Tag: sustainability

Categories
Power Dynamics

Monbiot denies peak oil.

In reply to:‚ We were wrong on peak oil. There's enough to fry us all

Dear George,

Once again I feel constrained to write to you in defence of cool-headed rationalism rather than vapid emotionalism. I refer of course to your recent piece in the Guardian on peak oil. I would really welcome any hard‚ facts that led you to change your mind since the concept gained public awareness in the late 90s. Geologists have long known of huge reserves in Alaska, the South Atlantic and even deep under the Antarctic Ice. We have long‚ known of vast reserves of tar sands. Peak oil refers to the maximum commercially viable extraction rate of easy oil, as present in‚ the Middle East, Venezuela and formerly in Pennsylvania and Texas. Once we start drilling 3000 metres below the Mid Atlantic seabed, as Brazilian surveyors already are, the EROEI‚ a concept‚ with which‚ I hope you are familiar, will diminish very fast in any currency and oil will lose its relative advantage over alternatives, which unfortunately either yield much less (biomass), are unreliable (wind), require enormous infrastructure and maintenance (solar and tidal energy) or are downright dangerous (nuclear). However, don't take my word for it, Richard Heinberg has dealt with your assertions much more eloquently than I could:‚ Peak Oil Denial.

I had previously written about your refusal to attribute‚ our ruling elite's support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq to control of the oil supply. You seem to have a‚ wonderful knack for pandering to our establishment's self-righteousness (namely we did it for democracy‚ freedom and human rights). You also expended considerable literary resources on your condemnation of 9/11 truthers, likening them to climate change deniers. To the best of my knowledge, nobody denies the destruction of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 or the murder of around 3000 office workers, although many Americans and others fail to believe the official explanation for this terrorist act. So why would you join William Engdahl and others in denying the reality of finite resources on a finite planet? For the environmental movement, the timing could not be worse, only two week's ago James Lovelock admitted overestimating the scale and consequences of man-made climate change. While our collective overconsumption has undoubtedly affected our planet's ecosystem, I remained somewhat sceptical of some of the more extreme predictions, mainly because the so-called scientific consensus has frequently been wrong on so many issues. Continued human hyperactivity is‚ very likely to disrupt natural climatic cycles, but maybe not before other technological constraints begin to thwart our suicidal drive for growth at all costs. Indeed the message climate change and peak oil deniers have been getting is quite simple: The enviro-fascists were wrong, the party can go on. We can keep expanding markets and place all our uncritical faith in the next generation of technofixes. Remember in geology a century is but just a split second, yet in this period our‚ population has quadrupled and our per capita consumption sky-rocketed. We are indeed treading unchartered territory and may not be fully aware of the consequences for another 50 to 100 years.

I suspect it's because you fear the consequences. Indeed I also note your disagreement‚ with Jonathon Porrit on the population issue. You simply fail to recognise it and accuse, albeit diplomatically, true‚ environmentalists of wanting to depopulate the planet through Draconian measures such as sterilisation and‚ eugenics.Yet any rationalist would distinguish science from ethics. If we get the science right, we can then consider its ethical implications and act to avert suffering. If we get the science wrong, through misplaced faith in dangerous‚ technology or overreliance on finite resources, then the ethical consequences can be catastrophic. Yet since the mid‚ 1980s, and increasingly since the advent of New Labour, the trendy left has been enamoured with the neoliberal‚ Globalist project, its growth mantra and its imagery of multicoloured happy consumers sipping lattes and fondling their iPads. Humanitarian intervention, outsourcing and mass migration were key tools‚ of the new globalist world order. Yet the left seems to have confused the noble causes of International solidarity and‚ humanism for an economic system that thrives on hyper-competition and hyper-consumption addicted to growth at all costs. Its advocates in the British media stop at nothing to accuse its intellectual opponents of authoritarianism (green fascists), racism (anyone opposed to cheap labour and free trade) or conspiracy-theorism (anyone refusing to believe orthodox propaganda)‚

In short, I suspect you changed your mind on peak oil, not because of any new evidence, but because of peer pressure to embrace growth and remain politically correct on immigration and‚ population. Well done! So as 1.3 billion Chinese, 1.2 billion Indians and 700 million Africans strive to emulate Western European living standards, will they kill each other in the process? Will we ever learn from experience?

I'd prefer to see tens of billions more human beings over the coming millennia than destroying the ecosystem on which our civilisation depends just to squeeze in a few billion more here and now.

Categories
All in the Mind Computing

All true conservatives are green

I sometimes enjoy Peter Hitchens‚ antidote to mainstream trendy Neo-Liberal thinking, but fear he is on some subjects in bad company and a tad ill-informed. No rational person could deny volumes of hard evidence showing the exponential rise in humanity's collective impact on our planet's delicate ecosystem, both in terms of our numbers (rising from just 750 million at the start of the industrial revolution to 7 billion now) and our per capita consumption. Our population will probably peak in the next 10 to 30 years, but at the expense of adopting modern high-consumption lifestyles. And now 2500 million Chinese and Indians are preparing to join the mass consumer frenzy, resources that previously seemed almost unlimited, are nearing depletion.

The fact that scientific forecasts have so often proven wrong should lead us to take a more rather than a less cautious, and thus conservative, approach to future development. Climatologists know full well our climate is subject to multiple natural and, dare I say, anthropogenic factors, but man's impact on our environment has reached unprecedented levels. But climate change is just one of many potential side effects of our rapid overdevelopment. James Lovelock has merely conceded that some of the more alarmist forecasts made 20 years ago have not been supported by subsequent observations. So what! They were just forecasts. Meanwhile, other forecasts, such as available oil reserves in Saudi Arabia, have also turned out to be gross exaggerations. That's why Brazilian geologists are busy surveying fossil fuel deposits 2 miles below the surface of Mid Atlantic Ocean, the Chinese are sealing deals with Nigerian businessmen and Western Oil companies see Libya as a mere gateway to oil in Chad and Darfur, despite the huge costs of building pipelines and other infrastructure.

Wishful thinking cornucopians would like to see the current era of cheap mass motoring for all continue without drastic consequences and place blind faith in scientists to find to magic techno-fixes. Climate change denial, so popular in Neo-Conservative circles, has little to do with any understanding of the actual climate (which may get warmer, colder, wetter or drier in different parts of the globe) and everything to do with the same culture of entitlement Mr Hitchens so rightly denounces in his columns. Claiming to have a god-given right to drive your car to a suburban shopping mall, funded by your non-productive marketing job, is just the same as claiming a right to welfare handouts to subsidise your hedonistic idleness. If we are to tackle our very real environmental challenges and avoid unprecedented loss of life resulting from a grotesque overconsumption, we need to power down.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Hedonism Ablaze

What a coincidence! Just days after the US administration agreed to raise their country's debt ceiling and let the global consumption party go on for a few more months or maybe years, In London marauding mobs run riot, loot retail outlets and set commercial and residential buildings on fire. Reportedly it all started in Tottenham Hale, North East, on Saturday evening when demonstration against the police shooting of a minicab driver and alleged drug dealer, Mark Duggan, descended into violence, just four miles from my bedsit. Eye witness accounts and video footage clearly show that police lost control and were unable to contain the ensuing disorders. Some observers have dwelled on the conflicting evidence behind the initial incident, whose background builds on longstanding mistrust between the police and local communities. In 1985 a notorious riot on the Broadwater Farm Estate after Cynthia Jarrett, an African Caribbean woman, died during a police search of her home, later saw a Policeman, PC Keith Blakelock killed. Early reports indicated just another example of police brutality against an innocent man. It now looks much more like another case of police incompetence, as both bullets fired were police-issue, but the 29 year-old victim and father of four was undoubtedly involved with narco-trafficking Star Gang. That may not have justified his death, but like many other lads from sink estates in a city with over 50 billionaires he opted to service the service sector by not only facilitating the distribution of drugs, but living by the law of the gun.

The saddest part of all the destruction that has followed is that many young people in towns and cities across the UK see little future other than to party and re-enact some gangland fantasy. The more talented youths may aspire to becoming pop musicians, actors, dee-jays or film producers. A few entrepreneurs may open hairdressers, pubs, nightclubs, restaurants and gyms,. And a few conscientious individuals may be drawn to the caring surveillance professions such as social workers, police and learning support assistants, but many just choose to live on benefits. The purpose of life in London has now become simply having fun or rather exploiting other people's desire to indulge in frivolous entertainment. The city has long been a parasite on the world stage, importing huge quantities of additional goods through the proceeds of a global casino.

As riots spread to other London boroughs on Sunday and Monday, a pattern began to emerge. Thousands of hyperactive youths, a small but sizable minority in a city with over 8 million inhabitants, enjoyed re-ennacting the kind of wanton mayhem they had previously seen on TV and simulated on game consoles. Rather than protesting against the evil capitalist system that enslaves them they could not wait to get their hands on the latest electronic gadgets. Admittedly some food outlets were trashed too, many fast food eateries, but these were no food riots. Britain's generous social security system ensures nobody goes hungry unless they choose to squander their benefits on booze, drugs and gambling. Indeed the scenes of ransacked shopping districts reveal another grim reality. Most shops sell non-essential merchandise. One happy looter posted a picture of his bounty on Twitter, a vast collection of video games and other gadgetry. Was this some kind of statement against the UK/US invasion of Iraq, a sign of solidarity with starving Somalis or attempt to redistribute wealth from the rich to poor? The looter may have feigned his opposition to the excesses of British imperialism or pretended to care about malnourished Africans or the urban poor in a grotesquely overpriced city. But no, he just wanted some instant gratification.

As more reports come in, the choice of looting targets seems to reflect the spirit of our times, to name but a few "The Sony Distribution Centre" in a large warehouse filled mainly with DVDs and game consoles in Enfield and the Party Superstore in Clapham. The big babies are throwing their toys out of their hyper-consumptive prams.

In reply to a New Labourite:

I wonder if New Labour's supporters will ever question the wisdom of economists whose advice has bankrupted the US and European economies in the name of growth? While New Labourites may distance themselves from the current ConDem coalition, they actively supported the previous administration with almost identical policies and equally subservient to the unaccountable multinational organisations who really run the country.

Recent debt-fuelled economic "growth" in the UK has mainly relied on banking and frivolous media services, aided only in part by North Sea Oil (the UK as a whole is now a net importer of oil and gas). Once demand for these non-essential services crumbles, as it surely will, Britain will have to start living within its own means. However, after 30 years of unashamedly pro-globalist policies (by which I mean reliance on global trade), a huge public and private debt and a large section of the working age population on benefits, the country will be ill-equipped to weather any storms. In a historical context globalism is but the last stage of imperialism, so let's call it global imperialism.

Circular Arguments over Immigration:

While mass immigration may create new jobs by boosting demand, that's an entirely circular argument, e.g. before the 2004 influx of Eastern Europeans there were 600,000 unfilled vacancies, 4 years later the UK still had the same number of unfilled vacancies, but a million more residents boosting the country's reliance on imports. The UK's population has not grown at such a fast rate since the end of WW2. During the 1970s and 80s more people left the UK than entered. Indeed we've witnessed a steady brain drain of talented Brits to the US and Australia and from countries like Nigeria, India and now Poland to the UK. We have a shortage of surgeons because many of the best UK born surgeons work in private hospitals abroad. The oft-repeated claim that "the economy benefits from immigration", means big business gets a short-term boost in profitability due to the influx of enthusiastic workers and total demand rises, but what is good for the economy in the short term is not necessarily good for society in the long term. These arguments made sense in countries like Australia, the US, Canada or Argentina. Indeed for some time now, UK economic growth has been consumption-driven. This logic fails to take account of rather obvious socio-envionmental factors. Southern England is now the most densely populated region of Europe and Londoners would starve within a week in the absence of food imports. Who said we need to boost aggregate consumption? We should be doing exactly the opposite. If you believe infinite economic growth is possible, then surely you'd have to believe in infinite energy and dismiss man-made climate change as a green plot to depopulate the earth (as some pro-growthists do), but you don't because it would be politically incorrect.

As we hit limits to growth, the consequences of a recent consumption frenzy growth will significantly reduce the earth's carrying capacity (i.e. more consumption per capita => fewer people). Yet new Labour's policies actively encourage procreation through Europe's most generous child benefits leading to a benefits-driven baby boom and these babies become young adults wanting to emulate Jeremy Clarkson because that's the consumer culture your friends in big business keep marketing. This observation may horrify you, I hear you murmuring "racist" or maybe sexist, but the facts on the ground are pretty undeniable, so don't shoot the messenger. We should not subsidise irresponsible procreation, because it will inevitably lead to more social problems further down the line. You know that. I know that, so stop pretending otherwise.

Waves of Migration and Social Breakdown

Advocates of mass immigration had claimed before 2003 we needed an influx of highly skilled Eastern Europeans because native Brits lacked these skills, although as you no doubt remember the Home Office estimated only 5000 to 13000 Eastern Europeans would move to the UK in the first year after their countries joined the EU,. The classic example was the Polish plumber. First why did British-born young adults not aspire to these jobs? Second how does simply importing skilled and semi-skiled workers form abroad address a skills shortage among the home-bred population? It doesn't. More important a large proportion of this new unemployable underclass in the London area are themselves descendants of immigrants from the 1950s and 60s, whose parents and grandparents had filled a skills gap. So many conflicts we see now are between different waves of immigrants, something that can only get worse in the event of economic meltdown. However, in the 1960s unemployment in the UK was negligible, two-parent families still very much the norm and housewives valued members of society. Fast forward 40 years and most of the manufacturing and skilled manual jobs that made the British working class proud have been outsourced or assigned to new communities. Whether you like it or not, only a small minority of people will ever excel in the kind of cerebral jobs created by a knowledge economy. I know from personal experience that while millions of people are proficient in the use of software applications, only a few have the mental discipline required to write programs. Hence there are more IT recruiters (talking the talk) than programmers (walking the walk). Back in 1997 your friend, Tony Blair, boasted about how Britain led the world in IT. I presume that's why so few young adults from the XBox generation can write more than a few lines of client-side Javascript code. Much of the rest of the knowledge economy revolves around marketing goods we don't really need and promoting various social agendas (hence growth in the charity sector), which in turn serve to create new markets.

Do you seriously think British born young adults cannot learn plumbing, bricklaying or farming? Their forebears did. Why did they become de-skilled? And if there was such an urgent need for friendly smiling retail and catering staff, why could big business not tap into the large pool of British unemployed, many of whose parents were immigrants themselves? Why had they become so demotivated and unwilling to get out of the bed in the morning? You may blame Thatcher, who oversaw a tremendous rise in benefits dependency, but Tony Blair followed in her footsteps albeit with different rhetoric.

"Tariq Jahan had lost his 21-year-old son Haroon, murdered in the Winson Green area of Birmingham by thugs who drove at him in their car in what appears to have been a racist attack. No one could be more aware of the simmering racial tensions between Asians in his neighbourhood and those of Caribbean ancestry".

So why should we tolerate further erosions of civil liberties turning us all into suspects to deal with the side effects of over-development and its recent manifestations as unbridled consumerism, narcissism and media trivialisation of violence. Yet as a result of these policies we will soon be cajoled into accepting even more authoritarianism

Attacking our Communities?

Globalist policies destroyed these communities. A community requires shared values, customs and social cohesion that cannot be built if its composition keeps changing. Ordinary people cannot afford to live in London except if the government, read taxpayers, subsidises rents. Indeed among the main beneficiaries of New Labour's welfare and immigration policies have been landlords, who in many cases can charge what they like because the Department of Word and Pensions will pick up the bill. As a result we have mind-boggling cases (that I have witnessed personally) of families subsidised to the tune of £3000-4000 a month? Let's do some maths. A typical semi in London is around £320,000 ... that means a couple needs to earn £80,000 per annum to get a mortgage, while real average salaries are closer to £30,000. Indeed in Scotland, I knew many on 15/16 K per annum as late as 2009. In case you haven't noticed there has been a whole scale exodus from vast swathes of London. Deny it if you will, but normal working people cannot afford to live here, unless like me they can tolerate a single room. So we have the chattering classes on 100K+ a year, wealthy advertising and media executives, and then street after street of houses converted into flats and rented to a motley crew of migrant workers, home-grown benefits scroungers and miscellaneous gangsters. What a wonderful community!

Categories
Computing Power Dynamics

The Bankers are bankrupt and so are we

Today over a hundred thousand demonstrators will descend on Central London to protest against cuts in public spending. I can sympathise for I've joined many similar protests‚ defending the rights of ordinary working people and against wanton waste and wars. Why should ordinary people suffer because politicians and bankers have wasted billions on wars and billionaire bankers continue to reward themselves huge bonuses? Unfortunately many have misdiagnosed the problem. While undoubtedly many welfare dependents may suffer hardships as a result of cutbacks and some public sector workers will lose their jobs, we do not suffer from underspending on key public services such as health and education, but from huge waste on unsustainable bureaucracy financed mainly by a non-productive tertiary sector, offering services that nobody really needs. Demonstrators will be entertained by the spectre of a former New Labour cabinet minister and now their leader, Milliband, claiming we can keep spending as if there were no tomorrow. Few will dare challenge the previous‚ administration‚ on their grotesque overspending, fuelled by an economic boom based on property trading, banking, lobbying and media, and worse still their bail-out of the very bankers who caused the mess in the first place. In 2008 the country stood on the brink of financial collapse as banks could no longer sustain such a level of bad debt, i.e. debt on loans to people who could never repay. Throughout the late 1990s and early 20 zeroes manufacturing industries continued to close as retail outlets and other services expanded. New Labour oversaw more than a decade of private and public waste. Ordinary folk were urged to indulge in cheap holidays abroad, large plasma TV screens, more cars, electronic gadgets, boozing and gambling. While New Labour monitored and regulated the habits and behaviour of private citizens, it deregulated the hedononism‚ business and let bankers offer loans to those who could never realistically repay. At the same time despite official declines in unemployment, millions remained dependent on a multitude of benefits. In 1997 John Reid responded to demands for the re-nationalisation of the railways by simply stating "We can't afford the projected cost of £20 billion". Since then the government has not only spent more on subsidising private rail companies but has also squandered billions on PFIs (Private Finance Initiatives) to build new hospitals and schools, which the general public do not even own. Inflation-adjusted public health spending has doubled, but the quality of health care has seen no measurable improvement as the NHS is overburdened with the side-effects of hedonism and, dare I mention, unsustainable levels of net immigration. Politicians‚ on both sides of the House continue to talk about economic growth and none more so than Ed Milliband. Yet by growing demand for consumer products and promoting a non-productive service sector, we simply increase the country's reliance on global markets and imports. If the world economy as a whole proves unsustainable and, as recent events in Libya and Japan should surely remind us, energy becomes more expensive (i.e. a higher EROEI = Energy Returned On Energy Invested), we will find it much harder to readapt to the real world, where we need to be largely self-sufficient in food staples and material resources and can only provide for the weak and elderly through hard work. Our current model of development is entirely based on marketing and thus dependent on a plentiful supply of cheap human and material resources. However, as China and India grow and demand a larger share of the world's finite resources, their labour will become more expensive. Why should we rely on outsourcing menial office tasks to India and production to China, Vietnam or Indonesia? Why should their labour subsidise our consumption?‚

Practical Solutions

  1. Phase in a 30-hour working week and give people more flexibility. This may be bad for business and economic growth in the short terms as some of the best workers will be able to work less, but it will encourage a wider section of the population to aspire to high-skill jobs.
  2. Cut all child benefits after the second birth (i.e. allowing for twins, triplets etc.). If couples choose to have more children, they should not expect the state to subsidise it.
  3. Remove all NHS help for IVF and facilitate adoption when couples are unable to have children naturally.
  4. Cut all forms of unemployment benefit after 1 year, unless a person has a genuine disability preventing work. After this period, the out-of-work will be employed on the minimum wage in a vast range of environmental and social projects for up 30 hours a week.
  5. Reward housewives or househusbands who choose to stay at home to look after their children until the age of 14. There are also plenty of new remote working opportunities allowing parents to work part-time if they so choose. Couples could be granted 20 hours of parental time a week deductible from their income tax. The tax system should clearly encourage small two-parent families, in which at least one parent works.
  6. Raise the minimum wage for antisocial working hours. We do not need to shop 24/7.
  7. Treat mental health as primarily a psycho-social issue rather than a medical issue. Cut NHS spending on the promotion of mental health issues and address the very real psychosocial causes. Reduce dependence on psychoactive medicines.
  8. Encourage school leavers‚ uninterested‚ in academic subjects or hard sciences, to undertake vocational courses in practical trades such as plumbing, building, farming‚ mechanics etc. There is no need for 40%+ of school leavers to go to university. We should target further education spending on the 10 to 15% who can make a real difference.
  9. Provide special bursaries for degrees in hard sciences, medicine and engineering.‚
  10. While immigration would naturally fall as a result of declining domestic demand for superfluous consumer goods and services, we should ensure migration is both manageable and socially responsible.
Categories
Power Dynamics

Forerunners of Modern Globalisation

Homo sapiens sapiens first evolved as a distinct species at least 120,000 years ago with some recent finds in the Middle East dated as long ago as 200,000 years ago. On that time scale, the Neolithic agrarian revolution, which took place in most parts of world between 15,000 and 5,000 years ago and only reaching some locales such as Australia with European colonisation, is fairly recent. Prior to the agrarian revolution, communities had a much more direct relationship with their natural surroundings, were largely nomadic hunter-gatherers and so intensely involved in precuring food for their extended families that they lacked the technological means for more advanced forms of political organisation that could subdue other populations.

By and large human communities kept their distance limiting population growth and conflicts, but traded tools, artefacts and bounties. The earliest human settlers of Europe were not imperialists intent on dominating other peoples or seeking greater wealth for their rulers, but adventurers seeking greener pastures and often responding to regional climatic and environmental changes. Some anthropologists now consider the first waves of Indoeuropeans who expanded from Anatolia or the Crimean region around 7000 years ago to be the first imperialists, who set out to spread their culture on horseback through their mastery of animal husbandry and ability to generate food surpluses and this sustain larger communities. Pre-Indoeuropeans correctly designate the peoples who had colonised the Indo-european linguistic and cultural area before Indo-European expansion as opposed to later waves of migrants such as the Ural-Altaic who rode in from the east. Recent genetic analysis of established communities across Europe has shown how significant proportion of the modern European genome can be traced to a handful of ice-age retreats. The modern linguistic landscape emerged from an interaction between these pioneer communities and subsequent colonisers, but as Stephen Oppenheimer's research into origins of the British suggests, each new wave typically little more 5% to the existing ethnic mix. When pro-Globalists argue Britain has always been of nation of immigrants, they seem to overlook two critical factors, timescale, environmental sustainability and population density. Very early peoples could expand into new uninhabited regions without need for conflicts over economic resources with rival groups and even where other humans had settled in the vicinity, ample space allowed for some peaceful cohabitation and intermingling among groups with similar levels of technological advancement. Comparisons with the world's remaining pre-agrarian peoples may not prove very instructive as they tend to inhabit extreme environments as are usually surrounded by more technologically advanced communities eager to reassign their habitat to other more productive purposes.

Globalisation is simply imperialism on a planetary level, in which old nation states have become little more than regional councils implementing policies dictated by unaccountable supranational bodies. Imperialism means the subjugation of other communities to expand the military and commercial influence of a given ruling class. Historically speaking all nation states, which today form culturally distinct entities, grew out of generations of empire building.

Western European Timelines:
Years ago
20,000 to 11,500 Early Mesolithic with only a few communities in ice age retreats.
11,500 to 7,000 Post-glacial expansion to central and northern European mainly following coastal and river routes.
7,000 to 2000 Gradual expansion of agrarian civilisations and early empires.
2000 to 500 Imperial expansion, nation building, wars, spread of Christianity and Islam and introduction of the feudal system and mercantile networks.
500 to 250 European colonisation of the Americas with outposts in the Africa, Asia and Australasia
250 to 50 Industrial revolution and expansion of great European and North American empires. Consolidation of competing nation states with advanced social welfare structures.
50 to 20 Accelerated globalisation with domination of a US-centred business empire, supported by a huge military-industrial complex and limited national sovereignty, but kept in check by rival regional power centres and national welfare states.
20 to near future Rapid of growth of rival power blocks within the global system and huge expansion of consumption in the world's most populous countries, accelerated pace of migration, disappearance of national sovereignty, increased political instability, early signs of resource depletion.

In the beginning we had small communities around a limited number of extended families. It wasn't until the agrarian revolution that we could produce enough surplus food to enable the development of urban settlements and advanced political organisations. Some such civilisations may have existed as long as 15,000 years ago as evidenced by the archeological finds in South East Asian Malay archipelago, which during the last ice age formed a continuous landmass from modern Java to Cambodia, known as Sundaland. Archeologist Francis Pryor estimates Britain's neolithic population as little more than 100,000 in 4000 BC and Ireland's at around 40,000. In Roman times it barely rose to a staggering 3.5 million, out of an estimated 56 million in the whole Roman Empire, only to decline again to around 1.5 millions in the aftermath the pan-European Justinian Plague between 540 and 750 AD. For 700 years Britain's population fluctuated between around 2 and 8 million before the industrial revolution enabled a huge demographic boom and the excess population could easily emigrate to new colonies.

As recently as 1850 much of Africa's hinterland remained unchartered by European explorers, while to your European the world revolved around their region and nation state with merely tales of remote promised lands. To many French, German and Italian farmers English seemed about as relevant to their every day lives as Latin or Chinese. While the educated classes may have been aware of emerging empires abroad, most ordinary Europeans were only aware of foreign culture through tales from relatives who might have migrated. Indeed the great European exodus did not really get into full swing until the end of the 19th century. In 1850, shortly after the Mexican-American war with the acquisition of California and Texas, the US had just 23 million inhabitants. By 1900 this had soared to 76 million nearly doubling to 136 million in 1940 as Europe plunged into its second episode of mass slaughter of the last century, and most of the rise can be attributed to immigration. Now the US population stands at 320 million. The country may be large, but has ceased to be self-sufficient in non-renewable energy and a net exporter of food (see The Next Crisis Will Be Over Food). Worse still like the UK, the US outsources much of its heavy industry, so much pollution is generated elsewhere to satisfy consumer demand in the US.

My thesis is simple. Nation-state imperialism with rival French, Spanish and British empires has morphed into multipolar globalisation, where US and European multinationals collaborate with Japanese, Chinese, Brazilian or Russian corporations. While the system thrives on consumption generated in Europe and North America, growing demand in India and China means as per capita resources become scarcer capitalists are likely to switch from the current hyper-consumption model, where indulgence is practically subsidised to boost the retail sector, to a more traditional survival of the fittest.

Categories
Power Dynamics

New Labour’s 1997 Manifesto

This is the honest manifesto the Labour Party did not publish in 1997 before its historic landslide win, well it did gain 43% of the popular vote with a 75% turnout.

Education:
  • We will introduce tuition fees, initially at £1000 per annum, then rising to £3000 per annum, and allow students to repay their loans over extended period of time at competitive interest rates.
  • We will make exams easier to boost pass rates and thus expand the further education market in collaboration with our corporate friends.
  • We will increase class sizes to accommodate more newcomers.
Family:
  • We will introduce working family tax credits and expand a range of special benefits to encourage couples to separate.
  • We will continue the demonisation of fathers, while encouraging loutish behaviour via our entertainment policies..
Economy:
  • We will promote the outsourcing of manufacturing and the expansion of non-productive media, entertainment and banking.
  • We will drive consumer growth by letting banks offer loans to benefits claimants and then bail them out when it all goes pear-shaped.
Entertainment:
  • We will deregulate gambling and promote violent video games as eco-friendly works of art.
Health:
  • We will double spending on lifestyle drugs, large IT projects and management consultants.
  • We will subsidise IVF so single mothers can have children outside of a loving relationship.
  • We will promote early screening of mental health issues, appropriate medication and employ more special needs learning support assistants. Our target is for approximately 10 - 20% of all kids to be labelled special.
Taxation:
  • We will offer billionaire gangsters complete tax exemption.
Housing:
  • We will encourage immigration, leading to higher property prices and rents, and offer landlords special housing benefits.
Race Relations:
  • All opponents of our policies will be demonised as racists, while radical Muslims will be tarnished as terrorists.
Environment:
    We will encourage immigration, emigration, long-distance commuting and consumption to boost our economy, while lecturing the population on climate change.
    Foreign Policy
      We will join the United States in military interventions in the Balkans, Central Western Asia and the Middle East in order to secure control of fossil fuels and minerals and to prevent China from denying our multinationals easy access to resources essential to our way of life.
    Categories
    All in the Mind Power Dynamics

    Ubiquitous Assault on the Senses

    How will future generations view early 21st century Britain? An age of enlightenment that allowed more women than ever to work, redefined loud arguments as domestic violence, exposed childhood sexual abuse and extended the benefits of prosperity to more people than ever. This is the spin of the neo-liberal media, i.e. you've never had it so good or experienced such a wonderfully fair and harmonious society. Surely you don't want to return to the dark ages when parents routinely spanked their children at the slightest hint of disobedience and women were chained to the proverbial kitchen sink? In affluent communities violence has been confined mainly to virtual reality, blasted through speakers in the form of death metal and rap, projected onto mega-screens and translated into a captivating and highly addictive games. We are not just separated from the harsh realities of nature as our forebears knew it, but shielded from the consequences of violent ideation, now a dominant form of entertainment. This genre of entertainment may be likened to less technologically advanced spectacles such as gladiatorial fights in ancient Rome, or more recently boxing, wrestling or fencing, but over the last 20 years we have witnessed the gradual encroachment of war themes into our leisure life It's no longer just war movies, thrillers and video nasties occupying little more than one or two hours a week, but over 80% of the most addictive video games, paintball, Laser Quest and steady repetitive raucous beats and metallic dins accompanying electronic sound marketed as music and played in locales as diverse as sports centres, shopping malls and even offices. Indeed some young people find it hard to concentrate without a continuous blur of discordant noise at work. So paradoxically one may not shout at one's spouse for fear of being charged with domestic abuse, but one may play gangster rap at full volume while washing the car. If one dares suggest first-person shooters trivialise violence, one is soon ridiculed as reactionary and wait for it, against progress. Dare one suggest rap triggers feelings of hatred and intolerance, one is routinely slammed as intolerant of our wonderful cultural diversity.
    So while many of us feel increasingly powerless to change any aspect of our lives, we can only sit back and watch the spectacle of millions immersed in virtual violence in the safety of their bedrooms or offices. Paradoxically many first person shooter fans would be utterly horrified by the slightest hint of real-life gore. Recently an Italian teacher in a farming community arranged for her class to view the slaughtering of a pig. Parents were horrified, how could children learn the truth about meat processing. Sadly many pupils had previously believed meat comes from supermarkets in the same way as petrol just magically gushes from a filling station pump. Did our ancestors dream of heroic battles six to eight hours a day? Did they revel in death and destruction? At stake is the viability of human solidarity for if we dream of exacting revenge against perceived foes in times of economic disparity and limited per capita resources, we are doomed to repeat the worst democidal excesses of our recent history. To what extent is violence an inextricable part of the human condition and to what extent can culture either channel violent urges into socially useful activities or trigger violence in otherwise peaceful individuals?

    I would measure progress, not in terms of material possessions or abstract statistics championed by bureaucrats, but as a broad measure of social harmony, contentment and self-fulfilment, a delicate balancing act focussed on the reduction of conflict and personal suffering, e.g. ambition can drive innovation leading to significant improvements in life, but also cause conflict and selfishness.

    Human beings have a vast array of instinctual behaviours that may be unleashed under certain conditions. Some of our behvaiours require little active thought, either because they are essential to our existence and have been inherited from millions of years of evolution or because inculcated behaviours have become second nature. A healthy baby need not learn to suckle, breathe or even cry in response to basic nutritional needs. By contrast, humans did not evolve to drive cars or type, but many of us perform these tasks with amazing agility. In comparison with most other animals human babies are pretty helpless. Other newborn mammals can walk within minutes of birth. However, many other ingrained behaviours are learned skills building on our intellectual hardware and primitive reflexes, e.g. linguists such as Noam Chomsky believe complex language relies on a specialised brain functions absent in other species, but clearly the exact manifestation of our linguistic abilities depends largely on our environment. Our humanity determines our intellectual potential, while our environment determines how we develop and utilise our intellect. Without applying reason and compassion in the forebrain, a male responding to his innate libido might be inclined to sexually assault any unaccompanied attractive female within easy reach. Were we to let our basest instincts guide our actions, modern civilisation as we know it would never have arisen. The technological progress that helped us expand our food supply, tame nature to meet our needs and lower infant mortality relies on advanced forms of social organisation and co-operation, in which our intellect and sociability prevail over primitive forms of social control.

    Violence has long been a feature of human existence, but its role and pervasiveness have varied enormously over the millennia. Many anthropologists have observed we are the only animal that wages war against other members of our own species, but disagree on whether tribal warfare first emerged in the Neolithic era as stone-age humans began farming and establishing more permanent settlements around fifteen to ten thousand years ago, or whether internecine conflict has always accompanied homo sapiens sapiens throughout the Paleolithic era. We might consider some exceptions, e.g. a lion may fight a rival over control of a pride and then slaughter cubs that are not their own. However, not only are lions some of the most ferocious mammals, but their survival depends largely on brute force and obedience within a tightly knit community and, more important, on hunting other animals. They evolved to be top of the food chain, not to go forth and multiply and thus dominate through numbers. On the African plains, aggressive predators are in a minority, while the vast majority are mere grazers, browsers or warblers. Violence as a survival strategy only works if your species has a low population and can feed on a much larger number of easy prey. It is plainly foolish to apply human ethics to other species. Lions are born to kill and care only for their immediate family. Notions such as compassion and solidarity simply do not enter a Lion's mindset.

    We descend from a line of vegetarian and omnivorous primates, who succeeded in mastering their habitat through dexterity, cunning and social organisation rather than the exertion of physical force, which was largely reserved for travel, work, foraging, hunting of small animals and occasional defence against predators. Around six to seven million years separate us from our closest primate cousins, chimpanzees, but why would violence evolve as an innate human instinct? First we need to define violence a little more accurately. Many primates do not hunt at all preferring to forage as vegetarians should their habitat provide plentiful food, but we are most closely related to chimpanzees who do not only hunt, but have been observed resorting to violence as a means of conflict resolution and imposing their power on more submissive females. By contrast Bonobos, close cousins of chimpanzees, use playful erotica to diffuse social tensions. Obviously any carnivorous animal exerts physical force to catch and kill other animals. Few animals practice cannibalism except as a last resort in after a natural calamity. However, we do not relate to other animals in the same way as we relate to members of the same species. To a carnivore, other animals are food, not sentient beings. At this point it might be useful to distinguish intra-species violence from inter-species violence. Some would take an absolutist stance against murder of all sentient beings and thus promote vegan pacifism, arguing that human technology allows us to be at one with nature. However, most Vegans in wealthy countries relies on a huge human infrastructure that has completely reshaped our planet and effectively ethnically cleansed whole species from their natural habitats or confining them to wildlife reserves. To enable the apparently peaceful existence of a middle class Western European family with their 4 bedroom house, two cars, household appliances, endless gadgets, holidays abroad and weekly supermarket shopping sprees, we need to inflict violence on a huge scale against the planet's delicate eco-system, something many of us would rather deny. So we might not witness real warfare firsthand, but it is committed in our name so we can drive our cars and fill our refrigerators without much thought as to how that delicious frozen salmon ends up in our freezer. This warfare may not always be waged against non-collaborative communities, but simply displaces traditional human communities and other species in the name of progress.

    In many ways we are slowly emerging from an age of apparent harmony, in which people from different socio-ethnic backgrounds learned to live and work together. Certainly throughout history different ethnic groups have intermingled, but also fought bloody battles. Most of us have enough trouble trying to care for our immediate kith and kin. We can easily relate to our immediate geographic community and if this is cohesive enough, we might help disadvantaged neighbours. Charity really does begin at home. All of a sudden we have been asked to care not just for other members of our ethnic community, i.e. a group of people with a common language, mores and cultural identity, but all 6.7 billion estimated to grace our planet in 2010. As this is clearly impossible, we just pretend to care and look after ourselves, but often seek revenge against rivals by playing victims to justify our selfish actions. In reality while many of us pretend to care about the wider human race and some of us have been known to help strangers in distress, unless we are very rich and/or resourceful, we can only practically look after number one and our immediate family and friends. More important a socially competitive and high-consumption society pressures people to acquire more material posessions for themselves, either through hard work or financial manipulation. As a result millions are so busy struggling to make ends meet in a never-ending rat race, they have little time for others. Philanthropy has become a luxury afforded to the fortunate professional classes with time on their hands, while often members of idle classes prefer to indulge in media therapy (watching TV, chatting on Facebook etc.) rather than help others in their community. And even when people do help others, deep-seated cultural prejudices condition how this is targeted. The idea that billions of atomised human beings immersed in variations of the same global culture will learn to love each other is clearly a myth.

    Postscript

    While the Web is deluged with gamers' rants against any attempt to limit their freedom to indulge and many journalists in mainstream newspapers make a living out of promoting virtual violence as a legitimate genre of entertainment, my thoughts are not entirely unique. An Yugoslav Australian, Dejan, reached similar conclusions:

    Are we becoming a violence obsessed society? I think we are.

    Is it the excitement or the adrenaline rush? Maybe its a product of the life pressures we face today or even a mixture of the aforementioned? Something surely is driving us towards this culture where violence is being glorified and aggressiveness respected. It seems that way. The political sphere, the media and entertainment industries promote this aggressive culture that cant be leading the world towards a prosperous future, quite the contrary. Read full article at http://socyberty.com/society/the-obsession-with-violence

    Categories
    Power Dynamics

    Corporate Mercenaries

    The LM Gang are back, this time advocating, in a new C4 documentary Britain's Trillion pound Horror Story, the privatisation of healthcare and education and downsizing of the rest of the public sector to reduce taxes, the national debt and stimulate economic growth.

    Back in 1998 a post-modern intellectual associated with the former Revolutionary Communist Party, which later became Living Marxism and then just the LM Group and more recently Spiked Online, produced a documentary for Britain's Channel 4, Against Nature, railing against misanthropic greens. They have taken some radical and provocative stances aimed mainly at the thinking left, those of us who are not completely brainwashed by corporate conditioning and actually want to see a more caring, sharing and, dare I say, sustainable society. Since the fall of the former Soviet Union, they have argued that the socialist cause they once espoused is dead and instead they began a campaign against what they considered reactionary forces opposed to progress. To them progress was redefined as the globalisation of labour and consumer markets, rapid evolution of technology to enable constant material growth and the replacement of previous social structures such as families and close-knit communities with a shared cultural heritage with new structures based around life-style choices and special interests. The clique around Frank Füredi, a professor of sociology at the University of Kent and author of Reviews of Where Have All the Intellectuals
    Gone?, have morphed from extreme proponents of a worldwide Bolshevik revolution in the dying days of the modern era, to extreme advocates of postmodern neoliberal globalisation. Back in the 1970s and 80s, most on the left opposed immigration controls and welcomed multiculturalism because of a basic sense of humanitarian solidarity with the downtrodden, the perceived victims of imperialism and irrational ethnic prejudice. That was my gut instinct until the early years of the new millennium.

    Yet as I try to explain in another post, modern globalisation owes its roots in 18th and 19th century European colonisation and the expansion of the United States as a world power. The left also championed women's rights, another very noble cause, which has arguably been perverted to disempower families, as wel as gay rights, which while removing stigma against natural feelings of erotic attraction towards the members of the same gender, served similar purposes in weakening traditional family units and empowering big business and the state. Thus for many years the disciples of Frank Furedi could pose on the left. When other sections of the left opposed nuclear power and later genetically modified food, the descendants of the British RCP, championed these technologies as a means of feeding the poor.

    As noted elsewhere, former RCPers have become very media-savvy, but we'd be very naive if we thought they had somehow successfully inflitrated corporate media organisations in order to promote a revolution that would see the overthrow of the today's ruling elites. Rather they serve as fifth-columnists embedded in media and organisations appealing to the wishful-thinking left on behalf of a corporate elite who owe no allegiance to the ordinary people of any country.

    Smart propagandists like to build on concerns about a very real problem and then differentiate themselves from other more mainstream opinion leaders to appeal to a disgruntled section of the gullible electorate. If we sum the government debt accumulated thus far and the total commitments for debt repayments, planned public expenditure, the UK public debt is forecast to reach a staggering 4.8 trillion pounds, which as the documentary pointed out could not be repaid if every house in the country were sold at current market rates. This is obviously unsustainable, indeed so obvious that even advocates of unlimited growth admit it. The documentary rightly sheds light on the huge bureaucracy within the UK's public services. Of 9 million public sector workers, only 2 million are engaged in frontline jobs as teachers, doctors, nurses, firefighters, police officers etc... Instead most sit in offices administering and monitoring others. Many dependent services become self-serving as they only exist to service the administration of the public sector. For instance, an equal opportunities commission does not provide the underprivileged with new opportunities, but merely liaises with other employers and service providers to ensure their client groups are well represented. However, as they're in the communication business, they inevitably require IT, multimedia, printing, catering and transport services and their infrastructure relies on hardware technicians, builders, plumbers, joiners, mechanics and electricians. However, this huge waste of resources is not confined to te public sector. We not only have a huge rise in the third sector of NGOs, charities and not-for-profit foundations promoting this or that agenda, but large corporations, even those with an industrial base, have morphed into miniature states. For all the talk of lean manufacturing and streamlined organisation, most large private sector companies are chock-a-block with non-productive penpushers and people-managers. hile the public sector is undoubtedly inefficient, it is at least in theory accountable to taxpayers. The documentary completely missed the point, why would the government and its corporate masters subsidise non-productive people management on such a large scale? The previous NewLabour government, which ran up the largest deficit in the UK's history, can hardly be accused of not acquiescing to the needs of large transnational corporations. More important before the government began its huge spending splurge following its 2001 re-election, banks had begun lending irresponsibly to millions without stable employment or even on benefits. The UK doesn't just have a public debt, but also a huge private debt to the tune of £1.4 trillion. Most owners of typical 3 or 4 bedroom houses do not really own their homes outright, their bank or building society does. They are in most cases 6 months to a year away from eviction should they fail to honour monthly mortgage repayments. Worst still as property prices skyrocketed in the South East of England, hundreds of thousands took out interest-only mortgages, i.e. for an initial period, usually 1 to 2 years, they pay only interest on their mortgage, but after this period of grace, their monthly repayments go through the roof. Many believed in a era of unprecedented financial growth that 2 years later they would double or triple their earnings and once they were on the property ladder living the middle class dream, life would be sweet. In the end the government had to bail out the bankers, so a good deal of the huge £4.8 trillion debt is actually inherited from the private sector. I would suggest that both the state and corporate sectors wanted to stimulate consumer growth. Miraculously, as NewLabour launched Private Finance Initiatives and continued to transfer public services to private contractors, quangos continued to grow.


    Expropriation

    Most transfers of ownership from private to public and the from public back to private hands disempower locals and empower transnational corporations. In its early stages in a favourable resource-rich environment , a market economy can theoretically reward hard work and let entrepreneurs build communities around the provision of useful products and services. This certainly appeared to be the case in 19th century North America and even in prosperous enclaves of Western Europe. However, such a system relied on a working class willing to let their bosses profit from their labour in exchange for job security. As small companies grew larger to take advantage of economies of scale and drive industrial development, the proletariat became a distinct class whose interests clashed with those of their bosses. Before the emergence of capitalism, most workers were mere peasants tilling a small plot of land and handing a large proportion of their produce to their landlord as rent. Much of the British economy came under government ownership in the aftermath of the Second World War as much of the country's industrial infrastructure such the still important railways, coal mining, steelworks, health system could not operate effectively at a profit. The State left the profitable sections of the economy to the private sector. Indeed much had controlled by huge state interventions, not least through massive armaments contracts. Nonetheless after the austere 1940s, the 50s and 60s saw the longest period of economic and social betterment, as measured by rapidly decreasing infant mortality, the reduced incidence of poverty-related diseases (such as rickets) and full employment. Although the tertiary sector continued to grow, Britain still had a manufacturing base. Most cars, lorries and trains were still made in the UK as was most industrial machinery, coal and steel. While more and more women chose to pursue careers, most mothers of young children were happy to work as housewives. In many ways the 50s and 60s were the hey day of the modern nuclear family with its typical 2.3 children. Social services still played a relatively marginal role and Health and Safety inspectors were few and far between, hence despite apparent technological limitations before the advent of microprocessor-enabled information technology, public sector bureaucracy was a lot smaller.


    Proponents of nationalisation or privatisation often use the democracy argument. Thus nationalisation makes an organisation democratically accountable, while privatisation frees an enterprise of the constraints and inefficiencies of state control and places it in the hands of private shareholders. In reality nationalisation merely transfers ownership to the state, which in turn serves the interests of its corporate backers and usually rewards former owners handsomely, while privatisation leads to a temporary injection of capital into the public coffers, but has always transferred ownership to monopolistic capitalists, thus failing to provide any real competition. We could even argue that nationalising loss-making industries did an enormous favour to venture capitalists as they could invest their compensation oversees, allowing other entrepreneurs to acquire the more profitable remnants when the government privatises again.


    The post-war boom would simply not have happened without an advanced welfare state, a healthy and largely contented work force and the survival of strategic energy, transportation and manufacturing industries. Hence even capitalists, claiming to favour a free market, supported nationalisation in the mid 20th century. The Thatcherite revolution practically outsourced most major manufacturing and refocussed on non-productive media and banking, a trend that continued unabated under New Labour. The only segments of Britain's industrial base that remained almost unscathed were the multi-billion pound government-subsidised armaments industry (so-called defence), the pharmaceutical and biotech industries with some niche luxury and entertainment gadget producers. Manufacturing saw a brief comeback in the late 1980s and early 1990s with an influx of American, Japanese and German inward investors. However, by the early twenty-noughties factories resumed closing, replaced only by supermarkets, call centres, entertainment complexes. In 2006 Tessa Jowell promoted regional casinos as a means of job creation and urban renewal in Britain's depressed former industrial heartlands.


    In 1997 I suggested to an acquaintance who worked as an advisor for the Labour Party that he'd better save up for his daughter's university education. "Nonsense", he said, "New Labour would always ensure higher education remain accessible to all". A few months later, New Labour announced the introduction of tuition fees, initially just £1000 a year, soon rising to £3000 and now, under the Con-Dem government to £9000. As a result millions of young workers will either have to accept low-paid jobs to escape repaying their loans, thus defeating the purpose of higher education, or forever be in debt. However, the true cost of higher education actually exceeds £9000 a year, but that misses the point, the whole sector is slowly but surely being primed for privatisation, relying on wealthy foreign students and failing to train the country's future generation of engineers, doctors and scientific researchers, while the relative academic value of degrees has been significantly debased. In the 1970s only 15% of school leavers went to uni, by 2010 that number is nearly 50%. Despite the Blairite mantra of education, education, education!!, class sizes have grown and student behaviour worsened leading hundreds of thousands of middle class parents, including Labour cabinet ministers, to send their offspring to private schools. When they consider the costs of a UK university degree, they might as well use their academic loan to send their offspring abroad. I suspect Indian universities will soon start offering cut-price degrees to the same disgruntled moneyed middle classes who travelled to Eastern Europe for cosmetic surgery.


    The previous government pumped billions into the national health service, insisting all new hospitals be built via PFI (Private Finance Initiatives). Despite the rhetoric the NHS bureaucracy has mushroomed with billions squandered on management consultants (not doctors) and centralised IT projects, as detailed brilliantly by David Craig in his 2008 book Squandered. More disturbingly, vast sums of public money have been spent not on essential frontline healthcare, but on promoting awareness of new mental illnesses and lifestyle-related ailments ( diabetes, obesity, angina, high blood pressure etc..) hugely boosting demand for pharmaceutical products. Amazingly, the new Con-Dem government, depsite a massive debt, has committed itself to maintaining the previous administration's spending plans. In real terms public health spending has doubled since 1997, yet the nation's health patently hasn't as any gains in prosperity have been offset by culture of hedonism and a growing rich-poor gap. Any recent gains in life expectancy have more to do with improvements that occurred 30-40 years ago (i.e. your life expectancy is largely determined by your health in your 30s and 40s) than multi-million pound anti-smoking campaigns. The US probably has the world's most wasteful healthcare system with 16% of GDP devoted to public and private healthcare. This compares with 10 to 11% in France, Canada and Germany and 8.9% in Italy, 8.7% in Australia, 8.4% in the UK and just 8.1% in Japan, while life expectancy is highest in Japan, France, Italy, Spain, Greece and Iceland, probably more down to diet and lifestyle than provision of drugs. The US Model is to boost public demand for healthcare services persuading more people that they need long-term medication and cosmetic surgery (not included in the above figures), creating a huge comsumer market. In my humble analysis the UK health system is being primed for privatisation in all but name. It has become such a monster as to be completely unsustainable and the corporate elite will rely on a knee-jerk reaction to reports of waste and inefficiencies to soften public opposition to the removal of universal provision of healtcare free at the point of delivery. Nadeem Waylayat of

    Market Oracle

    has detailed the almost inevitability of the failure of the NHS project ( see

    http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article23744.html

    ), however, he seems to welcome its downfall. I hasten to add, when the NHS collapses, millions will suffer the consequences.


    Martin Durkin's documentary is just the latest salvo in a war against common sense, i.e. a rational world in which education and healthcare serve the needs of taxpayers rather than those of multinational corporations and are not allowed to become unsustainable. Apparently he has the government on his side as they have now allowed the cloning of animals for human consumption and given the green light to transgenic farming and quiely announced the privatisation of the Royal Mail.

    Categories
    Power Dynamics

    The Keynsian Dream is Over

    None of the major parties in the UK have had the courage to tell the electorate the unpalatable truth. They act as mere middle managers or public relations officers, somewhere between their masters in global banking, energy cartels and military-industrial establishment and the hundreds of thousands of minion bureaucrats in the UK`s non-productive public and private sector institutions. It takes relatively little research to expose their presumed facts and figures. Indeed what should surprise us is not their apparent disagreements on issues such as Britain`s adoption of the Euro or immigration controls, but their agreement on the continued need for economic growth by injecting more virtual cash into an economy that has long ceased to produce more than a small fraction of what it consumes.

    Over the last 13 years Britain has experienced its biggest collective spending spree in history. We may look back nostalgically at the monuments and urban infrastructure of Victorian Britain, erected over a period of some 70 years when the country`s industry not only led the world, but could exploit the resources of a huge empire. Yet the UK`s national debt didn`t really figure until the great depression of the late 1920s. In the aftermath of the seconds world war, the US had amassed such a large surplus it could easily bail out much of Western Europe to fuel growth and give rise to a new age of mass consumerism. It may seem ironic, but without huge government intervention through fiscal stimulus packages, direct subsidies, nationalisation and social welfare, mass consumerism would never have spread beyond the affluent upper middle classes.

    Unlike previous splurges, Britain has gained little in lasting infrastructure. We have literally squandered 1.3 trillion of the country`s personal debt on holidays in the sun, property trading and 60" plasma TV screens. Most recent extensions to the country`s rail and rapid transit network were planned back in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, yet owing demographic growth in the Southeast of England and increased commuting as people are forced to buy houses further and further away from their place of work, road and rail networks are bursting at their seams. To accommodate a rising population and smaller households, property developers have littered the countryside with suburban sprawl composed of compact houses designed to last 30-40 years requiring more roads, plumbing and wiring. Superficially, much of the country still has vast expanses of greenbelt, farmland and pastures. In reality it relies on natural resources from abroad to temporarily support current levels of aggregate consumption. Everything from vegetables to bottled water, electronic gadgets to coal, timber to steel, plastic utensils to fridges or cars to ships are imported to the birthplace of industrial revolution, in effect exporting pollution. Arm-chair human rights activists may bemoan the working conditions and exploitation of the Chinese, Indonesian, Vietnamese or Eastern European labourers who actually produce the goods we consume, but would they get out of bed for less than £5 an hour, let alone the derisory pay packets of the millions of virtual slaves who enable us to party like there were no tomorrow? Left-leaning Guardian-readers tend to live in a bubble, in which their non-productive service-sector earnings are exchanged for real goods labelled fair-trade, organic or environmentally-friendly and inspected by wishful-thinking corporate compliance officers.

    The same government that bleats incessantly about climate change promotes economic growth and the globalisation of production. They may talk about investing in public transport, but rely on advertising revenue from automotive multinationals. The Blair years will be remembered as the final act of a 60 year experiment in mass consumerism, the age of 60" Plasma TV screens, people carriers and 4x4 off-road vehicles in suburbia, cheap Ryanair flights ferrying young Brits to stag or hen nights in Eastern Europe as well as for the commercialisation of the Internet and a national obsession with re-enactments of warfare and gangster violence. An age when absurd thought-suppressing political correctness coexists with disrespect for the uncool and widespread moral depravity, drunken binges and deregulated gambling.

    Rather than champion Blair as a great democrat or human rights activist, future historians will view his fervent support for US/NATO military intervention in the context of depleting fossil fuel resources. Whether the recent consumption binge will trigger catastrophic climate change or not, sooner or later we will be confronted with the harsh reality of limits of growth on a finite planet and will need to readapt to a more humble localised existence. New Labour left future generations with a cultural vacuum, unsustainable material expectations, a huge debt and a woeful shortage of practical hands-on skills.

    Categories
    Power Dynamics

    Technocracy and Science

    Science
    Study of the physical world and its manifestations through empirical observation of natural phenomena and monitoring of systematic experimentation.
    Technology
    the study, development, and application of devices, machines, and techniques for manufacturing and productive processes
    Technocracy
    Power based on the control of technology in which scientists, engineers and technicians useful to the ruling class may enjoy high social standing and exert influence

    Broadly speaking a better understanding of our physical environment, origin, capabilities and limitations helps us plan our future and learn from our mistakes. Science is applied to develop technology, but may also reveal its adverse effects. Technology may be beneficial or detrimental and have good or bad applications, while technocracy concentrates power in the hands of those who control technology. If we aim to build a fairer, more open and democratic society, scientific research is not just good but essential, while technology should be applied only if it enhances our enjoyment of life and benefits the long-term sustainability of society as a whole.

    The short-term benefits of new technology may lead in the long term to conflicts over the distribution of resources, empower the masters of technological know-how and radically alter the fabric of society. Just consider the immense impacts of television and automobiles on wealthy countries over the last 60 or so years. Together they have discouraged communal transport and entertainment and encouraged mass consumption and the atomisation of communities and families. Many workers commute over 30 miles to benefit from lower property prices or safer neighbourhoods. Cultural life revolves around mass entertainment whether it's multichannel TV, radio, high-profile interactive web sites (which nearly always require a dedicated team of content managers), mass-marketed pop music, movies or pulp fiction. The tentacles of big business reach far and wide. Opponents of such developments are inevitably dismissed as luddites. Think of the benefits. TV educates, informs and shows parts of the world most viewers would never see. Cars broaden horizons beyond the parochial bounds of one's home village or town. Supermarkets provide a variety of food products local grocers could never hope to match and at more competitive prices. Sooner or later even traditionalists are driving to church, watching soaps on TV and doing the weekly shopping at sparkling new supermarkets 10 miles away. While we're lulled into a false sense of freedom, we have inadvertently empowered an even tinier elite to run our lives. Without fossil fuels, electricity and potable tap water our lives would soon grind to a halt. While consumers use and admire the wonders of technology, few can either create or control it. Our governments fight wars over resources needed to sustain a lifestyle promoted by the mass media.

    Common sense holds that technology should serve people and not the other way round. We need a more thorough application of science and less blind faith in technocracy.