Tag: sustainability

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Question Time on Rise of UKIP

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

Dame Penelope Guardian Reader

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

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

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

Extreme Labour Mobility

Rethinking the Migration Debate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ungreen Greens

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

A country of Immigrants?

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

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

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

How to Help the Needy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
All in the Mind

Ten Trendy Actions which are very bad for the Environment

  1. Economic growth: Once people have clean water, a healthy diet, adequate housing with plumbing and electricity, meaningful employment, access to modern healthcare and a few other essential personal possessions, all additional consumption does very little to improve life expectancy or happiness. Yet our GDP growth drains many finite resources that could be better used by others suffering real poverty or be saved for future generations. Overconsumption, generating vast oceans of rubbish, is currently the biggest threat to our eco-system. We should focus on ensuring eveyone has the basics rather than artificially boosting the economy through superfluous retail therapy.
  2. Buying a more fuel-efficient car: If you really can't live without a car you may feel buying a newer and more fuel-efficient model may help save the planet. Unfortunately two thirds of the pollution that an average European vehicle creates takes place in the multistage resource-extraction and manufacturing process. By buying cars more regularly, you may well boost your country's GDP but for a marginal gain in fuel economy, you contribute to massive environmental destruction thousands of miles from home. Worse still, a more fuel-efficient vehicle will encourage you to drive more rather than consider other options like walking, cycling, public transport or simply avoiding unnecessary journeys.
  3. Having more than two children (per woman): Many countries may have undergone a demographic transition from traditional large families to one or two child families, yet the world's population is still rising. Most estimates predict a peak global population between 8 and 10 billion human beings sometime between 2050 and 2100. The rapid rise from just 1 billion in 1825 to 2 billion around 1930, 3 billion in 1960, 6 billion in 1998 and now over 7 billion has happened largely due to two parallel developments. First huge advances in sanitation and medicine have dramatically lowered infant mortality, so most children now survive even in the poorest African countries. Second the fossil fuel revolution has provided a plentiful source of cheap non-renewable energy helping us overcome previous constraints on the earth's human carrying capacity as envisaged by Thomas Malthus. We have witnessed two centuries of rapid technological progress, but until recently only 10–15% of the world's population participated in mass consumerism. While we may be able to survive with a low-consumption Tanzanian standard of living, hundreds of millions of Chinese, Indians, South Americans and even Subsarahan Africans are transitioning towards more Western European consumption patterns. Car ownership is currently growing at a much faster rate than human population. Nigeria alone now has 180 million inhabitants, mainly in a few large conurbations. Yet its fertility rate is unlikely to drop to replacement level any time soon without Chinese-style coercive one-child famility policies. If its economy and population continue to grow at their current rate, then the vast oil reserves in the Niger Delta may just suffice for local needs. Some claim education and female emancipation can reduce the birth rate to sustainable levels. However, greater per-capita consumption usually accompanies such a transition. Some fear an ageing population, but with increasing automation and growing unemployment, this may well be an opportunity to build massive care sector that can almost guarantee employment for millions of jobless young adults. We should welcome a natural decrease in population, but fear only the disastrous human consquences of our failure to deal with two-edge sword of skyrocketing consumption and a record global population.
  4. Obessing with cleanliness and presentation: Yes, we all need to wash to keep our bodies fresh and prevent diseases from spreading, but our modern obsession with appearances often does more harm than good. Not only do washing machines and irons consume vast amounts of electricity (typically 2kWh each), mostly generated by gas, coal or nuclear power plants, but your washing detergent along with 50 litres of water per full load ends up in a local sewage plant, where it has to be treated before being dumped in a natural body of water.
  5. Holidaying abroad: We all love to enrich our lives with a taste of foreign cultures, stunning scenery, historic architecture, good food, sunny weather, beautiful beaches and exciting nightlife. However, cheap long-distance travel is a relatively recent phenomenon. Until recently, most working class Europeans just went to the nearest seaside resort or embarked on a brief excursion to the rural hinterland away from urban pollution. Air travel has made the world a smaller place and transformed thousands of kilometres of coastline and thousands of small fishing villages into monotonous open-air shopping malls, tanning lounges and nightclubs. As a result many areas of Spain, Portugal, France and Greek Islands have been colonised by bland global consumer culture and bear little semblance to their host countries' traditional cultures.
  6. Unbalanced mass migration: While many of us pay lip service to cultural diversity, the trend is clearly towards cultural homogenisation. The more people migrate from one cultural region to another, the more they lose contact with their cultural heritage and embrace global consumer culture. Most pro-migration arguments focus on short term economic growth rather than long-term socio-environmental stability. If people were migrating away from overburdened high-consumption regions to live a simpler life in a more environmentally sustainable way in a low-consumption country, we may be able to temporarily justify unbalanced migration. Likewise, positive immigration can be sustained for a limited period in spacious and resources-rich countries, like Australia, Argentina, Canada, Russia or the USA (before it became a net importer of energy and food), as long as the growing population does not unduly endanger delicate ecosystems. However, most recent migration has been away from relatively poor countries to spendthrift countries. Worse still much has been from warmer to colder countries that require greater indoor heating for much of the year. As long as migration is driven by artificial economic incentives, it will lead to greater per capita consumption, while promoting the wrong kind of development in countries of mass emigration, i.e. a brain drain and greater dependence on trade with wealthier countries. Yet current levels of immigration to richer countries cannot address the fundamental socio-economic imbalances that caused people to migrate in the first place. Ironically, growing consumer demand for imports from richer countries leads to greater environmental depredation in poorer countries with lower environmental standards. While many trendy lefties consider any opposition to mass immigration racist, many pro-migration arguments are incredibly prejudiced, e.g. assuming cheap third world workers should care for the elderly and disabled in wealthy countries because locals loathe such menial jobs. One wonders who should look after the old and sick in poorer countries. In an ideal world we would have a balanced cultural exchange between different communities. Indeed the technology exists for us to share life-enhancing ideas with other communities around the world without having to leave our home region. Ironically, tougher immigration controls are not the only way to redress this imbalance, shrinking overheating economies may be a better long-term solution. If we fix the underkying economic imbalances and remove the need for economic migration, we could let people move freely. Alas we are a long way from such an ideal world.
  7. Outsourcing industry: We all hate oil refineries, chemical processing plants, gargantuan assembly lines, pollution, inhumane working conditions and child labour, at least in our immediate backyard. Unless you retreat to a low-tech self-sufficient farmstead, which would require a lot of hard work, your lifestyle depends on a colossal industrial complex. The short-term economic gains of cheaper goods due to lower wages are offset by greater environmental cost of shipping goods half-away around the globe and the loss of key skillsets essential to our modern way of life. Worse still, as factories have closed in the UK, retail outlets have mushroomed everywhere from Lands' End to John O'Groats. Consequently our activities cause more pollution than they did in the grim 1960s, but it largely been transferred to the Asian Pacific Rim and Africa.
  8. Health and Safety Regulations: Common sense goes a long way, but many health and safety regulations actually obstruct simple maintenance tasks and waste finite public resources. I have been prevented from climbing on a desk to change lightbulb in a local council office where I worked temporarily, because their insurance policy for such tasks only covered trained electricians. As a result, a council technician had to drive 10 miles to change a lightbulb and the council paid me for two hours in which I could not work.
  9. Stupidity: Yes, I know stupidity is fun. Why walk to the shops, when you can show off your new car? Why watch a movie at home, when you can drive to a new cinema complex twenty miles away? Why cycle in wet and windy weather, when you can drive to your local gym? Why install a filter to purify tap water, when you can buy bottle water? Why wash nappies, when you can buy disposable nappies? Why drink coffee from a reusable flask, when you can advertise your favourite caffeinated milk brand in a disposable paper cup? Many people know their actions damage the environment, but other social pressures take precedence. Now try explaining to a 19 year old lad that he should not drive his new girlfriend to a restaurant, but rather they should both catch a bus or cycle.
  10. Ignorance: This has never been quite as trendy as stupidity, but is still surprisingly widespread. However, the worst form of ignorance is credulity, especially when it comes to the kind of eco-friendly advertising clearly geared to pseudo intellectuals. These trendy ignoramuses like to believe they can help African coffee growers by choosing a fairtrade brand at Starbucks or tackle clean water scarcity by buying Volvic-branded bottles of flavoured water. Their actions merely help the marketing of trendy brands and further subjugate the developing world to foreign multinationals.
Categories
War Crimes

Rewriting History: The Myth of the Good War

Planned Berlin to Baghdad Railway

As we mourn the deaths of millions of young Europeans in a futile dispute between rival empires, British, French, Russian and American leaders perpetuate the myth of a simple battle between good and evil, freedom and tyranny, democracy and dictatorship. Yet without the deep scars left by the blood-stained aftermath of the Great War, much of Europe would probably not have endured revolutionary uprisings, which soon gave rise to much more grotesque expressions of tyranny in the form of Fascism, Stalinism and most catastrophically Nazism. Many younger people could be forgiven for believing Herbert Asquith, Winston Churchill and Lloyd George took the British Empire to war in order to defeat not just Prussian adventurism, but all the horrors later associated with Nazi Germany. Yet the Germany of 1914 was as democratic as Britain or France. Not only did Germany have universal male suffrage before the UK (which excluded not just all women, but also millions of poor men from the electoral franchise), it had the world's largest Social Democratic party and best organised labour movement. Far from being a beacon of social enlightenment, despite its wealth and intellectual talent, the United Kingdom still ruled over hundreds of millions of colonial subjects in the Indian Subcontinent and much of Africa. Openly racialist ideas justified the supremacy of small white minorities and local elites in most colonies. How could one country that had fought a long string of wars in locales as diverse as South Africa, Afghanistan and India lecture another with a much smaller sphere of influence and only a fledgling colonial empire? Just 44 years earlier Britain seemed quite happy for its ally Prussia to humiliate its long-time imperial rival France, by first seizing Paris and imposing its terms for peace with the transfer of much of Alsace and Lorraine to the newly formed German Empire. Only 55 before that in the infamous Battle of Waterloo, the British army under the command of the Duke of Wellington had helped Prussia defeat Napoleon and thus contain Britain's main maritime competitor as well as the dominant continental European power. For much of the 19th century Germany, not France or Russia, had been Britain's main ally on the continent. Britain supported the creation of the new Belgian state out of the southern Netherlands Provinces and French-speaking Walloon region to limit French ambitions more than those of Prussia. Indeed the British Royal Family descended from the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. In 1914 King George V's government effectively declared war on his cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Standard schoolbook history usually emphasises the assassination of the Habsburgian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, which the Austro-Hungarian government blamed on Serbia, a small slavic state rising from the ashes of an Ottoman Empire in rapid decline. Sandwiched between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, Serbia naturally sought alliances with Russia and France. However, let us not forget France and Britain had temporarily joined forces with the Ottoman Empire to contain an expansionist Russia in the 1853-56 Crimean War.

In the century prior to the outbreak of the 1914-18 Great War, Britain had supported Prussia against expansionist France, France and the Ottoman Empire against expansionist Russia, before letting Prussia curtail the European influence of Napoleon III's resurgent Second French Empire. Why would Britain now side with Russia in its quest to gain a foothold in the Balkans via Serbia over the assassination of a foreign royal. While the German Empire had gained Alsace and Lorraine to the west and chunks of former Poland to the east, the Russian Empire had gobbled up the rest of Poland, the baltic states north of East Prussia and Finland as well as all the former Caucasian and central Asian Soviet republics that gained independence from the Russian Federation in 1991. Germany's main competitor in rapidly industrialising Central and Eastern Europe was Russia, who had in turn formed an alliance with its main competitor, and former occupier to the West, France. Britain, although now eclipsed by Germany and United States as an industrial power, had reached the pinnacle of its imperial power. Did it really matter if Germany settled a few scores with a despotic Russian Empire and once again put France in her rightful place as a medium-sized Western European nation? Could Britain not act as a mere mediator between Russia, the Ottoman Empire, France, Austro-Hungary and Germany. After all, it had both opposed and joined forces with all these empires to suit its imperial interests. As for neutral Belgium, it had just overseen the slaughter of possibly a million or more Africans in the Congo Free State (some accounts suggest as many as 10 million, depending on the accuracy of pre-colonial population estimates), while over half its European population would sooner reunite with the Netherlands than fight dirty wars in the service of Belgian colonialism.

However, Germany was certainly not blameless. It had been too eager to settle scores and strike preemptively against France via Belgium. Its military leaders sought to expand their geographic reach through their industrial power at a time when most of the world had already been carved up, except for one lucrative region whose recently discovered abundant fossil fuel reserves would enable unprecedented economic expansion later in the century. Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany had begun the construction of a ground-breaking Berlin to Baghdad railway, just as American and British geologists working for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company discovered black oil at Masjid-i-Sulaiman in the mountains of north-western Iran. Not surprisingly, though conquering the Middle East was never mentioned either as a pretext for war, much of Britain's military operations over the following four years took place not in continental Europe at all, but in Mesopotamia.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/2DCwafIntj0

For more read: The Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain's Rush to War, 1914 by Douglas Newton

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

The Trouble with the NHS

How disease-mongering turns patients into customers

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

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

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

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

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

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Dictatorship by Consent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Power Dynamics

The Globalist Mindset

If you love planet earth and the human race, may I humbly suggest corporate globalisation leading to a grotesque misappropriation of resources may not be such a good idea after all. However, some self-proclaimed progressives disagree. They somehow associate the onward march of transnational organisations, the proliferation of branded retail outlets and the relentless expansion of the non-productive hedonism business with a concept they like to call progress. Indeed, even many wishful-thinking greens and socialists have internalised the notion that we, as a species, are all on a one-way journey towards a better tomorrow and we can face all potential challenges through ever greater cooperation. Guiding us are an alliance of transnational organisations, multinational enterprises and virtual social networks integrated seamlessly with the entertainment industry. As soon as people gain access to the World Wide Web from Norway to Chile or Japan to Angola, they tend to join Facebook apparently to stay in touch with a diaspora of friends and family, but also to broaden their mindmap of familiar faces to friends of friends or newly formed virtual communities of special interest groups. Never has the world been more connected and never has travel from one country to another been so easy. Many global optimists already view countries as mere relics of a bygone era of nation states, fallen empires and anachronistic religions. Local languages, dress codes, cuisines and custom blend into a potpourri of flavours and choices available in an apparent free market. Whether a modern world citizen happens to be relaxing by the beach in Goa, visiting museums in New York City or Paris, attending a business conference in Dubai or inspecting a factory in a Chinese megacity, the interconnected global culture never seems far away. The same brands and artefacts of our postmodern decadence and techno-wizardry accompany financial wealth wherever it spreads. While 50 years ago opulence was concentrated in a handful of wealthy countries, extreme decadence has spread worldwide. There are billionaires in countries we once prefixed with the label third-world such as India, Brazil, Indonesia and even Nigeria, and billionaires in the first and second world countries often hail from former colonies of the old imperial powers. Nowhere is the scourge of ostentation as daunting as in the Middle East, the scene of over 80 years of imperialist meddling and destabilisation. Yet without easy access and control of the world's cheapest oil reserves in the Middle East, the global economy would shrink.

Just 20 years after the fall of the former Warsaw Pact, European governments have become little more than county councils negotiating deals with multinationals and harmonising legislation in line with new laws in other countries and with the wishes of international pressure groups. In practice government ministers act merely as middle managers implementing policies decided elsewhere and liaising with local underlings to mitigate adverse effects for social stability. In many ways the history of post-war Europe has been a conflict between rival visions of global harmonisation. As long as the rift between the Stalinist East and Capitalist West remained, leaders paid lip-service to outmoded concepts such as self-determination, national sovereignty and workers' rights. Countries could intervene to protect markets against destabilising global competition thus protecting not only local jobs, but also key skill bases. After the big powers had redrawn boundaries and forced millions to move, enduring extreme hardship and even starvation, from around 1950 to 1990, Europe enjoyed one of its longest periods of peace, social stability and general prosperity. Admittedly large pockets of relative poverty and social exclusion remained, as did authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe and until the mid 1970s in Spain, Portugal and Greece. However, the degree of democratic participation and freedom of expression tended to reflect both social and economic realities. Those countries with the highest material living standards and thus best equipped to meet demands for better pay, working conditions and availability of life's pleasures and luxuries, could allow greater debate on economic policies and tolerate much greater dissent. If the business classes can distract the populace with bread and circuses and carefully manage the range of acceptable opinions, dissent can be easily sidelined or channelled into narrow lifestyle issues. Despite longstanding cultural differences, all Western European government pursued essentially social democratic policies. While governments allowed industries to compete, trade, expand and satisfy growing demand for consumer goods, they also invested in technological innovation and infrastructure, expanded welfare provision and protected national markets and workers against unfair competition from low-wage economies.

In the 1980s globalisation entered a new era with the Reaganite and Thatcherite obsession with supply-side economics and outsourcing of manufacturing. Since the fall of the former Warsaw Pact, we have seen the expansion of the European Union from a small set of countries with similar living standards to encompass most of the continent from Ireland to Romania or Finland to Portugal alongside other regional trading pacts from NAFTA, Mercosur to ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations). As a result the social democratic dream must either be extended to all and sundry or be gradually dismantled. In the UK we have the paradoxical situation where many descendants of the once proud working classes have become trapped in welfare dependence while low-wage jobs are increasingly the preserve of newcomers. To put things in perspective, despite public concerns about immigration from Commonwealth countries in 1950s to the 1980s, this immigration was always relatively balanced by emigration. Indeed between 1945 and 1995, total immigration to the UK was just under 2 million, a large number but spread over 50 years. Of course, the demographic effects were distorted by varying birth rates. Since 1995 more than net migration has been running at between 100,000 and 250,000 a year and the population has risen from a 58 million in 1991 to 63 million in 2011 despite a below replacement fertility rate among the native population. This means the UK has import raw materials, manufactured goods and food to sustain economic growth. So, as ironical as may seem to many trendy lefties, a higher population and greater economic growth in the UK leads to greater depredation of resources elsewhere. Where people suffer hardships in many apparently developing countries, it is often because foreign multinationals have uprooted them from their ancestral lands to exploit resources required by global markets. Yet corporate globalisation acts as double-edged sword, forcing people to leave their homelands and conveniently shifting the blame to the incompetence or corruptions of local leaders, while simultaneously promoting the very consumption-led economic growth that causes this displacement.

A False Sense of Security

Harold MacMillan, British prime minister in the late 1950s, once claimed "You've never had it so good". In some respects our material wellbeing and life expectancy have continued to improve since. However,what mattered most to those who remembered the humiliation of mass unemployment, soup kitchens, orphanages and real poverty below the breadline, were a secure job, affordable housing and a better future for their children. By the early 1960s most Western Europeans had all three essential components of the good life. With the advent of affordable television sets and growing car ownership, the new norm came to resemble the American Dream. It mattered little that most of the world still lived in a kind of post-colonial semi-feudalism or had to endure the excesses of Maoist or Stalinist authoritarian idealism.

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Power Dynamics

11 million empty homes, in the wrong places

The Guardian newspaper has just revealed to its credulous readers that EU-wide no fewer than 11 million dwellings stand empty. This apparent news has been endlessly recycled by various well-funded lobbies and think-tanks to suggest there is no housing crisis in the regions that have recently attracted most inward migration. Meanwhile to accommodate 4 million new UK residents, the government has relaxed planning laws to allow the building of 3 million new homes, many on prime agricultural land. At the same time it has sanctioned hydraulic fracturing across England, which will pollute the groundwater in much of the remaining farmland. So presumably news of 11 million empty homes could not come at a better time. We may be able to house everyone and keep our farmland to cope with rising global fuel and food prices, or can we ?

The trouble is most of these empty homes are far from where most jobs are. Indeed many millions are the direct result of international commuting as young people vacate their home towns and villages in Eastern and Southern Europe and head to the wealthier climes of Northern Europe and the British Isles. Many millions more are second homes built for ex-pats in Mediterranean or Black Seas tourist resorts. Just 700,000 of these empty homes are in the UK, most of which are in rundown post-industrial wastelands. At the other end of the scale are prime pieces of real estate in overpriced neighbourhoods bought as investment by international gangsters, so just as many London-based workers have to commute several hours a day or make do with substandard accommodation, sumptuous properties lie empty in Hampstead and Mayfair.

However, what would happen if we could force the government to seize these properties and allocate them to those more in need? For starters demand would greatly exceed supply. There are nowhere near 11 million des-res Hampstead villas waiting for minimum wage workers to take up residence, there are at best a few hundred. London-wide there may be several thousands of empty properties, but many would require renovation and would only temporarily ease an artificial housing shortage. I say artificial because without mass migration, there would be enough houses for all without destroying valuable farmland. Forced repossession of empty luxury properties would have one very positive side effect, it would discourage property speculators (mainly foreign) from distorting the London market and thus deflate the economy and diminish the need for so-many temporary service workers. Like it or not, the whole London economy thrives on recycling wealth generated somewhere else, so once again you either support corporate globalisation and live with its many consequences, or you support more viable alternatives, that inevitably means economic shrinkage in overheating economies.

Few seem prepared to admit the obvious. With huge economic imbalances between regions, a growing rich-poor divide, shrinking middle classes and open labour markets, globalisation has succeeded in simultaneously creating chronic overcrowding and unbearable congestion while leaving other areas in a state of abandon and social decline.

In addition the environmental impact of housing depends very much on habitation. Abandoned properties may decay, but they pollute very little. Inhabited properties inevitably consume water, electricity, produce sewage, add to local retail consumption and traffic (especially if their owners insist on driving everywhere). For every inhabited house we need to provide more shops, schools, hospitals and roads.

Europe's empty properties fall into 4 categories:

  1. Too expensive, only suitable for wealthy property investors
  2. Holiday homes by the sea or on the slopes, not suitable for young city workers
  3. In areas of high unemployment and mass emigration
  4. Substandard, in a state of disrepair

Of these only the fourth could be easily repurposed to cope temporarily with Europe's large population movements, but long-term we should look at smarter solutions. Rather than moving to where big business offers more lucrative employment opportunities, how about restructuring the economy so jobs are more evenly spread. It really makes little sense for more Eastern Europeans to abandon underpopulated regions to add to environmental problems in London, Frankfurt or Stockholm.

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Power Dynamics

The Sheer Arrogance of Tony Blair’s Clone

"But let me be clear - Britain may be a small island, but I would challenge anyone to find a country with a prouder history, a bigger heart or greater resilience."

David Cameron

So presumably thousands of years of Chinese, Indian or Middle Eastem history, literature, innovations count for little, and Britain's neighbours have little to teach us. Britain may have had its heyday in the 18th and 19th centuries, but today just builds on its past glory as a marketing tool.

"Britain is an island that has helped to clear the European continent of fascism and was resolute in doing that throughout the Second World War."

Such gross simplifications open up a can of worms. Broadly speaking in the 1920s and 30s more stable countries with relatively tame and malleable populations retained some form of consultative democracy, while those that underwent greater economic instability and had a more rebellious and free-thinking populace fell under the control of more authoritarian regimes. Moreover, Britain and France relied on resources from their empires to placate workers at home. The British government and UK businesses were happy to do business with a wide range of dictatorships. Indeed in much of the non-white British Empire, natives were only consulted through their leaders. In the first world war Bismarck's Germany and David LLoyd George's Colonial Britain had similar democratic credentials.

Britain is an island that helped to abolish slavery, that has invented most of the things worth inventing, including every sport currently played around the world, that still today is responsible for art, literature and music that delights the entire world."

The new capitalist ruling class only sought to abolish slavery after it had become an obsolete means of exploitation, replaced by wage slavery and the uprooting of traditional rural communities to make way for a new era of industrialisation and later mass consumerism. Child labour (exploitation of preteen boys snd girls)continued in the UK well in the 20th century, e.g. as late as 1911 over 18% of Lancashire boys between 10 and 14 had to work.

Reportedly at the G20 St Petersburg Summit a Russian official, close to Vladimir Putin, dismissed Britain as just a small country that nobody really pays much attention to. That may seem rather undiplomatic, but for over 15 years the government of this small island has been busy promoting military intervention under false humanitarian pretexts, while lecturing everyone else on free trade, democracy and human rights. Such an attitude presumes the UK government and its favoured NGOs know better than the rest of the world, eagerly awaiting Anglo-American emancipation.

All countries can cite their heroes and achievements. Without the agricultural revolution that spread from the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia via Anatolia to Europe and North Africa, few of the subsequent technological advances in later European empires would have been possible. To put things in perspective, the Sumerians had mastered the art of writing 5000 years ago, yet before the Roman Conquest there is little evidence of any writing besides isolated ideographs in ancient Britain or Ireland. Without literacy and an understanding of mathematics, developed by various civilisations over thousands of years, the famous scientists and inventors of the early industrial period would have lacked the intellectual building blocks that underly many ubiquitous objects like ball bearings, pistons, camshafts or electric motors that make our modern world possible.

Cameron's eulogy to the greatness of the small island he represents does have a modicum of truth. Beyond doubt between the early 18th century and the late 19th century, scientists and inventors flourished more in the British Isles than in many other larger countries. However, by the turn of the 20th century the US economy had overtaken Britain's while the centres of technical innovations had moved to US, Germany and Japan. Without its technological headstart, it is unlikely Britain would have conquered over 1/4 of the globe. Yet throughout its heyday of industrial power, the subjects of this blessed isle toiled away in factories, down mines and on ships for 12+ hours a day, were condemned to abject living conditions and had little say, if any, in the way their country was governed for the electorate was restricted to just a select group of male property owners. Infant mortality in the England of 1800 was much higher than in today's Malawi. Mine owners would willingly send 8 year old boys into dark and narrow coal shafts inaccessible to adults to gain a competitive advantage and drive their country's economic expansion.

If one's sole sources of current affairs news are the Anglo-American mainstream media (namely BBC, CNN, Fox News, Sky News, the Guardian, the Times of London, the Independent etc.) and one has failed to check their track record in the run-up to previous military interventions, one may be forgiven for believing, at least temporarily, that the head of the Syrian regime is a bad guy responsible for heinous crimes against his people, while the US and UK represent the forces for good. One can just imagine the spectre of multicoloured UN peace corps marching into Damascus greeted by thankful Syrians eager to join the global consumer frenzy. Indeed for some that is the end game, so all places just become provinces of a happy global empire of Latte-sipping Bohemian marketing executives debating the relative merits of Google Glasses, iPhones and Samsung Watches. In such a world regions would only differ in their climate, historical architecture and accent of World English. However, such a reality is unlikely to extend beyond an affluent elite. Behind the scenes the system's dependence on permanent economic growth in a finite world is causing greater tension over access to precious resources. The kind of free trade that successive British governments have championed have promoted not only greater interdependence and less food security, but have also enabled some financially rich regions to consume much more than their landmass and resources would otherwise allow. The UK may be a small collection islands, but through its reliance on imports it is a major offloader of pollution. All those inexpensive Chinese-made goods pollute China and depredate resources from the rest of the world to drive the UK economy. They do not somehow magically appear prepackaged in warehouses and retail outlets in wealthy countries, without undergoing multiple stages of industrial transformation and travelling thousands of miles.

Most ironically, the globalist neoliberal elite do not really care about ordinary British people. When employers spoke of a skills shortage in the debt-fuelled boom years of the early noughties (2000-2007), New Labour had a golden opportunity to reform the welfare system and encourage the millions of workless adults reclassified as disabled to get back into work. Instead they decided to allow recruitment agencies to bring in Eastern Europeans in bulk to do jobs that ordinary working class people used to do, but now reportedly refused to. The pseudo-left liberal intelligentsia looks down on ordinary English people, dismissing them either as unenlightened feckless layabouts if they do not work or Daily Mail-reading whingers if they do work, but complain about mass immigration and social engineering. So the country that gave birth to Isaac Newton, James Watt and Alan Turing, now has a severe shortage of home-grown engineers and scientists because the new generation entering the workforce is more interested in easy money in management, training, recruitment, advertising and consulting. Britain has become a country where most workers can talk the talk, but few walk the walk without the aid of foreign machinery and resources.