Tories, Ayn Rand and Other Things

The current Tory regime – known at Nowhere Towers as the Simulated Thatcher Government (STG) – is fixated with shrinking the state. They don’t even try to deny it. If Thatcher herself “believed” in Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty, then today’s Tory government is inspired by Ayn Rand’s terrible prose. By the way, it’s widely believed that Thatcher hadn’t actually read any Hayek and her knowledge of his ideas were mediated to her by the child abuser, Sir Keith Joseph and former communist, Sir Alfred Sherman.

Four years ago, I spotted, what I’d considered to be, traces of Rand’s ‘philosophy’, “Objectivism”, contained in the 2010 Conservative election manifesto.  Daniel Hannan and Douglas Carswell (now a UKIP MP) wrote a book called The Plan: Twelve Months To Renew Britain. According to the pair, their book was inspired by Objectivism. They gleefully told their readers that some of their ideas had been adopted by Cameron and co. The book itself offers unsourced graphs and a lot of badly thought out remedies for a series of problems that the authors claim are caused by the state. One stand out line from the book is “the state is running at capacity” (Carswell and Hannan, 2008: 18). Does the state have a capacity? Is there a stated “capacity” for the state or is that just an empty rhetorical device? It’s a curious line to be sure. The Plan is essentially a manifesto for a nightwatchman state. Think of a land with no infrastructure, rampant crime and endemic corruption and you’re halfway there.

Rand’s influence can be heard in the language of government ministers: the insistence on “hard work” and the frequent mention of the somewhat vague concept of the “wealth creator” versus the scroungers and layabouts, resonates with the language in any one of Rand’s turgid novels, which cast the rich as downtrodden heroes and pits them against their nemesis: the moochers and looters – the latter being a shorthand for the enemies of unbridled cupidity. A couple of years ago, Bozza wrote an article for The Torygraph which claimed the rich were an “oppressed minority”.

But there is one minority that I still behold with a benign bewilderment, and that is the very, very rich. I mean people who have so much money they can fly by private jet, and who have gin palaces moored in Puerto Banus, and who give their kids McLaren supercars for their 18th birthdays and scour the pages of the FT’s “How to Spend It” magazine for jewel-encrusted Cartier collars for their dogs.

I am thinking of the type of people who never wear the same shirt twice, even though they shop in Jermyn Street, and who have other people almost everywhere to do their bidding: people to drive their cars and people to pick up their socks and people to rub their temples with eau de cologne and people to bid for the Munch etching at Christie’s.

From this rambling mess it’s possible to deduce that Bozza has at least been exposed to Rand’s trashy philosophy and has internalised its central premise that anyone who doesn’t create “wealth” is a leech. We must slap the rich on the backs, admire the size of their enormous wads and tell them how marvellous they are! What! According to this 2014 Guardian article by Martin Kettle, Sajid Javid (aka Uncle Fester) is also a Rand admirer. Well, blow me down! Peter Hoskin on Conservative Home writes:

Javid explained that this isn’t his favourite movie, but it is the most important to him. He first watched it on television in 1981, aged 12, and even then it struck him as “a film that was articulating what I felt”. From there, he soon read the book, wore out a VHS copy of the film, and brought his enthusiasm for all things Fountainhead with him to university. He even admitted, with a self-deprecating grin, that “I read the courtroom scene to my future wife!”

Uncle Fester’s lack of humanity certainly comes across very strongly in his media appearances, so it comes as no surprise that he would read Rand’s dull prose to his future wife. If I were his other half, I’d be thinking “Why are you reading me this shit? Do you hate me that much”?

The continued destruction of the welfare state; the attacks on the poor and disabled and the emphasis on the slippery concept of “aspiration” are clear examples of Rand’s influence on the STG’s social and economic policies. We can add to this, the compulsion to control all forms of discourse, and their tendency to render all facets of everyday life into neoliberal economisms. This can be seen in the way in which the STG and its allies in the press insist that the main opposition party adheres to the government’s doctrine of presumed fiscal rectitude, thus serving to illustrate not just their desire to shrink the state but to create an authoritarian one-party state as well. Why? Because the Tories despise opposition even if they claim otherwise. If they must deal with an opposition, it is better to deal with one that goes on the defensive every time false accusations are levelled at them.

If the Labour leadership’s rhetoric and policy positions look little different to those of the government, then you’re not really being offered a proper choice at the ballot box. You’re being offered a choice between Coke and Pepsi. Life’s a bitch. Now shut up and eat your shit sandwich.

Let’s Talk About: Economic Growth

Images like this mean nothing to Dan Hannan. who prefers to deal with fictional characters than real people and their complicated lives.

Economic growth or just ‘growth’ is the holy grail of career politicians, neoliberal economists and their hangers on in the media. We’re often told how important it is to have ‘growth’ in our economy and it is only then that everyone will see the benefit. The trouble with this notion is that those who continually spout this rubbish aren’t the ones who need to worry. They’re already comfortable. The ones for whom these pronouncements mean little, if nothing at all, are the poor and the low waged. They continue to see their income squeezed, while the cost of living continues to rise. But the media and the government will have none of it.

A few weeks ago, the BBC’s economic editor, Robert Peston, was crowing over low oil prices. He told the nation’s viewers that “everyone” would now feel “richer” because of the continued fall in petrol prices. This is not only misleading; it’s also dishonest. The only people who can feel “richer”, by definition, are the rich themselves. If you are poor, you cannot be “rich”, it’s an absurdity. Yet this does not stop the likes of Daniel Hannan repeating this meaningless tosh. In Thursday’s blog for CapX, he repeated Peston’s bogus claim that “The rich are getting richer and the poor are… getting richer”. This is a measure of how out-of-touch our media and politicians are in relation to the people they purport to serve. We can also draw the conclusion that the mainstream media, the Westminster politicians and economic cults like the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute for Economic Affairs are in a cosy conspiratorial relationship with one another. The relationship between these institutions and ordinary people themselves is one of power. They consider themselves to be the voices of authority and we must listen and obey… or so they think. So when they tell us that “things are getting better” we are expected to believe them. But I no more believe them than I believe in the existence of God, the tooth fairy or Father Christmas. I see no improvement and neither do millions of other people.

The problem with those who constantly talk about ‘growth’ is that they can only speak the language of statistics and mathematics, and can only view the world through the lens of their social status. They are incapable of relating their nutty ideas about economics to the average person because what they’re saying bears no relation to everyday life. Trickle down, for example, is one economic fallacy that is repeated ad infinitum by economic cultists and held up as a model for ‘growth’ and economic well-being. But not even right-wingers like George HW Bush believed it and derided trickle down as “voodoo economics”. Yet the Hannans and Osbornes of this world cleave so tightly to it like men at sea clinging to any bit of flotsam that comes their way.

A couple of months ago, the Labour leadership claimed that if the Tories were re-elected, they would take public spending back to the levels of the 1930s. This was enough to get all manner of right-wing economic cultists into a lather. Hannan was one of those. In this blog, he does his best to claim how the 1930s was a “time of growth”. It’s a risible misrepresentation of a decade that’s become synonymous with economic hardship.

Well, here’s a fact that may surprise you. The 1930s saw more economic growth than any other decade in British history. It’s true that there were patches of deprivation. As in all times of economic transition, some industries declined while others rose. The poverty of the Jarrow Marchers was genuine: theirs had been a ship-building town, devastated by the collapse of international orders.

Sophistry, damned sophistry. For the millions of working class people who struggled to survive the decade, this is an insult to their memory. My mum’s family was Liverpool working class and I can remember her telling me what life was like in the Thirties: if you were poor or low-waged, you had no access to affordable or decent healthcare, because there was no National Health Service (the Tories will abolish it if they are re-elected). There was very little work on Merseyside in the 1930s, so people lived a hand-to-mouth existence.

Hannan continues his fantasy tour of his romanticized past:

Yet these were golden years for new industries such as electrical appliances and aviation and cars, the years when Morris, Humber and Austin became household names. The 1930s also saw an unprecedented boom in construction, as the comfortable suburbs of Betjeman’s Metroland spread across England. The Battersea Power Station raised its minarets over the capital, a symbol of self-confidence in architecture.

Here, Hannan waxes floridly about a world that only those with the economic means could take part. The appliances and cars that he talks about were beyond the means of my family and many others. No working class people owned cars, let alone possessed household appliances. My grandmother was still using a boiler and a mangle well into the 1970s. As for Metroland, the houses that were built there were for sale. Only those with nice, middle class incomes could afford a mortgage.

Here, Hannan slaps more gloss onto his fantasy.

 Britain responded to the 1929 crash by cutting spending drastically and, in consequence, soon saw a return to growth. The United States, by contrast, expanded government activity unprecedentedly under the New Deal, and so prolonged the recession by seven years. Yes, seven years. Here is the conclusion of a major study published in 2004 by two economists at the UCLA, Harold L Cole and Lee A Ohanian:

Cole and Ohanian are comprehensively defenestrated in this blog. Hannan isn’t interested in reality and like all right-wingers of his ilk, he exists in the hermetically-sealed space of privilege. The material of history is bent and twisted to shrink-fit a weak narrative. Like many of his fellow Tea Partiers, he makes the same feeble argument for cuts.

Contrasting the American and British experiences, we are left with an inescapable conclusion. Cuts work, and trying to spend your way out of recession doesn’t.

Let’s put it this way, if a company doesn’t borrow or spend money to invest when it is doing badly, it will go under. Cuts only work for the already wealthy. They are also a means by which the powerful punish the poor for being poor. Hannan makes clear his hatred of FDR and the New Deal. This is the same position held by the economic cultists at the Ludwig von Mises Institute as well as his fellow Randists.

This is perhaps the greatest fallacy of all:

Still, if only for the record, let me set down the real lesson of the 1930. The best way to recover from a crash, not least for low earners, is to bring spending back under control. Growth follows, jobs are created, and the people taking those jobs thereby gain the most secure route out of poverty.

It’s easy for those who have never personally experienced poverty to claim that “the most secure route out of  poverty” is work. Low-paid and zero hours contract jobs actually lock people into poverty. Hannan is not only a fool, he’s a dangerous fool. Leaving people to fend for themselves without a safety net will lead to greater social problems. Hannan is unmoved by such concerns. Yet he would be the first to complain that shanty towns are an “eyesore”. This is the man who calls himself a “Whig”.

Talking about economic growth when people are struggling to survive is deeply offensive. Talking about GDP is meaningless because not only is it a poor way of measuring economic performance, it means nothing to ordinary people. For all his claims of how cutting public spending will improve economic performance, Hannan has never had to suffer the privations of working in a low-paid job. Like all of his pals in Westminster and beyond, he is a bully, who talks a good talk but when his words are unpacked, they reveal the true horrors of the current political system.

Life on Hannan World (Part 16)

Russell Brand: he must be doing something right if Hannan hates him.

I realise there has been little activity on my blog for a number of weeks. This is because I have been very busy with other things. I won’t go into detail but these things have taken a great deal of my time and demanded my utmost attnetion. It’s also likely that my blog output will be patchy over the coming weeks, though I expect to do some blogging closer to the General Election.

I’ve resisted the temptation to comment on Russell Brand because he has been covered from all different angles by all manner of people. Brand’s associations with Laurence Easeman have been the subject of considerable discussion since last October, when his book launch was cancelled after Easeman’s anti-Semitism and fascism were revealed. Under the circumstances, Brand did the right thing by cancelling the launch. At least Brand turns his back on fash and racists. Daniel ‘Anglosphere’ Hannan, on the other hand, airbrushes the latter.

Brand’s appearance on the national political stage has got tongues wagging on the Left and as for the Right? Well, they aren’t taking this at all well. Why? Because they’re in the firing line and they know it. I found this blog from Hannan that attempts to paint Brand as a wannabe dictator.

Russell Brand describes himself as a “comedian and campaigner”. While we might wonder at the first epithet, we can’t argue with the second. The man has built up a huge following among the angry teenage Lefties who dominate Twitter. His theme is that all politics is corrupt, all MPs are plutocrats’ stooges, and all rich people – except him, naturally – are part of a racket.

Bitchy and bitter. “Twitter” Hannan opines, is dominated by “angry teenage Lefties”. Really? That’s news to me. I’ve found many lefties on Twitter but equally, I’ve encountered plenty of vile right-wingers whose idea of free speech begins and ends at insult. They’re also rather fond of the kind of racist and sexist language that wouldn’t sound out of place coming from John Tyndall (deceased) or the bully boys (and girl) of Britain First.

Think about that for a moment. Russell Brand’s quarrel isn’t with the people who have more courage than him; it’s with parliamentary democracy itself. A chap might be making an honest living as, say, a “comedian and campaigner”; but the very fact of bothering to ask his countrymen for their votes would turn him into a shyster.

I love the way The Lyin’ King opens this paragraph with the word “Think”. Thinking isn’t something that either he or his brethren do very well. They react and they presume. Hannan, a Conservative MEP for the South-east, spends his time attacking the European Union, while taking his not-too-insubstantial salary from it. His position on the EU doesn’t differ that much from the Kippers. He is a very part of the corrupt system that Brand stands against.

OK, Russell, so if you don’t like representative democracy, what’s your alternative? Anarchy? Fascism? Monarchical absolutism? An Islamic Caliphate? Because you can’t have a functioning democracy without politicians; and politicians, in every parliament, tend to group themselves officially or unofficially into parties.

More bitchiness. Let’s get something straight: anarchism is a political philosophy; anarchy is a state in which there is chaos and disorder… which is what would happen if we lived in the kind of Randian world that Dan and his buddy Carswell dream about. Most right-wingers can’t tell the difference between anarchism and anarchy and if you attempt to point out the differences, they put their fingers in their ears. Hannan squeals “you can’t have a functioning democracy without politicians”. Well, that depends on what you mean by “democracy” and it also depends on what you mean by the word “politicians”. I suspect Hannan is only thinking of professional politicians that are drawn, as they currently are, from the ranks of the bourgeoisie and the grand bourgeoisie; the scions of the aristocracy, landed gentry and the so-called captains of industry. The very same people Hannan went to school with: in other words, those who believe it is their right to govern by dint of their circumstances of birth. We also see how the political world is explained to us on television by members of the same class as the politicians themselves, who coincidentally attended the same educational institutions. Nick Robinson? James Landale? Tom Bradby?

You might think that Brand’s contention is so puerile as not to merit serious refutation. The chap is, if nothing else, brilliant at promoting his book by courting controversy. But, listen to the ululations of the studio audience when he speaks; read the ecstasy of his Twitter followers. Russell Brand may be cynically boosting his sales, but there are millions out there who take him seriously, parroting his line about parliamentary government being a scam.

Yawn. Someone’s jealous they’re not getting enough attention. Dan? Is that you? Daft question. Hannan is rather good at promoting his dismal books too (like How We Invented Freedom and Why it Matters). In fact, he’s a well-versed in the art of self-publicity to such an extent that when he farts, Fox News is on hand to cover the event. Let’s have a look at the last phrase about parliamentary government. Hannan clearly believes there is nothing wrong and that it doesn’t need to be fixed. Parliamentary politics, as they are currently constituted, is a political dead end. Neoliberalism dominates the thinking of most of Westminster’s politicians and they countenance nothing else. “The market” we are told, “is moral” and the best we’re ever likely to get. We don’t live in a democracy, we live in a tyranny – albeit an elected one. Welcome to the dystopia, leave your dreams, hopes and desires at the door.

I remember hearing the same remarks in South America during the 1990s. Democracy is a sham, all politicians are crooks, voting only encourages them, blah blah. Such disillusionment was the prelude to the populist authoritarianism than has since spread across the continent, knocking aside parliamentary rule in Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela and elsewhere. The new caudillos aren’t exactly dictators: they were more or less fairly elected. But, once in office, they set about destroying every check on their power, from opposition media to independent courts, justifying every power-grab as a way of getting even with the old elites.

There’s only one problem with Hannan’s thesis and it’s the kind of people who were running these South American countries: the oligarchs and bootlickers who were in thrall to Washington. They were displaced through a combination of popular suffrage and education; two of the things that were denied to ordinary people during the rule of the caudillos. No doubt The Lyin’ King would like to see a return to the days of Operation Condor when people knew their place and those who didn’t were crushed under the military’s jackboot. How dare you question capitalism’s evident limits and fallibilities?

Could something similar happen in Europe? Well, look at what has already happened. In 2011, Brussels imposed civilian juntas on Italy and Greece, toppling elected governments in favour of Eurocrats. What was the justification for these Euro-coups? Pretty much the same as Russell Brand’s: that democracy had failed. As the then President of the European Commission, José Manuel Durrão Barroso, had put it a few months earlier: “Governments are not always right. If governments were right, we wouldn’t have the situation we have today. Decisions taken by the most democratic decisions in the world are very often wrong”.

Hannan’s reasoning here is sloppy, confused and relies heavily on two things: his antithesis to the EU and his love of laissez-faire capitalism. If you hate the EU so much, Dan, you could always stop taking a salary from it. Just a thought, eh? The idea that you’re fighting an ‘evil’ entity from the inside just doesn’t ring true.

Let me put the question again: what is the alternative? Dislike of party politics has been the justification for every autocrat in history: Cromwell, Bonaparte, Lenin, Mussolini, Franco. And it always starts in the same way, with the arguments now being put forward by Russell Brand.

Scaremongering and histrionics. You will notice how Pinochet is absent from his list of autocrats. Presumably, he was the right kind of autocrat. Pinochet, after all, was bolstered by the Chicago Boys, a group of Friedmanite economists who privatized everything in sight and provided the template for Thatcher and Reagan’s assault on the working class. Hannan is an admirer of Thatcher and the notion that markets will provide [for the rich].  For Hannan, all that matters is the idea of growth but it’s the kind of growth that most ordinary folk can’t see in their wage packets. It’s the kind of growth that only benefits the rich and powerful, who continue to increase rents and prices. In fact, Hannan has written a panegyric to the supposed economic growth in the 1930s in another blog. I shall carve that up in due course.

What kind of libertarian are you?

In recent years, the word “libertarian” has been hijacked by the Right, who have transformed the definition of the word from “one who supports the principle of liberty” to “one who supports an idea of liberty that gives license to the elite to continue to exploit others for personal gain”. Personally, I think these soi-disant libertarians suffer from a combination of arrested development and bad parenting. Why do I say this? These so-called libertarians are fond of complaining about “big government” and if you unpack this discourse, it’s no different to a child railing against a parent. Yet, paradoxically and without any apparent sense of irony, they would demand the retention of the repressive functions of the state should their dream of a ‘free’ society come to fruition. So much for liberty.

Among these so-called libertarians, selfishness and greed are celebrated and venerated. Selfishness is one ugly trait that the majority of parents stamp out at the age of 2. “It’s mine”, screams the toddler. Many parents will have witnessed such behaviour and will act swiftly to nip it in the bud, but other parents will cave in as soon as their child starts screaming, stamping their feet and holding their breath.  It’s the children of these parents who grow up to become Right Libertarians. They continue their selfish, greedy behaviour into adulthood and seek to rationalize it with cherry-picked words from Hayek or will hide behind the dull prose of Ayn Rand, whose words are akin to gospel in their eyes.

I saw this amusing cartoon a couple of years ago and I thought I’d share it with you.

The followers of Ayn Rand, who call themselves “Objectivists” (Oh, the arrogance), deny that they are libertarians but their gross misanthropy and their obvious cupidity says otherwise.

Ayn Rand (left) even wore a dollar sign brooch, for crying out loud!

Right libertarians never tire of telling us how much they love freedom and this wide-eyed zeal often seems like nothing more than the veneration of a fetish-object. This is clear in the language they use to promote themselves too. By the way, I’ve never heard anyone say that they “hate” freedom or even love for that matter but love is the last thing on the mind of the Objectivist. I mean, what’s in it for them? If you see what I mean…

As I’ve indicated in previous blogs, the Right’s idea of freedom is narrow and can only define itself against what it perceives as unfreedom. In other words, anyone who isn’t on the Right or doesn’t support a neo-Hobbesian formulation of liberty is, in their eyes, against freedom. If you think the NHS is worth saving, then you “hate” freedom. If you’re a socialist, you “hate” freedom and so on and on it goes.

I support civil liberties and I consider myself to be on the Left – I am a libertarian socialist. To the Right libertarian, this is as bad as admitting to being a Stalinist. Ironic, really, when you remember that many of them gave the thumbs up to General Pinochet and others like him. When you confront them with this truth, watch how they squirm.

Other self-described libertarians will tell you that they are “anti-war”, but will then advocate the use of military force to “open up” markets, often under the rubric of fighting “terror”. Remember Iraq? There were some of these so-called libertarians who saw opportunities created by the invasion and occupation of that country. In fact, they don’t mind sharing a bed with neoconservatives.  Indeed for all their talk about peace between free-trade nations, many of them are ardent warmongers  and some are even members of the Territorial Army (others hold undergraduate degrees in War Studies). What does that say about them and their brand of libertarianism? It says that they lack the capacity for self-reflection and they don’t have the critical skills to interrogate their ideas. It also shows them up for the immature liars they truly are.

Dirty money makes the world go round

Money isn’t called “filthy lucre” for no good reason. Not only do many hands touch the stuff, somewhere along the way, it  may have been involved in the oppression or deaths of others. Maybe you sell arms to dictators or gangsters. Perhaps selling crystal meth to minors is more your thing. Whatever the case, your utility provider doesn’t care where it has come from. It’s all money and money is good. Or is it?

Ayn Rand worshipped money

Ayn Rand once argued that capitalism is a “moral system”. If that is the case, then what is so moral about mass killings being funded by your taxes and channelled to some bloodthirsty tyrant overseas in a country that you’ve probably never heard of? If capitalism is a “moral” system, why doesn’t your utility company or mortgage lender never ask you the question, “How did you make this money” when you pay your bills? Surely, by accepting money that has been made from the proceeds of crime, does the recipient not become an accessory to the crime? If someone gave me some money that they’d made from crime, wouldn’t I be guilty of being an accessory?

As things currently stand, a pimp can go to his utility provider and pay his bills using the money that he obtained through immoral means. Arms dealers can pay for their meals at restaurants with money they’ve earned by selling guns, tanks and rockets to some violent dictatorship. Yet no one bats an eyelid. Who cares? I do and so should you.

Money laundering is a common method of cleaning dirty money and even legitimate institutions like banks become involved. Recently HSBC Bank was charged with money-laundering. Its CEO found himself answering the Senate’s questions.

A report compiled for the committee detailed how HSBC’s subsidiaries transported billions of dollars of cash in armoured vehicles, cleared suspicious travellers’ cheques worth billions, and allowed Mexican drug lords buy to planes with money laundered through Cayman Islands accounts.

Other subsidiaries moved money from Iran, Syria and other countries on US sanctions lists, and helped a Saudi bank linked to al-Qaida to shift money to the US.

And

HSBC’s Mexican operations moved $7bn into the bank’s US operations, and according to its own staff, much of that money was tied to drug traffickers. Before the bank executives testified, the committee heard from Leigh Winchell, assistant director for investigative programs at US immigration & customs enforcement. He said 47,000 people had lost their lives since 2006 as a result of Mexican drug traffickers.

HSBC Bank said, “Sorry”. So I guess that makes it okay. If you or I had done the same thing, we could expect to spend years behind bars but not HSBC Bank or any of its executives: they get a fine and a slap on the wrist. Naughty boys! Don’t do it again!

It’s hard to estimate how much money has contributed to the death and misery of its victims. Some people simply aren’t interested such details. These people tend to worship money and for them, the stuff can do no wrong. But is the money that’s been laundered really clean or are we deluding ourselves into thinking that such processes magically disinfect the money? To be honest, money is magical and I don’t mean that in a nice, fluffy Harry Potter kind of way. Its magical powers are derived from the meaning that people project on to it.  In other words, it isn’t real, but it isn’t tied to anything real as it had been in the past. It is based on nothing. Not gold, not oil, not platinum. You can’t even take your paper money to a bank and demand your pounds of silver in exchange,  because the teller will laugh in your face if you try.

Yet for all its magic, money is dirty, nasty stuff that ruins people’s lives. But without it, none of us can do anything.

There really has to be a better way.

Next time you pay your bills or your rent, tell the other person that you earned your money by nefarious means. I guarantee you that they won’t refuse it.

Capitalism on the slide (again)

So, it looks like we’re heading towards another recession. You can bet that the right libertarians will start screaming “We need Ayn Rand more than ever”! Actually, that’s the last thing we need. Adopting Rand’s warped ideas will only lead to a more dystopian world in which we return to a sort of pre-industrial era where right libertarians rule as feudal overlords from their gated communities.

As sure as night follows day, the usual suspects at the Telegraph and elsewhere will blame the recession on the Euro. In doing this, they wilfully ignore the writing on the wall, so to speak. The system is unsustainable. Any economic system that is based almost entirely on the pointless consumption of reified commodities solely for the purpose of impressing others is like the proverbial castle built on sand – eventually it will sink.

It’s time to put neoliberalism out of its misery and adopt a system that isn’t entirely reliant on human fear and panic. Of course, right libertarians and hardline capitalists will try and cling on as long as they can. If they won’t take their hand off the tiller, then we have to break their [metaphorical] fingers.

The party’s over for the City traders and hedge fund managers.

Rand the Moocher

From Alternet. I wonder if Dan Hannan or Dougie Carswell know about this?

Ayn Rand Railed Against Government Benefits, But Grabbed Social Security and Medicare When She Needed Them

By Joshua Holland

Ayn Rand was not only a schlock novelist, she was also the progenitor of a sweeping “moral philosophy” that justifies the privilege of the wealthy and demonizes not only the slothful, undeserving poor but the lackluster middle-classes as well.

Her books provided wide-ranging parables of “parasites,” “looters” and “moochers” using the levers of government to steal the fruits of her heroes’ labor. In the real world, however, Rand herself received Social Security payments and Medicare benefits under the name of Ann O’Connor (her husband was Frank O’Connor).

As Michael Ford of Xavier University’s Center for the Study of the American Dream wrote, “In the end, Miss Rand was a hypocrite but she could never be faulted for failing to act in her own self-interest.”

Her ideas about government intervention in some idealized pristine marketplace serve as the basis for so much of the conservative rhetoric we see today. “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” said Paul Ryan, the GOP’s young budget star at a D.C. event honoring the author. On another occasion, he proclaimed, “Rand makes the best case for the morality of democratic capitalism.”

You can read the rest here.

Randism

This made me laugh.

Britain’s press and the race to the bottom

The King Rat of sewer journalism

Last Thursday, the starting gun was fired in the British press’s race to the bottom. Just when you thought Britain’s media couldn’t sink any lower, up pops the BBC’s Ben Brown with possibly the worst interview ever conducted on television this year.

This descent into the gutter has been in progress now since the BBC opted to run a 24 hour rolling news channel that it likes to tell us is “award winning”.   On BBC Breakfast, the following day, the snide Bill Turnbull and his on-screen ‘spouse’, the simpering and gushing Sian Williams, repeated the same line of questioning. Turnbull and Williams, it should be remembered, infamously allowed Stephen Pollard to talk over Ken Loach in the day before the Iraq invasion took place in 2002.  The BBC wanted to compete on near-equal terms with Murdoch’s Sky and its US counterpart, Fox News, which offers nothing that can be described as ‘real news’.

Brown’s insensitivity was defended by Toby Young, who says in his Telegraph blog,

Watching the above clip, I don’t think Brown did anything wrong. He may look a bit callous for not making allowances for the fact that McIntyre suffers from Cerebral Palsy and just treating him as he would any other interviewee, but that’s exactly how the interview should have been conducted. For Brown not to hold McIntyre to the same standard as he would any other person on the programme because he’s disabled would be deeply patronising. After all, there’s nothing wrong with McIntyre’s brain.

But that isn’t the point, Tobes, it’s the fact that Brown insinuated that McIntrye could use his wheelchair as a “weapon”. McIntyre’s cerebral palsy is not the issue. Young offers a wee concession at the end of his blog but this is quickly followed by a boot in the face.

I’m horrified by the way in which McIntyre was treated – this really does seem like an open and shut case against the police officer concerned. But if only he had understood the policy properly – realised that it would actually make higher education more accessible to children from socially deprived backgrounds, not less – he wouldn’t have been on the street in the first place.

Young, like so many other soi-disant journalists makes the usual point of missing what the protests are all about. He, like the others, continues to labour under the misguided assumption that the demos are about tuition fees alone. Wrong. They’re about the cuts that his beloved government are about to make on public services.

The Telegraph’s John McTernan tries to make amends by saying,

My esteemed colleague Toby Young makes a brave attempt to stand up for Ben Brown’s interview of Jody McIntyre on BBC News 24. He really needn’t have bothered. The clip speaks for itself. To be honest, Brown looked like a police stooge when he repeated their claim that prior to the clip on YouTube McIntyre was rolling his wheelchair towards them. “Aw, diddums, did the man with with Cerebral Palsy scare you, and you in your riot gear and all” would have been the right response to whichever Metropolitan Police flak had the chutzpah to offer up that nonsense

But McTernan soon reveals his true colours towards the end of the blog,

While Frank Field was asked to “think the unthinkable”, today Iain Duncan Smith is going one better – he is “doing the unthinkable”. I look forward to many more blogs from Toby Young explaining precisely why the protesting public have got the wrong end of the stick about a change to the system which is really in their own best interests.

By far the worst offender in this race to the sewer, is the Daily Mail’s Richard Littlejohn. To tell the truth, Littlejohn is a long-term resident of the sewer (having moved there from the gutter years ago). He’s merely there to welcome the others to his world of turds, spent condoms, used baby wipes and discarded tampons. What’s worse is that he’s commissioned the Mail’s resident cartoonist to create a sort of Little Britain-inspired image. The suggestion here is that Jody McIntyre is ‘faking it’ because he isn’t four square behind the government’s misguided plans for higher education

The text that accompanies the cartoon isn’t any better – as one would expect.

I want to go to the demo…

Wheelchair-bound Jody Mcintyre has complained that he was beaten and manhandled by police during last week’s student fees protests.

But if he’s looking for sympathy, he’s come to the wrong place.

A man in a wheelchair is as entitled to demonstrate as anyone else. But he should have kept a safe distance.

Mcintyre put himself on offer and his brother pushed him into the front line. It’s not as if he didn’t know there was going to be trouble.

He was also at the last student demo in London and persuaded friends to hoist him on to the roof of the Millbank Tower. If his brakes had failed and he’d gone over the edge, who would he have blamed then?

Jody Mcintyre is like Andy from Little Britain.

‘Where do you want to go today, Jody?’

‘Riot.’

‘Are you sure? Wouldn’t you rather go to hear Bob Crow speak at the Methodist Central Hall. You like Bob Crow.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘So, we’ll go there, eh?’

‘Riot!’

‘Ken Livingstone will be there, too. He’s your favourite.’

‘Riot!’

‘All right, then.’

Five minutes later at the riot . . .

‘Don’t like it.’

I wonder how long it took Littlecock to dream up the idea that Jody was really Andy in diguise? Not long, I should think. Littlejohn lives in a world where he imagines himself to be under siege from the ‘polticially correct-gone-mad’, liberal do-gooders, lefties, feminists, gays, blacks, Muslims, lesbians…in fact anyone who doesn’t support Littlehjohn’s distorted version of reality is an ‘enemy within’. 9 years ago, Littlejohn had his first novel published. Titled To Hell in a Handcart, the book was roundly condemned by critics as well as those who understand real literature. The Guardian’s Stephen Moss had this to say,

To Hell In A Handcart is racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic trash. Now, Richard Littlejohn should be satisfied. He said recently that if the Guardian dismissed it in those terms, he would put it on the cover as a recommendation. Littlejohn, you see, hates the Guardian.

Christ, that sounds worse than Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

Localism: a marketing gimmick to sell council cuts?

Who ate all the pies?

I am not impressed with this new word “localism”.  It travels along the same linguistic line as the phrase “Big Society”.  It is an utterly meaningless word in the hands of avowed neoliberals.  The term “localism” has been coined to present a friendlier face to the savage cuts that are about to be made to local government finances. The localism in question is originally derived from Hannan and Carswell’s Randist-inspired treatise, The Plan- Twelve Months to Renew Britain.  Make no mistake, the general thrust of the government’s localist agenda is to remove forever the link between local people and the only bulwark they have between them and the excesses of central government. Thatcher abolished the metropolitan county councils precisely because they stood in opposition to her policies. The current plan carries this idea much further by eliminating the possibilities for town halls to spend money on social projects, since the money that comes from central government is to be dramatically reduced.

Last week, Eric Pickles, the local government minister announced his plans for ‘localism’. Pickles says on his Twitter feed,

Localism Bill will be introduced next Monday. Lots of power to to Councils

The Guardian reports,

Central to the bill, and to the decentralisation, is the general power of confidence (GPC) being given to councils. Through this, authorities are given the freedom to make social, economic and environmental decisions for their local areas, rather than being subject to top-down targets.

But how empowered councils will be in reality is up for debate. Experts warn there is a distinct lack of financial freedom partnering the GPC which could hamper any true reform.

The Guardian asks the same question that I and many others have been thinking: how will this bill “empower” councils? Local authorities will have no more power to control their finances than they do already.  The paper adds,

David Walker, the former managing director of public reporting at theAudit Commission, argues that the localism bill is in fact a con and that underneath its glossy exterior of power to the people, councils will have no more financial control than at present.

The government’s ‘localism’ project is another means by which to shape British society along the lines of Randist individualism. This means that people are disconnected from their peers and the society in which they live and are remoulded as individual consumers of reified products in a localized, but highly artificial, market place. Even the Conservative-run Local Goverment Association is finding Pickle’s localism hard to stomach. The Guardian,

The Local Government Association (LGA) is predicting 140,000 job losses over the next four years and the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accounting predict that 70,000 of those could come in the next year alone.

Pickles has already slammed the Conservative-run LGA for scaremongering on job losses and making up figures “on the back of a fag packet”, but the front-loading of the cuts in particular risks another confrontation between central and local government.

The Public Service website says,

The Localism Bill is nothing more than a smokescreen that will enable thousands of local government jobs to be cut under the name of the Big Society, the Unite union has said.

Precisely. George Orwell must be spinning in his grave. But Pickles is adamant,

“I believe it is possible to cut significant sums out of local authorities by simply improving the way local authorities operate.”

He told the BBC that councils have “simply got to wake up to the fact that it is no longer viable to have their own chief executives, their own legal departments their own education departments, their own planning departments”.

Which begs the question, why have elected local councils in the first place if this is how the government views them? This hasn’t been explained. Some councils like Barnet have cut back so severely on their public services that they may as well not exist as local authorities. Such ‘reforms’ are guaranteed to make councils into nothing more than a rubber stamp for outsourced public service contracts. As such, councillors will arguably be less accountable to their electorate. It seems to me that local authorities will have to outsource even more of their services to private interests. Companies will be invited to tender; the company that claims to be able to provide the service for the lowest cost, wins the contract. The emphasis is not on quality but what can be done for the least cost. This raises a problematic: the service provider that runs say, social services cheaply will not necessarily produce work of quality. We could see more Victoria Climbies and Baby Peters because of these highly experimental policies. But social services is one area of local authority provision where the cuts will impact the poor and the vulnerable the most. The rich will not have to worry about local provision of social services because they have the economic capital to deal with their own affairs.

As I pointed out earlier, the objective of the Localism Bill is reduce the possibility for councils to oppose any government diktats at a local level. This is also a social engineering project that is being sold as a decentralization of power. It is a dishonest attempt to foist unwanted cuts on those who are already vulnerable and those who are about to be made vulnerable.  This is a form of politicized misanthropy that is dressed up as empowerment. Like the Big Society, Localism is another marketing idea that has been dreamt up by people who place their trust in the sign alone. Philosophically empty and devoid of any real meaning, Localism is likely to kill rather than cure.

Resist the cuts!

UPDATE: 20/1/11 @ 1950

Changed “state” to “central government”.