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.
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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.

Categories
All in the Mind

Addict Nation

There has always been a thin dividing line between legal and illegal or between therapeutic and recreational drugs. We tend to call bad psychostimulants "drugs" and good officially sanctioned mind-altering pills "medication". While the former are distributed by underworld dealers, praying on our psychological weaknesses and the cool factor, and the latter are aggressively pushed by pharmaceutical multinationals.

Much has been made of the health benefits of recent anti-smoking measures introduced across Europe and North America. Back in the 1960s many smokers wouldn't think twice about lighting up on buses, in cinemas or in the office. A visit to Russia may give you glimpses of our recent past. But back then, pubs closed at 10:30 in much of the UK, teenage binge drinking involved just the occasional student escapade, only 5 to 10% of adults were on prescription medication and despite the buzz around the swinging 60s addiction to hard drugs remained a largely marginal phenomenon. Fast forward 40 years and over 30% of adults and 15% of children are on prescription medication in the UK, including 4 million SSRI addicts, binge drinking regularly blights our streets, offices and homes, over 1 million adults consume crack and millions of aspiring slimmers fill their trolleys with jumbo-packs of Diet Coke, a concoction of addictive caffeine and aspartame. And addiction is not just limited to chemicals. Millions of us are addicted to TV, the Internet, video games, shopping and, more disastrously from a financial view, to gambling. Rather than combat any of these prevalent addictions, except occasional lip service paid to the bogus war on drugs or rhetoric about taking the right medication or partaking only in responsible gambling, the government and its friends in big business urge us to indulge more. Mood-altering drugs are now subsidised by our beloved National Health Service and handed out like sweeties. And unless you've been secluded in a remote Hebridean crofthouse for the last 12 years, you cannot have failed to notice the burgeoning entertainment business with 24/7 pubs, dance halls and casinos appearing even in minor provincial towns and frequented by the nation's vibrant youth the length and breadth of the country. All made easier by laws introduced by our wonderfully progressive government. That's right, the same government that has banished smokers outdoors and spent millions urging us to get nicotine patches from our local GP, is quite happy for our youngsters to drink themselves insane and get high on ecstasy in one of the friendly dancing establishments run by pioneering entrepreneurs in cahoots with the government. The boom spanning from the mid 1990s to 2008 saw the expansion of four related sectors:

  • financial
  • retail
  • bio-medical and pharmaceutical
  • media and entertainment (often indistinguishable)

In the same period domestic manufacturing of essential items continued to migrate elsewhere. Even call centres, once a saviour for unemployment blackspots, were either outsourced or downscaled as technical support migrated to the Web. Where once school leavers would follow in their father's footsteps or learn a new trade they would pursue for much of their working lives, they now flock to colleges and universities with high aspirations of professional success in the tertiary sector, especially in media, entertainment and finance, only to find themselves changing careers every few years leading to immense insecurity. If you aspire to be a good plumber and work hard without unfair competition, you can succeed and become an essential pillar of your local community. By contrast if you aspire to fame and fortune, you will more likely than not be let down, possibly accepting a few low-paid roles in the advertising industry before discovering you lack certain physical attributes. Despite all the rhetoric to the contrary and all the bogus awareness-raising campaigns, those of not endowed with attractive bodies with a natural gift for smarm and well versed in the art of neurolinguistic programming are at a serious disadvantage. Suddenly being uncool has become a significant handicap warranting a mental health diagnosis. Unable to join in a culture of rampant hedonism? All-night ecstasy-fuelled parties not your scene? Not finely attuned to the latest celebrity gossip? Unable to bear piped techno sound? Then you probably suffer from chronic cultural discordance syndrome and need help. So basically if you're not a recreational addict, we'll help you cope with the stress of alienation from a society hell-bent on fun at all costs by getting you hooked on prescription medication. Ever wondered why people start taking tranquilisers to cope with anxiety, develop obsessive phobias or succumb to eating disorders? More often than not, it's because they feel estranged from an increasingly competitive society. We compete not just in terms of material possessions, physical prowess and performance in culturally valuable skills, but also socially. How many hearts and minds can we win to support our social career. Recently the media have highlighted a number of teenage suicides resulting from cybernetic and real-world bullying, exam stress and a sense of worthlessness. In each case school mates expressed their sorrow through diverse media and emphasised how popular the deceased was. “We don't understand why X took her life. She was such a popular girl. We didn't realise she suffered from depressionâ€. Indeed the next line is implied “Why didn't she seek the (pharmaceutical) help she neededâ€. Not once have I read “X freaked us out. She just didn't fit in. Only the cool deserve a place on this planet†or “We picked on this easy target because she such a loser. Don't blame us for driving her to suicide. We are only reacting to media pressureâ€.

Medicalising Uncoolness

A preoccupation with soft skills implies anyone with a relatively low popularity ranking somehow deserves all their misfortunes and the only way forward is to modify one's behaviour to please the popular cool dudes in one's peer group. Thus if one genuinely can't stand rap music and all the cool dudes in one's peer group like this genre, one has to morph one's tastes or rather desensitise one's aural discernment. We could call this cultural adaptation. One needs to mimic the behaviours and hone the skills that are valued within a given social group, often to the detriment of valuable skills and perfectly functional behaviours that other group members disfavour. Not surprisingly many of us either require some form of medical or therapeutic intervention to keep up with the cooler trendsetting dudes in our neighbourhood and circle of acquaintances. Uncoolness has now become a disease.

Categories
Computing Power Dynamics

Surprise: The Big Business Party won

I predicted a hung parliament that would ditch any manifesto promises at the behest of corporate lobbyists. A weak government is arguably more malleable than a strong one, unless the strong government does exactly what its true masters want. I suspect the new Conservative administration will disappoint many traditional small-c conservatives as it pursues a rigorously corporatist agenda while undermining the very United Kingdom it claims to champion.

I seriously expected Labour to do just a bit better and for the SNP wipeout not to be quite as complete (with only three Scottish seats not won by the SNP). How could the English electorate differ so markedly from the Scottish?

Let's take a closer look at what really happened. In percentage terms the polls were not entirely off the mark, Labour gained 2-3% less than expected, while the Conservatives attracted 3% more and SNP 4-5% more. The Liberal Democrats did worse than expected, while UKIP's popular vote was only marginally lower than most opinion polls suggested. We saw three divergent dynamics at play.

  • In Scotland many Labour and Liberal Democrat voters switched to the SNP. In working class provincial England many Labour voters switched to UKIP.
  • In middle class provincial England and much of Wales, Liberal Democrat voters switched to Conservatives, while most affluent Tory voters stayed loyal. In short UKIP took more votes from Labour than from the hated Tories especially in key marginals, where most disaffection went to the one party that had serious proposals to address unbalanced mass migration.
  • In urban areas with large immigrant populations, especially Muslims, Labour did modestly well even gaining a few seats, but mainly from the LibDems, except in posh areas of London with affluent immigrants where the Tories posed as the party of international business.

UKIP gained 3.9 million votes, but just one MP, Douglas Carsewell, whose love of free trade and Gladstonian Liberalism sets him apart from most UKIP voters, who would support not only tougher immigration controls but also import controls to bring back manufacturing to Britain. The offspring of Great British working class are now represented by three parties who look down on them. Labour and the SNP support greater EU integration, free labour movement, greater surveillance and generally more state interference in private lives. UKIP would increase military spending and expand hydraulic fracturing, while promoting free trade and doing little to address fundamental problems of outsourcing and reliance on volatile financial markets. They won support primarily on two issues: immigration and exit from the European Union. Yet millions of workers across the Europe distrust remote transnational entities not because they want an even more deregulated labour market, but because they want to regain the power to regulate their local labour markets to meet the long-term needs of the local population. It clearly makes little sense for millions of young Europeans to move to other countries because free trade deals have caused relatively inefficient local industries to close as production moves to the Pacific Rim or elsewhere. By and large ordinary workers support greater protection, while privileged professional and business classes benefit from a more dynamic globalised economy able to tap into an almost unlimited pool of talent. It's clearly duplicitous to advocate free trade, but not to allow free movement of labour. However, in an unequal world such globalist policies benefit the privileged and well-educated to the detriment of the unskilled poor. To make such a system vaguely fair we would need to extend Western European welfare provision and workers' rights to the whole world and impose a global living wage. This is precisely the kind of fantasy that the Green Party entertains. That would also mean raising everyone to Western European levels of consumption. Alternatively, we'd have to lower consumption in Western Europe to some sort of global average, but this would inevitably prove not only very unpopular but would lead to cutbacks much more severe than current austerity measures, which are by comparative international standards very modest reductions in a welfare system that has grown considerably over the last 40 years.

Labour should stand up for the long-term interests of ordinary working people in its country. Instead it defends the short-term interests of client groups. If you're a low-paid worker, a single mum with a part-time job or a recent immigrant, Labour's policies may seem slightly more appealing than the Conservative alternatives of cutbacks in welfare provision or tougher restrictions on access to welfare for newcomers. But these are only short-term fixes that address the symptoms of unbalanced unsustainable development rather the root causes. More disturbingly, welfarism combined with global free trade promotes dependence on state institutions beholden ultimately to the same multinational corporations that cause so much inequality and misappropriation of resources in the first place. As Noam Chomsky pointed out, neoliberal corporatism means the privatisation of profit and the nationalisation of losses and social deprivation.

SNP Wipeout

Why would Rupert Murdoch's News International support the Conservatives in England and the SNP in Scotland? They appear both rhetorically and ideologically at loggerheads. The English Conservatives have a public image as the party of business, economic stability and fiscal responsibility. Conversely the SNP present themselves as staunchly anti-austerity and to the left of Labour on most issues, e.g. they oppose Trident and have opposed most recent military interventions. Yet such deceptively radical stances are common in the global business community, who see nation states as a thing of the past and much prefer a porous mosaic of interdependent regions subservient to remote transnational organisations like the European Union or NAFTA. As British imperialism is very much a dead duck, international big business does not really care about peripheral British disputes such as Northern Ireland or the jurisdiction of the Falkland Islands. They merely want privileged access to any resources in these territories and to wider global markets. Any concerns about cultural diversity or self-determination are pure political posturing designed to appeal to local sensitivities.

The SNP leadership could promise increased public spending because it knew it could blame either Red or Blue Tories down south. It could always blame Westminster for any economic woes. If Labour had won, it would demand unsustainable increases in government expenditure way beyond the meagre 2-3 billion saved by scrapping Trident. SNP strategists advocate the kind of radical debt-driven Keynsianism that Labour pursued for two-short years under Gordon Brown in the wake of the 2008 banking collapse. While such quantitative easing boosted the retail and property markets, it failed dismally in stimulating productive growth. The ConDem coalition merely reduced welfare spending to its 2008 levels, while still pumping more money into the economy and deregulating the labour market through zero-hour contracts. For all the emotive talk of slash and burn austerity cuts, total welfare spending continued to rise until 2013 and has only fallen slightly since due to lower unemployment, a by-product of zero-hour contracts and the growth in temporary work contracts. Far from shrink, the beloved UK economy has continued to grow, as has net migration. Yet millions of British residents find it hard to make ends meet. This is largely because the real cost of living, not the fiction portrayed by official retail inflation statistics, has risen astronomically. Property prices in London and much of Southern England exclude a growing section of the workforce. If you do not qualify for housing benefit and are subject to market rates, you could not hope to buy a modest semi-detached house for less than 10 times the average salary or rent a decent two bedroom flat for less than ½ the average the average salary. Moreover, our post-modern way of life requires us both to travel further for work and pleasure and to allocate more of our meagre earnings to communication gadgets and services. Living without an Internet-enabled smartphone, laptop and/or pay-TV package seems increasingly unthinkable. A typical family of four needs not one, but 4 mobile phone contracts at £25-40 each a month plus a broadband/Pay-TV package.

Ultra-conformist SNP activists

While it's easy to dismiss UKIP as a Dad's Army of climate-change-denying xenophobic little Englanders and latter-day Thatcherites, for some inexplicable reason the Scottish National Party has convinced a large cross section of pundits and electors of its radical leftwing credentials. I guess it all depends what you call leftwing. Does it mean empowering the working classes and favouring policies in the long-term interests of ordinary working people or does it mean pursuing a corporate agenda of far-reaching social change whose implications ordinary voters cannot fully comprehend? The latter variant is often known as progressivism, ongoing change towards to a new better tomorrow. Indeed it's surprising just how many politicians on both sides of Atlantic love to talk vacuously of the need for change, without dwelling too long on its definition or on its impact on our everyday lives.

The SNP has a simple rallying cry, Independence from Westminster, a convenient slogan that masks the deep-seated historic animosity and distrust that many Scots feel towards their English neighbours. On two issues I agree wholeheartedly with the SNP: Scrapping the Trident Nuclear missile system a colossal waste of money and devolving power from the UK. I would stop short of full independence because Scotland shares not only an Island with England and Wales with much of its transport infrastructure, but has very close social and family bonds with other regions of the British Isles. In an ideal world I'd probably have a British Isles Federation including the Republic of Ireland. Such a Federation would mark a clear break with the UK's imperial past and would grant its member nations considerable autonomy. It would merely recognise the fact that these Islands have long lived as an extended community and need to work together on many practical logistical issues, from transport to energy, fishing to telecommunications.

Yet for all its talk of independence, the SNP seems very happy to transfer power to a much larger multinational entity, the European Union, which they portray as a progressive force for social justice and environmental protection. This is certainly the outward image that the European Commission would like to convey to younger Europeans. In reality the EU promotes an essentially corporatist vision, in which large transnational companies collude with multitiered state institutions to set rules and regulations in their hegemonic interests. Big businesses find it much easier to comply with new regulations than smaller local enterprises, but if need be they can always outsource nasty low-paid jobs to third parties. Back in the 1990s many on the left saw the EU as a kind of fortress Europe protecting workers against greedy multinationals. 20 years later, an expanded EU looks much more like a microcosm of a new emerging borderless global corporate empire, in which local democratic institutions merely implement policies decided by corporate consultancies. Indeed even today, the UK government has very limited power over a whole range of key issues that affect our daily lives.

Big business does not really need a UK nuclear deterrent, but merely local institutions that collaborate with its favoured multinational military forces, whose main purpose is to ensure access to strategic resources and to open up markets. Even some UK military chiefs oppose Trident. The rationale for its existence belong to a bygone era of superpower rivalry. Besides even if Russia, India and China overtake the EU as economic and military powers, they would be exceedingly unlikely to invade Western Europe militarily. They could simply expand their large property portfolios and buy up more leading enterprises. The SNP leadership focus on Trident because they know its an easy win in any future negotiations over the status of post-UK Scotland.

However, the SNP preaches a mix of extreme Keynsianism and regional advantage. They claim to oppose the UK government's austerity and campaigned in increased spending throughout the UK. Yet if the new Conservative government granted Scotland Full Fiscal Autonomy, they would have to find an additional £8 billion just to keep public spending at its current levels. The price of crude oil would have to rise way above its 2014 level of USD $100 a barrel to make up the difference. Of course, it can be argued that Scotland with many deprived communities and sparsely populated outlying regions needs more per capita funding, but the same would be true of many other regions in the UK from Cornwall to Northeast of England. The SNP hope the EU may be more generous than Westminster, but with vast areas of Eastern and Southern Europe. If the SNP tried to borrow more than the rest of the UK, it would inevitably lower Scotland's credit rating especially as the country has a very high dependency ratio and a large proportion of young people lack practical skills.

Would Rupert Murdoch let the Scottish Sun support the SNP in Scotland while backing the Tories in England, if he seriously thought the SNP would challenge his business interests? I very much doubt it. If you dig deeper, you find that on most important issues that SNP harbour very little debate, other than ranting and raving about Westminster-imposed cutbacks and Trident. They have no power to change the former, while the later will probably be dropped anyway. Indeed they agree with the much maligned BBC and Guardian establishment on virtually everything else.

In the coming EU referendum, the SNP will join forces not just with Labour, Liberal Democrats and mainstream Tories to support continued EU membership, but will be firmly on the side of big business and against those of Scottish fisherman unable to compete with large fishing fleets from other EU regions. Their love of corporate power is reflected in other policies too. For instance the first majority SNP administration of 2011 opted to allocate extra money to fund free prescription charges. As they did not increase taxes or were unable to borrow, this meant diverting funds from other public spending priorities. It can be reasonably argued that some low-paid people who require medication to stay alive should not pay for being sick. Such people are usually entitled to other benefits anyway and the Scottish government could have simply restricted free prescriptions to genuinely worthy cases. However, Scotland suffers from another more prevalent problem: over-medication, especially for subjective conditions such as depression or other mental health conditions. With one of the highest antidepressant prescription rates in Europe, the SNP administration just made it easier for GPs and patients to choose the biochemical route. Inevitably, this policy affected poorer working class Scots more than others. If you're an affluent professional, a mere £6 a month is not going to influence your decision to keep taking antidepressants. But if you're on the breadline and cannot manage your money very well, the availability of free antidepressants will sway the balance in favour of biochemical intervention instead of addressing a hundred and one other potential issues, such as booze, recreational drugs, lifestyle, exercise, employability, relationships etc. Prescription charges served not so much to pay for healthcare as they were subsidised anyway, but to promote wise use of prescription drugs. Do you really need antibiotics for a viral infection which a healthy immune system should defeat in a couple of days anyway? More often than not, patients will demand quick fixes such as antibiotics for minor ailments such as sore throats against the better judgement of independent medical professionals, but writing a quick prescription is often for GPs to easiest way to placate a patient demanding instant remedies rather than advice on lifestyle choices. Naturally, medical professionals have differing opinions on the suitability of prescription drugs, but most would agree while in many cases they are life-savers or life-enablers, in many others they offer only modest short-term alleviation or may actually counter-productive, i.e. have more adverse side-effects than benefits. Worse still, once you start taking many medicines it's hard to wean yourself off them. Current SNP policy clearly benefits the pharmaceutical industry, who now have a captive state-subsidised market, while the underlying social and environmental causes of so many ailments remain. My attempts at reasoned debates with SNP activists prove futile. One may not challenge the need for antidepressants for fear of offending the 1/7 Scots on SSRIs. If one persists in citing the many whistleblowers within psychiatry such as David Healy or Robert Whitaker, one is quickly dismissed as a conspiracy theorist siding with outliers who fail to get their writings peer-reviewed. The same paternalistic attitude is applied to the venerable EU. SNP activists will cite official reports by EU-funded institutions uncritically, while dismissing critiques as the mischievous work of rightwing think tanks. If the Scots may not debate healthcare or the hegemony of transnational organisations over every aspect of our lives without submitting oneself to official experts, one wonders what else we may debate in a post-UK Scotland, controlled by the SNP's corporate backers.

Categories
Power Dynamics

Whoever wins the election it will be business as usual

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

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

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

Now let us briefly consider likely electoral outcomes.

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

Ungreen Greens

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

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

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

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

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

Coalition Record

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

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

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

Shifting Alliances

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

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

Reading between the lines

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
All in the Mind Computing

The Nice Party Manifesto

As an environmentally friendly, safety-aware, anti-racist, disability-positive, anti- homophobia, feminist, pro-growth, pro-children, pro-happiness party, we oppose all nasty policies that may harm other human beings.

Global minimum salary:

If elected the UK Nice Party will provide everyone in the world with access to an online bank account and transfer 1 bitcoin ( £150) a day to ensure a min. global living standard. Any work will be optional.

Pollution outsourced to Mars:

All industrial activities will move to the Moon and Mars. All resource extraction, manufacturing and shipping processes will be fully automated.

Imagine there were no countries:

We will abolish all border controls and provide free public transport for anyone wishing to move from one region to another.

Free Fertility Treatment:

We will encourage people to have as many children as they like and provide free fertility services for all those unable to conceive naturally.

A Luxury Villa for everyone:

Our automated builders will provide luxury eco-friendly villas for anyone with long or short-term accommodation needs.

Electric Cars for all:

All global citizens over the age of 18 months will be entitled to their own eco- friendly driverless electric car. These cars will automatically recharge to overcome rage anxiety.

Food for all:

We will build gigantic greenhouse satellites to grow practically unlimited supplies of sumptuously juicy health food to meet all tastes.

Sex for all:

We will provide all sexually repressed human beings with free humanoid sex dolls to suit all possible erotic preferences.

Free Gender Surgery and Body Transplants

Anyone dissatisfied with their current gender or body shape will be entitled to free gender realignment surgery or potentially a full body transplant.

No more accidents

We will repeal Isaac Newton's outdated and frankly misanthropic Law of Gravity and replace it a kinder Law of Floating Attraction. Everyone will thus be able to fly, float or walk as they please. Cliff-jumping, sky-diving and skateboarding will be safe leisure pursuits and pigs will be able to fly.

No more sadness

We will add Soma to the water supply to banish all residual forms of sadness or stray critical thoughts.

Caveat

A combined software and hardware upgrade is required to implement the above policies. We will migrate all physical human beings currently on planet earth to cloud servers interfacing with massively multiplayer virtual reality simulation software.

Categories
All in the Mind

Why do people get depressed?

With so much media attention, you'd seriously think depression awareness raising charities would want to answer this very simple question. As the purported biological disease model of depression has now become almost an act of faith, debate now seems to revolve mainly around the relative merits of different forms of treatment. Whether it's medication or intensive psychotherapy, any talk of treatment implies a medical condition comparable with cancer, Alzheimers or broken limbs.

Affluenza

By now it should be clear that higher material living standards do not necessarily lead to healthier or more balanced emotions. We possess more powerful, versatile and efficient electronic gadgets, more cars and can afford more holidays abroad than ever before. Yet this material abundance does not translate into greater happiness. The infamous Germanwings copilot, Andreas Lubitz, had a wealthy family who could afford to pay for expensive flying lessons. By any accounts he enjoyed a privileged jetsetting lifestyle and, if reports are correct, was not averse to performance-boosting and mood-altering medication. Countless multimillionaire celebrities have publicised their depressive episodes. Indeed depression seems largely a concern in opulent consumer cultures and the very concept of melancholy is practically unknown to pre-agrarian societies such as the Amazonian Pirarã people.

Human Emotions

Human emotions are certainly complex, but why would we have evolved to have clearly distressing and dysfunctional mood swings that make it hard for us to address any of the more immediate problems in our life? If your house is on fire along with all your worldly possessions, what should you do? Contemplate the market value of your endangered possessions? Spend the next 60 minutes negotiating with your home insurance company? Laze around watching Youtube videos about how to rebuild your life after a catastrophe? Actually none of the above, the most rational course of action would be to quickly find the safest way out of the building and if possible help anyone else at home to join you. If you fail to act fast in such situations, you may very well die and be forever unable to help anyone else dear to you. Ironically the kind of emotions people experience in the face of death differ markedly from the self-centred feelings of inferiority and introspection that prevail in melancholy. When faced with a life-threatening crisis, all considerations about your relative social standing, your body image, your love life or lack thereof or your financial woes fade into insignificance. If you are penniless, homeless and starving, the relative merits of the latest and greatest gadgets or the number of social media friends you may have, are of little concern, but you will be probably be very glad to have a square meal and a roof over your head.

Most of all people strive for two things in life: A sense of purpose and affection, i.e. we need to have clear idea of what we aim to achieve in life and to feel wanted or rather emotionally rewarded for our efforts. In the simple pre-agrarian societies that prevailed in most of humanity's two hundred thousand year odd history, our sense of purpose was the survival of ourselves and our immediate community while our sense of love came from the close bonds we had with our community. As long as we did our bit to help in the collective struggle for survival, we would be rewarded with love and affection. As many died young from diseases and injuries that can now be easily treated, the mere fact of survival gave us cause for optimism and gratitude to mother nature and our community. Diverse cultures throughout the world value health more than material possessions.

The lottery of life has always been tough. It is clearly unfair that some of us are blessed with better, stronger or more appealing physiques than others and are thus better equipped to attract the best mating partners. However, humanity would never have evolved to its current level of technological excellence if we had not been able to harness different skill-sets. Carrying heavy building materials undoubtedly requires much muscle-power, but several thousand years ago someone took a break from the tiring task of lugging stones and logs around to devise a new more efficient technique for transporting heaving goods. At first heavy slabs of stones were rolled on logs and later logs were cut into wheels on rudimentary carts. We still needed muscle-power to load and unload carts, but mechanical engineers and craftsmen had enabled us to carry more with less effort. Even primitive societies began to value brains as well as brawn, wisdom and experience as well as youthful energy. That explains why many primitive societies cherish their elders, although they may no longer be able to help hands-on with hunting, building and food preparation, their experience and wisdom is invaluable especially in small close-knit communities.

As societies became more and more complex with greater levels of specialisation, trade and competition, more people failed to lead productive lives as their potential skills had been outsourced or devalued by techno-economic progress. Greater opportunities for some always mean fewer opportunities for others. Current socio-economic trends clearly favour flexible and highly mobile labour markets with a rapid turnaround in human resources and skill-sets. These far-reaching changes affect every aspect of our lives from job security to intimate relationships. In our brave new world, the only certainty is perpetual uncertainty, which in turn makes more and more of us dependent on remote organisations just to stay afloat.

Drugs and Psychiatry

While I do not rule out that some genuine neurological conditions may make some of us more susceptible to melancholic thoughts, the primary cause of depression in modern society is a sense of helplessness, i.e. an inability to help oneself overcome a temporary setback, exacerbated by the breakdown of traditional extended family and community networks. Any purported treatment plan that fails to identify the root causes of so much emotional distress is doomed to failure as in any other cases of misdiagnosis. If you have a broken leg, pain killers may help you temporarily cope with unpleasant sensations, but may have long-term side-effects if taken for prolonged periods of time without addressing the root causes of your suffering. Likewise, no rational dentist would treat tooth decay with ibuprofen alone. In an ideal world we would avoid breaking limbs or exposing our teeth to decay, both of which depend on external or environmental factors. However, at least caries and bone fractures are easily identifiable medical conditions. Depression, on the other hand, is a state of mind induced in an incredibly complex organ with an estimated 100 billion neurons.

The over-prescription of anti-depressants is merely a symptom of a more fundamental problem, a shift away from the psycho-social model of emotional distress to a strictly biological model of mental health patients. The former model recognises biological differences that may make some of us more susceptible to mood swings (not least of which is gender), but rather than concentrating on natural phenomena we cannot easily change, it focuses on how the rest of society can help these people become more productive citizens able to help themselves and feel wanted by helping others. The latter approach, currently in vogue, treats individuals as psychiatric subjects and psycho-social stimuli as mere external triggers of underlying conditions. This turns the depressed into victim groups who require more treatment, and thus greater dependence on others, both of which are very likely to exacerbate their sense of helplessness and under-achievement. If a condition is considered a life-long illness caused by an underlying neurological syndrome, then there is much stronger case for lifelong medication.

Many claim that anti-depressants helped them out of the depths of misery or that they would be unable to function without them. Both claims dodge the more important issues of causation. First if you are on psychoactive medication, you cannot easily just go cold turkey without suffering severe withdrawal symptoms, because your brain has already adjusted to your regular chemical stimuli. Second, there is much stronger case for mild anti-depressants for short-term use if the underlying psycho-social causes are addressed, but in these cases we cannot easily identify whether Selective Serotonin Uptake Inhibitors such as Prozac are more effective than placebos or natural remedies such as St John's Wort. The evidence would suggest outcomes are much better for those with better emotional support from friends and family and more rewarding careers who only need temporary treatment. Unfortunately that leaves millions of marginalised individuals who struggle to realise their self-worth through meaningful work (sense of purpose) or relationships (sense of belonging).