Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Left vs Right: The Yin and Yang of political analysis

Left vs Right: The Yin and Yang of political analysis

As an idealist teenager I always wanted to side with the notional left on everything. The left represented progress towards a better tomorrow freed of human suffering, prejudice, inequality and exploitation, a panacea in which all human beings could enjoy life to the full in a giant communal garden of Eden. The right, on the other hand, represented the forces of reactionary conservatism emotionally tied to the establishment and traditions that prevented progress to a fairer world. I could summarise my naive adolescent appraisal of the left versus right dichotomy as a simple battle between altruistic good and selfish evil. If only life were so simple? However, this simplification of the left - right spectrum still holds true for many youthful political pundits. If you want to discredit a political stance, it often suffices to call it rightwing, end of debate.

The real distinction between left and right transcends broader political questions such as the balance between state control and private enterprise or the relative merits of equality and healthy competition. A left-winger, at heart, is just a wishful thinking idealist who believes social and technological progress will enable us all to enjoy a very high standard of living if only the greedy rich could share more of their wealth. Right-wingers on the other hand are simply pragmatists. They do not necessarily mean to harm anyone else, just they believe we can only really take care of ourselves and our family and should owe greater allegiance to our national community than our species as a whole. While left-wingers view humanity as an organic network that will converge on a new progressive agenda, right-wingers view people as a complex web of competing individuals and in-groups with different interests, strengths and weaknesses.

Fifty years ago in the midst of the Cold War, it may well have seemed that the notional left, at least in Western Europe and North America, challenged a notionally right-wing establishment. Conservative parties would tend to favour private enterprise, family values and civic pride, while the left called for greater state control, more social welfare and international solidarity. In reality most Western governments, whether nominally left or right of centre, pursued business-friendly social interventionism, often confusingly called social democracy, to engineer high living standards, a growing consumer economy and relative social cohesion. National debates would be framed in terms of progress versus traditionalism, personal freedom versus social intervention or democracy versus tyranny. However, both the left and right had plenty of skeletons in their proverbial cupboards. While the libertarian right could point to godless dictatorships behind the Iron Curtain, the radical left could expose national capitalism's complicity in supporting not only Mussolini and Hitler, but also dictatorships in Spain (1937-75), Portugal (1933 to 1974), Greece (1967 to 1974) or Chile (1973 to 1990). Whichever way, authoritarian regimes of the notional left and right, had the blood of tens of millions on their hands. Moreover, these regimes often enjoyed the full support and collaboration of governments in supposedly democratic countries. Meanwhile much of the European radical left sought either to distance themselves from the Stalinist Soviet Union and Maoist China or downplay their authoritarian excesses. Yet repressive regimes of all hues tended to favour collectivist rights and responsibilities over personal freedoms.

For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the notional left would champion the self-determination of subjugated peoples, whether in Ireland, India or the African colonies. Imperialism remained largely associated with the right, except when dealing with regions and peoples attempting to free themselves from a rival imperialist power. As the Spanish and Portuguese empires waned, the British, French and later American empires could spread their more technologically advanced liberal mercantilist culture, often supporting local forces of national liberation. As the Ottoman Empire declined, the French, British and Italians filled the vacuum as progressive purveyors of Western civilisation, a concept which would later morph into freedom and democracy. The left's view on self-determination began to change with the birth of the Soviet Union. While previously the left had always favoured the self-determination of all peoples in the age of expansionist empires, socialists became more interested in international solidarity and in defending what many saw as a workers' state, whether deformed or not. Yet many of the struggles, from which quasi-socialist regimes emerged, started as wars of national liberation from foreign oppressors.

Nothing epitomises the modern left more than its oxymoronic obsession with equality and diversity. Surely, the more diverse we are, the less equal we are too, except in the loose sense of equality of opportunities, rights and responsibilities. A hunter-gatherer community will never be equal to a globally integrated complex society reliant on advanced technology and an extreme division of labour. That doesn't mean hunter-gatherers are in any way intellectually inferior, just they use their intelligence in a different way. Hunter-gatherers conceive wealth in terms of their ability to enjoy the bounties of nature, not as their ability to use abstract finances to allocate strategic resources for their personal benefit. Yet traditional ways of life that evolved over thousands of years are rapidly giving way to a globally integrated high-tech mono-culture. The more we talk of diversity, the less we have. As fewer and fewer people survive as subsistence farmers or hunter-gatherers (the latter being an endangered way of life), most of humanity now depends on the financial economy. Globalisation has unmasked a massive, and indeed growing, disparity between the financially rich and poor, concealed only by generous welfare in wealthier countries and lower costs of living in some low-wage regions. Equality and diversity initiatives really have little to do with either equality or diversity, but merely managing global convergence as people from different social and cultural backgrounds come into contact with each other.

The heirs to the great European and American working classes, who in large part made today's world possible through skill and dedication, have either had to adapt to a volatile service economy or have been made redundant through automation and/or outsourcing. By keeping large swathes of the population dependent on welfare, the social democratic left has mainly succeeded in keeping the consumer economy alive while slowly but surely thwarting the willpower and self-motivation of millions in the growing underclass trapped on benefits. How could the heirs of the once-proud labour movement defend a system that not only demotivates the lower classes, but wrecks family life and requires a massive social surveillance apparatus to maintain some degree of social order. Fatherlessness alone costs taxpayers hundreds of millions through additional welfare support needs and lack of ambition in teenage boys. Yet the trendy left sees the demise of the traditional two-parent family as a sign of progress, because it allegedly empowers women and homosexuals to break free from heterosexual patriarchy. Yet in promoting this brave new world, the lifestyle left have broken with thousands of years of cultural evolution across many diverse societies. Rather than adapting the traditional roles of men and women in line with technological and social change, the doctrinaire left seeks to eradicate all functional differences. As a result in many Western countries, young men have become great demotivated underachievers, while women have an advantage in a plethora of non-productive people-oriented roles, such as social workers, project managers or recruiters. While female emancipation has been enabled by technology developed mainly by men, it has effectively turned most women into wage slaves and undervalued their traditional role as mothers.

All too often many of the forces that pose on the left advocate policies that suit the needs of power-hungry transnational corporations much more than those of ordinary women or men. Meanwhile the globalist left pretends to oppose the excesses of global capitalism, such as environmental depredation, grotesque overindulgence or mind-bending hyper-consumerism. Yet these are mere side effects of a system that creates insatiable demand for elusive opulence.

Categories
Computing

Why are there so many recruiters?

I don't know about you, but 90% or more of my linkedin contact requests come from recruiters. I don't accept them all. Am I the kind of talented high-flyer you would want to headhunt? Probably not, in person I'm rather shy and certainly not management material. I suppose I just know a few esoteric programming tricks and have a good understanding of data and information architecture. What's more, apart from a few modules taken as part of an Open University degree, I'm entirely self-taught. With all these young whizkids graduating in IT-related degrees in a country obsessed with electronic gadgets and multimedia wizardry, you'd think I'd have plenty of competition from young twenty-somethings. Despite high youth unemployment and free access to tutorials on just about any programming framework that takes your fancy, relatively few youngsters get beyond writing a few lines of Javascript. Unfortunately the tech industry does not need mediocre code monkeys who can churn out repetitive procedural scripts, for that task can be fully automated. In the software industry you do not judge someone's productivity by the amount of code they write or even by the number of hours they work, but how well their application performs. To produce lean and mean applications, you need to get your head around various programming algorithms and design patterns. Yes, it really does matter if you pass a variable by reference or by value or if you clumsily copy and paste variants of some old procedural routine rather than encapsulate it in a neat reusable function that can be reliably tested and yields no side effects.

A good developer never stops learning new techniques to write better, more expressive, more maintainable and more efficient code, rather than clever tricks to automate monotonous tasks. That means good hands-on developers are nearly always geeks, as we have to dedicate much of our time to learning new languages and cutting-edge techniques We can learn some things by social osmosis, but only if we understand core concepts that relate to direct experience. Indeed if a subject does not actively interest us, that's what most of us do. We rely on other people's expertise, but know enough about the subject to avoid getting ripped off. In some academic fields a specialist in someone who has researched a subject extensively, but in most hard sciences specialists are people with active hands-on experience. Unless you have written and tested applications with complex and irregular business logic, you wouldn't be able to appreciate what application developers do. They just sit in front of screens writing quirky symbols with a few English-like key words. Concepts such as design patterns mean little if you have just learned how to do a simple loop. Now suppose you need to hire a new developer, for sake of argument, let's just assume you need a good NodeJS specialist. Who could possibly judge if a candidate knows their stuff? They may have an excellent CV, good qualifications and some good references, but in today's fast-changing world, these mean very little. Millions have worked directly or indirectly for major media multinationals. If you say you worked on the BBC news Website, which bit did you do? Did you just design a prototype for a new button or test a new interactive widget on different browsers? Does your recruiter really understand what skills are required?

Recruiter
Hello, Neil. It's Ryan Adams here. Look we've got a Drupal gig on at Arty Farty New Age Media over in Soho. They need a hard-core backend guy like yourself for a couple of weeks. Would £400 a day tempt you?
Me
Well, actually I'm very busy at moment (trying to fix someone else's awful code), but might be available in a couple of weeks (just in case my contract is cut short).
Recruiter
They really need someone to start straight away. This is for a massive media campaign of a leading household brand.
Me
What happened to the last developer?
Recruiter
Oh, he had issues, some of kind of personality clash, I think. How about £450 a day?
Me
If we continue this conversation, my contract here will be terminated. Let me get back to undoing the mess the last developer here created.
Recruiter
Is your boss looking for any new developers?

One way or another for every real hands-on developer out there there's at least one recruiter, one project manager, a business analyst, a marketing wonk and an accountant (because many IT professionals are contractors with their own limited companies). For some jobs in London's frenetic media sector, I've been contacted by five or more recruiters from different agencies for the same job. "Do you have experience with Solr, the Zend framework, Git and IPTV?" enquires a 22 year old IT graduate. These are really just buzzwords, which mean little until more details are revealed. In most cases they just need an experienced developer who happens to have a used the required programming language in the context of a specific framework and has worked in small teams with agile methodology. Requiring a good understanding of business processes is a good way to weed out self-taught novice programmers or inexperienced IT graduates.

For over 20 years the UK education system has produced millions of graduates who can, figuratively speaking, talk the talk, and not so many who can walk the walk. Although our way of life relies on complex technology, few have more than a cursory overview of its inner workings, but millions are employed in managing the complex human interactions between business owners, government agencies and mission-critical human resources. If all recruiters went on strike tomorrow, no essential services would be disrupted. Life would carry on as usual, except slowly lead developers would have to spend a little more time hunting new talent and would probably choose other geeks just like themselves. That is precisely the scenario, that upper management would prefer to avoid. They do not want a new category of indispensable engineers who can hold their business to ransom. They do not want technical experts to see the whole picture or even gain credit for the fruits of their labour. Meeting business requirements often means just accepting you're a cog in a much bigger machine and cannot work out of sync with all the other cogs, chains, pulleys and lubricating fluids.

Categories
Computing

The Copy and Paste Design Pattern

copy paste

All good programmers understand the concept of design patterns, creational patterns, structural patterns and behavioural patterns. We apply these patterns in different aspects of our projects. It's good to recognise common patterns so we can generalise routines into reusable functions or objects. I won't bore you with the details because you can learn more from a wealth of other online resources, but two key principles underly all design patterns:

  1. Think strategically about your application architecture
  2. Do not Repeat Yourself, aka, DRY. Organise your code so common routines can be reapplied.

Great, but in my humble experience we should add probably the most common design pattern of them all, though strictly speaking it's an anti-pattern: Adaptive Copy & Paste. The core idea here is if it works for somebody else you can just copy, paste and post-edit their code. Sometimes you can begin with some really good snippets of well-structured and commented code, but all too often online code samples are just formulaic and adapted from textbook boilerplate code. I've seen blocks of code pasted into Javascript files with references to StackOverflow.com complete with source URLs and deployed on high-traffic live sites. Let me show you a simple example:

var GBPExchangeRates = {
    USD: 1.52,
    EUR: 1.38,
    CDN: 1.57,
    SKR: 12.89,
    AUD: 1.45,
    CHF: 1.76
  };
  function convertGBPToEuro(GBPVal) {
    if (typeof GBPVal == 'string') {
        GBPVal = GBPVal.repplace(/[^0-9.]/g,'');
        if (GBPVal.length>0) {
            GBPVal = parseFloat(GBPVal);
        }
    }
        if (typeof GBPVal == 'number') {
        return GBPVal * GBPExchangeRates.EUR
    }
    return 0;
  }
  function convertGBPToUSD(GBPVal) {
    if (typeof GBPVal == 'string') {
        GBPVal = GBPVal.repplace(/[^0-9.]/g,'');
        if (GBPVal.length>0) {
            GBPVal = parseFloat(GBPVal);
        }
    }
    if (typeof GBPVal == 'number') {
        return GBPVal * GBPExchangeRates.USD
    }
    return 0;
  }
  
  var coffeePriceGBP = 1.90;
  
  var teaPriceGBP = 1.10;
  
  var orangeJuicePriceGBP = 1.50;
  
  var coffeePriceEUR = convertGBPToEuro(coffeePriceGBP);
  
  var teaPriceEUR = convertGBPToEuro(teaPriceGBP);
  
  var orangeJuicePriceEUR = convertGBPToEuro(orangeJuicePriceGBP);
  
  var coffeePriceUSD = convertGBPToUSD(coffeePriceGBP);
  
  var teaPriceUSD = convertGBPToUSD(teaPriceGBP);
  
  var orangeJuicePriceUSD = convertGBPToUSD(orangeJuicePriceGBP);

For a beginner, this is honestly not that bad at all. First we set up a simple object of common currencies with their exchange rates. In the real world this may come from some sort of feed. Next we devise a neat function to convert our GBP prices to Euros. Just to make it failsafe, we make sure we can handle strings with a mixture of numerals and currency symbols, which may include commas or other symbols than decimal points. If we only ever had to convert between British pounds and Euros, that would be just fine, though we may convert all prices via some sort of loop rather than make separate calls for each price. Here for just three prices and three currencies, we need to set nine explicit price variants and six explicit function calls.

However, later an intrepid project manager decides we need to support other currencies and may need to convert other units too, such as measurements or clothes sizes, so a busy code monkey promptly copies, pastes and adapts the first method to USD. Not too bad we only have two functions, but they contain much shared logic. Indeed the only difference lies in the conversion rate. We should break down this logic into steps. First we test if the input is a number (Javascript has a generic Number type that covers both floats and integers). Next we strip any non-numeric characters and cast to a float if the result is not empty. Only then do we apply our conversion rate. The above code could be even worse. We could have opted to hard-code the conversion rate. This may work for constants, such inches to centimetres, but it doesn't work for variables like exchange rates. What we need a generic method to convert number-like strings to true floats and another generic method to apply conversion rates from simple key/value objects.
Javascript makes it very easy for us to apply the decorator pattern by extending an object's prototype. This allows us to chain methods in a very self-descriptive way.

String.prototype.numeralsOnly = function() {
    return this.replace(/[^0-9.]/g,'');
}
String.prototype.toFloat = function() {
    var self = this.numeralsOnly();
    if (self.length < 1) {
        self = 0;
    }
    return  parseFloat(self);
}
Number.prototype.toFloat = function() {
    return parseFloat(this);
}
Object.prototype.matchFloat = function(key) {
var obj = this, val;
    if (obj instanceof Object) {
        if (obj.hasOwnProperty(key)) {
            val = obj[key];
            if (val) {
                return val.toFloat();
            }
        }
    }
    return 0;
}
Number.prototype.convert = function(fromUnit,toUnit,units) {
    if (units instanceof Object) {
        return this * (
        units.matchFloat(toUnit) / units.matchFloat(fromUnit)
        );
    }
}

We then apply a simple conversion table:

  var rates = {
    GBP: 1,
    USD: 1.53,
    EUR: 1.37,
    YEN: 132.2,
    RUB: 12.7
  };

Then if we were to allow users to convert to the currency of their choice, we could simply add prices in the base currency (in this case GBP) via some hidden element and then apply the conversion factor via the Document Object Model (or DOM):

  $('table thead .currencies .option').on('click',function(e){
    var it = $(this),
      tb = it.parent().parent().parent().parent(),
      selEl = it.parent().find('.selected');
    if (selEl.length < 1) {
      selEl = it.parent('em').first();
    }
    var selCurr = selEl.text().trim().toUpperCase(), tgCurr = it.text().trim().toUpperCase();
    tb.find('.price').each(function(i){
      var td = $(this),
      nVl = td.attr('data-gbp').toFloat().convert('GBP',tgCurr,rates);
      td.html(nVl.toFixed(2));
    });
    
  });

This may look like more code, but we now have a solution that works with any currencies and any number of data items to be converted. Moreover, our convert method may be applied to any units. If we wanted to present volumes in either millilitres or fluid ounces we would just include our decorator methods as a library, set up a conversion table and write a short DOM script. 90% of the code would have been tested for other use cases:

var volumeUnits = {
    ml: 1,
    l: 1000,
    floz: 29.5625
}

Good programmers always think out of the box, not just how to solve the current problem as presented by a project manager, but how do I solve other problems like this? More important, we should ask how to make our code more maintainable and easier to test.

Common Mistakes

  1. Placing editorial content in code files that only developers know how to edit: e.g. A senior manager has decided to edit some text on your company's online shop. The only reason she needs to involve you in this editorial change is because your predecessor placed the text in a template or even worse embedded it verbatim on line 1451 of a fat controller file. What should you do? To make your life easy you could just edit the offending line and write a note for future developers that this text is hard-coded in such and such a file. Management will then think that whenever they wish to edit content they need to ask your project manager to ask you to apply some cryptic code change. However, later they will review their IT budget and decide you are too expensive and then outsource the whole project to a low-wage country or replace it with a state-of-the-art content management system that let's them edit any content without any programming knowledge. What you should do is suggest all such content should be editable in a special admin area and all hard-coded text, media or numbers should be replaced with references to editable content.
  2. Quoting one programming language in another: This is surprisingly common. The main reason for doing so is to inject server-side variables into client-side scripts, e.g. using PHP to build a Javascript routine with a few variables generated dynamically by the server. Not only does this make your Javascript very hard to debug, but it inevitably leads to more repetitive and thus slower Javascript. If you want to fetch data from the back-end, you should inject it as hidden attributes that Javascript can read or simply inject some JSON easily converted from native server-side objects or make an asynchronously request with a JSON response. Keep your javascript lean and mean and ideally in separate files, so your browser can cache these resources more efficiently. If you're using backbone.js or jQuery or other framework, these can be loaded from a content delivery network or CDN.
  3. Repeating routines: Whenever you find yourself repeating a routine more than once, you need a new function or at they very least a loop:
    var d = new Date(item.created);
   item.created_date = d.getDate() + '/' + (d.getMonth()+1) + '/' + d.getFullYear();
   
   var d = new Date(item.modified);
   item.modified_date = d.getDate() + '/' + (d.getMonth()+1) + '/' + d.getFullYear();

This is messy. What we need is a generic date conversion function:

var isoDateToEuroDate = function(strDate) {
    var d = new Date(strDate);
     return d.getDate() . zeropad(2) + '/' + (d.getMonth()+1) . zeropad(2) + '/' + d.getFullYear();
}

And if we're doing a lot of date manipulation,we might like to include a date library to make our code simpler. Your bosses may not notice that you are just writing the same code over and over again, but if your code becomes very expensive to maintain, they will either ditch it or outsource your work to some hapless code monkeys on a fraction of your wage.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Creepy Agendas

2015 11 03 olice

Do Corbyn and Cameron agree on Policing the human mind?

Did anyone notice that we now have a shadow minister for mental health? Until recently we just had ministers for health concerned with the provision of medical services and social welfare. Indeed Labour's new allegedly anti-establishment leader chose to use his limited time at Prime Minister's Questions to address the perceived shortage of mental health services in the NHS. If you substitute the word psychiatry for mental health, you will soon understand where I'm coming from. Let's be under no illusions, when awareness-raising lobbyists talk of mental health (theoretically a positive term as we all aspire to good health in all aspects of our lives), they mean psychiatry, the notion that any deviation from some arbitrary definition of sanity merits medical treatment, intrusive monitoring and potentially hospitalisation. Indeed Mr Corbyn specifically bemoaned the lack of hospital beds for mental health patients, when in reality NHS spending on so-called mental health services has continued to rise year on year, with direct state intervention supplemented by a growing third sector. The problem is increased spending fails to meet spiralling demand, so the real question is why do so many people fail to cope emotionally?

Jeremy Corbyn comes across as extremely sincere. I shared many of his views 30 years ago and still agree with his consistent opposition to neo-imperialist faux-humanitarian wars. I rejoiced as Labour activists voted against the careerist heirs to Tony Blair and endorsed a rebel MP. Should Jeremy Corbyn wear a neatly ironed tailored suit or sing a national anthem that hails from Great Britain's colonial past? Should he acquire a modish sense of humour or feign interest in popular spectator sports? Personally, I like his apparent authenticity and prefer people to be themselves rather than try to emulate media personalities, which leads me back to the creepy mental health agenda.

This subject seems to find its way into speeches and stage-managed debates in all mainstream political parties from the Liberal Democrats to the Tories, from New Labour to the SNP, now the governing party in Scotland. Concern about mental health services is always billed as progressive and caring, yet few question the underlying authoritarian roots of the latest attempt to rebrand psychiatry.

Define Irrationality!

Many human behaviours seem irrational and some are either evil or simply self-destructive. In antiquity, long before modern medicine and social welfare, dysfunctional behaviour would be rewarded only with social exclusion and procreational failure. By definition functional behaviour serves the best interests of oneself and one's immediate family and community, while dysfunctional behaviour may satisfy temporary desires, but destroys livelihoods. However, who may define insanity and gain the right to intervene in the lives of those who exhibit signs of madness? The answer to this question goes to the very heart of our concept of personal freedom and collective responsibility. If I want to run around naked in my back garden, do I not have the freedom to do so? Some would consider this an obscene act of madness and others a harmless and perfectly natural pastime on a sunny afternoon. The apparent insanity of such an act depends very much on its social acceptability. Not all actions are entirely logical. Many serve functions other than mere physical survival. We need to nurture not only our body, but also our soul and social bonds. We gain pleasure not just from essential life-sustaining deeds such as breathing, drinking, eating and keeping fit, but from our relentless quest for greater connectedness with the outside world and above all with other human beings. We live not just for the sake of life itself, but to play, learn, communicate, explore and experience. Over the millennia we have developed an almost endless variety of rituals and pursuits to fulfil our emotional or spiritual needs. Sometimes such adventurous creativity led us to discover new techniques and thus allow our species to colonise new habitats and dedicate more time to leisure and learning than mundane survival tasks. However, we have always grappled with two competing impulses. On the one hand we may seek greater social approval and integration, a tendency we call conformism. On the other, we have a natural drive to learn new tricks and engage in new experiences. We may call this latter inquisitive impulse, non-conformism, or when expressed as a rebellion against orthodoxy, as anti-conformism.

Is Society Insane?

As a rule illogical, non-productive and/or dysfunctional behaviours are fine as long they meet social approval. In modern Britain, all sorts of very antisocial destructive antics are justified as mere drunken larks. Many seemingly irrational deeds are not just socially acceptable, but are actively promoted by advertising and social media. Obsessive gambling, intensive video-gaming and all night drug-addled raves are now fairly mainstream, advertised in digital media and glorified by celebrities. Such activities carry mere warnings, yet have the power to blind us to reality or prevent us from leading productive lives. We have become obsessed with fame and publicity. If rock stars can lead lavish lifestyles high on heroin or crack cocaine, why should I not emulate them?

By contrast many harmless non-conformist acts are simply judged mad, or in modern parlance, mental health issues. If you have just re-mortgaged your house to bet on a horse who may not win, that may be slightly unwise, but just the kind of wild things people do these days. However, if you are fixated with media lies and refuse to believe hijacked jet planes could cause the collapse of New York's famous Twin Towers in 2001, many will consider you a conspiracy theorist. It doesn't matter that historically governments have repeatedly lied to their people. If you doubt your mainstream media today, you are probably afflicted by some sort of paranoid delusion.

Shifting Goalposts

Mental ill-health criteria depend not so much on illogical dysfunctional behaviour, but on people management and social integration. If someone deviates from societal norms and behaves in a challenging way that affects social order, it is much easier for myriad social workers and psychologists to view the problem as a neurological disorder rather than a wider societal problem. While we all like to pretend we care about each other, all too often we seize on some of other people's most superficial imperfections to justify exclusion and discriminatory treatment. More investment in the mental health sector inevitably leads more people to be diagnosed with spurious personality disorders. Once labelled, a person begins to view life's challenges mainly in terms of their new psychiatric identity rather than as a complex set of psychological reactions to a divisive social rat race. The more we diagnose people with one mental health condition or another, the more we need to invest in treatment for such conditions. Worse still such conditions are increasingly seen as natural genetic variations that have always existed.

The powerful pro-psychiatry lobby has meanwhile coopted the language of the radical left. People diagnosed with personality disorders are now seen as victims of stigma against their labels, rather than victims of psychiatry and of a wider society unwilling to understand why they behave as they do. They claim to defend the rights of the vulnerable, yet absolve the society that caused their emotional problems.

By equating physical health with mental health, we reduce complex human thoughts and feelings to mere physiological organs that respond to medical treatment. Some people do have genuine neurological deficits or brain damage. Our brains are amazingly versatile and adaptive. Some have coped incredibly well even after losing half their brain. These conditions are rightly the realm of neurologists, but most sufferers of depression, OCD, anorexia or psychosis do not have any discernible neurological defects that predate their first exposure to psychoactive drugs and a very large proportion of those who suffered psychosis had been regular users of recreational drugs, even of allegedly soft drugs like cannabis.

Awareness raisers will endlessly recycle the statistic that 1 in 4 adults will suffer a mental health issue. In Jeremy Corbyn's words this means everyone has a close friend or relative who has experienced a mental health crisis (which we used to call a nervous breakdown). The corollary is we need to invest in public healthcare and welfare to help such people. In other words we need more psychiatrists, social workers and welfare dependence rather than more tolerant and accommodating workplaces and less insane social competition. If someone finds it hard to meet and keep friends, is it necessarily their fault? Do we only act if social exclusion can be attributed to racism, sexism or homophobia? Why the hell do we all have to act cool and feign interest in shallow junk culture just to be popular among our peers? Why do we measure ourselves against movie stars, rather just look after our natural bodies? Can we not just be ourselves?

Lastly where do we draw the line between normality and mental ill-health, between sadness and depression or between audacity and insanity? These lines have been steadily blurring for over 20 years to encompass a widening cross-section of society. By normalising mental health labels, we're walking down a slippery slope to a Brave New World, in which everyone is classified by their neurological traits and all aspects of our lives are monitored for the greater social good.

The only irony is the media has already begun to explain away Corbyn's views on foreign affairs, wars and monarchy in condescending psychiatric terms. Yet expanding the surveillance state has been as much part of the elite agenda as waging destabilising wars in the Middle East. Corbyn will have little impact on any policies that are effectively devolved to NATO, the EU or global banks, but on mental health he is at one with Cameron.

Categories
Power Dynamics

Confusing arguments about Refugees

refugees

Some of us are fully aware of the semantic differences between refugees and migrants. A migrant is anyone who moves from one region to another. All people classed as refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, emigrants, settlers, travellers or nomads are migrants. Migration is a wholly neutral term that implies nothing about our motivations or plans or indeed whether we are moving to another continent, country or just another region of the same country. By contrast a refugee is a special category of migrant fleeing persecution, war and/or environmental calamities. A refugee has little choice but to move to a place of safety. Helping refugees is an act of human solidarity, not a business transaction. You don't help refugees to boost your economy, provide a convenient source of cheap labour or transform your country into a dynamic multicultural mosaic of ethnically diverse communities. You help refugees because you can and because you hope one day your act of human solidarity will be repaid in kind. Yet the mass-migration lobby recycle many of the same arguments used for increased economic migration. Indeed I agree in some circumstances economic migration can benefit the native population, but that has nothing to do with refugees, unless you are prepared only to help those who can enrich you and not those who need your help most.

More important, refugees do not choose to abandon their homeland for selfish economic betterment, but to seek safety until they can return to their homeland. Sometimes this may not be easy, but good samaritans help others to help themselves.

In 1973 Ugandan dictator Idi Amin expelled Indians as part of his Africanisation programme. Indian Ugandans formed a distinctive business community who did not fully integrate with African Ugandans and were often seen as lackeys of British colonialism. They were caught in a limbo between Britain, whose language they spoke fluently, and India where most had never lived. Some moved to India, but the UK accepted some 30,000 as many recognised the British Empire's primary responsibility for their plight. This is often cited as an example of successful accommodation of refugees, largely because they were relatively well-educated and had a strong entrepreneurial spirit. However, in most emergencies wealthy Western countries do little to help. Compare and contrast the way the British government welcomed 30,000 Asian Ugandans to the way only a few years earlier it resettled around 2000 Chagos islanders to temporary camps in Mauritius at the behest of the US State Department so they could build a strategic airbase there. To military planners the Chagossians represented little more than an inconvenience that had to be dealt with in the name of progress, a little like rehousing the residents of dwellings demolished to make way for a new motorway. British colonial history is littered with examples of resettlements and ethnic cleansing. Concern about refugees beyond one's immediate border zones is a very modern phenomenon, facilitated by 24/7 news and easy long-distance travel.

Now the mass-migration lobby have decided to exploit the very real Syrian refugee crisis. The 4 way civil war was caused largely by US and UK military intervention and funding of opposition militias, who later split and joined ISIS. Before the war most Syrians wanted to remain in their home country. Now over half the population has fled. Yet many of the same globalist forces that supported intervention first against the Assad regime and then against ISIS, also want European countries to welcome more refugees. The same is true for Libya. Before the overthrow of Colonel Gadafi, migratory flows from North Africa to Europe were relatively small, because for all his faults Gadafi stemmed the tide by accepting a fair number of Sub-Sarahan African immigrants to work in his oil-rich republic. After his regime fell and rival militias took over, the country has descended into chaos allowing a huge rise in people trafficking.

Migration is all about checks and balances

Until recently we talked mainly in terms of immigrants and emigrants, because before the age of cheap long distance travel such movements tended to be permanent. Europeans would emigrate to the Americas to start a new life and we would assimilate immigrants from other countries, often former colonies. However, many birds regularly migrate, a natural adaptation to seasonal and climatic variations. Common starlings will winter in Iberia or North Africa, but fly north to the British Isles in summer. We call this migration because it involves periodic round trips. We may assume if the Ice Age returned starlings would adapt their migratory patterns accordingly. Likewise some human communities still lead a nomadic lifestyle, especially in sparsely populated regions with inhospitable climates for much of the year. For most of humanity's existence, we were hunter gatherers organised into tribes who would regularly move within their known habitats. We lived more at one with nature. Our movements would adapt to natural ecological changes, but would usually lead us to familiar territory, unless overriding environmental vicissitudes motivated us to risk life and limb in search of new lands, which often meant traversing hundreds of miles of unchartered territory before discovering a new hospitable habitat. Again this process is correctly called migration because we had no foreknowledge of any human communities that might live in our new homeland. We did not migrate to colonise other people, but to find a new home for our community. Then around fifteen thousand years ago the agrarian revolution led more of us to abandon our nomadic lifestyle in favour of more permanent settlements that would become fiefdoms with armies and eventually lead to the first city states and expansionist empires. When you move from one country to another, you shift your allegiance and adapt to a different set of customs. That's why we talked of immigration and emigration.

By stressing migration rather than immigration, opinion leaders hoped to shift public perception away from the social and environmental challenges of accommodating more people with different cultural backgrounds into their neighbourhoods to the normalisation of free movement as a fact of post-modern 21st century life. Just as British people holiday in Spain or Turkey and even buy second homes there, others choose to move here for work. This seems fine as long as it's balanced and, dare I say, sustainable. Unfortunately, opinion leaders have only succeeded in persuading us to say migrants rather than immigrants. They have failed dismally in persuading us that mass movements of people and transient communities with rapidly changing ethnic compositions benefit longstanding native communities. They have merely impoverished the English language by removing important semantic distinctions.

Now the mass-migration lobby wants us to call all migrants refugees. Not only is this factually incorrect, it does a disservice to genuine refugees, who have to compete with economic migrants for access to the more prosperous safe havens.

Categories
Power Dynamics

Imagine there’s no countries…

Utopia or dystopia

Reflections on Global Convergence

As an idealist teenager John Lennon's Imagine became my anthem. I yearned for a future devoid of the seemingly pointless nationalist rivalry and imperialism that had fuelled two world wars and enslaved millions in the colonial era. I dreamed innocently of a world where different peoples would learn from each other, share their experiences and cultures altruistically and fairly. Yet as I travelled around Europe, South America, Southern Africa and India, another reality emerged. Far from converging on a new environmentally sustainable and egalitarian world order with genuine cultural exchange, the world was converging rapidly on a new model of hyper-consumerism based on the North American dream. As the increasingly globalised world media, albeit localised in a multitude of idioms, spread awareness of the 2-car suburban family with all mod cons, traditional alternatives lost their appeal. Suddenly everyone wanted a washing machine, fridge, car, TV and holidays in the sun. Anything less might now be viewed as some kind of denial of human rights. If you enjoy these luxuries you may reasonably wonder why you should deny them to those who through no fault of their own were born in a low-wage country, where with a lower purchasing power people may not afford all the gizmos of early 21st century life that many of us take for granted. This begs the question, can we ratchet up global consumption to sustain 8 billion people (the world population is forecast to peak at between 10 and 11 billion sometime mid century) with a Western European lifestyle? That would require 4 billion motor vehicles, millions more miles of multilane highways and high-speed railways, a huge rise in air traffic, and four to five-fold rise in electricity consumption, even taking into account improvements in energy efficiency. Even if we could convert our entire car fleet to electric power, we'd still need billions of tonnes of steel, aluminium and plastics as well as copious supplies of lithium for mission-critical batteries. Yet some wishful thinkers would rather believe the only reason we have not yet refined technology to accommodate 10 billion happy consumers in perfect harmony with our ecosystem is because of a combination of evil capitalism, repressive regimes and remnant border controls that prevent people from escaping third world hell holes.

An apparently well-meaning group of left-branded activists have recently staged protests under the No Borders banner in Calais. As their name suggests they want the complete abolition of border controls. If corporations can operate globally without restrictions, then why can't human beings? Their demands stand in stark contrast to widespread opposition among millions of ordinary Europeans to growing levels of immigration. Then Germany's business-friendly government announced they would accept as many as 800,000 refugees (and other migrants) this year. As migrants continued to flow through Southern and Eastern Europe to reach the more generous welfare states of Sweden, Germany and the UK, incessant media pressure mounted for more countries to take their fair share. The stage is set for the perfect storm in the next phase of globalisation, as ethnically diverse groups of natives and newcomers compete to gain access to higher pay and living standards. Newcomers fail to understand why they cannot enjoy the fruits of what is by any measure a globally integrated economy, while natives all too often remain not just sceptical of the alleged benefits of mass immigration, but see their wages compressed as the practical cost of living keeps rising.

Global Village

For the sake of argument let us just indulge the universalist fantasy, prevalent in much of the allegedly green left, that as we are all human beings in an increasingly interconnected world, we may as well just abolish all borders and let people move freely wherever they see fit.

If your ideal society is some sort of post-modern metrosexual vegetarian hippie commune where everyone shares a worldview broadly based on the 1969 Woodstock festival but with state-of-the-art smartphones and designer-label fashion accessories resembling a typical London advertising agency, borders would be pointless. Everyone would share the same godless politically correct mindset, speak the same language, watch the same movies and worship one or more global brands, a jetsetting, peace-loving generation eager to explore the world. Except they'd all be fairly rich and would only travel to embellish their facebook profile and boost their CV.

I agree borders are a major inconvenience for globetrotters. I've had a few unpleasant exchanges with border guards myself. In 1990 I was refused entry into Argentina on a British passport while my Italian partner was welcome to enter the country visa-free. After waiting 2 hours, I was granted a temporary 10 day visa. In 1999 I had my backpack humiliatingly ransacked (exposing two rolls of film in the process) by a Kalashnikov-wielding Namibian border guard. In the early 80s I can recall being detained by a Dutch border guard because my garishly dyed hair and earring did not match my 2 year-old passport photo. But by far the most awkward border crossings I endured were between West and East Berlin. On one occasion I sported a red SWP fist badge. The East German border guard was not amused as I explained it stood for International Socialism and then discovered a crumpled copy of the magazine of the SWP's tiny West German sister organisation. Just 6 years later jubilant crowds knocked the infamous Berlin Wall down. Later as the Schengen Zone expanded to include Poland and Baltic states, one could travel from Portugal through Spain, France, Germany and Poland without ever having one's documents checked. Just 30 years ago longstanding communities were torn apart by arbitrary borders imposed by superpowers. Now not only is Europe largely borderless, but the ruling elites plan to open the continent's doors to millions of economic migrants and refugees. Many cities and suburbs have already been transformed from mildly cosmopolitan urban districts that still reflected the cultural traditions of their provincial hinterlands to microcosms of a rapidly converging global village of diverse transient communities. Cities have come to resemble airport terminals populated by a motley crew of international commuters frequenting localised variants of the same global brand stores and restaurants.

I should admit a selfish personal interest in maintaining regional cultural diversity. For me part of the joy of visiting another locale is to experience different customs, ways of life, philosophical outlooks, expressions of humanity, belief systems, cuisines and languages. I admit such differences are not always convenient. I once had trouble ordering a meal with a monoglot Czech waitress in the pre-Internet era before I had a chance to buy a phrase book. During a four week exchange with an Indian family on the outskirts of Delhi my stomach took two weeks to adapt to Uttar Pradesh cooking, bucket showers and squat toilets. I was the only non-Indian in the neighbourhood. Now these differences are either commoditised as regionally branded dishes and fashion accessories available worldwide or are submerged by a global lifestyle. Cultural diversity in Europe's metropolises is just a temporary illusion as different ethnic communities adapt to a bland new superculture, often at odds with most of the world's traditional cultures.

However, many radical universalists view real cultural diversity as an anachronism. We may celebrate our differences and share recipes, but national cultures may soon become mere historical artefacts of interest largely to ethnologists, preserved only in vestigial formats for tourists, a little like Maori Dances of Life performed at New Zealand's All Blacks national rugby team matches or quaint signs in Manx or Cornish, now defunct languages resurrected only by local enthusiasts.

Global Fantasy

So what would happen if all border checks disappeared? 30 years ago most people in Africa, Southern and Eastern Asia would have simply been too poor to take advantage of their new travel freedoms. Even today many would rather stay within their native communities than risk uncertainty in foreign lands. Yet the world today is a radically different place as hundreds of millions have already abandoned their ancestral rural homelands for large conurbations. Moreover, we live in an unprecedented era of instant telecommunication, peak population and, more disturbingly, peak consumption. Never have so many wanted to consume so much and so rapidly. So now with the consumerist genie of out of the proverbial bottle, it seems only logical for millions more young people to migrate to where the best economic opportunities present themselves. I've experienced this myself as an IT contractor. "Would you move to Dubai as an Oracle database administrator", enquires an IT recruiter, "Surely many locals would like such an opportunity" I reply. It seems all countries experience both high youth unemployment and a skills shortage.

As long as migration is controlled, substantial differences can remain in welfare provision, workers' rights, environmental protection, tax regimes and salaries. The UK's population has risen by nearly 7 million in just 15 years, its fastest rate ever since the early 19th century, almost entirely due to record levels of net migration. Yet seven million extra human beings are a mere drop in the ocean compared to 6 billion human beings who do not yet enjoy Western European living standards. Some have argued the free movement of labour enshrined in the 1993 Maastricht Treaty worked well when the EU only had 15 member states with fairly comparable living standards. However, without overriding economic motives, inter-EU migration remained relatively balanced. By contrast when countries have huge differences in wealth, migratory flows tend to become unbalanced. We see that both within countries and internationally. For much of the 20th century the British Isles saw a steady drift of best and brightest from the North of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland to the Southeast of England. Likewise Southern Italians would migrate to the industrial North. However, governments would intervene to redress the imbalance. In the 1990s many Northern Italians grew tired of subsidising the South and supported the Lega Nord, who wanted to secede from the rest of Italy. Little did they know that their taxes would soon not only subsidise Sicily, Campania and Calabria, but much of Eastern Europe and a growing influx of migrants from Africa and Middle East too.

Life as an Emigré

Fed up with life at home, I migrated myself to Italy at a time when just as many Italians were in the UK. I belonged to a tiny minority that felt a little disillusioned with British cultural decadence in the mid 80s and relished the opportunity to learn Italian, a different outlook on life and new ways of doing things. Cultural change catches your attention much more when you return to a place after a lengthy interlude. After 13 years away from the UK, I returned in 1997 feeling rather alienated, but for the first few years I failed to grasp the true scale of cultural change as we moved to the relative backwater of Fife, Scotland, but within easy commuting distance of more cosmopolitan Edinburgh. Only when I moved back down to London in 2006 did I begin to realise that the gradual cultural changes of my youth had given way to a new era of rapid global cultural convergence. Whereas once I would worry that 90% of movies in Italian cinemas were American or continental Europeans unduly worshipped English rockstars, the England that I knew as a child was fast fading into a distant recent past. Its capital city has become a global hub unhinged from its geo-cultural setting. Indeed while I may have once worried that Spanish waiters would reply to my Spanish in English, I would often struggle to make myself understood in the heart of England's capital. What we are witnessing is not, as I previously thought, Anglo-American cultural imperialism (as Robert Phillipson theorised in his seminal book on Linguistic Imperialism), but full-blown Global imperialism. This may sound oxymoronic. How can the world colonise itself, but a global superculture is rapidly superimposing itself on all autochthonous cultures everywhere.

Global Justice

As the global juggernaut seems unstoppable, despite our undeniable environmental challenges, let us briefly evaluate the feasibility of this borderless fantasy. If transnational corporations exploit people and resources globally, how can we expect them to subsidise welfare and higher pay only in Europe and North America? Abolishing borders would surely require us to get rid of different tax regimes, salary levels and environmental standards. The European Union is well its on its way to harmonising tax systems and welfare provision across the continent. If a Federalist EU merged with NAFTA, MercoSur and other regional trading blocs, some idealists believe global corporations would pay global taxes to be redistributed fairly to anyone in need wherever they may live. Global justice warriors imagine they can welcome the mass exodus of people from low wage regions and simultaneously defend welfare provision in high-wage regions. They imagine resources are extracted merely to boost corporate profits, but not to meet an insatiable demand for more and more consumer goodies.

Democracy and Human Nature

Lower living standards are not great vote winners, yet as wealthy countries lose their exclusive right to a larger share of global resources, that is precisely what we may soon have to accept.

Should the economies of Northern Europe, North America and Australia (the most popular destinations of the current exodus from developing countries) decline, you can be sure migratory pressure will subside too. However, business elites have found a clever way to grow the economy by promoting a huge oversupply of low-skilled labour servicing the affluent professional classes alongside cheap manufactured goods keeping the consumer classes happy. This growth is both illusory and ultimately counterproductive as it relies on importing more and more waves of compliant workers to replace home-grown workers with higher material expectations. Worse still unbalanced migration in an unequal society tends to erode social cohesion and trust. However much we may pretend to care for the rest of humanity and embrace new cuisines or music, the system induces us act selfishly as self-marketing players in an economic rat race. In this context the prospect of a better paid job in Australia or Norway is simply an opportunity.

Reality Check

Historically, the higher living standards of ordinary workers in wealthier countries like Sweden, Canada, Germany or the UK were built on a high-skilled and dedicated workforce, subservient to a rapacious ruling class eager to gain access to plentiful supplies of raw materials. I very much doubt Britain's industrial revolution would have given the country such a vast technological lead over its main imperialist rivals in the 18th and 19th centuries without immense coal reserves, and shortened lives of hundreds of thousands in miners, powering its shipping and steel industries. Likewise Britain would not have conquered a quarter of the world's landmass without a sizeable navy. UK-based corporations built the nation's subsequent wealth on the back of its mercantile empire with the blood of its native workers and colonial subjects. As industrial automation and outsourcing took hold, people became less aware of the complex processes involved in the production and distribution of their beloved consumer products and began to value them only for their utility and prestige. We take many consumer products for granted and have redefined poverty to mean a relative lack of the kind of devices considered essential for our modern lifestyle. Just 20 years ago, most of us could manage without a mobile phone. Just 60 years ago most Europeans did not have a car. Now anyone unable to afford these technological marvels is considered poor.

Alternative Futures

Global idealists envisage the only way to tackle global inequality is to abolish nation states altogether, so in effect the whole world becomes one country. If we simply enforced a global average on everyone, living standards would plummet in wealthy countries, so global justice warriors believe rapid technological change will enable us to elevate everyone to Scandinavian levels of welfare provision while reducing consumption. They seem to believe solar panel and wind turbine technologies are progressing so fast that massive efficiency gains will enable all 7-8 billion human beings alive today to escape poverty in a nice cuddly tree-hugging eco-friendly way. The problem is while the current phase of intensive globalisation has certainly seen rapid rises in wealth in countries once considered poor and a shift of global power away from Europe and North America to Asia, Africa and South America, it has destabilised whole regions and continued to fuel proxy resource wars. The Euro project, far from creating a level playing field among its member countries, has led to record youth unemployment in much of Southern Europe, unable to compete with cheap imports from the Far East. Meanwhile we see extreme concentrations of profligate wealth in the Middle East, China, India, Africa and Latin America. How can we build a global utopia if Nigerian billionaires squander the proceeds of their country's oil bonanza on Ferraris, private jets and marble palaces? Why should working class Europeans compete with refugees and economic migrants from the Middle East for social housing and healthcare provision, if Arab billionaires build fortress city states that refuse to accept any refugees at all?

I've long argued that mass migration is not the answer, but merely a symptom of a grotesquely unequal world. The only sustainable solution that accords with human nature is to roll back corporate globalisation and build a new multipolar world order of independent countries that live within their means and only trade fairly. We would still pool some sovereignty on global environmental issues and we would still have some balanced migratory exchanges. To me it seems perfectly fair to ban imports reliant on cheap labour or to give preferential treatment to local lads and lasses for local jobs. We must become more aware of global issues, but seek local solutions to our immediate problems.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/2ca5y1qj848

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

Categories
Power Dynamics

Managing the Opposition

Jeremy Corbyn looks set to become Labour Leader and may soon trigger a realignment of the variety show called British parliamentary politics. Don't get me wrong, Jeremy Corbyn was one of the few Labour MPs to take a consistent stand against recent military interventions and oppose the government's love affair with global corporations. I'd certainly agree with him on some other other issues such as the re-nationalisation of railways and energy companies, which are natural monopolies. Yet on other issues such as his steadfast opposition to welfare reform and immigration controls, he may tick all the politically correct boxes and win much kudos among the rhetorical left, but fails to present a coherent alternative that can stand a moment's scrutiny. Corbyn's campaign appeals mainly to emotions and widespread rejection of the kind of corporate politics we've seen from all governments since, well err. 1976 when the then Labour government went cap in hand to the IMF to negotiate a bailout.

I still recall the last time the gullible loony left temporarily held sway in Britain's main opposition party after a decisive defeat in the June 1979 General Election that saw Margaret Thatcher's Tories sweep to power. Unlike real alternatives such as ecologism or communitarianism, the loony or trendy left merely offers a wish list of virtuous policies with little consideration to their holistic viability. With massive job losses and a rising cost of living, in early 1982 Michael Foot's Labour Party, committed to the re-nationalisation of privatised industries, unilateral nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from the EEC, held a healthy lead over the governing Conservatives. Had there been a general election in March 1982, Labour might well have won. I suspect a combination of vested corporate and military interests would have tamed the government's radical agenda. Then in April 1982 Argentina's General Galtieri kindly invaded the Falklands (aka Malvinas) to give the Iron Lady a decisive lead. Michael Foot joined the chorus of engineered public opinion calling a Naval Task Force to liberate 1600 British citizens in windswept islands, some 250 miles from the Argentine coastline (but 10,000 miles from England). The Tory government's monetarist economic policies, far from promoting British workers' interests, furthered those of global corporations who deemed British workers too expensive, too lazy and above all unreliable. It was cheaper for industry to subsidise welfare handouts in the UK than it was to maintain inefficient manufacturing plants. Overnight the public mood changed from one of disaffection with Thatcherite policies to one of nationalistic support for the heroic liberation of some remote Islands, many had never heard of. Four ministers of the former 1974-79 Labour administration left to form the Social Democratic Party in alliance with the Liberal Party. In the end Labour did not do quite as badly as many feared. Michael Foot tried his best to keep Labour grandees such as Dennis Healey and Roy Hattersley (both very much in favour of the EEC, NATO and a nuclear deterrent) on board and tame the more radical elements of the loony left, personified by Tony Benn. Yet with just 27.6% of the popular vote (with a turnout of 72%, so effectively just over 20% of the electorate), Labour sank to its lowest level of popular support since 1918, despite over 3 million unemployed and growing social unrest.

The new Consumer Classes

Labour could not persuade working class voters that their policies were either viable or desirable. Skilled workers no longer wanted to travel by bus from council houses to manual factory jobs with an annual holiday in Blackpool or Clacton, they aspired to enjoy faster cars, home ownership, better-paid office jobs and Mediterranean holidays. Progress for the working classes did not mean lower train fares or more council houses, but the new era of inexpensive consumer gadgets marketed by Maggie's business friends. Under Thatcher, the service sector, especially the toxic financial services industry, blossomed as factories shut and moved abroad. The British working class seemed happy to watch Japanese tellies, drive German cars, buy Italian washing machines and holiday in Spain. Many were left behind, especially a growing underclass of NEETs (Not in Education or Employment) and single mothers. Despite all Thatcher's rhetoric about living within our means and back to basics morality, her premiership saw the further decline of traditional families and the emergence of a hot-air economy where real jobs were increasingly outsourced. Oddly far from downsizing Labour's beloved welfare state, the social security system continued to expand in large part to manage the growing underclasses unable to adapt to the new dynamic but perennially unstable service economy. National governments became powerless to change the fundamental logic of the global market economy. Governments could merely regulate businesses, adjust tax rates, provide infrastructure, incentivise inward investors and ensure some degree of social stability.

The New Left

The political debate no longer focussed on the nature of the global economic system, but how to tame or harness it to our best advantage. Within just a few years the Labour leadership under Neil Kinnock embraced the European Union and gradually dumped commitments for the re-nationalisation of privatised industries or nuclear disarmament. The left turned its focus to social issues. Rather than champion the majority of working class people, the left began to promote the identity politics of various victim groups, whether they were ethnic minorities, single mothers, homosexuals, disability groups and the growing array of disadvantaged individuals who claimed some sort of victim status. Rather than advocate a different model of development, the new left embraced globalisation and planned to regulate corporations to be more environmentally friendly, respect workers' rights and promote their various victim groups in the name of equality and diversity. As the global economy became more tightly interdependent, big business started to co-opt the language of the trendy left. International corporations began to embrace and promote multiculturalism, feminism, LGBT rights and mental health advocacy. All these issues were honed to meet business needs. Multiculturism tended to mean multi-coloured cultural homogenisation. Feminism no longer supported women's rights as women, but coopted women into wage slavery. LGBT rights served not to remove prejudice against sexual minorities, but to change the family as it had emerged in diverse cultures around the world. Mental health advocacy far from making society more tolerant of natural human diversity, imposed a new concept of social normality. Capitalists had not suddenly had an epiphany, with a burning urge to undo all the evils of 500 years of European colonialism and 250 years of industrialisation. Rather their marketing departments had instructed them to embrace the new ethnically diverse and culturally metamorphosing demographics of their expanding consumer markets. Global capitalists genuinely believed their economic model would emancipate not only women, but also the poor of the third world. To do this they needed a new alliance of transnational businesses, governments and non-governmental organisations. Big business now marketed itself as a force for progress and no longer needed to pay lip service to the cultural whims of the old aristocratic and ecclesiastic elites. Indeed, big business much preferred to deal global institutions and bypass national and local governments altogether. They also preferred atomised consumers with new and forever morphing cultural identities to rival national and religious communities with more stable identities, and thus less malleable to the kind of cultural change required in a dynamic consumer society.

Britain's most Radical Government

Just as Thatcher's government was way more radical than Callaghan's more conservative 1970s administration, John Major's cautious stewardship of UK PLC gave way to one of the most disruptive management teams the country may ever see. Rather than undo the Thatcherite revolution, New Labour rebranded it and attracted the support of large swathes of the corporate media. Many Labour supporters welcomed Scottish and Welsh devolution, the minimum wage, working family tax credits and Good Friday Agreement that saw the apparent end to an anachronistic feud between protestants and catholics in Northern Ireland. Though sceptical of Blair from the very outset (I couldn't vote Labour in 1997 because I was still in Italy, but probably would have), I welcomed these developments too. What too few realised was just how fast the world outside was changing and how even these modest reforms in part enabled a much greater transfer of power away from national governments to supranational organisations. Within the context of Federal British Isles, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish devolution make perfect sense, but soon the UK itself would be a mere region of a wider European and eventually Global superstate. The minimum wage seemed long overdue, but soon became the maximum wage of an overheating service economy that generated hundreds of thousands of low-paid jobs. Working family / child tax credits merely incentivised low wages and, paradoxically, family breakups (as families were redefined). Retail inflation remained deceptively low as property prices began to rise much faster than salaries. By 2006 a typical 3 bedroom house in the outskirts of London cost the equivalent of 10 times the average salary and mortgages, not included in retail inflation, became the largest item in most households' budget. Unsurprisingly the Blair era saw a shift towards the private rent sector as millions of young adults could no longer afford to step on the property ladder, while other mischievous homeowners became landlords using convenient buy-to-let schemes.

Yet it was on the international stage that New Labour showed its true colours. Not content with the rebranding of big business as a vehicle of enlightened social change, Blairite spin doctors sought to rebrand military interventionism, which had gotten itself a bit of a bad name during the Vietnam war and post-colonial escapades such as 1956 Franco-British occupation of the Suez Canal. Blair became one of the world's most vocal advocates of a new form of global colonialism, in which an international alliance of progressive countries would intervene against repressive regimes to spread freedom, democracy and free trade. In 1998 a vast majority of Labour MPs, with the support of a large body of public opinion, supported NATO's airstrikes over Kosovo and Serbia. Despite protests from the rebellious fringes (including Jeremy Corbyn and George Galloway), the concept of humanitarian wars had been successfully sold, especially as the intervention aimed to save Muslim Kosovars against orthodox Christian Serbs.

While Blair appealed to Britain's lingering patriotism, his entourage didn't really believe in nation-states or self-determination at all. Labour had long championed the rights of racial minorities, especially with the influx of immigrants from the British Commonwealth during the 50s, 60s and 70s. However, the indigenous working classes remained sceptical and as most Commonwealth countries gained independence and Britain remodelled itself as a modern West European social democracy, the political consensus shifted towards integration and managed limited migration. Indeed by the early 1980s Britain had negative net migration, which returned to modest migratory surpluses by the late 1980s. By the mid 1990s migratory flows had risen everywhere. The world was on the move, but some destinations were much more appealing than others. Many talented British physicians and engineers preferred better pay in Australia, Saudi Arabia or the United States. State education had also failed to train millions of disadvantaged youngsters for the world of work. While manufacturing had mainly moved abroad, we still needed plumbers, bricklayers, electricians, chefs, nurses, mechanics, carpenters and care assistants. These jobs had failed to capture the imagination of the growing underclass who failed in academic subjects. Indeed employers began to complain about UK school leavers and graduates who lacked even basic literacy and numeracy skills or simply failed to turn up for work. Without any public consultation, New Labour decided first to relax immigration controls (something largely welcomed on the left) and then in 2003 opted not impose transitional work restrictions on the new Eastern members of the European Union. As a result net migration grew from 20-30,000 a year in 1970s, 80s and early 90s to 320,000 a year in 2005. Even this masked the true picture of ethno-cultural transformation, as 650 thousand entered the UK and 330 thousand left with very different groups of people moving either direction. Little has changed since the fall of Gordon Brown's Labour administration in 2010. Under the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition, net migration reflected wider global economic imbalances. The UK population has grown from 58.5 million in 1997 to 65 million now, while in the previous 20 years the population had hardly changed (56 million in 1981). Unsurprisingly, we now have a dire housing shortage and need to import an even greater proportion of raw materials and food. Despite growing concern about the scale and sustainability of these rapid population movements among ordinary British workers, the political classes have continued to argue that migration is good for the economy. The Labour Left may rightly oppose gangmasters and low wages, but they still think mass migration is always a good idea or the best way to tackle global inequality. Jeremy Corbyn may be sceptical of the corporate grip on the European Union, but he embraces the free movement of labour. Yet too few on the left admit the chief beneficiaries of the current waves of mass migration is a global corporate elite who really do not like self-determination in any form. Indeed the current Conservative Government would rather cut workers' rights and downscale the welfare state for all, than protect British jobs.

Having your cake and eating it

In life you sometimes have to make choices. You could stay in bed all day watching Youtube videos or get up and go to work. Both choices have their appeals, especially if the state subsidises your worklessness and you can justify your idleness as a consequence of depression or eating disorders. However, most rational observers agree that despite technological advances, effort and diligence should be rewarded. Likewise, we could choose to cut air traffic and save our countryside from the blight of a new airport or we could continue to fly abroad more regularly, but be prepared to allocate more arable land to new airports. If you want more people to enjoy motoring, then we'll need to build more roads.

If you listen to some on the wishful thinking left, you'd seriously think only rabid right-wingers want us to face these dilemmas. Do we reduce carbon emissions or do we let our population rise to boost our economy? The trendy left does not want to face this dilemma. They believe some magic bullet technology will enable us to have the best of both worlds. We can keep growing our economy, welcoming more newcomers, building more houses, improving transport infrastructure, while leaving plenty of countryside, arable land and only trading fairly with the rest of the world. In the minds of the loony left, pollution and limits to growth are right-wing inventions.

So just for a short summary of Jeremy Corbyn's policies.

  1. Boost the money supply to avoid any cuts in welfare.
  2. Oppose immigration controls.
  3. Grow the economy to pay off debt and accommodate a growing population.
  4. Stop hydraulic fracturing.
  5. Reduce nasty pollution.
  6. Re-open closed coal mines.
  7. Stop resource wars.
  8. Tax global corporations
  9. Develop a high skill economy

Few politicians would disagree openly with the last point, though a global labour market place reduces the need to train local workers and corporate moguls would rather keep the masses relatively unskilled. Moreover, our current comprehensive education system and generous welfare state fail to motivate excellence in our underclasses, while middle and upper classes opt for cushy careers or prefer to migrate to sunnier climes. However, the remaining policies are inconsistent. Unless you are prepared to cut total consumption by stabilising the population and cutting per capita consumption you cannot reduce our dependence on resources imported from war-torn countries. Even much green technology increases our dependence on finite resources. Electric cars require lithium batteries and the world most abundant reserves just happen to lie in Central Asia and especially in Afghanistan. You might think trendy lefties want you cycle to work instead and grow vegetables in your back garden, but not if you can claim to have a special medical condition such as obesity or have to drop off your kids on the way to work in an out-of-town business park. A global labour market requires an increasingly mobile and versatile labour force, which in many practical situation necessitates some form of personalised rapid transport. Last but not least, it defies logic that the loony left expects global corporations to subsidise welfare largesse in the UK. Any attempt to impose higher taxes on multinationals will simply prompt them to migrate for tax purposes or pass on the local tax to local consumers as an additional cost of operating in the UK. If we introduced some form of European corporation tax, then multinationals would move their HQ outside the EU and local governments would have even less control over fiscal policy. Indeed the only way to tax multinationals fairly would be to enforce a global fiscal regime backed up by a global military. However, an independent country could ban multinationals with bad records on environmental protection or workers' rights. However, that would fall foul of the WTO,

If these policies do not seem wacky enough, just consider Jeremy's brother, Piers Corbyn, who has been running a 15-year long crusade against the religion of Global Warming. I have little faith in our corporate elites, but the one consistent strand in all mainstream economic thinking is the need for perpetual growth. The issue at stake is not whether the climate is cooling or warming or whether Sunspots play a role in weather cycles (Scotland has just had its coldest summer for over 50 years), but whether massive human activity on an unprecedented scale can destabilise our delicate ecosystem. Yet another dilemma, the loony left refuses to consider. Amazingly Piers seems very supportive of Jeremy's campaign. However, there is one small influential political cult that would entirely endorse a combined Jeremy + Piers Corbyn manifesto, the Spiked-Online brigade of media-savvy intellectuals. At least they are consistent, they are outspoken techno-optimists and climate change deniers.

Whose interests does Corbynmania really serve?

It doesn't take a genius to realise Jeremy Corbyn's policy platform could never be implemented in its entirety. Most policies would be vetoed by supranational bodies like the EU. In some ways I wish Corbyn's dream of plenty for all could be true. I too would like cheap food and well-paid farmworkers, clean cities, abundant wildlife, clean rivers and efficient inexpensive rapid transportation. However, I also detect a centralising and potentially authoritarian statist streak in Corbyn's agenda, not least his talk about mental health and support for more social workers.

Like or not, big business only agrees with two of Corbyn's policies, more migration and economic growth at all costs. If the main opposition party, albeit a rump Labour Party deprived of Blairites, could oppose even the most feeble attempts to regulate unsustainable people trafficking, the government can pose on the middle ground of public opinion while covertly pursuing an unashamedly globalist agenda. That leaves the settled working classes only with another bunch of climate change deniers in UKIP while the greens back a rebranded Labour party.

The other 3 candidates behave like overgrown school students trying hard to impress their politically correct social studies teacher and gain favour with their classmates. I guess Andy Burnham tries to appeal more to his classmates, while Liz Kendall and Yvette Cooper want to get full marks for their Labour leadership project. Only Andy Burnham, in a sop to working class voters, has dared to criticize Labour record on mass migration, but this is probably as credible as similar musings from Tory politicians. All support the EU and free movement of Labour. Yvette Cooper even suggested David Miliband's charity, Rescue International, help with the refugee crisis in Calais. Now, why would a staunch Blairite and supporter of Iraq war (which together with other interventions in Aghanistan, Libya and Syria helped create a much bigger refugee crisis in North Africa and Turkey), be so keen to help refugees? It's like selling double-glazing services to someone whose windows you have just smashed. What matters most to global corporations is to keep the range of acceptable public debate on message, which is simply there is no alternative to the curent globalist model of development and any attempt to regain control over the levers of economic power will be ridiculed and sidelined.

If something sounds too good be true, in my experience it probably is. The loony left cannot change the laws of thermodynamics, but it's up to us on the rational left to suggest coherent alternatives to our current economic system.

Categories
Power Dynamics

Do we really need more economic growth?

hop ntil ou rop by anksy

If you want to justify any policy whether it's higher military spending, deregulation of gambling, lower corporation tax or higher levels of immigration to a sceptical public, just claim it's good for the economy. How could any rational human being be against greater prosperity? In today's cultural climate could any political party openly advocate greater poverty, the presumed opposite of a growing economy? Worse still, both left and right-branded mainstream politicians all agree we need to grow our economy. The notional right want to deregulate business so they can boost profits and invest in new more competitive technology, while the rhetorical left wants to inject more virtual cash into the economy so ordinary people can buy more goods. Even the Greens talk of more environmentally sustainable growth. To oppose growth seems tantamount to condemning most people to more misery and extreme hardship.

Here I will argue we have lost sight of what really matters in life, focussing too much on ephimeral techno-fashion and quantitative growth and too little on the long-term happiness, intellectual fulfilment and sustainability of our species. If we are to tackle the great social and environmental challenges of the next century, we need greater stability, yet our collective consumption is growing at a faster rate than ever before.

For the last 30 years, we have witnessed almost non-stop economic growth with only brief periods of economic recession, i.e. negative growth. If we measured our quality of life in purely economic terms, we should be ecstatic because never have so many had so much financial and material wealth. In the last 25 years car ownership has nearly doubled (from 582 million in 1990 to a projected 1202 million last year) as China and India seek to emulate Western Europe. Just 20 years ago most Europeans did not have a personal computer, now most have an Internet-enabled smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop PC. Now most Indians over the age of 16 have a mobile phone. By 2010 India had some 563 million subscribers. Even in remote Tanzanian villages, where most residents live without mains water and electricity supply, many have second-hand mobile phones. In the UK owning a mobile phone has become for all practical purposes a basic human right. Now teenagers compete to have the latest and greatest branded smartphone, usually setting their parents back £20 to £40 a month. If we add to that growing expectations for fashion accessories, holidays abroad, cosmetic surgery and bottled water, it becomes clear that despite some gains in industrial and operational efficiency, we consume much more per capita today than we did just a generation ago. Worse still, as intensive manufacturing has migrated mainly to low-wage regions, we replace consumer products more often. Fridges and washing machines used to last 10 to 20 years. Furniture would be handed down from generation to generation. Now these items are treated like disposables. The rapid pace of technological change has produced mountains of unusable junk for which mission-critical spare sparts are no longer readily available. Any trip to a waste disposal site in the UK will reveal heaps of trashed devices from just 10 years ago. Topping the list of discarded items are inexpensive printers and CRT monitors. Not even charities want these products as it usually costs more to repair them than buy newer alternatives. Lifestyle changes have led more of us to choose ready meals, buy snacks to eat at work, order a pizza online or grab our food from a smorgasbord of fast-food outlets from budget burger bars to upscale organic health food shops. All these trends result in more packaging, more cardboard and plastic with modest quanities of edible matters, often marketed as health food. While paper and plastic can be recycled, it takes energy to sort incompatible materials and transform them into usable objects.

In theory a growing economy will help us offset any real or perceived downsides to business-friendly policies, e.g. proceeds from the gambling industry could be invested in charities that help victims of gambling addiction. By the same logic we could legalise brothels, just as Spain and parts of Germany and Australia, and invest the extra taxes generated to help victims of sexual abuse. However, our establishment's fixation with economic growth does not explain all policy decisions in an increasingly complex and interdependent world. A general trend is to see greater regulation of private lives, while simultaneously deregulating the burgeoning leisure, hospitality and mood-altering industries. Smoking is now banned in most public places, but moves are afoot to decriminalise and commercialise marijuana, while a collusion between the state and big business promote the growing use of psychoactive drugs to regulate mood. One may argue that smoking cessation and substitutes are now much more profitable than cigarettes ever were. Have some naughty fun by all means as long as your pursuit of pleasure is commoditised and thus subject to commercial logic and state control.

Are we happier?

Life is certainly sweeter for many privileged denizens of gated neighbourhoods, leafy suburbs and luxury apartments. They gain all the benefits of a dynamic global economy and yet remain protected from the social upheaval it creates. They can mix with like-minded wealthy young professionals, but still believe their purchasing power helps the less fortunate in society as they dine in nearby restaurants or hire the services of chidlminders, cleaners, plumbers and itinerant tradespeople. Today wealth tends to buy exclusivity more than larger amounts of disposable stuff. One pays more to steer clear of the stress of modern life. If you want to be inundated with in-your-face advertising and ostentatious displays of junk consumerism, you can endlessly wander free of charge through shopping malls and supermarkets the length and breadth of the land. Yet if you want some tranquility away from the madding crowd while remaining within easy commuting distance of a busy city, you will pay extra to live in an exclusive neighbourhood.

Yet in the frenetic rat race that everyone else has to endure, we are trapped in a system that necessitates wasteful mass consumption and only succeeds in generating more envy over superficial branded accessories and artificial bodily enhancements. While real world per capita consumption has risen dramatically, emotional unease, often conceptualised as social anxiety, depression, OCD or other personality disorders, has spread by epidemic proportions. Happiness itself has become a commodity sold in the form of retail therapy, cosmetic surgery or mood-altering medication. We find it harder to enjoy the small pleasures of life and are much more likely to abandon our partners due to a sense of non-fulfilment or perceived economic hardships and/or emotional abuse.

Once our basic needs, such as food, water and shelter, are met and we have the sanitary and medical technology to ensure most of us can survive into old age, further rises in per capita consumption and economic activity have only a marginal effect on overall happiness. By contrast economic inequality, debt-fuelled financial stress and job insecurity, all symptoms of our current growth-obsessed corporate-globalist system, engender envy, anxiety and despair. If you lived in a village where everyone has either a horse or a bicycle before the advent of the Internet and smartphone, you would not fret about your lack of a car, mobile phone or computer, but merely about the relative merits of owning a horse or a bicycle. Until recently much of the world remained blissfully unaware of the true scale of Western consumer culture. It took around 50 years for the kind of happy shopper mentality that flourished briefly in affluent suburban North America in the 1950s and 60s to reach rural Africa, India and South America. In the 1990s two trends led to an acceleration of consumer culture awareness. First, hundreds of millions moved to swelling conurbations and came into regular contact with the wonders of the industrial revolution. Second, wider availability of electric power generators and rapid advances in mobile telephony connected even the remotest backwaters with the rest of the world. To many rural African motor vehicles were mysterious machines that foreign visitors would occasionally use to reach their home settlements. Suddenly they were everywhere alongside advertisements for fashion accessories and technological marvels that promised to transform their lives. The relative stability of subsistence farming, albeit struggling to cope with a growing population (in large part due to modern medicine lowering infant mortality), desertification and climate change, gave way to the instability of overcrowded third world metropolises with a huge levels of inequality. New city dwellers had little choice but to enter the financial economy through street trade, begging, prostitution or burglary. With a massive oversupply of cheap unskilled labour only a minority made the transition to the lower reaches of the middle classes. Most could hope at best for temporary jobs and crumbs from street trade ventures. Yet if we look at the raw statistics, economic growth rates across much of the developing world look very impressive, but hide growing social insecurity.

Categories
Power Dynamics

Bursting at the Seams

Europe faces an unprecedented stream of human traffic from Africa, the Middle East, Southern and Central Asia. As wars rage from Afghanistan to Yemen and Darfur while deserts expand and arable land available for each inhabitant shrinks, this crisis shows few signs of abating. The heart-wrenching scenes of refugees huddling together on makeshift rafts in the middle of the Mediterranean should concern any conscientious human being, but why would anyone go to such extreme lengths to seek economic betterment? Why did this not happen on such a large scale 20 years ago when people in the developing world were arguably even poorer?

Many economists will tell you more people mean more workers, more consumers and best of all more economic growth, all of which are supposed to be good things. Bleeding heart humanitarians will tell you we cannot turn a blind eye to the plight of millions seeking to flee war, persecution and extreme deprivation for the greener pastures of post-industrial high-consumption countries like the UK, Sweden or Australia. Meanwhile many environmentalists prefer to blame greedy corporations and past Western imperialism for the tragic scenes we see unfold before our eyes as migrants struggle to reach the more prosperous corners of Europe.

Yet few seem prepared to admit the real causes of the undeniable social and environmental problems that drive so many to abandon their home regions. Rational debate on this subject is impossible unless we can get our facts right rather than rely on the selective statistics that many powerful lobbies present us. First there are two competing justifications for more mass migration.

  1. More people boost the economy, which in turn creates more happiness and prosperity. If this were true countries like Nigeria and Pakistan would be paradises on earth rather than exporters of human traffic. But given current levels of overconsumption and waste in much of Europe and North America, do we really need to boost our economy to improve our quality of life? What matters isn't the economy, but people's livelihoods dependent on a sustainable work-life balance.
  2. We have an ethical duty to help other human beings in need: I find this argument a lot more appealing and can think of many circumstances where it's absolutely right to help those less fortunate than ourselves if we can. For instance, if you have a spare room, you could let a homeless guy sleep there until he can afford his own accommodation. Would you trust this guy to respect your property and how many other homeless guys are out there? However, with the current migration crisis, we end up helping only those who choose to migrate, leaving behind everyone else who cannot afford to pay people traffickers or just prefer not to leave the devil they know best. So by helping people to emigrate, we promote mass migration as a solution rather than treat it as a symptom of systemic failure. Besides, it's sheer hypocrisy to advocate open-door immigration while living in a gated neighbourhood as many wealthy neoiliberals do. Borders are just a variant of fences and gates between properties. In an ideal world we wouldn't need any protection against intrusion, but it's human nature to envy other people's perceived wealth.

Next, many seem unclear about the extent and long-term consequences of such large movements of people. Were we faced with a limited flow of people due to a temporary natural disaster, it would be much easier just to rise to the challenge of acccommodating everyone.

Many pro-migration charities and NGOs will endlessly recycle claims that more mass migration is just what Europe's ageing population needs. Indeed many businesses too welcome the prospect of an influx of more malleable young workers eager to accept low wages. Meanwhile, opponents of mass migration tend to forget the culpability of our economic system that keeps diverting resources away from poorer regions to non-productive high-consumption regions. The fundamental question that many refuse to answer is why should an IT recruitment consultant from Aldershot earn much more than a sardine-canner from Agadir, especially as the latter actually produces something we need and the former just wants a slice of the someone else's earnings. More important, why should an unemployed Moroccan get nothing, while a jobless Briton can claim generous welfare handouts? Life just ain't fair. Another good question is if the global economy has been steadily growing for the last 20 years, why are so many young people jobless? The real answer lies a phenomenon we tend to call globalisation, with an unprecedented acceleration of technological, social and cultural change. These days few countries are remotely independent or self-sufficient. National economies have become little more than localised regions of a larger global economy. Many global corporations are more powerful than the governments of large countries.

Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, hundreds of millions in the developing world have moved from rural communities to sprawling conurbations. A majority of Sub-Saharan Africans now live in towns and cities, while just 20 years ago most still lived in traditional rural communities as subsistence farmers. Once a rural African has overcome the culture shock of cosmopolitan urban life in their nearest African metropolis, it only takes a small leap of faith to leave the overcrowded shanty-towns and slums of Lagos, Cairo or Mogadishu to seek refuge in a region where nearly everyone gets to enjoy the wonders of our consumer culture and the security of the modern welfare state. All large cities have ostentatious displays of material wealth. You'll see plenty of Mercedes and iPhones in Lagos or Kinshasa, but many more street traders, beggars and sex workers. Unemployment is not an option, without a viable business or a paid job, one has to work full-time to raise funds for basic sustenance. With no land, new city dwellers have no choice but enter the financial economy. Everything from clean potable water to food, transport and lovemaking now has a price. Once people are mentally and emotionally connected via modern telecommunications technology with the wider consumer world, they suddenly feel entitled to a fair share of the action. It hardly matters if a single trademarked iPhone costs more than the annual income of many Subsaharan Africans or if Africa is being raped to meet growing global demand for raw materials required for disposable electronic goods, the mass consumer genie has well and truly popped out of the proverbial bottle. If white welfare claimants from Uppsala or Hull can afford a smartphone, a new pair of Nike sneakers and a holiday in Ibiza, why the hell should a hardworking shoeshine boy from Karachi not be entitled to the same modest luxuries? Welfare subsidies may have been won through decades of workers' struggles, but as most manufacturing and even many office jobs have been outsourced to low-wage economies, it's hard to justify special treatment of the unemployed in countries with traditionally higher living standards, except to prevent social unrest and keep the consumer economy alive and kicking. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, everyday I would read reports of factory closures compensated only by retail expansion. In reality many traditional manual jobs have either been automated or assigned to expendable cheap labour. A flexible economy transforms workers from valued full-time employees into human mere resources who can be hired and fired or self-promoting agents whose contracts can be terminated whenever their services are no longer required. As the pace of technological change quickens, stable jobs have become very much a luxury and well-paid permanent jobs are only available to the highly qualified. Ironically the current wave of mass migration owes much more to Thatcherite business restructuring and outsourcing than it does to the social-democratic mixed economy of the 1960s when most adults of working age either had full-time jobs or were gainfully employed at home in childcare.

Many on the left believe in universalism, at least in theory, i.e. they care as much about the rights and wellbeing of your average Burundian as they do about their next-door neighbours or extended family. If we can accept, say, 1 million migrants from the Middle East and Africa, what about the 1 billion or more we cannot accommodate? Even if we spread the migratory load among other prosperous regions, we'd be hard-pushed to accommodate more than 1% of those who would potentially prefer to enjoy our living standards. Moreover, the UK's population has increased by 6 million in since the year 2000 meaning to sustain our current lifestyle, we need to import more and more resources from the very war-torn regions that millions wish to flee. Often these resources are expropriated indirectly, e.g. A UK-based retailer imports electronic goods from China, who in turn cuts deals with kleptocratic African leaders to gain access to essential raw materials. Most of the pollution and habitat destruction created by retail therapy and wasteful lifestyles is outsourced. Conveniently, the trendy left prefers to blame greedy capitalists and selfish billionaires for all this wanton environmental destruction rather the consumers who buy this junk. Of course, if all 7 billion human beings alive today enjoyed a typical Western European lifestyle, we'd have a good deal more environmental destruction, without significantly boosting efficiency and cutting unnecessary waste, both of which would shrink the very economy that motivated and enabled such rapid technological change in the first place.

How many is too many? If we took universalism to its logical conclusion, then the European Union would merge with all other regional trading blocs to become the Global Union and everyone everywhere would not only enjoy complete freedom of movement, but also universal global welfare and a global minnum wage. Seriously, if big business is global and the wages of non-productive service workers in the UK depend on corporate profits gained by exploiting resources in other countries, why should welfare be restricted to a few nanny-state countries? In case you're wondering, I'm not trying to write the 2020 Green Manifesto. I'm just trying to suggest that if we can barely afford a fair and equitable welfare system in one of the most financially prosperous countries in the world, any move towards a global government will inevitably spread poverty more than prosperity, unless we can ramp up global consumption at least five-fold so your average Pakistani or Ghanaian consumes as much as your average Dane. As I hope to explain soon on the Economic Growth Mantra, most of the world's social and environmental problems are caused by our obsession with economic growth at all costs and by our inability to adapt to an unprecedented rate of technological change. While technology may help us tackle environmental constraints in the long run, but right now we are generating mountains of garbage from obsolete gadgets, toxic chemicals and sprawling road networks just so we can travel to shopping malls or office jobs.

My question to the wishful thinking left is how does accepting a few hundred thousand more refugees help address any of the underlying causes of socio-economic deprivation? More to the point, how does a growing UK economy reliant on resources from the rest of the world, help people in poorer countries? In short it doesn't, it just grows corporate profits and increases demand for fossil fuels to ship goods over here. If we were to pay the real price of our compulsive shopping, then many goods and services would be a lot dearer.

Real green solutions to the migration crisis:

  1. Stop destabilising other countries through direct or indirect military intervention. Wars in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, the Balkans and Libya as well as arms sales to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan or Israel have not only fuelled internecine warfare, but have led millions to flee their home regions. Do not trust any politicians who supported recent wars on spurious humanitarian grounds and now wants us to accommodate refugees from wars they helped foment. The main downside to this approach is much lower revenue for our arms industry.
  2. Replace free trade with fair trade, i.e. only import goods and resources if their production respects a global minimum wage and meets very strict environmental protection standards. This would make many goods much more expensive, but would also remove the primary motivation to move from low-wage regions to high-wage regions. People need to be aware of the true environmental and social impacts of their carefree consumption habits.
  3. Promote greater regional self-sufficiency, by relocalising agriculture and production. Why should Kenya export mange-tout beans to the UK, while many Kenyans starve? Globalisation has led to hyper-specialisation where goods essential for basic human existence are no longer made in many countries. Hyper-specialisation creates hyper-dependence on large transnational corporations. Currently, corporate lobbyists export free trade as a model of development, but once a country relies on imports to feed its people it is subservient to international bankers. Once again, while regional diversification would bring about more sustainable development, it would be very bad for corporate profits and economic growth measured in strictly financial terms.
  4. Cut consumption in the wealthy world. Whether you like it or not, people tend to move regions where per-capita consumption is highest. We need to seriously rebalance the world economy so we pay the real price for the products we consume before we can build a more stable and sustainable future for all. In the short term, that means fewer cars in the wealthy world and a lot less waste. Your mobile phone may have to last 5 to 10 years.
  5. Responsible procreation: If you want to benefit from modern sanitation and medicine so more children survive, you cannot keep having more children than your local environment can sustain. In the past, nature would always keep population in check usually through higher infant mortality, emigration and starvation. Few regions in the world are currently able to accommodate larger populations without drastic changes to lifestyle. As a result of the demographic transition, much of Europe and Asia already has fertility rates at or below population replacement level. However, not only is the global population still destined to peak at 10-11 billion, but per capita consumption is rising much faster. It cannot escape our attention that the countries with the highest emigration rates are also those with the highest birth rates. By promoting sustainable development, i.e. where countries become more rather than less self-sufficient, we can motivate more responsible procreation. If you think that can't be done without coercive Chinese-style one-child policies (which saw the fertility rate fall from 6 babies per woman in 1970 to just 1.66 in 2015), then just look at Italy and Bangladesh, where the birth rate has fallen from 2.4 to 1.4 (Italy) and from a staggering 7.0 to 2.2 (Bangladesh) respectively between 1970 and 2013. We need to think more in terms of the quality of our next generation than quantity. The world may have a growing elderly population, but we will not run out of young people any time soon. However, owing to greater automation of most manual labour, will they have any meaningful jobs?
  6. Easing the burden of migratory flows: If we cannot stop migration in the short-term, without imposing Draconian restrictions on travel that would adversely affect economic activity, we can at least divert as many migrants as possible to regions that have recently experienced large-scale population decline. Many areas of Eastern Europe are full of abandoned dwellings and villages with few young people of working age. This would not be long-term solution and probably not very popular in with the locals (Indeed Hungary has already refused to apply the EU rule that requires it to accommodate all migrants that claim asylum in its territory), but may in the short-term be more cost-effective than cramming more into a few economically hyperactive regions like the South East of England.
Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

The Wealth Illusion

finances 111116 money bags of three currencies

A much publicised factoid, popularised by many left-leaning campaigners for greater equality, shows that the richest 85 people in the world are as wealthy as the poorest half or around 3.5 billion human beings. That would make each multibillionaire a staggering 41 million times richer than your typical Sub-Sarahan African, Indian or Indonesian. I've done the maths and it turns out the combined financial wealth of the top 85 billionnaires is around £1 trillion, at least according to research carried out by Oxfam as reported in the Guardian last year and retweeted endlessly ever since. 1 trillion is a mind-boggingly large number, ten to the power of 12, a million millions or £11 billion each. By contrast the same sum divided by the bottom 3.5 billion world citizens is just £286.

The upshot is to alleviate poverty we just need to redistribute wealth from the top 85 to the bottom 3500 million. However, this simplistic solution is based on the fundamentally flawed logic that financial wealth bears any direct relationship to real wealth and real living standards. Moreover, transferring abstract financial wealth to billions of the world's poor may simply fuel inflation and subjugate more people into a debt-driven monetary economy. £286 is peanuts in Europe, but then so is £572. Intriguingly, financial wealth does not necessarily buy more material resources, but merely exclusivity, privilege and power over others locked into a money economy. As I will explain, the real problem is the overconsumption of much larger minority of the world's citizens and the logic of infinite economic growth. That means if we are to transition to a more sustainable and equitable steady-state economy, we would need to drastically cut consumption and waste in places like Western Europe to let poorer regions enjoy much more of their own natural resources. We would fool ourselves if we believed we could bring about such a change by taxing the very same global corporations and investment bankers who created such grotesque inequalities in the first place.

In purely monetary terms what can £11 billion buy you? Possibly, more power via shares in leading corporations, an art collection, a few luxury villas, a private jet, a helicopter, a yacht, a team of tax consultants and lawyers, a personal security squad and privileged access to various wheelers and dealers in government and finance. At current prices, no normal human being could consume material goods worth £11 billion. A Ferrari 458 Spider may set you back £200,000, but it's not 10 times better or 10 faster than a more modest VW Golf hatchback. It also consumes a lot more, is harder to park and less versatile for practical purposes. Likewise having 2 cars for personal use does not help you travel twice as far or twice as fast. It merely gives you greater choice, a second option if one car breaks down and takes up twice as much space in your driveway if you're lucky enough to have one. Owning 200 cars would be sheer insanity as few people would have the time to drive and maintain such a large fleet of vehicles. However, owning a car rather than just a bicycle can change your life. There may be no limits to how much someone can waste or how much junk someone can accumulate, but there are limits to how much a human being can personally consume. When a billionaire, like Roman Abramovich, boards his £20 million Mediterranean yacht to entertain guests, he is not consuming the yacht for his exclusive gratification, but allocating some of his wealth to corporate hospitality. Some would also argue the Russian oligarch's maritime extravagance also employs boat builders, sailors, catering and security staff. Nonetheless, Mr Abramovich's wealth certainly leads to a misappropriation of resources.

If we take a wider look at the top 1% of the global population, around 70 million lucky individuals, we see a staggering concentration of both financial and material wealth, worth around £114 trillion in 2013, or just over £1.6 million each. In purely financial terms, that's astronomically more than the bottom 3.5 billion. If you spend much of your life in international airports, corporate get-togethers, scientific and academic conventions, luxury hotels and secluded holiday resorts, this wealthy cosmopolitan elite may well seem the norm, with the remaining 99% a mere backdrop. But does it mean your average global elitist is 6000 times happier, longer living, better nourished, better educated or smarter than your average bottom 50% guy? They do not own 6000 times more real estate or 6000 times more gadgets. Your average Tanzanian (in the bottom quarter on the global financial wealth scale) lives in a small bungalow or thatched house, owns second/third hand mobile phone or may have a bicycle or motorbike, but as long as someone can eat, has access to clean water and shelter and is integrated into a cohesive community, they do not feel the same kind of extreme poverty of many temporary city dwellers in makeshift housing or sleeping under bridges in cardboard boxes. Yet even the poorest city-dwellers have much more money than rural Tanzanians, simply because they have to buy everything. The global rich simply own properties in more exclusive or strategically located neighbourhoods and have access to the latest, usually much more expensive, cutting-edge technology. A small two bedroom flat in Tokyo or New York has a market value much greater than a 1 square kilometre farm in Tanzania capable of sustaining a small community of approximately 300 people, based on the average yield of the 16% of Tanzanian land that is actually arable.

For a few short years, my income rose way above the UK average (just £27 thousand a year), but because I had to rent a flat in London, pay off some debts and allocate around £1200 to maintain two teenage offspring, I saw pitifully little of this income. Indeed I had diminished and hectic lifestyle. Some people earning £100,000 a year in expensive cities are actually worse off than others on a tenth of that sum in much of the rest of the world. A better measure of wealth is purchasing power parity or PPP, but even that discounts all the extra goods and services that people in high-consumption countries feel they need or deem essential to maintain their way of life or compete in the labour market.

Green Billionaires

If you thought the anti-elitist left always backed green policies, while the billionaire-loving right wanted to despoil the planet, think again. A common argument against the extreme concentration of wealth is that the mega-rich do not spend most of their immense financial fortunes on manufactured products. If the same wealth were redistributed to the poor (and this usually means the relatively poor in high-consumption regions), they would spend it on manufactured goods and thus boost the economy. In reality such a release of financial assets would just trigger inflation as demand for consumer products would rise. If a billionaire owns a vast forest, some may naively conclude he is denying the rest of us of land for more farming, housing or parks. In reality he is just a custodian of natural resource that provides us all with oxygenated fresh air, absorbs carbon-dioxide and plays a vital role in our planet's ecosystem. A populist government may seize such land and allocate it to other purposes for short-term social and economic needs, but a wise administration would take a more holistic and farsighted approach. Naturally, as a counter-argument we would argue the billionaire forest owner probably made his fortune through profits from wasteful industrial processes, but only to meet consumer demand.

Who pollutes? Consumers or producers?

If you drive a car and shop at supermarkets, as most Western European adults do, why should you complain if the industrial processes required to maintain your lifestyle trash the planet. If a chemical processing plant contaminates groundwater destroying not just natural ecosystems, but food crops, we instinctively blame its evil capitalist owners rather than a system that creates massive demand for inexpensive petroleum-based products. Environmental regulations inevitably increase costs. These days the dirtiest industrial processes are outsourced to regions with lower levels of environmental protection, who we then blame for failing to adhere to our high standards. We often seem blissfully unaware of the massive levels of habitat destruction created by our addiction to more and cheaper gadgets with a very short operational lifespan.

Consider the humble example of a compact smartphone. In some ways it has the potential to act as a green device by avoiding unnecessary journeys, but in other ways it's very ungreen. All mobile phones require durable lithium batteries, silicon microchips and coltan capacitors as well as specialised plastics and aluminium. Nearly 13 tonnes of water and 18 square metres of land are required to make a smartphone, with two fifths of the water impact due to pollution at the component manufacturing and assembly phases.

What is Poverty?

It used to mean living on the breadline, on the verge of starvation or lacking the bare essentials of human existence. As our needs and relationship with nature have changed, so has the definition of poverty. A car-less citizen of North American suburbia is much more underprivileged than a Nepalese smallholder with just a horse, although the former may still have a greater carbon footprint as nearly everything she consumes has to be shipped from afar. An unemployed North American may feel alienated without the tools required to compete in her world, but her true poverty isn't the temporary lack of a motor vehicle, but her disconnection from the natural world.

Financial wealth is a mere temporary illusion. It can at best buy us only relative advantage in an endless arms race with diminishing returns. Rather than simply blaming the mega-rich, we should look at our own overconsumption. We cannot solve any fundamental social or environmental problems by misallocating concentrated financial wealth on short-term mass consumption which will only exacerbate existing environmental depredation. We should focus on quality of life and experiences rather than financial worth.