I Specialise in Revenge (II)

Overheard the sounds of horses' hooves, people fighting for their lives... / My brother was still watching me, back in the days of ‘83 / By 1985, I was as cold as cold can be, but no-one’s underground to dig me out and set me free...
- All from ‘Last Day of the Miners’ Strike’

Russell Senior may have been a flying picket, but Jarvis’s main experiences with miners involved them kicking the shit out of him outside nightclubs. Working class solidarity all too often carries with it an instinctive distrust of outsiders - you can sympathise with Jarvis, who was obviously too caught up in smaller, personal struggles, to get involved in a class war (more thoughts on this subject here). His streak of determined individualism was heroic in its way, but as time went on, he seemed to regret not showing more solidarity. Later on Jarvis would speak ruefully about how growing up in the sixties and seventies made him believe in better futures, the gleaming promise of modernism (‘we’d all be living in space‘), and how he had to watch this promise snuffed out, post-78, and replaced with a universal cynicism and deflation. The evidence of later lyrics suggests that he came to feel haunted by his own inaction at the time - how can an individual fight a class war, anyway?

Fast-forward twelve years, and four songs into ’Different Class’, we find surely the greatest class-related song in Pulp’s discography: ‘I-Spy’. This is a song about sexual conquest, to begin with (‘Just another song about single mothers and sex’ as Jarvis would later spit), but using that as a window to a world of more interesting tensions and energies than the mere thrill of sleeping with another man’s wife. It is that, to be sure, but what else?

In today’s world, structures of power are decentralised, and responsibility is diffused (defused) into faceless hierarchies. Managers, politicians, and other ostensible authority figures are all too quick to remind us how their hands are tied, how little real responsibility they have - they’re victims just like the rest of us. What kind of war can be fought by an individual against such systems? Who can Cocker blame for the death of better worlds? Yet the system that goes to great lengths to spread an attitude of corporate irresponsibility (it’s everyone’s fault, it’s no-one’s fault in particular, it‘s no-one‘s fault at all) is the same one that has dumped all of the troubles of human existence (poverty, unemployment, illness) on the shoulders of the individual, as their responsibility and their own fault.

But if no particular individual chose, deliberately, to destroy the lives of (for example) a generation of miners, this doesn’t mean that nobody bears responsibility. Cocker reaches the same conclusion as the terrorist groups of the last century - where the head of the structure is unreachable, fight your war against those individuals who (actively or passively) collude with it. Knowing culpability is not necessary, or even particularly relevant. How can one man fight a system? By inflicting suffering on collaborators - Cocker will channel his resentment and direct his campaign of sexual terrorism at one more or less blameless bourgeois couple. He is as careless and indiscriminate as the forces he has opposed himself to - it’s self-evidently unfair, but like policies of affirmative action, it’s unfairness being deployed to counteract an existing, wider, injustice. The couple don’t even need to be Tory hardliners - in fact, it works better if they’re assumed to be Concerned Liberals.

If you’re reading this, you have presumably heard the song many times - the stirring movie-theme arrangement, Cocker’s entirely believable delivery (even where the language verges on the absurd, as with his poker-faced recital of adolescent triumphs), all chosen to remind us that, like the victim, we should take him very seriously indeed. ‘I will get my satisfaction,’ he vows. ‘I will blow your paradise away.’

Fifteen years later, this phrase has an additional resonance - today, for better or worse, the word ‘paradise’ mostly comes up in the context of Islamic terrorism. Even in 1995, the explicit violence of the threat was jarring. What does it mean to blow someone’s paradise away? We might think of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine - raging on his deathbed at the intangible, unaccountable forces that have struck him down, threatening to ‘march against the powers of heaven / and set black streamers in the firmament / to signify the slaughter of the gods.’

The paradise at stake here is a smaller, meaner one - the paradise of James Dean posters, endowment plans, and figurines, or schools near the top of the league, as disgustedly mapped by Cocker in various songs - all in a world that has long since ‘drowned the heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour… in the icy water of egotistical calculation’. The nausea and anxiety this world seems to inspire in Cocker is well documented, but here the fear is balled up and turned into anger. We are left to reflect on the image of some cluttered estate agent’s dream home, in some super-gentrified exurban Avalon, being obliterated in a firestorm - and this is before it gets really venomous.

The idea that this a tale of straightforward revenge-through-sex is belied by the lyrical content - the female of the couple is mentioned in one verse, and addressed in only a couple of lines. The sexual attraction may be genuine - Ladbroke Grove looks and all that - but his concern for her is limited. He feels moved at one point to show something resembling contrition (‘It’s not a case of woman v man’), and that’s as far as the conversation goes. It’s nothing personal - just business.

Here there’s an echo of the most famous self-created avatar of vengeance in literature - Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo. At one point the Count finds himself begged by his old lover to end his near-demented, decades-planned campaign of retribution, for the sake of his love for her. He is torn - the only time the implacable Count’s mask slips - but anguishedly agrees to end the vendetta. All we can conclude here is that Jarvis is far more dedicated to his purpose, and would never let any personal feelings get in the way of his operation.

Nothing personal… just business…

Jarvis always had a talent for spitting his adversaries’ words back in their faces (best seen in later solo effort ‘Cunts Are Still Running The World’). Early in I-Spy, he whispers ‘I don’t do these things for real; I do these things just so I survive’. Partly a ghost of an apology to the used lover - mostly a mocking echo of the words his target might use to excuse himself of any blame, if he were only given the chance. ‘Look, we’re good people underneath, we don’t really believe in any of this’ - the victims are people who keep the appropriate ironic distance from the implications of their actions. It’s the disavowal required to operate in a rotten system, and Cocker viciously taunts them for it. This, above all, is why the song makes most sense directed at people who are, at least in theory, progressives. If this distaste was still more or less inchoate in 1995, it had crystallised by the time of ‘Cocaine Socialism’ three years later (‘You owe it to yourself/ Don’t think of anybody else’).

At the crucial point in the song, as the music drops away and Jarvis gloats in his half-second of triumph, he uses the same technique again. ‘I can’t help it - I was dragged up…’ he sneers, slipping into cartoonish proleface, a caricature of some mindlessly hostile estate dweller - ‘take your year in Provence, and shove it up your ass!’ But if the intricacy of Cocker’s scheme belies his victim’s casually contemptuous views of the urban poor (‘Your minds are just the same as mine’), the sheer vindictive glee of the delivery reminds us that, as well as being a rhetorical ploy, the bluntly hostile car parks / birds monologue is also true. The views Cocker has arrived at through his long campaign of studying and planning happen to coincide with the unthinking knee-jerk reaction the victim might have expected. Cocker has, by the most circuitous route, reached a concord with his own class.

Toward the end of the song, following his not-quite-apology to his lover, Jarvis solemnly informs her that ‘it’s more a case of haves against haven’ts - and I just happen to have got what you need’. Deliciously, for once in the whole setup, Jarvis is the ‘have’ - he possesses the commodity in demand (in this case, his well-rehearsed ‘second-hand excuse for technique’), and, as any good laissez-faire economic liberal knows, the market must not be interfered with. We can imagine him cackling over his defeated victim - ‘Come on, what’s wrong with you? Up your game! You could be where I am if you only aspired a bit fucking harder!’

How can one individual make a difference? By turning himself into a vengeful revenant, dragging the Last Men back into history one at a time, reminding them that scores remain unsettled, that we’re not all middle class now. If we concede that it’s not going to achieve anything constructive in the long run, surely none of us could begrudge the man his satisfaction.

***

For more of the same, only better, why not buy Owen Hatherley’s forthcoming book ‘Uncommon’?

The politics of gloss, post-gloss

‘It feels as if the winter closing in around Cameron. Neoliberalism isn't working. All the boom gloss is falling away, and England feels shoddier and shabbier than it ever did in the 70s.’

If those GDP numbers don't pick up in the next quarter, it's going to be a lot more than a winter of discontent.

For almost fifteen years, growth was New Labour’s great alibi. As long as the economy kept expanding (even if the expansion was largely powered by dubious speculation and borrowing) then all boats would rise, and there would be no need to resort to divisively old-fashioned policies of redistribution. Now that growth has ground to a halt, and looks a dicey prospect for the future in general, light-touch neoliberalism is going to have a difficult time living up to its billing. Its justifications - hollow even in the good times, but I’ll get to that - begin to look as cheap and flakey as its architecture. The Coalition’s scrabble in the bins for a political discourse based on austerity nostalgia and vindictive dogwhistling shows how difficult it is write a persuasive pitch under the circumstances. Does anyone, anywhere still believe that we live under the best (or least bad) of all political systems?

It’s at times like this - when ordinary people can no longer expect to have the occasional sticking-plaster policy like tax credits thrown in their direction - that they begin to question why even the country’s party of organised labour have no plan to reduce the greatest gap between rich and poor since the period between the wars. They start to ask awkward but fundamental questions about where the wealth is, who controls its flow, and what criteria are used to decide these things. All the governing Coalition care to offer in response is to plead national togetherness and stage a lavish Royal wedding (showing, touchingly, that love can cross class boundaries, down as far as those who are mere millionaires).

Robert Peston, currently a BBC business correspondent, wrote a timely book on this general theme called ‘Who Runs Britain?’* Its writing and publication coincided almost exactly with the crash and the bailout. Peston spends the entire introduction to the book talking about his background, presumably to reassure readers that he’s making his arguments as a credible grown-up authority and not some typical loony lefty. ‘My teenage conviction that it is always in the national interest for the gap between rich and poor to be reduced was wrong,’ ‘I gradually came to see that much of what Margaret Thatcher did was necessary,’ and so on. Yet the book is generally critical of lax regulation and the maniacally blinkered short-termist mindset of those making the big decisions in the financial sector.

Peston was on television recently in a spot about China’s economy, mentioning in passing that China was responsible for almost all of the global net reduction in poverty that had occurred over the last twenty years. This doesn’t necessarily say a great deal about social justice in China - eliminating rural serfdom, perhaps, the necessary first steps to building a modern industrial economy - but it’s an arresting statistic all the same. It can hardly be denied that the West’s neoliberal policies, even before the crash, were completely unsuccessful at addressing the interests of those at the bottom of the ladder. The trickle down was marginal and irregular - sometimes enough to distract, never enough to make a real impact on the poverty figures. The story of all benefiting from growth amounted to a vague promise of jam tomorrow. Certainly there was no point at which policymakers and grandees would pause and say ‘Okay, guys, that’s more than enough wealth for us - now let’s find out how we can make it trickle down faster.’

The irrational notion that it’ll all come good, eventually, has survived the crisis. The belief held by most of the Opposition and the critical media is that the problems of the financial crisis were ones of excess, soon fixed by a few legislative tweaks and a tightening of regulation. But the crisis wasn’t an event of an exceptional nature - it was an entirely in keeping with the philosophies and practices of the financial sector, and the economic policies of successive governments. Talking about ratcheting up powers of scrutiny is a mistake on more than one level - a categorical error, obviously, as our problem is qualitative rather than quantitative. It’s also a tactical mistake, because it lets the objects of this scrutiny indulge their Randroid fantasies about their incredible talents being strangled by a cabal of resentful bureaucrats.

If the standard line of opposition is weak and counterproductive, it’s a blood-soaked revolutionary cull compared to the attitude adopted by the Coalition in power. Last week, the news broke that that the level of money coming from the City into CCHQ has doubled during Cameron’s leadership, and now makes up 50% of party funding. So, back in 2008, faced with several unpalatable choices, the last government chose probably the least objectionable - opening huge lines of public credit to reinvigorate the financial sector’s shrivelled self-confidence. The recipients of this aid showed their deep gratitude by taking their newly liquid assets and investing them with a party who might find ways to be even more intensely relaxed toward them.

One night have expected Cameron, PR-savvy as he is, to make at least a show of clamping down on the banks for some cheap political capital. In fact (assuming we can dismiss the one-off, much-downsized £2.5bn levy) they’ve carefully steered in the opposite direction. The campaigns for Tobin or Robin Hood taxes - backed by assorted Serious Figures, not just the great unwashed - have been studiously ignored*. Remuneration and bonuses are back at the pre-2007 levels. Corporation taxes are being lowered, and tax laws amended to enable ‘large financial services companies’ with operations overseas to pay less tax here. The last measure in particular has to be read as a brazen, unapologetic fuck you to the UK Uncut movement and its relatives. It’s pretty clear that the financial sector is exception to the general rule of shared austerity - ostensibly so they can apply their talents and get the economy growing again. It’s more likely they’ll drive it into a big fucking wall a few more times first, but even when the glorious day comes, all involved have been careful to make it clear that we shouldn’t expect the rewards to be shared around.

With the figleaf of collective progress long since blown away, we get to see what kind of society we’ve really built. All that three decades of neoliberal supremacy have achieved is to concentrate more wealth in fewer hands, and rearrange society so that it presents as few obstacles as possible to the lives of those fortunate individuals. Our policies have made us (on one measure, anyway) less socially progressive than a country ranked 136th in the EIU’s Democracy Index. Of all nations, it had to be China, whose much-vaunted economic success shows that there’s no necessary antagonism between a powerful State apparatus and an acceptance of free-market principles. But then it was never the existence of a large state per se that our neoliberals despised. It was just our, particular, Western state edifices, born out of the postwar social democratic compromise, that had to be painted as the enemy and ruthlessly destroyed. They were never aiming for complete deconstruction, some abstract Hayekian ideal of perfect market freedom - certain functions of the state (authoritarian ones, in particular) were not realistically going to be dispensed with.

China has been the spectre haunting industry in the West for some time - it’s in the name of ‘competing internationally’ (ie with emerging economies) that we held back wages, cut corners, decimated workforces, and embraced the just-in-time precarious approach to manufacturing. With countries like India and China now producing a supply of highly-qualified graduates, the same rhetoric of global competition has been deployed to justify the marketisation if higher education. Next, I can only presume we’ll be attempting to compete with these countries by filing away at standards of living and basic democratic rights - what use is democracy, after all, if worrying about ordinary people holds back the economy? From a certain point of view, these things are luxuries, or weaknesses. The priority given economic performance above all else exists already - many writers have observed that the Coalition rhetoric of ‘there is no alternative’ is an attempt to sidestep politics entirely. Certainly, when you’re attempting to force down a dose of IMF-style medicine - whose glorious results can be seen in Latvia, Greece, and Ireland - it helps not to have to worry about a popular mandate. Then you’re free to bend the entire resources of your nation to ensuring that the people at the top of the pyramid scheme get their returns.

To have to drop even the pretence of fidelity to the principles of liberty and democracy wouldn’t be such a terrible chore for our leaders. For some time now, the role of the Home Secretary has been to compete with his Shadow to see who can profess the most hostile stance toward immigrants. Those unrepentant souls who dare to use what’s left of the benefits system can expect to be put to work, even if it’s busywork conducted for the sole purpose of balming the perpetually wounded psyches of passing commuters. You could go on - heavy handed police tactics at demonstrations, ‘human rights’ becoming an expression most commonly followed with an ejection of saliva - but the best illustration is our foreign policy. The international reaction to events in Egypt showed us how surprisingly ambivalent democratically elected leaders can be when it comes to other people expressing the desire to choose their own representatives and take part in the workings of government. There were many reasons to cheer the ‘Glory of Tahrir’ - the infectious energy, the sheer indefatigable lust for liberation that refused to be beaten down or intimidated, was one; the explosion of the usual deflationary faux-wisdom from expert onlookers was another. One to savour above the others - and one that’ll stay with us however this revolution turns out - is that it exposed certain of our leaders (who might in private moments have considered themselves champions of global democracy) as the irrelevant, corrupt hypocrites they are.

When men like Blair and Berlusconi threw extravagant praise at their braid-chested friend Hosni Mubarrak, it was because, more than anything, they envied him. These men never really liked to think of themselves as elected public servants. Instead they were Presidents, Statesmen, reshaping not only their own parties but entire political establishments, societies, in all cases investing more power at the top. All they ever wanted was a chance, like Hosni, to demonstrate their strength, courage, and far-sighted wisdom free of pesky democratic fetters. After all, what right did impudent journalists, child-like voters, or deluded leftist dinosaurs have to question their great works? And if, as a side enterprise to their tireless efforts, they wanted to make themselves as rich as Croesius and as powerful as God, that was no concern of ours. These men never gave the impression of caring a great deal about the desires of their electorate, and Cameron (though a less effective figure) is cut from the same cloth - pushing his agenda forward on all fronts at breakneck speed, despite having failed to persuade even a majority of the public to vote against their own interests and place their trust in him.

There is a certain grim humour in watching the blithely confident Coalition struggle with reality - Gove’s humiliation on school-building, the State Department worrying that Cameron and Osborne are ‘lightweight’, the endless weary rebukes from volunteer leaders. They’re the leaders nobody would choose to handle a crisis - to echo my rhetorical question at the start of this post, does anyone believe that George Osborne is one of the top ten (hundred, thousand, ten thousand) economics brains in the country? These are the last dregs of neoliberal politics, the crew left behind to go down with the ship. The struggle will continue after they’re gone - capitalism will remain, just forced to drop its latest human mask and reveal itself. If the response to crisis across the board is to take certain measures out of the remit of democracy, it’s not so implausible that we could shift gears into some kind of authoritarian, oligarch-friendly hypercapitalism - perhaps conducted under the auspices of democracy, perhaps not. As Peston himself so delicately puts it on his BBC minisite: “Reconciling our political traditions with the imperative of making safe the globalised world will be a challenge, to put it mildly.” If we can’t articulate a more appealing future than that, we might as well pack up the tents.

1. In fact it feels like Peston tried to redirect the book halfway through, when events caught up with him - from a fairly standard investigative journalist piece about hedge funds and high earners to a blame-throwing Cassandra act. Publishing gold!
2. Even set at the meek, cheese-paring rate of 0.005%, Tobin would bring in 2-3bn per year, and has the added advantage of removing the incentive for some of the riskier speculative transactions. It is so unrevolutionary that Nicolas Sarkozy is an enthusiastic fan.

Various forms of passion

Most Britons are good, conscientious people - content to live together in peace and the pursuit of happiness. But there are groups living among us who don't share those values. They make no contribution and play no part in wider society. They speak their own languages, live in sealed communities - hothouses for extremist thought - and wall themselves off from contact from outsiders. They declare themselves hostile to the majority of people in this country, and openly call for violence against their enemies. Most shockingly of all, in the name of 'liberalism'(!) , they look for ways to twist the legal system in their favour, and scheme to inflict their warped values on the rest of us. While tolerance is an admirable quality, we must surely accept that it has limits, and that any sensible country would have rooted these people out long ago.

I refer, of course, to think tanks.

Paul Mason's sharp, much-linked piece on the Newsnight website considered one reason for the wave of dissent to be the complete language and values disconnect between ordinary people and the Westminster Village - "I'm finding it common among non-politicos these days that whenever you mention the "Big Society" there's a shrug and a suppressed laugh - yet if you move into the warren of thinktanks around Westminster, it's treated deadly seriously." Disjunctions between politics and wider reality aren't a new phenomenon, but a Government like ours (hardly of-the-people), and its attendant policy shops, seem to revel in the division, positively gleeful that they don't share the same empirical reality as the rest of us.

Tory think tanks - driven by a characteristic combination of cloistered ignorance and batshit ideological fervour - have always been the experts at considering the unspeakable and presenting it as common sense. Here you can find the ever-popular Policy Exchange conduct a rational, calm, and proportionate discussion in which they compare anti-cuts protesters to the IRA, and conclude that the Met Firearms and Headbangers Club have been far too tolerant and need to take a considerably more physical line against street protests.

Assorted Tory figures have taken the same tack - endorsing water cannons because the protesters "need a good wash" (total projection, as Dom Fox observes), cheering the use of CS spray* on people pushing leaflets through doors, and so on. The police have contributed their tuppenceworth too - from Hugh Orde's comments about those pesky trespassers who go into Boots without intending to buy anything, to Paul Stephenson's completely feasible and not-at-all panicked threat back in December to ban protest marches entirely.

Among the recommendations of the PE is that kettling 'be retained at all costs'. Ah, kettling. The Spectre of Hillsborough itself. For anyone watching the government and senior police going into full-blown frothing authoritarian heat, it's a flashback to the football crowd control policies in the 1980s. You've got the casual dehumanisation of those in the crowd. The sense of collective responsibility (one person throws a missile, you can all expect a baton charge). For the BBC's 'tough' attempt to exculpate the authorities of any responsibility for Jody McIntyre's treatment ("were you wheeling yourself toward the police?" - one of the most contemptible and pathetic things I have ever heard on television), read the questions asked of bereaved relatives among the cooling bodies of the dead in Sheffield ("so, your husband... he liked a drink, didn't he?). The CPE's considered reponse to the McIntyre incident was to declare that he should have stayed away from the protest altogether. The message is that if you go to one of these demonstrations, you're fair game, and anything that happens is on your head. And for the proposal to ban protest demonstrations entirely, we have an analogue in the final, draconian scheme to introduce ID cards, which would by implication have criminalised all football supporters, as well as killing off casual attendance at a stroke and smothering football's revival before it had even started.

Football survived - just a few years after Hillsborough, MPs who had seen football as a 'law and order issue' were seen fishing for votes by ostentatiously attending games (in suspiciously pristine-looking scarves). I think that whatever strongarm measures are wheeled out against us, and whichever Tory blowhards denounce us over the airwaves, we have real cause for optimism. Just like football, the anti-cuts movement is profoundly popular (even polls in Tory tabloids reveal that the majority have sympathy), and the harder the authorities crack down on it, the worse they will look in the long run. Does anyone really believe that our movement isn't going to outlast this Coalition? The only question is how many of us are going to be injured or imprisoned before then.

***

Much as we're all enjoying this new wave of unrest, and looking forward to the start of the kettling season and the chance to quote some Lacan with our fellow hipsters, we must remember that the bread-and-butter work of the left goes on. Uncannily enough, the very morning that the world heard David Cameron loudly denounce the 'failed experiment of multiculturalism', the English Defence League were staging a rally in Luton.

More careful analysis of Cameron's speech can be found elsewhere. The first thing that struck me is that, if moderate Muslims (as suggested) must take responsibility for policing their own communities, it follows that if any terrorist attacks do take place, all Muslims bear some of the blame. For the PM to make a statement along these lines on the day of an anti-Muslim march** (sample chant: 'burn down mosques' - also on Youtube, if you're not squeamish) is astonishing. The League predictably leapt on the publicity, declaring that the government had 'come round to their way of thinking'. This kind of political maneouvring is normally referred to as 'dogwhistling'. Can it still be called that if it's brazenly apparent to everyone's ears? The speech had no other substantive content (as far as I am aware, the previous government offered no special suicide-bomber grants).

Most of the speakers at the Luton UAF counter-demo eschewed peace-and-harmony platitudes for a more militant tone. The union reps in particular took pains to link this blatant attempt to create divisions among ordinary people with the wider programme of cuts - much better to draw attention to the brown people taking your jobs and/or benefits than for anyone to address the real causes of our recession. Gathering in one place to be kettled by a (proportionally) heavier police presence than the League felt as futile as ever, but at least the sentiments were right.

I'm sure Cameron's speech was very carefully vetted by Party apparatchiks - I'm sure it has tactical value and will win a few votes among closet racists and the they've-banned-Christmas crowd. Nowadays, though, even the Government's friends in the media can't offer them unqualified support. Even the Mail condemned the forestry sell-off, and even the likes of the Spectator expressed their 'concern' over the economic contraction (the US economy managed to grow despite much of the country enjoying the worst winter in living memory).

As Armando Iannucci quipped, they're dogmatists disguised as pragmatists
- except the disguise is increasingly frayed, and the dogma is one supported by blind faith alone. Tch, eh?

Meanwhile, here's Michael Gove falling over.

1. The fact that the officer concerned managed to catch himself in the blast is one of those lovely cosmic twists that give atheists momentary pause. The family of officer CW2440 are presumably very grateful he wasn't in Armed Response.
2. Originally the League were only opposed to extremist Islam, but that distinction seems to have gotten lost behind the proverbial sofa cushions. Frankly I doubt that the average League member could tell a fundamentalist from a normal Muslim, or even from a Hindu or Sikh, without the aid of a map - and probably wouldn't even want to know.
3. UPDATE. The highly instructive guide, 'How To Win At Kettling', appears to have been taken down, but can still be found in google's cache.

I specialise in revenge

I will blow your paradise away...

#solidarity

The protests seem to be going well.

There’s still a dimwitted lack of understanding of the nature of these actions - too many television and newspaper reporters seem to be operating under the assumption that those of the protesters who are currently students are only attempting to get their own fees waived. A moment’s consideration would of course reveal that these people will all be working and paying back their loans by the time the Browne proposals are in full effect. The inability to comprehend the idea that people can have motivations other than self-interest reveals far more about the Burleyesque sections of the media than it does about the marchers. The archetype of the spoiled, selfish student living it up on taxpayer money, never particularly fair, is now positively antiquated. Viz - often a reliable social barometer - dropped its 'Student Grant' character years ago, but it's being dug up and spat back at us in 2010. Desperate stuff.

To dismiss the students (as as every organ in the land seemed to do) as wanting ‘something for nothing’ or ‘everything handed to them on a plate’ is to completely, wilfully misunderstand the situation. The immediate demand of the protesters was for a proposed fee increase to be scrapped. In other words, for the maintenance of a situation in which students work jobs in term-time, live in cheaply built (but tastefully coloured!) PFI rabbit hutches, study hard, and three years later, accept a debt measured in the tens of thousands that will hang over them for most of their adult lives. Compassion for these students might be dulled by the thought that they will eventually be earning high salaries - the risible Gove defended the Browne Report with the uncannily bad argument “why should a postman subsidise someone who will go on to become a millionaire?” - but in times like these, how many students (even those in vocational subjects) do we really believe will be prospering after they graduate? It should be obvious that what these students want is something for something - the prospect of some kind of reward for all of the hard work and financial risk they‘ve undertaken. If anything, it’s a display of the kind of ‘prudent household management’ that the Coalition seem so keen on with the delightful homespun analogies they’re happy to trot out in other contexts.

It all reminded me of the more incoherent-of-Tunbridge-Wells letters to the Metro in the wake of the anti-bailout march two years ago - one correspondent implausibly claimed that the young scruffniks were only out to "jump on the free money bandwagon".

The Labour party hasn’t covered itself in glory on this issue, but no matter - oppositional arguments and ‘Punch and Judy politics’ may soon become a thing of the past. One effect of the Browne measures is that it will become all the more difficult for working-class kids to study Politics (along with History, International Relations, PPE and related subjects) - come 2030, we could yet see an all-Bullingdon House of Commons…

***

Entitlement seems to be the topic of the day. Who has a right to what? Does anyone have a right to anything they don’t work for? We could at this point talk about the arbitrary and essentially non-productive nature of most (paid) jobs, but let’s leave that thread unpulled. If the consensus at present is that nobody has a right to anything much, it hasn’t always been so - there have been plenty of counter-arguments. Thomas Paine wrote about how every man has a right to share in the common wealth (even in these post-crash times, even with a growing population, an equitable distribution of UK property assets would come to £110k per adult). Crass made the point more bluntly - "do they owe us a living? ‘course they fucking do!"

Apparently the outstanding problem with the welfare state is ‘benefit dependency’ - one of those neologisms that may spin your brain into non-Euclidean shapes, suggesting as it does that it would be okay for an independently wealthy person to claim benefits, because they wouldn’t be dependent on the benefits, and could come off any time they wanted. Every article on the subject, even those in the right-wing press, praise the welfare state as a noble idea, but not something that can ever be used by real people - suddenly the Borstal officer from Brass Eye looms in front of us - ‘yes, we have a welfare state, but DON’T ACTUALLY USE IT! WHERE’S YOUR SELF RE-COCKING-SPECT?’

Right now anything that doesn’t cover itself financially is in the Coalition’s gunsights. Education shouldn’t be subsidised (in the zeitgeist-capturing language of the Browne Report, “Institutions do not compete for this funding – they get it automatically. Our proposals will shift toward a more dynamic system of funding”) and students should have to pay for themselves. Dolescum shouldn’t be subsidised - they should have to work for their dole, and be bloody grateful they get anything at all (previewed in this miserable case - “nobody owes you a living, not even your employer.”). And while modern Britain's Three Faces of Evil (students, dolies, public sector workers) are the subject of most attention, the principles are being applied to a much wider spread of targets.

New Labour introduced us to the concept of ‘efficiency savings’ - local authority department budgets being trimmed by 3%, year on year, regardless of need or circumstances. In most circumstances there would have been fat to be trimmed, and efficiencies were duly made, but the sheer block-headed crudity of the measure is what stands out. Assuming for the sake of argument that a council had made all possible cuts, and couldn’t trim any further without adversely effecting services, there was no mechanism for appeal or waiver - they simply had to go ahead and find another 3%. This approach has been enthusiastically adopted by the Coalition and applied to the entire budget. One particularly obtuse display came via the Ministry of Justice, who announced a major reduction of funding for Legal Aid, meaning that “[Aid] for civil cases will all but disappear”. The measure was justified as a way of addressing “the great challenge of tackling the ballooning legal aid bill“. Never mind why the Legal Aid bill was so high, or why Legal Aid was introduced in the first place, or whether widespread access to justice is an important social good. The issue of whether particular spending is justified has apparently become specious and academic. Turn big numbers into small numbers, and screw the context.

The economic argument (and the alibi given by the Liberal Democrats to explain their about-face on the fees issue) is that we, as a nation, don’t have the money for things anymore. We certainly can't afford to pay tuition fees, and give grants rather than loans. We managed both of those things for several decades up to 1997, without the economy collapsing around our ears and people pushing wheelbarrows of money through the streets and/or queueing for bread and salt, but never mind.

The vision of the world being presented to us by the powers that be, and cheerfully swallowed by the readers of the Daily Mail et al, is one in which it is simply not possible to provide a decent home, lifestyle, and education for all - there is not enough to go around. This idea is another one that’s only attained currency relatively recently - up until the 1970s, eminent polymaths like Buckminster Fuller were setting out their realistically-costed visions of a better future which everyone in the world could hope to share. But at around the same time that modernist architecture fell out of vogue, so did modernist political planning - now the ethos of the day is Hobbesian self-reliance. It appeals to a certain kind of macho mindset, and enables the powerful to do little while feeling better about themselves, so it endures.

Presented with this story, there are two possible responses for the ruled. First, the mindset of the gangster and the kapo - responding to communal desperation by shoring up their own positions at the expense of others’ - accepting (and reinforcing) the grammar of the official narrative on working class prospects while pleading a partial exception in their own cases. So we have to endure the self-justifying cries of ‘don’t hate the player, hate the game,’ from people who have done well enough out of the game and will continue to do so.

The second is to organise, co-operate, and resist.

***

What’s perhaps worse is that this programme of cuts isn't just a crude application of every-man-for-himself individualism. It’s even more cynical than that. Certain areas of society that demonstrably don’t pay for themselves (the aristocracy, the City, and that’s without getting into debates about the actual value of management consultancy and the like) are being spared, even rewarded, while those areas of the arts and education that have attempted to adjust to business ontology, and become profit-making enterprises, are being attacked all the same.

We’re going to see a lot more of this selective poverty-pleading over the next four years, always directed at the usual Conservative targets. As long as we’re being told all of the things we can’t afford, it may be productive to talk about the things we apparently can afford - the £50bn being chucked in the direction of one-time economic policy exemplar Ireland, for one. There’s already talk of another, larger, British bailout in the wind, which has an uncomfortable ring of plausibility about it. If not a bailout, then we'll perhaps enjoy some zany scheme to 'stimulate private sector growth' - because if the history of PFI has taught us one thing, it's that our dynamic private sector won't get out of bed without cast-iron guarantees against financial loss. What’s mildly ironic is that, as financial manoeuvres go, this transfer of public wealth is just as dicey and unreliable an investment as a bundle of rotten mortgages, and won't necessarily lead to any increase in liquidity. But that’s for the economists to debate - for the rest of us, it’s going to mean an even larger program of ‘necessary’ cuts that will doubtless also be blamed on the unemployed and the public sector, assuming any of either remain by that time.

(Big Cuts Posts were all the rage a few weeks ago - I’d single out these three in particular.)

Man has kids, can't pay for same.

Tony Parsons on scintillating form.

'Go on my son, you get stuck in to the next fat bird you meet at the bus stop. The benefit cheque is in the post.'

I admit I haven't followed the background details of the Keith MacDonald story particularly closely. Are all eight of his conquests noticeably larger than the average woman? Is it a matter of public record that he spends most of his time playing on his XBox? Does he really put lager on his cornflakes every morning? I hope that all of these things are really true, otherwise TP has spent the entire article fighting himself - landing vicious, bruising blows on a product of his imagination.

Yes, you've got the casually contemptuous language - 'fat birds' three times, 'fat ladies,' 'obese women,' and 'porky harem' once each in what is a very short article, not to mention 'rat faced sperm' and 'a bunch of beady-eyed spongers' - and the whole Theresa May breadknife castration thing. The implication there seems to be that we ought to castrate deadbeat dads with rusty kitchen implements, but that those namby-pamby Liberal Democrats wouldn't be man enough to do it. Never mind, though, I'm pretty sure TP's tongue was firmly in his cheek the whole time

And, of course, there's the small point that Keith MacDonald hasn't made a penny from fathering all of these children - in fact, money will be deducted from his 'benefit cheque in the post' - a point well made at Liberal Conspiracy (who called him 'the world's worst benefits scrounger') among other places. Still, eh? Why let facts get in the way of some good old-fashioned resentment?

Putting aaallllll of the above aside, the actual argument of the piece runs thus: the welfare state was a noble idea, but now it's being abused by Keith MacDonald and his ilk, and we can't afford to subsidise them, so we ought to do something (TP remains heroically vague about exactly what).
He calls the welfare state 'the noblest idea in the history of this country', which is nice, but even at that stage you can sense an almighty iceberg-like 'BUT' about to loom out of the fog.

What the piece amounts to is a piece of drab austerity-realism, a fillip for the right ("Oh, the welfare state was such a nice idea, but we can't afford it anymore, let's be realistic"). Naturally, TP takes pains to maintain his credibility as a liberal by putting in a jab at the Tories (not unlike the times Littlejohn breaks off from a stream of xenophobic abuse to say 'the BNP are loonies,' then switches seamlessly back). He says that the MacDonald case can't be put down to some Tory idea of Broken Britain, because KM grew up in a loving family, with a hardworking binman Dad and siblings who all turned out okay. Again, I don't know the details of KM's history. Are his siblings all okay, or are they only 'okay' in that they haven't fathered a load of children? Was his family really loving? Are the kids of binmen generally known for their education, social mobility, and lifestyles?

So go on, Tony, if we can't put it down to his upbringing (and predictably there's no thought of social factors beyond the immediate family), why is KM like this? Well, obviously, because of the welfare state. Having the safety net in place makes people dependent on it - the mothers were 'too certain that the taxpayer will play Big Daddy when Keith goes to play on his Xbox'. We're all growing up weak, unlike the working class in the good old days. 'All the virtues of the old working class - pride, dignity, self reliance, work ethic, knowing enough to never mix your cornflakes with your lager - are inverted by KM and all those pregnant fat birds holding out their hands for more of our money'.

It's a popular idea these days - Ian Duncan Smith and Chris Grayling certainly see 'benefit dependency' (rather than, say, poverty, or limited opportunities) as the greatest scourge of the working classes today. The way to combat benefit dependency is (apparently) to stop paying benefits. This will discourage the next generation from leaning on benefits and make them more self-reliant. The logical conclusion of this argument is that it would be a good thing to stop benefits completely, indefinitely - after the unemployed, the fatherless kids, the various other ne'er-do-wells have all died off (which would naturally happen completely peacefully and without incident, like the characters quietly accepting their fate in 'On The Beach'), Britain would be able to restabilise with a manageable, morally superior population.

A caricature? Well, how else is the disincentive supposed to work? Hand out benefits on a lottery basis, perhaps, so only 50% of applicants get money (Chris Grayling could flip the official coin), and repeat every year so that nobody will be able to take their benefits for granted?
Getting benefits is already a tedious, drawn-out, humiliating process and benefit-based lifestyles are already shite. Granted, we haven't pushed this as far as is humanly possible. Nobody has yet implemented Digby Jones' ace idea of putting the long term unemployed in hostel rooms on starvation rations, for example. But being on the dole isn't fun. We'll know when the cushy benefit lifestyle has become a 'disincentive to succeed' when we see hedge fund managers jacking it all in to go and sign on at their local Jobcentre. I daresay that the lack of leisure options (possible Xbox notwithstanding), the narrow horizons, are among the causes of the whole sorry MacDonald saga.

What's interesting is that TP very nearly stumbles across this idea himself. He affects (then shamefacedly apologises for) an iota of pity for the "lost girls" and mentions that they are "too uneducated, too devoid of hope" - you think, just for a moment, that he might go on to say something relevant or incisive about Britain's underclass - but no, he makes a sharp u-turn and goes back to making fat jokes. Again, he comes within a heartbeat of insight on the issue of benefit cuts - "when those in genuine need see their benefits slashed, we simply can't afford to keep Keith and his army of fatherless brats on the payroll" - he almost realises that the whole reason people in genuine need are facing benefit cuts is because of the moral panic about benefit spongers, and that his own article will doubtless (in the long run) make the situation worse for people in real need. But he can't quite make the connection.

More to the point, is 'benefit dependency' really making us morally weak? I once read a couple of comments from an American concern troll on an article about our welfare state. He wanted to express his sympathy for what his poor gullible cousins in the UK had done to themselves. He went into some length unveiling a theory that all of Europe's strong, self-reliant gene stock had been spent on the battlefields of two world wars, and that the only Europeans left are the descendents of mewling runts, hence the weak-willed welfare state dependency and racial mixing that's taken place ever since. Other forms of this 'bloodline theory' (which always puts me in mind of something from Lord of the Rings - "Arnor is not the kingdom it once was, their blood has been much mixed since their glory days" etc) can be found across the internet. Needless to say, it's not only racist lunacy, but also based on a cringe-inducingly poor understanding of science, so it's surprising to see a variant on the theme rolled out in a progressive newspaper.

If nothing else, the timing of this purported moral shift doesn't fit. The welfare state as we understand it was cooked up in the 1930s and unveiled in the 1940s and 1950s. The great moral decline of Britain, the reduction of us all to deadbeat fathers and pram-pushing teenage mothers at bus stops, didn't become a ubiquitous right-wing talking point until the 1980s. Why assume that one was a product of the other? The very last people who worked in a country without a welfare state are in their eighties now, and people who grew up with this morally corrosive safety net in place are now retiring after long and fruitful careers. Even if we accept the line that there has been a sea change in the character of the working class, we're going to have to search a little harder to find the cause. In terms of chronology, it would coincide not with the establishment of the welfare state, but with the the neoliberal assault on the same (beginning at the end of the seventies...)

Which is, of course, the answer. There has been no moral decline. The spread of the myth of one is a product of the perpetual war on welfare that's been fought by both parties over the last thirty years. Today's underclass are the old working class. The majority of the population haven't suddenly developed defective moralities en masse and lost their once-unassailable work ethic. They're the same people, just living in a very different society. The endlessly-praised hard-working parents and grandparents (case in point here) had the good fortune to grow up in a time when employment was higher, when industry was still the country's largest employer, and even people with little or nothing in the way of education could reasonably expect to find work for life. It was regimented, dull, badly-regulated work with precious little chance of advancement, true, but it was there.

In today's environment, the work ethic has been elevated to a virtue standing above all others. Taken literally - ie, as the powerful desire to contribute labour regardless of need or circumstances - it could equally easily be construed as a waste, or even a pathology. Owen spent some time on the subject here. The work ethic is in vogue because it's a handy (and very difficult to disprove) criticism to throw at the unemployed, at a time when more of them than ever are essentially blameless. Structural unemployment is with us to stay, and as the processes of mechanisation and outsourcing continue, the number of jobs in this country is going to continue to decrease. The blame for this situation is being privatised, dumped on the shoulders of the individual. Out of work? Your fault. You're not trying hard enough. You've applied for twenty jobs this week? Well, why not twenty-one, eh? You're worthless. You're capable of anything, but you're too lazy to do it. You beady-eyed sponger. For my part, I'd say that large-scale unemployment isn't going anywhere, and will probably get worse in the decades to come (it'll affect millions more people, regardless of their individual merit), so we might as well treat the unemployed halfway humanely, and let them live something aproaching normal lives. Perhaps we should even let them breed?

(The objection here is that it would all have to be funded with taxpayer money. The correct response is that if you baulk at contributing a few pennies in the pound to help other people raise their kids, you would probably make an even worse parent than Keith MacDonald).

Finally, I'm not entirely sure that putting lager on cornflakes (mentioned by TP three times) quite amounts to the ultimate symbol of the decline of western society. It seems more like the kind of hi-lar-ious jape students would get up to inbetween running off with shopping trolleys. I've never tried it myself, but it sounds... okay. I think I can recall a character doing it in an episode of 'MASH', so, y'know. Nothing new under the sun. I don't think a questionnaire along the lines of 'would you pour beer on your cereal?' is the best way to sort out the deserving poor from the undeserving.

Gormlessness.

Zone Styx suggested that it was time for someone to write a series of posts demolishing the old canard that the private sector does things more efficiently. This would normally be a daunting prospect requiring weeks of painstaking work, but if we limit the discussion to the privatised welfare sector, hey, the piece practically writes itself.

***

Today's news: the Public Accounts Committee have delivered their report on four years of the Pathways to Work programme for people on ESA/IB. It’s, to say the least, damning. You can read the text here, but the sentence most indicative of the whole is:

“Private providers have seriously underperformed against their contracts and their success rates worse than Jobcentre Plus even though private contractors work in easier areas with fewer incapacity claimants and higher demand for labour.”

Yes - even when carefully assigned the lowest hanging fruit, they couldn't get much picking done. The data of the report shows that the two providers involved with the scheme around the country managed to achieve between a third and a half of their target outcomes. As some 70% of their payments are determined by results, the poor dears have been struggling to get by financially. Still, five years on, with the benefit of good ol’ 20.20 hindsight, the powers that be have managed to identify the crux of the problem:

“Providers started from a low knowledge base with little direct experience of working with incapacity benefits claimants.”

Well, fuck, who could have guessed that that might turn out to be an issue? Could it be that maybe, just maybe, carrying out public sector services is a little more difficult than it looked when you were slagging off the public sector for not delivering them cheaply enough? Could it be that getting results in this area requires people with actual skills, and not the bunch of desperate, untrained, badly paid, couldn’t-get-jobs-as-recruitment-consultants chancers that comprise your staff at the moment?

“In 2008-09, £94 million (38% of Pathways expenditure) was spent on employment support that did not deliver additional jobs.”

Yeah, no fucking shit.

This shocking realisation that difficult jobs are difficult is obviously having repercussions up and down the country. CDG and A4e, two of the largest providers, find themselves in a bind - as long as they get paid by results, they won’t make profits, and so won’t be able to hire decent staff. They’ve attempted to square the circle by advertising for highly skilled volunteers. Perhaps you’re wondering why highly skilled people would volunteer for companies like this when they could, eg, earn a wage. Well - there are going to be a whole lot of DWP and local authority employees heading for the dole queue soon, with a whole wealth of knowledge and experience to share, and nobody left in the country (private or public sector) who’s able or willing to pay for it…

One press release (hat tip) begins:
“Ensuring Britain continues to be a civilised and harmonious society means attracting 50,000 expert volunteers to sign up to the fight in supporting the unemployed back into work, according to the charity Careers Development Group’s (CDG) position paper launched today.”

See? This is about the future of the civilised world. Not about a bunch of mean, thieving bastards realising that the pie has almost run out and guarding their remaining slices with murderously paranoid zeal. No sir. Anyone thinking that they could have saved time by writing a press release along the lines of ‘Darling Dave, we really love the Big Society idea, please renew our contracts, luv CDG xxx’ had best keep their dangerous Bolshevik ideas to themselves.

If you’re having trouble following all of this, it’s really quite simple. We can’t afford to pay teachers, carers, mentors, and social workers to do their jobs anymore. Instead, they’re going to do their jobs for free, and pass everything they know onto the next generation while scraping by on the dole. Half of Britain as unpaid tutors for the other half. Once the lucky young ‘uns have drunk deep of the well of knowledge, they’ll be more employable, and employers will suddenly have enough money to hire them after all, and will naturally choose the less experienced people with no work history over the people who have a lifetime's experience doing real work, and have recently been busy volunteering (which always looks good on a CV).

Meanwhile, there aren't going to be any substantial consequences for the providers' failures - for fans of throwing good money after bad, Ian Duncan Smith is all over a European A4e scheme for ‘strengthening families’. He’s ‘examining a German approach where long-term unemployed families have been encouraged to create a "household culture" with trips to the cinema and evening classes.’

In other words, IDS spends time sitting at his desk, chewing on his pencil, wondering ‘Why don’t these workless households ever take trips together? Why don’t they go to the cinema? Why don’t they go to Center Parcs? Or Umbria? Don’t they realise they could have valuable family bonding experiences that way?,’ before clapping his hands together in a businesslike manner and forging ahead with plans to cut benefits.

He's certainly the finest mind in the Department since we all enjoyed the paradigm-altering thought of James Purnell. Is it something particular about DWP that attracts people of this calibre? I can’t think of a word that fits better than gormlessness.