt some temporary despair. But surprisingly most women took such news in their stride, glad to be alive and able to contribute to their family and community in other ways. Now infertility is considered a tragedy, not just an unfortunate fact of life, because the fertility treatment industry have transformed people's perceptions of personal injustice and contributed to a growing culture of entitlement. This attitude emotionalises political discourse. The media present major issues in emotional terms. Thus if you oppose the European Union, you must hate European people. If are concerned about high levels of net migration, you must hate individual immigrants who may be good people. It's very easy to conflate the personal with the social. However, on a personal level we regularly express the most extreme forms of real discrimination. If a young woman rejects the sexual advances of a young man, she is not only discriminating, but may also hurt his feelings. This behaviour seems only natural and healthy until you internalise the crazy logic of social justice warriors in which every perceived personal misfortune is a crime against humanity. Thus if a fat person is entitled to expensive surgery to tackle their obesity and not expected to control their weight naturally through a healthy diet and exercise, there's no reason why a relatively ugly heterosexual male should not be entitled to expensive cosmetic surgery and generous welfare handouts to boost his attractiveness in the sexual marketplace. Employers often discriminate against incompetent or unqualified workers. I don't think many of us would like to be operated on by incompetent surgeon or fly in a plane commandeered by an unqualified pilot. None of this means we should not give everyone a chance to learn new skills or provide healthcare for treatable conditions. We just need to balance personal and social responsibilities, understand our limitations and limit our expectations.

A culture of entitlement leads to extreme interdependence. As we are not all equally gifted or equally able to pursue intellectually challenging jobs, it makes us more, rather than less, reliant on experts. These armies of official advisers are now responsible for every aspect of our lives from eating to shopping and leisure, lovemaking to procreation and child-rearing, communication to transportation, education to work as well as healthcare. Our freedom has largely been reduced to a choice of consumer goods and regulated leisure pursuits. Psychologists now view our opinions mere expressions of our psyche. If we stray too far from the narrow range of permissible dissent, sociologists may regard our views as dysfunctional or delusional or somehow incompatible with the kind of new society they wish to build. In their mindset if you believe, for instance, that fluoride in the water supply is a form of mind control, you are a victim of delusional thinking and the hypothesis that fluoride ingested in excessive quantities can cross the blood-brain barrier and inflict permanent brain damage is barely worth investigating. If you only ever rely on official reports from mainstream media outlets and respected scientific publications, you will probably only ever find out about any adverse effects of our current policies when it's too late. If you believe mass migration is the best way to achieve social harmony, you may have seen all manner of alternative explanations for events that may on the surface not fit your thesis. Could the rise in terrorist incidents in France and elsewhere be related to a growing Muslim population and record youth unemployment ? If you previously believed in something we rather misleadingly call multiculturalism, then you may only accept the latter part of that hypothesis. We know mass unemployment alone does not necessarily lead to terrorism, though it can naturally lead people to support political agendas that would otherwise be unpopular. However, a combination of extreme ideologies within a marginalised ethnoreligious group and neoliberal economics with limited job security could well destabilise delicate social cohesion when rival communities no longer share the same core values. As the universalist neoliberal dream, the idea that global big business can work in tandem with supranational organisations to bring about a better world, crumbles, we had better start listening to more subversive experts and learning, once again. to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Categories
Power Dynamics

Shifting Alliances

For a long time Britain's political parties have failed to represent the views and aspirations of ordinary people. Politicians have become mere implementors of policies devised elsewhere by a maze of global organisations. Labour, Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and even the SNP have all converged on a variant of Blairism, broadly speaking a form of managed corporate globalisation with a blurring of traditional national boundaries, a merger between large corporations and public sector services, greater surveillance and above all greater interdependence. They only differ in their presentation to their target audience and can even pretend to disagree on issues over which they have little control or are not mission-critical. The real changes we see in our lives are driven by large corporations and rapid technological innovation with environmental and human consequences few of us can fully comprehend.

The Brexit vote is likely to change the British political landscape in some quite unexpected ways. The EU referendum revealed a divide not so much on traditional party-political allegiances, as on socio-economic classes and tribal identity. In England and Wales people on lower incomes voted overwhelming to leave the EU. Even in Scotland, despite tribal loyalty behind the SNP and its calls for a second Independence Referendum ( #indyref2 ), many working class voters rebelled against their political elites.

In the aftermath of the shock Brexit vote, the British Labour Party is in meltdown. The English and Welsh working classes failed to heed its warnings about the dire economic consequences of leaving its beloved European Union. They sent a clear signal. "Enough is enough. We're fed up of condescending lectures on the benefits of globalisation. We think it's out of control and not in our interests. We want you to put local people first." One thing is clear few leave voters have villas in France or Eastern European nannies. Many live on the breadline, the very people who would once have voted Labour. While some protest votes went to UKIP in the last General Election, many more simply did not vote at all. A few Labour MPs and activists supported the Labour Leave campaign. I donated to help produce #Lexit the movie, presenting the leftwing case against the EU superstate. However, the mainstream media ignored these voices in the wilderness. Only Kate Hoey, Gisela Stuart and Frank Field really took part in the public debate. The party machinery and the bulk of its parliamentarians supported staying in the EU, something which had become an act of faith. Not surprisingly the party's staunchly pro-EU Blairite wing did not blame the handful of mavericks for openly opposing their line, but the new infantile left-leaning leader for failing to present a positive case for staying in the EU. The SNP proudly boasted that they had delivered a pro-EU vote, probably because many of their supporters instinctively distrust remote superstates. Why complain about Westminster being too remote, only to transfer control of your economic and migration policies to Brussels. However, the defining issue was not the finer details of free trade deals or international cooperation, but unsustainable unbalanced mass migration, a phenomenon felt much more in England and Wales than in Scotland. Amazingly on this subject both the Blairite and Corbynite wings are in wholehearted agreement. They may disagree on recent military interventions in the Middle East and Central Asia, on the renewal of Trident or the renationalisation of the railways, but both the infantile universalist left and Blairite corporate globalists adore mass migration, albeit for different reasons. Neither faction really cares about Britain, which they view merely as a social experiment, a kind of extended international university campus. While Corbynites imagine that people from different backgrounds will come together in their struggle against corporate oppressors, Blairites long recognised they had to work with multinational corporations and not against them. They could pretend to care about the environment, community cohesion, international solidarity and human rights just to bring the gullible aspirational left on board. Very often these concerns help drive their longer term agenda for greater corporate control. Human rights provide the ideal pretext for military intervention. Community cohesion can justify greater surveillance and restrictions on free speech. Calls for international solidarity can give grounds for the erosion of national sovereignty and environmental concerns can win public support for a transfer of power to global institutions, often working in cahoots with the same multinationals responsible for much of our industrial pollution. Blairites are pragmatists who usurp progressive rhetoric to empower their corporate masters. By contrast Corbynites can only offer the electorate abstract ideals. In power they could only follow a radical form of Neo-Keynsianism but would soon find themselves constrained by international markets and global institutions just as Greece's Syriza had to bow to the will of the European Central Bank. They may preach universal love for all, including the disadvantaged native English communities, but they have few plans for managing social conflicts when their economic plans go awry. Ironically, outside the European Union, Britain would be freer to pursue independent economic policies, though global banks would be unlikely to let a potential Corbyn government overspend. For all the talk of investing in the re-birth of British manufacturing, I suspect a Corbyn / McDonnell government would be too busy trying to eke taxes out of multibillion dollar tech giants than to stimulate the kind of technological innovation we need to address our environmental challenges.

The biggest surprise in the wake of the EU referendum is that the Conservative Party is still largely intact, though maybe not for long. I suspect a fair number of MPs, like many voters, were reluctant or rather pragmatic remainers. The establishment know all too well the odds were stacked against the Leave campaign. In the end more people voted with their brain than with their heart. Apart from a hardcore of EU fanatics such as Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine, Nicholas Soames and Anna Soubry, most Conservatives have accepted the result. They merely differ on the finer details of the UK's negotiated exit. For the first time in living memory, the Conservative Party seem more in touch with the aspirations of ordinary working people than Labour or the Liberal Democrats. Tory Brexiteers can now argue that all deals with the EU must exempt us from accepting free movement of people with the full support of a majority of public opinion. Most voters support balanced migration, i.e. where a similar number of workers enter and leave the country every year letting us still attract foreign talent, but reducing competition at the lower end of labour market. Most would also rather pay more for goods and services than see cheap agency staff undercut local workers. However, I would not trust the Tories to stand up for the interests of ordinary working people. If the Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative Party gain the upper hand in the coming leadership election and secure a favourable free trade deal with the EU that gives us full control over migration policy, UKIP will have lost its raison d'être. If they can genuinely bring down net migration to the tens of thousands, it will cease to be a bone of contention. UKIP's other policies such as their hatred of wind farms and support for hydraulic fracturing and cheaper motoring basically just appeal to the Jeremy Clarkson mindset. They may have made a few interesting points on the merits of grammar schools and squandering of foreign aid, but few of their policies stand up to much scrutiny in the real world. Education will have to keep pace with rapidly evolving technology and greater automation. Rather than reintroduce outdated grammar schools, we should be setting up specialised schools to further science, technology, engineering and mathematics and let children develop at different rates. Most important we should aim for smaller class sizes. This will mean training more teachers and limiting population growth. Unlike UKIP, I would spend more, not less, on international aid. I would rather help other countries develop sustainably than poach their best and brightest doctors and engineers. I'd rather see poorer countries give their people a better future than tidal waves of migrants crossing the Mediterranean on makeshift boats. The trouble with international aid has always been corrupt local elites and empire-building NGOs who act as mere fronts for the same global corporations that want to exploit the resources of much of the developing world. We cannot begin to address grotesque global inequalities until we reduce our dependence on resources only available in poor countries. I'm fairly certain the Middle East would be a much more peaceful place were it not for our dependence on plentiful cheap oil and the vast concentration of wealth in a handful of nabobs.

I cannot see any easy way to reconcile the divisions between the Blairite and Corbynite wings of the Labour Party. The Corbynite Momentum movement will retain its strengths among students, trendy cosmopolitan city dwellers and virtue-signalling click activists. If the Parliamentary Labour Party fails to win a likely leadership election with Corbyn on the ballot paper, they will have little choice but to form a new party, which could potentially attract some renegade Tories or even merge with the Liberal Democrats to become effectively the voice of the arrogant upwardly mobile professional classes. A nightmare scenario for British politics would be the growing likelihood of a narrow victory for Andrea Leadsom in the Tory leadership election, not because her team's policies are all that radical or dangerously rightwing, but because her commitment to an immediate invocation of article 50 and to negotiate a deal that would exempt the UK from freedom of movement. If Jeremy Corbyn wins a likely Labour leadership contest, we could see a seismic shift in UK parliamentary politics. It would only take 20 Tory MPs or so to join forces with the mainstream Blairite wing of the Parliamentary Labour Party to rid the government of its majority and trigger a general election with unpredictable results. Faced with a choice between warmongering Blairites and idealist Corbynites, many traditional Labour voters would run a mile.

I suspect neither grouping would carry a majority of the traditional Labour vote. The party has come to rely too much on the volatile support of ethnic minorities who see the organisation as a vehicle to further their ethno-religous interests. I really do not see Britain's growing Muslim community forming an alliance with Blairites committed to more wars in the Middle East or with the infantile left pursing a fanciful rainbow coalition of gays, ecologists, vegans and pacifists. That leaves a huge vacuum for working class labour, the kind of people who believe in a pragmatic mix of social conservatism, patriotism, a non-interventionist foreign policy, international solidarity, environmental sustainability, steady-state economics (i.e. a focus on the quality of life rather than GDP growth) and technological innovation.

Following Nigel Farage's resignation, I'm unsure whether UKIP will ever win over a substantial proportion of the tradition Labour vote. They may just ensure a complete exit from the European Union without any compromise on the globalist left's treasured Freedom of Movement. They may urge tighter immigration controls, but really have little to offer that differentiates them from the Eurosceptic wing of the Tory Party. There has been some talk about Red UKIP, but apart from a few populist commitments on the NHS, the party has little to offer disenfranchised Labour voters in a post-Brexit Britain.

Real Labour Manifesto

  • We want an independent, democratic and federal United Kingdom, defending the interests of our citizens while cooperating with our European neighbours and other countries further afield in an intersecting network of international communities. We support strong nation states and international solidarity. Democracy can only thrive in viable nation states able to respond to the will of their electorates.
  • Balanced migration. Only when we can manage migratory flows in a very unequal world can we safeguard the most vulnerable in our society and ensure community cohesion. Immigration policy should focus on social stability, environmental sustainability and international solidarity first and only then take into account economic factors. We should invest in the future of our young citizens by providing the right training opportunities for tomorrow's world of high skill employment.
  • International aid: In a fast changing world richer countries have a moral duty to help poorer countries develop the infrastructure and skills base they need to take full advantage of modern technology, so we can live in peace together. While we support international exchanges in science and engineering, we should not deprive poorer countries of their best and brightest.
  • Steady-state economics. For too long we have had a narrow focus on economic growth. In practice this just means a greater volume of financial transactions, higher corporate profits and more consumption. Economic growth cannot continue forever. We need to focus instead on improving people's quality of life through greater stability and a more diversified but high-skill economy.
  • Stakeholder economy: Artificial intelligence and robotics will transform the world of work. However, we must ensure everyone is involved in shaping our future rather than consigning a growing proportion of our working age population to a life of welfare dependence. We must invest in lifelong training and education, facilitate remote and part-time working and explore ways to ensure that everyone, except the most severely disabled, can contribute in some way. We would rather have full employment with average working hours of just 10 or 15 hours a week, than a growing divide between a technocratic elite of wealthy professionals on high incomes and millions dependent on corporate benevolence.
  • Self-defence: Britain should become a normal post-imperial country. Our armed forces should exist for the sole purpose of national defence. We will continue to participate in international military alliances to avert potential threats from foreign imperial powers, but we will not intervene unilaterally in disputes that do not affect our national territorial integrity. We will scrap all nuclear warheads and reinvest in essential naval defences.
Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Forget Europe, Brexit was really a peasants revolt against smug elitists

Oddly this referendum has restored my faith in humanity

Just over a week ago the global establishment and their cheerleaders in the liberal intelligentsia got the fright of their lives. They had failed to persuade the British electorate to vote remain in the referendum on the United Kingdom's membership of the European Union. When Labour lost in 2010 and again in 2015, the metropolitan elite did not seem all that bothered as the resulting coalition led by David Cameron and Nick Clegg offered more or less the same neoliberal politics, albeit with a little window dressing and hype about tackling the country's deficit through minor cutbacks in welfare and public services, which the left insisted on calling slash and burn austerity. Yet when the British public voted against their beloved European Union, hell had truly descended on earth. It hardly mattered that this supranational organisation had imposed real austerity on Southern Europeans, brought about mass youth unemployment through a one-size-fits-all currency and led millions to migrate across the continent in search of work destroying close-knit communities and widening the gap between rich and poor. Rapid globalisation may have benefited the upwardly mobile professional classes, keen to exploit new business opportunities and enjoy a wider selection of restaurants and more malleable foreign workers, but it has left behind vast swathes of the traditional working classes unable to adapt to our post-industrial present. Their voice has been largely ignored. Mainstream parties have merely pitied the remnants of the British working classes, talking glibly about new business investments in industrial wastelands, while defending welfare dependence and social interventionism. Whenever the topic of unlimited immigration of unskilled and semi-skilled labour from Eastern and Southern Europe cropped up, the pseudo-liberal elites would downplay its extent, misrepresent its economic benefits and, ever so subtly, suggest the native underclasses were too lazy and inept to fill vacancies in the country's booming service sector. To add insult to injury, over the last 6 years of Tory-led government, the phoney left has not only championed welfarism, but via myriad charities, has condescendingly treated growing sections of our communities as sufferers of mental illness. Rather than viewing the working classes as the true creators of the nation's wealth, the postmodern left now regards the underclasses as just another victim group alongside other underprivileged groups such as low-paid migrant workers, single mothers and ethnic minorities. In the new world of virtue-signalling, victimhood status matters more than hard work. If you're mentally ill, obese, gay, Muslim or a recent Bulgarian migrant, the bien-pensant left will pretend to champion your rights, but if you're just a low-paid or jobless native worker concerned about unfair labour market competition they will write you off as ignorant and potentially racist. Indeed many actually regard angry nativism as a form of mental illness, i.e. a phenomenon that must be managed and tackled, but not expressed in the ballot box. If working class white British males could rebrand themselves as a victim group, the trendy left may just listen. Indeed in many urban areas this ethnosocial category is already a disadvantaged minority.

The big Surprise

As the polling stations closed and the last opinion polls indicated a marginal lead for the remain side. I was braced for a big anticlimax. If the leave side could muster 45%, then maybe in five or ten years time, when the whole EU project goes pear-shaped, we might get another chance. In all comparable referenda, the public voted for the status quo, better the devil you know. I'm sure many remain voters were concerned about the EU's lack of democracy and unsustainable migratory flows. They just believed that the consequences of leaving the EU were much worse than any potential gains of greater national self-determination just as many proud Scots voted to stay in the UK just under 2 years earlier. The Remain side appealed to emotions, international solidarity, our love for our European neighbours and, above all, economic expediency. Indeed a common theme in the closing stages of the referendum, and one repeated endlessly by the bad losers now, is that simply leaving the EU will have little effect on migration. If the British economy continues to prosper, it will, according to free marketeers, attract more migrants than it exports. I think all this talk about trade deals and regulations bored most voters, partly because it's so hard to gauge how economic growth translates into a better quality of life for ordinary people, e.g. property speculation may drive GDP growth, but it also makes houses unaffordable for workers on typical salaries.

As the results piled in, we saw two clear patterns emerge. The United Kingdom was divided primarily along class lines, but also by ethnocultural identity. Outside a handful of cosmopolitan urban areas, in England and Wales the more affluent tended to vote remain. Much of Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire and the posher parts of Hampshire and Hertfordshire had remain majorities, while less affluent areas, especially those with more elderly demographic profiles, voted more heavily to leave the EU. The biggest leave majorities came not from the Tory-voting Southeast of England, but from Labour's traditional working class heartlands in the Midlands and North of England as well as Wales. In Northern Ireland the protestant community followed their English and Welsh cousins, while the Republican catholic community voted overwhelmingly for Remain, following orders from the Sinn Fein and SDLP leaderships. In Scotland the result was more mixed. If the UK had had a referendum on EU membership 15 years ago, I would have expected a healthy, but not crushing, majority for staying in the EU across the UK. That was before the Lisbon Treaty and before the EU's eastward expansion. Two factors swayed the vote for remain in Scotland. First all main parties, especially the ruling SNP, favour continued EU membership. Second, Scotland has seen much lower net immigration and only very limited population increase. For most Scots unfair Labour market competition is a side issue, but Scots compete with new migrants in the UK-wide labour market and are thus not immune from wage compression. Even in the areas with relatively homogenous populations like Fife, migrant labour is common in many sectors. The leave campaign here was very low key. I've seen more Stronger for Scotland stickers and posters, with their distinctive SNP branding, than VoteLeave signs. UKIP enjoy only limited support, but some cracks in the united front did appear when veteran Scottish independence campaigner, Jim Sillars, supported Brexit. After all if little Iceland, with a population of just 300,000, can manage outside the EU with its own currency, then so surely can Scotland. 62% of Scots supported the status quo, but a fair number not out of any love for Byzantine EU institutions, but simply to spite the English and trigger another referendum on Scottish independence. Alas 38% rebelled against their political elite and opted to protest against globalisation and gain greater control over fishing and agriculture.

People did not vote along party lines. Polls suggest only majority of conservative and UKIP voters supported leave, while most Labour, Liberal Democrat, Green and SNP voters supported remain (Nonetheless 25% of Green voters and 30% of LibDem voters rebelled against their staunchly EU-phile party leaderships). A closer look reveals a different picture. Turnout was highest in many deprived areas that often see lower turnouts in general elections, the kind of backwaters where Labour or Conservatives take their voters for granted. Just consider Scunthorpe in North Lincolnshire. In the 2015 general election only 57.7% could be bothered to vote, but in the 2016 EU Referendum a whopping 72% turned out. In London and Scotland we saw almost the opposite scenario with lower turnouts than in general elections. Remain supporters clearly lacked enthusiasm despite all the scare stories about a post-Brexit abyss of economic stagnation and rampant xenophobia. The brutal murder of pro-EU campaigner and Labour MP, Jo Cox, just a week before polling day had enabled the globalist media to appeal to the public's emotions, especially by associating the mentally ill murderer with far-right grouplets. #VoteRemain thus became the ultimate virtue signal akin to the #refugeeswelcome hashtag just a year earlier.

Back in 1975, it was mainly the left who opposed membership of the then EEC (European Economic Community). Leading Labour politicians such as Tony Benn, Barbara Castle and Peter Shaw as well as the bulk of the era's trade union movement all opposed the EEC just two years after Britain joined in the midst of an economic downturn. The key arguments were over democracy and trade. Immigration hardly figured in the debate because most viewed it as an issue only with people from Commonwealth countries. Apart from a few language students the UK did not see a massive influx of migrants from France, Germany, the Low Countries or Italy. There were few overriding economic advantages and citizens of other EEC countries did not enjoy the same acquired citizenship and welfare rights as British citizens until the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. Indeed in the early years more Britons may have taken advantage of work opportunities in the rest of Europe than vice-versa. EU migration only really became a bone of contention with the superstate's eastward expansion.

The result has sent shockwaves across the world as ruling elites become aware of the strength of opposition to global governance. In hindsight we may view such a reversal as a necessary adjustment to technological developments, which will soon allow a much smarter and more humane form of international cooperation to supplement viable compact nation states. Outsourcing production made sense when markets could take advantage of cheap and more malleable labour in other parts of the world. It makes little sense with the emergence of artificial intelligence, robotics and 3D-printing, which do away with the need for cheap semi-skilled labour or gargantuan manufacturing facilities. We will need more highly skilled software developers, engineers, designers and scientific researchers and fewer machine operatives, cleaners and hauliers. More important we can share expertise and cooperate closely without having to physically move to another country. Mass migration is driven primarily by economic insecurity and environmental instability, not by demand for low-skilled labour or a need to boost retail sales.

The referendum also shows growing conformism among the affluent chattering classes, all too willing to recycle orthodoxy. However, truly intelligent people do not blindly accept official advice from powerful institutions who may not have their best interests at heart. Everyday we are deluged with messages from advertisers and lobbyists, often masquerading as charities. Our high streets are teaming with professional awareness raisers, subtly pushing various hidden agendas that may not seem immediately obvious. This referendum has shown that ordinary people have lost their trust in condescending experts and pundits. There cannot be a soul in the whole wide land who has not heard the neoliberal elite's view on the benefits of the European Union and mass migration. Love of global institutions and multiculturalism are mandatory parts of today's school curriculum. The main TV channels have long subtly injected their universalist themes into popular sitcoms and soaps. Eastenders, the UK's most popular soap opera, portrays a fictional community where people from the most diverse backgrounds all get along fabulously in stark contrast to the reality of parallel communities that barely talk and transient agency workers replacing the previous bunch of underpaid labourers.

As a result opposition to the European Union was until recently a fringe concern. Affordable holidays in Southern Europe have given millions of working class Britons a taste of Europe's delights, although most tend to gravitate to tourist resorts and mingle more with their countryfolk than with the locals. I always make a point of venturing away from the madding crowd of British holiday makers. True diversity can only thrive when native cultures retain their homelands. Otherwise they become a mere flavour that blends into an indistinct melting pot.

Gradual change may be good, but rapid change is nearly always disruptive

Currently popular discontent with rapid globalisation and cultural change is filtered through a handful of tabloid newspapers with their sensationalist stories about benefits-cheating migrants and fake refugees. However much the wishful-thinking left may find these stories distasteful, they do seem to reflect the everyday experiences of ordinary Britons struggling to cope with rapid change more accurately than the sop stories one reads in the Guardian or sees in BBC documentaries. I have personally visited London housing estates where most residents are not only recent immigrants, but are also clearly in receipt of substantial welfare handouts. Otherwise they could not pay their rent and most do not pay enough taxes to compensate for the true cost of additional public services. Reassuring official reports attempt to contradict such anecdotal evidence, but often do so through selective data sets. However, midway through the referendum campaign not only did official statistics show another rise in net migration, but evidence also emerged of massive undercounting of temporary EU migrants owing to a large discrepancy between official immigration figures and new national insurance numbers. We thus have two contrasting narratives. One presents a progressive community of gradually converging European regions and view migratory imbalances as mere temporary and easily manageable phenomena that can only create minor inconveniences for local inhabitants. The other presents a failed superstate project that drives millions to seek work in high wage regions displacing local workers. The elites see these people movements as way of forging a new pan-European identity. While this international camaraderie may work in university campuses and affluent neighbourhoods, it has created new conflicts between natives and newcomers elsewhere.

The challenge ahead

In any case mass migration is a much more complex issue and certainly not confined to the European Union. Indeed the biggest challenge over the next decade will be to deal with growing migratory pressures from Africa and Middle East, two regions with high birth rates. I have long argued the best way to address these challenges is through sustainable development. That means helping these countries acquire the skills and technology they need to feed their people while transitioning to a more sustainable birth rate. China has already transitioned and India is well on its way to an ideal fertility rate of 2 children per woman (currently 2.45, but just 2.0 in Kerala). Greater migration to Europe or North America will do little to alleviate the environmental impacts of rapid population growth. Besides the real challenge will be to develop smarter and greener technology to reduce massive waste and inefficiencies.

Could the Native English have halted Cultural Convergence?

The Brexit saga reveals another irony. Today's globalisation is largely built on British and later North American imperialism. The English language has become one of the primary vehicles of cultural convergence. As a rule the more globally connected a place is, the more its people are likely to be fluent in English. Ironically as the European Union has morphed from a Western European free trade area to a pan-European superstate, the dominance of international English has grown. While paying lip service to French and other major European languages, Eurocrats have an unnerving habit of speaking a kind of Euro-English that alienates not only millions of continental Europeans who still prefer their mother tongues, but native English speakers too. Their diction, replete with neologisms, bears an an uncanny semblance to George Orwell's NewSpeak, namely it serves more to preclude unwanted thoughts than to expand mutual understanding. If the UK leaves the European Union, Ireland may be the only country where English spoken as the primary vernacular. (see English language could be dropped from European Union after Brexit) I'm beginning to feel the tide is turning on globalisation as people become more aware of what they are losing. We can actually harness modern technology to break language barriers without jettisoning our traditions and cultural identity. Will machine translation kill English as Lingua Franca?

Categories
Power Dynamics

Is Another Europe Possible?

implified anguages of urope map 0

The Democratic Delusion

Only a few days ago opinion polls showed a lead for the Leave side in the upcoming referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union. A growing cross-section of public opinion has been swung on key arguments on sovereignty and democracy so that the elected British parliament can regain control. From the outset the Remain side has had an inbuilt advantage as supporters of the status quo. They have practically the whole global establishment on their side. Everyone from Christine Lagarde at the IMF to President Obama as well as the most prominent economic research institutes supports the UK's continued membership of the EU. The leaderships of all the main parties represented in the British Parliament have also thrown their weight behind the Remain campaign. Even Labour's new leader Jeremy Corbyn, a longstanding opponent of EU expansionism and disciple of Tony Benn, came out in favour of the EU alongside the Greens, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and Scottish Nationalists. In the last general election only one major party, UKIP, stood clearly against EU membership. They may have gained 3.9 million votes, but only won one parliamentary seat. The referendum, it seemed, was a battle between the Tory Right, UKIP and a motley crew of mavericks from other parties versus everyone else, a clearcut fight between our interconnected global future and our insular past or between cosmopolitan universalism and reactionary nationalism. Yet to the astonishment of orthodox opinion leaders ordinary people no longer trust establishment experts or really care about nebulous concepts like economic growth (which just means a bigger GDP). People actually care about their country and social cohesion. Globalisation has largely benefited big corporations and the upwardly mobile professional classes to the detriment of the traditional native working classes.

The StrongerIn campaign has always emphasised Europe, something people associate with good cuisine, wine, beer, sunny holidays, fine art, literature, scientific excellence and a wonderful diversity of traditional cultural identities. How can we leave our European friends? Amazingly millions of ordinary working class voters are fully aware of the distinction between Europe and a superstate imposed on 28 of its countries. To confuse Europe with the EU is like mistaking Russia for the Soviet Union (although if you want to be pedantic at least the USSR comprised the whole of Russia, while the EU excludes European Russia).

Away from university campuses, corporate boardrooms and trendy international development agencies, most people still identify with their community, their home town, their region and their country much more than with hazy concepts such as Europe, increasingly indistinguishable from a broader universalism inspired by the American dream.

Real issue is not Europe at all, but unbalanced migratory flows

While the Remain crowd may have persuasive arguments on economics, the advantages of a common market and cooperation on environmental and security issues, they have always had one weakness in the eyes of many ordinary voters in England, Scotland and Wales, unbalanced migratory flows. To put things into perspective, in the 1970s approximately 100,000 moved to Britain every year, while a similar number left. Indeed in some years more left and entered. Net migration picked up in the 1980s, subsided slightly before growing gradually in the1990s along with global trends for greater labour mobility especially towards more prosperous countries. However, since 1998 net migration climbed steadily and has fluctuated between 200,000 and 330,000 since. The raw figures for 2015 show 630,000 moved to the UK for long term residence (counted as more than 12 months) and 297,000 went the other way. That's a phenomenal rate of demographic change if it continues over the next 15 years. See A summary history of immigration to Britain and Net Migration Statistics.

These crude statistics do not reflect the socio-cultural reality people experience in their everyday lives. If the quality of life keeps improving and communities retain some degree of continuity, immigration can, for want of a better word, enrich society. However, the sustainability of high levels of net migration over a long period of time depends not only on the quantity of newcomers, but also on their quality in terms of age, skills an cultural compatibility as well naturally as the host country's carrying capacity. Thus a large country like Australia can assimilate a greater number of immigrants every year than smaller and more densely populated European or Asian countries. What people perceive is how their community evolves, most important will their children have good opportunities to prosper or will they have to leave their community or fall into a trap of welfare dependence and/or job insecurity? Where you stand on Britain's great immigration debate is likely to depend on your sense of social and economic security as well as your regional identity. This explains why the greatest opposition to mass migration tends to come from outlying suburban areas of indigenous white working classes, although it is not uncommon among second or third generation descendants of Caribbean immigrants who have had to compete with newcomers from Eastern Europe at the lower end of labour market.

The biggest tragedy is a political class increasingly out of touch with ordinary people and only concerned with special interest groups who serve other agendas. If you inhabit a metropolitan elite bubble, you may believe corporate globalisation (a hackneyed term, but what else should we call it?) has benefited everyone except perhaps a few losers who keep moaning about immigrants taking their jobs. The truth is usually much more complex, mainly because of rapid technological change and ensuing job insecurity. The millions of manufacturing jobs that provided a livelihood for the working classes before the 1970s will not return. They have already been outsourced and/or automated. If young workers cannot adapt to the demands of a forever more dynamic service sector or a rapidly metamorphosing tech sector, they are likely to be condemned to a life of unrewarding temporary jobs and long periods of unemployment falling victim to all the scourges of modern society, such as depression, social anxiety and drug addiction. Youth unemployment in the UK is masked by the growth in further education, zero-hour contracts and part-time jobs. In Southern Europe youth unemployment now stands well above 40%. Many countries experience a kind of piggyback migration with waves of migrants from North Africa and Middle East arriving just as locals move to Northern Europe or, if they're lucky, Australia or Canada. The demographic and migratory trends that have seen dramatic changes in the ethnic composition of many urban districts have reverberations across Europe. We see people move literally in all directions. British entrepreneurs and pensioners may move to Spanish, Portuguese or Bulgarian tourist resorts, while millions of Eastern and Southern Europeans have escaped high unemployment to compete in the Northern Europe's booming service sector, but now find themselves displaced by new migratory waves from further afield. Likewise the indigenous middle classes have tended to move away from cities to suburban retreats and this occurs as much in Sweden or Belgium as it does in England and parts of Scotland.

The real irony in this whole Brexit debate is that other Europeans want to thwart the Brussels behemoth just as much as we do. Everywhere grassroots movements from Beppe Grillo's Movimento 5 Stelle (5 Star Movement) in Italy, Podemos in Spain, AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) in Germany and most notoriously Marie Le Pen's Front National want to wrest power from a centralising superstate. While millions of Eastern Europeans took advantage of job opportunities in wealthier European countries, they have not been so keen to accept their share of recent non-European migrants and refugees. Most Europeans would be happy with a looser community of nation states with separate currencies, protected labour markets, but largely tariff-free trade. We need to cooperate on common environmental and security concerns, scientific research, cultural and educational exchanges. We just do not need an all-powerful superstate that suppresses traditional national and regional identities and exacerbates economic divides between rich and poorer regions by imposing one-size fits all monetary policies on everyone. Europeans are not North Americans. We value our national identities and let's unite to build a different kind of European Community with a fraction of the budget of the former EU. We do not want to see the return of yesteryear's national rivalries or national despotisms, but a mosaic of peace-loving independent countries each doing things in slightly different ways. Brexit is probably the quickest way to achieve this as it would prompt renegotiations and embolden EU-sceptic organisations across Europe to challenge Brussels' hegemony. However, even a narrow Remain win would send a clear signal people want the levers of power to be much closer to home. Sadly in the wake of the murder of Jo Cox MP, I doubt the leave side can win, except by the narrowest margins. A more probably outcome will be 55% for Remain on a lower turnout as many reluctant Brexiters will be burdened by guilt for the crazy actions of one mentally deranged loner.

However, even with a comfortable victory for the Remain side, the fundamental weaknesses of the EU project will not go away. The Euro is unlikely to survive the bankruptcy of the Italian state or ten more years of mass migrations from North Africa and Middle East. The question is whether we could build a pan-European movement to dismantle the EU project peacefully and democratically or if it's too late and we let Europe descend into civil war between rival native and migrant communities when the next global banking crisis comes?

Categories
Power Dynamics

Rebutted: Top trendy arguments against balanced migration

  1. Immigration control is racist

    Unless you share your property with others less fortunate than yourself, you're racist too. Immigration controls ensure we can plan services and look after those already in our country. Besides our country has a limited carrying capacity and with an uncertain global economy it would be unwise to rely too much on imported food and raw materials to sustain our growing population.

    You're exaggerating, we have plenty of empty houses and green fields

    Only 13% of the world's land is arable at all. Most is very inhospitable, but we need countryside not only for farming, but for clean water, air and the replenishment of an ecosystem that took 3 billion years to evolve. England is already the most densely populated country in Europe and its population is growing at the fastest rate since 1800. There may be many empty houses, but they tend to be not fit for human habitation (a terraced house bought for £700,000 recently collapsed during renovation), are too upmarket (e.g. luxury flats for property investors) or are simply in the wrong place (e.g. in ghost towns, dangerous high-crime areas, in busy high-traffic zones not suitable for young children etc.). However, it's true around Europe there are around 11 million empty houses, most of which are naturally in Eastern and Southern Europe in areas of high unemployment and emigration.

  2. Our population is ageing.

    We need more nurses and carers to look after our parents and grandparents. You refer only to our native population. The UK now has one of the highest birth rates in Europe and this is much higher among recent migrants than the autochthonous community. Besides migrants age too, so unless we train our own young people we'll just end up importing forever more cheap carers and relying on imported goods and resources to sustain our growing population. The idea that net migration boosts the economy is a kind of Ponzi scheme.

  3. Migrants pay lots of tax

    Partly true. However, migrants also consume services and require more infrastructure. Most reports claiming migrants have made large net contributions to the Exchequer fail to take into account services that they use. An oft-quoted figure is that between 2001 and 2011 EU migrants paid £20 billion in tax. However, that works out at 2 billion year for approximately 2 million people leaving just £1000 per head to cover the cost of additional services required. An average worker has to earn over 32K a year to cover services consumed. Yet despite this extra tax revenue, our governments is still running a massive budget deficit.

  4. Our country was too boring before the year 2000

    Actually many urban areas were already culturally diverse in 2000, but migration began to run out of control in the late 1990s. Before then we could manage and assimilate people from many countries into our home-bred communities, now we create parallel societes. Besides what do you have against native Britons?

  5. We have a skills gap

    Mainly because successive governments have failed to invest in key science and engineering education or provide young people with enough apprenticeships. Indeed despite record levels of immigration, the skills gap is growing rather than shrinking as we have a vast oversupply of unskilled and semi-skilled workers, but rising demand.