Last week’s news was dominated by what to
my mind were three important events. Firstly the Tory Party Conference and the
stated intention of Chancellor George Osborne, supported by his boss David Cameron,
to deprive young people or anyone else unemployed for two years or more of welfare
benefits unless they engaged in paid or unpaid work, or daily attended a
benefits office for long periods of time or else began a course of study or
training. Secondly the Red baiting/ anti-Semitic smearing of Ralph Miliband as THE MAN WHO HATED BRITAIN by the Daily
Mail and by implication an attack on his son, leader of Britain’s Labour Party or
RED ED as he was described. Finally
the partial collapse of Government in the United States because of the refusal
of the Republican Party in Congress to support President Obama’s proposal to
give free Healthcare to countless millions of America’s poorest people unless
he supported their demand to cut the taxes of the country’s richest people.
This impasse over the funding of the Federal Budget has led to almost a million
people being laid off work.
THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY CONFERENCE : DEPRIVING THE NEEDY
To those Tories who recently attended their
annual Party Conference most unemployed young people are work shy. This is a euphemism for being lazy, idle, or boozed up to
their eyeballs. Their remedy for this is to force them into work by denying
them unemployment or any other state benefit if they’ve been out of a job for
two years or more and the same goes for anyone else in that category. The
unemployed, they maintain, simply don’t want to work and for this endless
self-righteous litany drum up support from the gutter press, most of the population
of Essex and the rest of the south of England’s lower middle class.
Irrespective of the cold hard fact that
most jobs for young people are atrociously paid and their labour exploited with
the so called Minimum Wage little more than a joke, most unemployed youth come
from poor or deprived backgrounds. They are among the neediest people in our
society. Those from wealthier families don’t have that problem. They either go
straight into University after leaving school or spend a year ‘travelling’ or
else like David Cameron or Nick Clegg have family friends or connections able
to start them off in a well-paid ‘internship’. Something that actually means
doing a bit of walking around and learning for a serious month’s wage. That’s
the reality of it for them after they leave public school and come out of a
jolly at Oxford! For most poorer kids however having no job is something more
than the price they pay for their background and the lack of opportunity that
goes with it. Both are disadvantaged enough but it’s the general economic
situation they face that’s the real problem.
For the current Coalition Government,
cutting state benefit is part of the much wider aspiration of running down and
dismantling the Welfare State. This is not simply a matter of reducing welfare
benefits to a minimum but also breaking up and privatizing the National Health
Service along with most other State controlled institutions such as the Royal
Mail Service and perhaps ultimately the Police. From the time that Gordon Brown
and his Labour Government removed regulation and control from the activities of
the financial services sector, men in suits in the City of London went through
golden days playing the roulette wheel of dodgy investment. Guided by little
more than ignorance and greed they happily went gambling on a daily basis using
money that didn’t belong to them for dodgy investments, earning million pound
bonuses in what was essentially a collective culture of swindling. With a
helping hand from friends operating funds of one kind or another they took
money from everyone’s savings and chucked it all on the wheel of change hoping
that tomorrow would never end.
Well it did. The revolving swindle went on
for half a decade till the banks and other financial institutions were empty of
everyone’s money. The loss somehow had to be paid. First worthless money was
printed. A bit like bunging up the hole in the Titanic copies of the Daily
Mail! It just wasn’t good enough. With
an economy that during the Thatcher years had substituted traditional forms of
wealth creation such as industrial production and exports to one relying on
earnings from financial services such as moneylending, when the collapse came there
was nothing available to help fill the hole. Something had to be done and the
rich weren’t coughing up their tiaras. One gaggle of politicians went, another
was elected. Looking around the Tories and their Lib-Dem dancing partners saw a
Welfare State purposefully designed to help the poor and the needy along with
millions of public sector workers whose pay they controlled! Never mind that
they perform a crucial role in the economy as health workers and teachers,
their earnings could be frozen.
Now to resolve the crisis! First Government
would freeze the salaries of those already among the lowest paid. Secondly
banks and other institutions would minimize the interest paid on deposits,
mainly belonging to those who’d worked hard and saved money for their retirement.
Finally the Welfare State funds paid to the unemployed the poor and the needy
would be cut to the bone or done away with altogether.
Throughout their conference the
Conservatives adopted as their resounding catchphrase, hardworking families. A typical piece of Tory impudence when one
considers the countless hardworking families they failed to mention... Those
now earning nothing from their savings and whose pensions from years of loyal
hard work are being daily eroded by circumstances they never created. Far worse
however is the matter of what may best be described as plain thieving. No more
unemployment benefit for those who have been without work for two years or more
unless they meet stated conditions. Consider this. Many unemployed people may
have previously worked for three, five, ten, even twenty years or more and
during this time had National Insurance Contributions deducted from their pay. The
National Insurance Contribution was purposefully set up as an essential part of
the Welfare State. It was established as a fund that would mitigate against
poverty and destitution, helping people who’d lost their jobs or had none through
no fault of their own. Working men and women paid into this fund weekly and
monthly while they were employed.
MOST HAVE PAID INTO IT FOR MANY YEARS. IT IS THEIR
MONEY. IT BELONGS TO THEM. NOT TO GOVERNMENTS TO GIVE TO BANKS.
When George Osborne told his fellow
Conservatives at Conference that unemployed people would be denied this benefit
unless they met specific conditions, he was stating his intention to take money
that didn’t belong to him from those who’d contributed for their own personal
protection at a time when they might need it most. Together with the financial
thieving that went on under Labour, this seems like another form of thieving to me. No wonder that the
corpulent faces of so many delegates lit up with joy! That the Tory Conference
resounded with cheering. Nothing more that these people enjoy than the thought
of punishment! Punishing the poor!
Punishing the needy! Punishing young people for not having jobs that simply
aren’t there! Forcing them to work in demeaning conditions for long hours and poor pay.
The Conservative Party Conference however was important, especially for any young
person new to politics. In the week before, at the Labour Party Conference, you
could listen to what people who worked in the public services like the NHS or
Primary School Teaching had to say. You could see from their faces how much
they enjoyed their work caring for the sick and the old and caring for
children. How much it meant to them. You could sense their community spirit.
Feel the warmth in their words. See the plain ordinary decency that lit their
faces. Ordinary working people caring for others… Low paid, wages frozen, but
doing their best… Then by contrast the well fed, well suited Tories. Cheering
at every attack on the public services, every criticism made about feckless
youth, every attack on the unemployed, the lazy, the idle. Those refusing to
work! Hard corpulent faces. Unfriendly to everything and anyone except
themselves. If you contrasted both sets of faces you’d know what kind of people
they were. And if you believe in decency, fair play and justice you’d know where
your sympathies lay and whose side you were on.
THE DAILY MAIL : UP TO THEIR OLD NASTY WAYS
The Daily Mail is the second most widely
read daily newspaper in the country. This has to say something but what? Essentially
it is and always has been the newspaper of the urban and suburban lower middle
class, a broad social group comprised mainly of self-employed tradesmen and
market traders, small shopkeepers and businessmen along with a multitude of pen
pushers working at various levels in commerce or the financial services sector.
They certainly don’t think of themselves as working class but economically and
culturally they haven’t yet attained middle class values.
Karl Marx, certainly no friend of the
newspaper they read, once described them as passively
rotting social scum trapped between labour and capital. In this he might
have been right. They are people who have elevated themselves from the working
class and certainly don’t want to go back to what they once were. Furthermore
they see themselves as an entirely different species of being to what remains
of the industrial working class. However they are most definitely not
capitalists, whether large scale industrial or commercial entrepreneurs. They
might aspire to being such but they’re not and stand in envious relationship to
them.
As a relatively newly emerged social class
that is neither Labour or Capitalist they are particularly vulnerable, as is
any new species of being, to the vicissitudes of life. Thus their position and
status within ever changing economic circumstances is uncertain. If they are
tradesmen for example, loss of trade or diminution of the value of their skills
from immigrant labour. If they are shopkeepers, concerns about local
competition or any loss of purchasing power of their customers. If they are
part of the clerical flotsam that makes up the services sector, loss of employment
through technological innovation. All in all their raised economic and social
status out of the working class makes them permanently vulnerable. Makes them
feel permanently insecure. Indeed their generalised psychological condition may
be said to be governed by an almost permanent anxiety, a fear that they might
soon not be where and what they are now. Forced to give up the new values they’ve
acquired and return to the dark commonality they rose out of. Their emotions
and fears, conditioned by insecurity and governed by anxiety about one thing or
another is what the Daily Mail speaks to. Loss of the value of pensions and
savings, loss of everything they’ve accumulated and the challenge from things
that are new are all grist to the Daily Mail mill.
It’s the home from home of the lower middle
class. A sanctuary for their trembling nervy sentiment and rightly so. It has
been at the forefront of each and every anxiety, running first rate news
stories and campaigns on their behalf. Its journalism is clear, forthright and
populist. In turbulent economic times playing to every nuance of uncertainty, worry
and doubt. It is emotionally and politically at one with its disturbed fearful
readership as much as the Sun is to cultural sterility of its working class-underclass
followers where literal communication is reduced to the lowest common
denominator. These people have Rupert Murdoch, the Daily Mail has Lord
Rothermere and along with him a powerful political intent and direction.
To counter instability, emotional turmoil
and doubt, the fundamental psychological need of the lower middle class is above
all reassurance. A permanent soothing balm for their anxieties. An ongoing assurance
that in the face of uncertainty someone understands their craving for security
in the face of change. Their need for order in the face of chaos that might
undermine their position and status. With its hostility to trades unions and
strikes, socialism and sharp social change, and with its attitudes to immigrants
and immigration, Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail politically speaks to this need. In
the eyes of the lower middle class these things represent a threat to
stability, to the way society is ordered in which they have their recognised
though insecure place. Their marginality indeed has its counter in a necessity
for order. With soothing subliminal themes such as these this is the tune
hummed by the Daily Mail since its inception. The Tories can lovingly belch
Land of Hope and Glory but that’s their patriotic certainty of class rule. The
Daily Mail’s offering comes from a far more dangerous ground and meets a far
more fragile and dangerous need.
Order in the face of change… reassurance in
the face of anxiety… calm in the face of fear… A firm political hand against instability
and social upheaval. The Daily Mail and the former Lord Rothermere had been
there before with their support for Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party during the
1930’s. Despite being fully aware of the destruction of democracy in Germany,
the persecution of socialists, trades unionists and Jews, and the concentration
camps that had been set up for torture and murder, the newspaper went along
with it all, never once drawing back from its adulation for Der Fuehrer and his
SS thugs who promised Germany order and stability during uncertain times. Reassurance
in the face of anxiety! The paper and its owner admired him for that, never mind
the brutality and torture, the degradation and murder.
It is from within this setting of the Daily
Mail’s history and the socio-psychological roots of its readership that I am
now able to address its recent grossly offensive Red-baiting, Jew-baiting
attack on Ed Miliband’s father which has disturbed so many people. Ralph
Miliband, now deceased, came to Britain from Belgium as a Jewish youth escaping
Nazi persecution. He fought for Britain during the Second World War in the
Royal Navy and participated in the D Day Landings. Later he became a Marxist
academic and ultimately a professor at the London School of Economics who was
vociferous and active for many socialist causes including taking a stance
against the Vietnam War. It was all harmless enough. A revolutionary he
certainly wasn’t, being frequently condemned by those much farther on the left
for being a traitor. His son Ed rejected his father’s Marxism, was much more at
home being a social democrat and became leader of the Labour Party on that
basis. That’s about it. The man the Mail smeared with the Red label by association with his father is about as revolutionary
as a cheese sandwich.
So what was it that got under their
editor’s skin? You really don’t need to look far. A week before, in his
leader’s speech at the Labour Party Conference, he condemned the attack on
people’s standard of living by the Tory-Lib Dem Coalition, pointed out that
endlessly rising energy prices were partly responsible and promised the British
people that a Labour Government, if elected in 2015, would freeze energy prices
for twenty months. It was this promise that made the Mail see red. I mean start
seeing Reds everywhere! Even for something as soft as wanting to control energy
prices the man was viewed as a red hot radical. A Jewish Marxist like his
father!
Time for them to get to work. Blacken the
father, blacken the son. Stir up immigrant-alien communist Jew hatred. What
they did was to almost perfectly reproduce the smears of Joseph Goebbels,
Hitler’s propaganda chief, a vicious Jew hating, Red-baiting nasty and one of
his favorites. Goebbels himself couldn’t have done it any better. First the banner
headline, THE MAN WHO HATED BRITAIN. Underneath
the story that Ralph Miliband was a young Jewish refugee from Belgium to
Britain and a Marxist who attacked Britain on every occasion. Alongside were
photos of him and his grave. No mention of the fact that he’d loyally served in
the Navy and fought for Britain during the War. Instead, the supposition
conveyed was that he was ungrateful for being given refuge as an immigrant and
disloyal to the country that gave it to him because he’d often been critical of
it later. Added together it was a poisonous mixture of disloyalty and
ingratitude. A disloyal, ungrateful, troublemaking communist Jew. A slur used
by anti-Semites for as long as Jewish history remembers, and particularly by the
Daily Mail’s favorites, the Nazis of the 1930s. Disloyal, ungrateful Jewish
immigrant, Red Ralph Miliband and his lefty radical son, Red Ed leading the
Labour Party! The smearing of the son included in the price of smearing his
deceased father.
You’ve got a nerve, you damned dirty Daily
Mail, attacking a dead immigrant Jew for disloyalty when you were kissing
Hitler’s arse and loving every filthy thing his Nazis did during the 1930s. Who
was disloyal then, the young Jew who fought for Britain against the Nazis or
your smelly gutter-press rag? Maybe you wouldn’t have reverted to type if Ed
hadn’t promised to freeze energy prices, but then blaming people for things
they’ve never done is part of your stock in trade, much like using the forged
Zinoviev letter to blacken the name of the Labour Party many years back. The
paper’s a nasty anti-Semitic rag and shame on any Jews who work for it, selling
themselves for a shilling so its owners can say it’s not anti-Jewish at all.
Okay, the Jew-baiting and communist
smearing accepted, there’s another part of the paper’s attack that needs
consideration, this being what the paper’s readers
are likely to think? The lower middle class, hard pressed economically, may
have noticed that despite the Red Ed, Jew story, the man promised to freeze their
energy prices given the chance. Well their own paper’s been going on about rising
energy prices long enough and why the Coalition Government is doing nothing
about it! In short, what will its readers make of it all? Ed Miliband making a
promise like that is much to their favour so will they go for the smear or do
the decent thing and brush off the dirt?
WHAT THE HELL IS IT WITH YOU AMERICA?
What’s the first thing that comes to mind
when you think of America? Could it be 9/11, someone playing a guitar or maybe
some film or other? Perhaps some great or heroic event like Neil Armstrong
being the first man to step on the Moon. Alternatively it could be the
assassination of President Kennedy. The last, fifty years back, is as likely to
be the case as any of the others, if only because of what we receive through
the media is an almost daily diet of gun crime. Think America and immediately
some major shooting incident comes to mind. It could be killings on a
University campus or in a high school. Maybe even a church. It doesn’t matter
where, only that it happens on a regular basis. Indeed, live firearms practice in public by a wide variety of angry
disenchanted crazies seems to have become an acceptable part of the American
news story to the rest of the world. Think America and it’s another group of kids
being shot somewhere. A busload of innocents here, a high school and its
teachers shot there. It’s either that quite frankly or America doing some
bombing. Attacking some country or other with cruise missiles.
What is it with you America? If you’re not
shooting and killing each other it’s bombs… so when we think about you it’s no
longer beefburgers, baseball or hot dogs that come to mind anymore but the fact
that you seem to like killing each other or dropping bombs on people you don’t
know in countries most of you have never yet heard of. Furthermore, when you
plan on doing the bombing you expect other nations you call friendly to drop
whatever they’re up to, lock and load and join you doing it likewise! Well
sorry to disappoint you and all but speaking as one of your English chums we
need to talk among ourselves first over here before getting involved in some
killing.
It was in this common sense manner that
David Cameron, led by other British Parliamentarians who only too well remember
being stampeded into joining you in a war against Iraq, decided to recall
Parliament and vote on the issue. And much to everyone’s surprise, because what
are old friends for but lend a hand in any bombing, the British said NO, we don’t want to get involved
militarily overseas anymore and besides, we’ve come to the conclusion that
you’ve got far bigger problems at home you need to sort out before joining up
with Islamic extremists and terrorists and start bashing the hell out of Syria.
The main problem you have, as everyone can
see, is that your Government is not governing most of the country anymore. A
large part of it has been shut down for almost two weeks because of a
disagreement between President Obama and Congress over how to fund the next
spending budget. A Democrat President has proposed a plan that would give
countless millions of Americans free health care. Something they’ve never had
before. Republican opponents in the House of Representatives, led by an arch
conservative wing known as the Tea Party (mostly made up of semi-lunatic
backwoodsmen from the Southern States) who speak mainly for wealthy Americans,
are refusing to fund such a plan unless the President cuts taxes for the rich.
Hence there’s an impasse that simply won’t go away and looks like permanently
paralyzing the world’s largest economy.
America’s running a budget deficit of some
14 trillion dollars. Something almost impossible to make up. A black hole in
the economy funded mainly by China and Saudi Arabia. A nation in hock to
countries like these is worrying enough but when it’s in hock to a handful of
reactionaries who think that giving free health care to millions of their
fellow citizens is communist, and are supported in their view by large sections
of American society, the serious social divisions that have always existed are
opening up with a vengeance. Frustration and anger are increasingly spilling
out all over the place. A psychologically disturbed mentality which on an
individual basis is only too often some kind of rage resulting from a sense of
injustice or perhaps something trivial or small, has led to people stockpiling
guns and using them to kill their fellow citizens, classmates or teachers. It’s
a particular problem in a nation whose constitution allows its citizens to bear
arms. Carry loaded weapons that is. It is this, combined with their anger or
sense of injustice whether right or wrong, that facilitates a deadly journey
into a killing spree, something light years away from any lawful intention that
people should protect themselves. The result as we all see is simply plain
murder.
Yet this so called right of self-protection
has no greater support than that coming from the political reactionaries of the
Tea Party wing of American Republicanism. It’s a kind of carte blanche given to
emotionally disturbed people to go out kill their fellow citizens and it’s these
self-same politicians who refuse to sanction free medical care for their fellow
Americans.
Federal Government being held to ransom by
a handful of political crazies… The peace and security of America held to
ransom by the crazies it arms with guns… The health and welfare of its citizens
held to ransom by people straight out of the political backwoods who think
their President’s a communist because he wants to help the nation’s poor
instead of spoon-feeding the already rich?
Think about shootings when you think of
America? When I began writing this post last week I just happened to turn on
the television and learn that a woman with a child in her car had been chased
and shot dead by police for ramming her vehicle into the gates of the White
House where the President lives. We’ll now never know why she did it. Was it prompted
by rage over Obama’s healthcare plan and the political impasse? The police
didn’t need to shoot her dead but they did. Bang, bang, bang! As though it’s a
normal and acceptable part of life in America. Well now we all see that it
surely is!
American society needs to sort out its
psychological problems. Acquire new, altogether more human values, a sense of
common decency, community spirit and justice rather than endless self-seeking
and greed. Religious people might actually wonder what kind of God it is in whom
you trust that allows you to see most of your people without healthcare, without
decent food and without protection from those who feel a need to take out their
anger on others by using guns. I’m making the point, even though I’m not a religious
person myself. America, the most important thing you need to sort out is
whether you’re decent and humane enough as a nation to give the majority of
your people free medical care. When you’re able to do that then you’ll also get
rid of the guns. And all the killing that you’ve become notorious for will
eventually cease.
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