Education and poverty

December 4, 2017 / WHY ARE WE POOR? / Leave a comment

Maybe we’re poor because we’re uneducated. Perhaps we left school without any qualifications, or maybe our qualifications aren’t as good as other people’s. Education is all equal, isn’t it?

Some people are educated for power and some people are educated for drudgery. Wealthy parents send their children to private schools, where they mingle with the children of MPs, ministers, executives, and judges. At these schools even the dimmest of students receives a personally structured education geared towards Oxford, Cambridge, or one of the other elite universities. They are given all the personal tuition needed to pass their exams. There have been allegations that often their coursework and exams are amended by the schools to ensure good marks. Their teachers are also Oxbridge alumni, their headteachers as well. Personal recommendations from close friends smooth the way. For students who aren’t very academic, the best universities have courses that are easier to get on, PPE, for example (Politics, Philosophy, and Economics) is considered easier to get on to than most courses, and the amount of work necessary during the course is much lower than more academically rigid courses. Similarly History of Art is another course tailored toward ensuring that even the least academic child of the aristocracy can get a degree. The degree is used, in these cases, to show that this person must be academically gifted and therefore suitable for office, when in fact their only real qualification is wealth. This is not to say that all degrees are worthless, just that some degrees are not really an indicator of brains. The qualification is the excuse for giving these people jobs, but the reason why the plum jobs go to the children of the upper classes is pure nepotism.

Working class children have always been poorly educated. Our education has always been second-best. The Conservatives generally prefer a two-tier system of education – grammar schools for the smartest kids and secondary moderns or comprehensives for the rest of us. This always seemed to end up with the middle-class children at grammar school, along with a handful of the smartest plebs, and the working class kids at the comp, to learn practical skills. This obviously was massively offensive to those working class parents who wanted their children to be able to work in an office, or aspire to better than they themselves had. But the varying needs of capitalism require many different types of worker, and all need to be provided by an education system. Each of them requires, to use an army expression, “just enough education to perform”. Over-educated workers get bored, move jobs more often, steal, slack off, and generally under-perform. This is bad for business! Under-educated workers make mistakes and cost money. So politicians are constantly being hassled by business leaders about changing education standards to meet their needs, whilst voters want their children to have a good education in a safe environment. So education policy is constantly being meddled with, and children suffer. Politicians almost universally pay to have their children educated so that they don’t need to worry about it. They won’t meddle in their children’s education! Not that it matters, as nepotism will see them through, no matter how dim the child.

Recently the educational trend has been towards academies. These allow businesses to make money from education, and to run schools as their own fiefdoms. Discipline is stern, allowing no leeway for vulnerable children from stressful backgrounds. Education is tailored towards whatever ideological pigeonhole the owner desires – commonly religion, or perhaps worse – the idea that future workers should have some maths and be able to read and write and be used to sitting for hours in silence, doing whatever they’re told, whenever they are told it. We know that academies are bad for us, because when the Conservatives decided that all British schools should become academies, the Tory heartlands revolted. Academies were not for their children, only ours. The plan was shelved and once again only working class children can be monetised by carpet millionaires and religious fundamentalists..

A short history of education in the UK.

Like every area of political life in the UK, education is and has been a battleground between various capitalist ideologies. Since medieval times, the upper classes paid to send their (male) children to school, to schools run by churches, or to “public schools” – that is, schools that are open to anyone who paid the fees and not restricted to those who followed a particular religion.

Working class people learned trades through a system of guilds and apprenticeships. Women of any class were rarely educated in schools, though many middle and upper class women were given some education at home.

Historically, schooling the children of the working classes was done to protect the upper classes. Unemployed children found themselves having to steal or starve. They stole from the wealthy, and they stole from the merchants. In the absence of effective social control methods, a Christian education was the next best thing. At best, working class children were given a bit of maths and english to help them before they were Apprenticed off, and a spot of food to stop them starving or stealing. At the worst, they were impressed with the knowledge that stealing was a sin and that if you starved to death at least you didn’t go to hell for eternity, and then they were left to get on with it. This was the mid 1800s. Church and Ragged schools proved a success, and laws were passed that dictated that all children should be educated between the ages of 5 and 10.

Many children were not educated because they were working. Employers of children under 10 were required to show that their employees had attained the necessary standard of education, but this was uncommon. Poor families needed the income, and unscrupulous employers needed low-paid child workers.

Working class activists were able to influence education, in these early days, by sitting on school boards and thus influencing what was taught. This was unacceptable to the Conservative party, who desired direct control over education, and thus a bill was passed that provided financial support for all schools, and gave educational control back to the British government in 1902.

In 1918 secondary education was made compulsory until 14, and secondary schools were also made subject to state control. Publically-funded education had seen to be successful, in that it both served the purposes of the wealthy and increased peace and prosperity in the country. In 1944 the Butler Act was passed, and “the tripartite system” began.

The tripartite system

Tripartite means ‘three parts’. This system splits all children into one of three types, using an examination at age 11, based on an exam called the 11+.

Type1: the grammar school student. Children who did well at their 11+ went to grammar school, where they studied academic subjects and were prepared for university, civil service, and and other important leadership roles. These children were generally the children of the middle and upper classes. This is because their schools taught them a syllabus that made it more likely the kids would pass this test, and because they could afford speciality tuition for their children. These children were then considered naturally gifted and appropriate leadership for the next generation. The children whose parents couldn’t afford to get them tuition, or who didn’t care about their children passing the 11+, or didn’t know that it was a fix and believed that it was all about natural intelligence and a level playing field, those children were considered ungifted and suitable for types 2 and 3. The 11+ did not have a pass / fail threshold. The results were sent off to the grammar schools who made offers to whichever children they wanted. Whilst this system did increase social mobility, by allowing access to the professional classes by the very brightest and best of working class children, it did so because those people who ran the businesses and industries of Britain needed more clever people than the upper and middle classes could provide. Most working class kids were not given the means to pass the exams, and that was the way it was intended. Even if a working class school provided the best possible education to the children, they were all fighting each other for a few golden tickets, and most of them wouldn’t make it even though less talented upper and middle class children were likely to get through. Cherry picking the very best and letting everyone else go isn’t true equality of opportunity or outcome, it’s a cruel imitation.

Type 2: the secondary technical student. These were the scientists and engineers. Clever children, but not the elite. For most working class children secondary technicals offered a good skillset for secure employment. However, these schools never really took off. The state wasn’t committed to the idea of spending the money to achieve uncertain aims, and so secondary technicals didn’t get going. This was because generally Unions were able to provide training for students in whatever skills were needed, and because capitalistic governments are generally reactive, no-one could make proper plans for what skills were needed. It is always cheaper and easier to import trained workers rather than wait around for a decade whilst children are educated in the skills needed today.

Type 3: the secondary modern student. That is all the rest of us. Basic education, warehousing of kids. At first secondary moderns didn’t even offer all students a chance to do exams. If you lived in the wrong place and you didn’t get into a grammar school, you might not even be allowed to take exams, no matter how smart you were or how hard you work. Imagine being consigned to failure before you even hit 11. That was how it was.

In 1965 the Labour government started the process of abolishing the grammar school system, but this process was never completed.

The comprehensive system

The idea was that the old tripartite system went, and a new system of comprehensive schools would replace it, where all students received the same quality of education as they would have done at grammar schools. In practice this didn’t happen, not least because many local authorities kept grammar schools, and because education for working class children has always been underfunded.

Despite everything, comprehensive education was mostly ok. Teaching standards were high, and exam results were pretty good considering how hard the exams were. During the 80s however, the Tories realised two things. 1. There were lots of left-wing teachers teaching children left-wing values. 2. Working class and poorer middle class Tory voters didn’t feel like their children were being prioritised over less deserving children. This needed to change. A prolonged period of meddling with the education system was about to begin.

The National Curriculum

The National Curriculum was the response to the first realisation. The National Curriculum would prevent teachers from teaching anything other than the proscribed version of events. Of course, this didn’t apply to private (aka public or independent) schools. They can teach what they like. The Tories understood the Gramscian idea of hegemony, and realised the power of working class teachers teaching working class children. This had to stop. The Gramscian idea of hegemony is that the prevailing ideas and prejudices of a society get in the way of people’s abilities to criticise a society. If a person grows up believing that Britain is fantastic and fair and egalitarian, they are less likely to believe anything that opposes this idea. And, of course, vice versa. Left-wing teaching made children more able to accept that society might have to change, which is the exact opposite of what Conservatism is about.

The National Curriculum was also an important part of creating a marketplace for education. Margaret Thatcher was a keen advocate of the capitalist economic policies that were known in the UK as Thatcherism, and which was part of a global movement known these days as neoliberalism. Competition is important to neoliberals. It was important that schools competed with each other for the best pupils, and that schools that were not popular would have to improve or close and be replaced with a new school. It was important that these ideas became embedded so that private companies could be introduced into education. Simply giving a school to a carpet millionaire to run wouldn’t have gone down well in the late 80s, people needed to get used to the idea of education as a marketplace, with failing schools being replaced by new aspirant schools, closing and reopening again with the same facilities but a new brand like a chicken shop changing from Mississippi Fried Chicken to Alabama Fried Chicken overnight.

Grant-maintained schools

Comprehensive schools were funded by the Local Education Authorities, and were subject to LEA rules and scrutiny. Many Conservatives in Labour-run LEAs felt that this was unreasonable, because it forced their children to go to non-selective schools, schools subject to the National Curriculum, or non-religious schools. In order to ensure that sensible conservative voters in Labour boroughs could ensure their children got access to an elitist education, the policy of Grant-maintained schools was introduced. The school could opt out of LEA control, and become owned and managed by the governors. The rewards were that the school got more money, could set its own curriculum, and set its own rules and regulations, and entry requirements. Essentially, schools were punished for not becoming grant-maintained, and control of education was handed over to a self-selecting group of wealthy and well-educated parents, to religious extremists, and other assorted lunatics.

A brief aside into Further Education: Polytechnics, Universities, Student Loans, and debt bondage

At the beginning of the 80s class stratifications in education were clear. The upper classes went to private schools and then to Oxbridge, the middle classes went to good comprehensives and then on to lesser universities, and the working classes, if they wanted to study, did something practical at a polytechnic. A Levels were really only for people who wanted to do a humanities subject at university, and very few children from working class families ever did. The best middle class students ended up at Oxbridge, of course, but not many working class children. However, during the 80s, the populist Conservative spiel about opportunities and aspiration (and the movement abroad of traditional working class jobs) led to an increase in working class children going to university. This created a number of problems for the Conservatives, and a number of opportunities too.

Problem number one: Student Grants. Once upon a time, the government paid a grant to all students to cover the basic costs of living whilst they studied. This was alright (thought the Conservatives) when it was just their children getting it, but upon finding their taxes supporting hordes of working class children the Tories discovered that it was a terrible idea.

Problem number two: Lots of students with degrees needed to find work, competing with the children of the upper and middle classes for professional level work.

Problem number three: Students were well known for being able to devote themselves to political actions. Many Labour MPs and a few Tory ones had spent their degrees organising and agitating against the government instead of studying. This was considered unacceptable to Thatcher’s authoritarian governments, who wouldn’t want an increase in student numbers to correlate with an increase in activism.

Problem number four: how to monetise students rather than have them cost the state money (see also, Problem number one).

Solution number one: Firstly, let’s open up university education to the working classes, without affecting the universities that the middle and upper classes go to. Thus polytechnics, the science, technology, and engineering educations centres, became universities and able to award degrees in whatever they liked without central oversight. Within a few years there were hundreds of thousands of university places available, offering degrees in every topic under the sun. It was often very easy to get in, I know of many students who were offered places on degree courses with awful A Level results – two Es, a single E, or no A Levels at all. With all these degrees out there, slowly but surely entry level requirements for work changed. So with all these qualified university-leavers out there, how does an employer know the difference between them? By the establishment, same as it ever was. One degree is not the equal of another. Degrees from Oxbridge and the so-called Russell Group of ‘proper’ Universities require a lot more work in exchange for a degree certificate. In terms of amount of work handed in, a former polytechnic degree taken in the late 90s contained about the same amount of work as a single year of an equivalent Oxford degree. And cost the same as an Oxbridge degree. The plebs were now able to get their degrees, the employer could tell by the university whether the degree was any good or not, and things were back to normal.

Solution number two: Secondly, let’s stop paying grants, and instead make loans to students. That way they’ll need to work part-time, providing a body of cheap labour for employers and competition for wages at the lower level. The loans will generate profit for private industry (once the Student Loans Company was sold), and we can keep increasing the price of education until we’ve discovered the maximum working and lower middle class students will pay for an education. Incidentally, because the interest on the Student Loans was low, wealthier students who didn’t need to take out loans in order to live would take out the loans anyway, invest them in a high interest account, and make a decent profit. This leads us to…

Solution number three: Under the old system, lots of students spent their ‘free’ time being activists and learning radical political theory. Under the new system, students spent their ‘free’ time working. Under the old system students left university with a degree and the freedom to go where they like and do what they wanted to do. Under the new system students leave university with a degree and huge debts, with the repayments starting right now. They are forced to take whatever work they can, at whatever price is being offered. Which is how we got to office junior jobs starting in the low teens demanding degrees. This is very similar to debt bondage and has successfully reduced wages for office jobs across the board.

Labour’s Legacy: PFI, many paths to funding, and academies

PFI, Private Finance Initiatives, are schemes whereby private companies bid for tenders to build and manage public sector assets on behalf of the local or national government. This is because schools and hospitals are expensive, and Tony Blair’s Labour wanted to be seen to improving the public sector, but also wanted to increase the profits of British businesses. Whilst not a bad idea in theory, what would happen would be that a contract would be offered to build a new school. The winning business would then build the school, do all the maintenance on the school, and generally at the end of the contract (normally 30 years or more) they would then own the land and buildings. There is, obviously, a lot wrong with this. Firstly, whilst the state’s initial outlay was lower, the overall cost is incredibly high, with annual contracts far far higher than the usual costs. The Labour politicians were confident that by the time their PFI repayments hit their peak, in the 2020s, none of them will need to account for their actions. They assume, as do all capitalists, that someone else will find a solution and it won’t ever be a problem. Of course, PFI repayments are already crippling the NHS and they are nowhere near their maximum. We’ve still got over a decade until it gets as bad as it is ever going to get. Secondly, the gift of the buildings and land to the contract manager has generally been a gift of publicly owned land, reducing the amount available for future public sector needs and increasing the price of private land. Thirdly, most of these contracts and land gifts will be finished around the same sort of time, losing huge amounts of hospitals and schools all at once. The planning needed to replace them at low cost should have already been started, but it hasn’t. Fourthly, the appeal of PFI to investors was that it offered fantastic returns on their investment. Given that there is little or no oversight, minimal performance indicators, and the contract managers are only responsible to the shareholders to maximise profits, how good do you think that the work is? Some PFI buildings have already collapsed -actual schools, less than 20 years old, have fallen down because the quality of the build is so bad. How long before one of these buildings goes down and causes major loss of life?

What we were offered during the 90s and 00s was the choice between making our children pay for infrastructure we need today, or not having it at all. Most people chose to make their children pay, but as the Labour government failed to predict the crash, failed to take appropriate action to deal with it, and borrowed trillions from the banks in order to stop the same banks failing, thus adding so much money to their children’s’ debts that it became incomprehensible to most people, it became obvious that New Labour had shafted the next generation in order to buy votes from this one.

Under Labour the types of different schools and their funding methods increased. The Blairite approach of being the nice Tories, aiming to take votes from the right whilst placating the left, meant that there were numerous schemes designed to appeal to both left and right voters. Community schools, voluntary aided schools, voluntary controlled schools, foundation schools, city technical schools, and academies all came along, designed to provide each set of voters with the evidence they needed that Labour was the party for them. Of these the most important to us now are academies. Like Right-To-Buy, academies are a Labour idea that Tories took to the logical extreme.

Turning children into money

Academies offer wealthy individuals and groups a chance to set up a school teaching what you like, setting what rules you like, and imposing your own ideas of education onto working class children – and it is working class children only. When the Tories attempted to roll out academies to all state educated children their own voters rebelled. What’s sauce for the goose certainly isn’t sauce for the gander. Our children can be monetised and indoctrinated into whatever lunatic position you want, but theirs can’t. If ever you need it, that’s evidence that academies aren’t good for kids.

Amongst the organisations who run ‘academy groups are:

ARK (‘Absolute Returns for Kids’), a charity created and run on behalf of hedge-fund managers. It’s board of directors is a who’s-who of serial tax avoiders.
Academies Education Trust, one of the largest, whose OFSTED results are appalling, and who pay huge amounts of money to its senior management whilst being given legal warnings for its poor financial management. AET tends to dump those schools it can’t improve, leaving their mess for someone else to sort out at the taxpayers expense.
E-ACT, whose financial mismanagement resulted in them being removed as the sponsor from 10 academies.
Emmanuel Schools Foundation, who appointed a Creationist activist as their Head Of Science, and who have been consistently linked to teaching fundamentalist Christianity in the schools.
Harris Federation, who received an incredible £45 million pounds of taxpayers money to set up a sixth form college described as a vanity project by the Public Accounts Committee, and whose working conditions are so bad that a third of their teachers leave after the first year.

Directors, trustees, and founders of these bodies are almost all heavy donors to the Conservative Party, and many have received honours from them.

So you see that we’re not poor because we’re uneducated, we’re uneducated because we’re poor. We’re given the bare minimum of education, standard qualifications that mean nothing in the so-called real world, and over-priced degrees that flatter to deceive. Those unicorns, millionaires who grew up in poor environments, are held up to show us what we can achieve, when their achievements are one-in-a-million, and are as much luck as anything else. Who will give us a proper education system that will allow our children to be the best that they can be?

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Why doesn’t work pay?

October 4, 2017 / WHY ARE WE POOR? / Leave a comment

Why are we poor? Why doesn’t work pay?

Working for a living is a fairly modern condition. Historically, from ancient times until the Enclosure Acts in the 1800s, we have worked for our local lord, giving the largest share of the crop or a period of labour or soldiering in exchange for using some common land to support ourselves. Earlier than that, people worked on a patch of land, grew whatever they could, and bartered any excess with their neighbours. And even earlier than that we were hunter-gatherers and only ate what we could find or catch.

Neolithic man – early farmers

Firstly I will explain quickly at how and why these conditions changed, and then I will explain why this is important to us today.

First of all, the change from hunter-gathering to farming meant some major social changes for ancient humanity. Farming allowed people to stay in one place and create fixed communities. This meant that individuals had to specialise. One person could grow wheat, another beans, another could raise cows for meat and milk. Farming allowed humans to create an excess that could be stored or bartered. Having an excess of food allowed us free time away from farming to develop skills such as tanning, crafts, and metalwork. These skills allowed individuals to create, and exchange their skills or creations for food or other people’s creations. These skills often allowed humans to make more food, more efficiently, and build up a greater excess and therefore have more free time for practising their own skills. But some of the creations were weapons. Even the finest stone weapons are no match for the worked-metal weapons of the Bronze age.

bronze-age weaponry was better than stone-age weaponry.

Weapons allowed some communities to dominate other communities and demand tribute. Weapons allowed a warrior class to exist. This warrior class did little or no work themselves. They claimed leadership rights and the ability to impose their own rules or laws over the places they dominated. They quickly learned to legitimise their rule by claiming that God (or the Gods) gave them the right to rule, to make it not only illegal but also a sin to dispute their rule. And from there on, in Britain at least, not much has changed. Our monarch still rules by the gift of God, our soldiers swear allegiance to the Queen rather than to the people, and much of the country is still owned by people whose land was given to them by previous monarchs, monarchs whose right to rule was based on having a bigger army and more soldiers than anyone else. The myth is that our laws, our government, our society, is modern and progressive, but all those things are based around one bunch of blokes being tougher than another bunch and getting to tell everyone else what to do.

Dominating lands gave you the ability to claim a tithe (in terms of crops, labour, or taxation) on that land (as mentioned earlier), or just take everything and pay your workers what you believed their labour was worth. At many points in history, this worth has been very low, sometimes far below that which is necessary to keep people healthy – literally starvation wages. Changes in conditions that favour the workers have been rare. In the 1300s, after the “Black Death” had killed two-thirds of the English population, peasants were able to sell their labour for much more money due to the lack of healthy workers available. The rulers of England weren’t having this, and passed a law, the Statute of Labourers which limited the amount of money people could demand, and making it illegal to move around to get a better deal. As a result of the labour shortage, very little bread was available, making bread more expensive, and so people were forced to work, facing imprisonment if they didn’t, but they couldn’t afford to feed themselves on their wages. This was one of the factors that led to the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381

The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Not pictured: London on fire.

As the amount of human beings increased, and technology got better, the amount of surplus production increased, and the amount of wealth that could be claimed from the land increased. There developed a group of people who managed trade on behalf of the landowners. They did not own the land or provide the money, but they were paid to ensure that the maximum amount of wealth was generated for the landowners. These people became increasingly wealthy themselves, many of them came to be landowners and business owners in their own right. This group of people became known as the bourgeoisie in France, though they are generally known as the middle classes in the UK. However, as they were not kings and aristocrats, they had no say in governing the country. Many of them felt that they should have a say or objected to the king spending their tax-money on his own luxury, or on wars that damaged trade. European countries were always at war with each other. This led to a series of revolutions across Europe from the 1600s to the 1900s as the middle classes struggled against the kings for power. In almost every case, authoritarian rule by the king and the aristocracy was replaced by some form of parliament, with the middle and upper classes electing members of parliament. In many places the kings survived in some form or other. In Britain, eventually the two factions settled on a parliamentary monarchy, whereby the aristocracy are allowed to keep most of their privilege in exchange for letting the middle classes run the country and have a share of the wealth. For how parliament used the law to formally take land from poor people’s use and give it to the wealthy, see my earlier essay. The monarch has to give their permission to all the laws made by parliament. It is generally considered that if she did not, then parliament would abolish the monarchy. So that this doesn’t happen, and the monarch and the prime minister have weekly meetings to ensure that parliament isn’t doing anything the monarch might object to. This is called liberal democracy.

The Queen demonstrating the British state’s commitment to democracy and equality of opportunity.

During the Labour government under Blair, the hereditary powers of the aristocracy were further eroded, as the House of Lords was reformed. By removing the right of most aristocrats to sit in the Lords, we replaced an unelected second chamber of the upper classes with an unelected chamber of government appointees. This is supposed to be fairer, but is just another undemocratic gravy train, this time favouring the political middle classes. It is used to bribe MPs and civil servants, business owners and charity workers, awarding them a healthy living and the illusion of being able to change things in exchange for them playing along with the government of the day. Incidentally, there are lots more Lords than there are elected MPs. The greater part of Britain’s politicians are not elected. Democratic choice is only a minor part of our system..

This process, by which the middle classes mostly gained the ability to control their own wealth, set their own taxes, and dictate the terms of employment, prepared the ground for the modern capitalist state.

Lots of democracy and accountability going on here, at a vast cost to the taxpayer.

This historical stuff is important because it allows us to see the set of conditions under which Britain is governed; Britain’s laws and economics and traditions have arisen through conflict between the upper and middle classes. It is these two groups who have collaborated and squabbled to create a system which works for both of them without leading to direct conflict between them. Laws are only made that benefit them. Any changes that benefit us are made only as compromise when threatened, or to buy us off. No improvements have ever been made to our conditions that have not been fought for, and often died for, by working class people long before anyone took up our case in parliament.

All of which leads us to the main points about working for a living:

Because we own neither money nor land nor factories we must sell our physical or intellectual labour in order to survive.
Employment exists because the employing class took from everyone else the ability to provide for themselves and their ancestors refuse to give it back or share. The entire system is and always has been about their needs, their laws, and their property “rights”.

The relationship between employer and employee is almost always based on exploitation. Even some very well paid people are only paid a fraction of what they are worth. The difference between the amount you are paid and the amount of money you generate for the business is called “surplus value”. Only at the very top is this relationship not always exploitative. Directors and other members of the executive classes are often paid many times their surplus value, because the people who set their pay have class loyalty and they expect to be paid this way themselves. We regularly see Chief Executives and Directors given performance bonuses despite running the business into the ground. We get laid off for their failures, they get performance bonuses and “golden umbrellas”, then get another job somewhere else and do it all again. This is class consciousness at work amongst the upper middle classes.

Sometimes the relationship between employer and employee can be pretty good – you might find that the employer pays well for your work, provides you with rights over and above the legal minimum, and pride themselves on being “a good employer”. You may get on well with your manager, or the company owner. But those things don’t change the economic facts. But even when you and your boss get on well, and your pay and conditions are good, the relationship is still exploitation. You are still generating profits for someone else, rather than receiving an equal share. Once you stop generating profits, you will be let go. You have no ownership over your work, your only incentive to work is either the need to look after your family, or sheer greed. And you might ask yourself, if I don’t get paid enough to look after my family, and I’m not greedy, then why should I work? You wouldn’t be the first to ask that.

These workers are making an informed and free decision to work rather than starve.

Capitalism is both an economic system and an ideology. As an economic system it means that private individuals rather than the state provide services and own everything. Many pro-capitalists claim that capitalism is not an ideology, and that capitalism is merely a description of a set of economic conditions. This is a dishonest claim, and is only made to deflect from criticism (both fair and unfair) of capitalism. They want us to believe that capitalism is a neutral position, rather than one in which there are lots of values, both implied and stated. There are a number of strands of ideology within capitalism, all of which compete with each other for political control. All capitalists agree that the pursuit of profit is the main and best incentive for human achievement, and that is is desirable that this should be the basis of a political system. They believe that this brings out the best in human beings, and conforms to human nature. All of them seek to increase profits year-on-year, or quarter-on-quarter. This pursuit of growth rules our society and dictates all policy from there.

The global fantasy… being able to extract infinite profits from finite resources.

Once examined, this seems both impractical and impossible. If, for example, you make profit of one million pounds in the first year, then profits of only three-quarters of a million pounds the second year, then you are failing to deliver growth and your prospects for economic success are low. Growth can be created in a number of ways. Through increased sales; through technological improvements making it cheaper to create your product; through developing new products or finding new people to sell your product to; by finding cheaper suppliers; by reducing your margins (using less ingredients / parts but charging the same price); by reducing labour costs in various ways. All companies use every one of these methods, all at once and constantly. So why is it impractical and impossible?

The answer to this question is huge and complex. I will not be able to cover everything. But we can give it a good try!

It is impractical because it reduces every idea and interaction into units of profit regardless of the success or failure of the product, environmental or human cost. It creates both artificial scarcity and artificial glut depending on whether it suits the owners better to flood the market or starve it. It encourages dishonesty and unpleasant behaviour. We measure human success only by money generated and not by anything meaningful. Development is based on profits, not social usefulness. Money is all that counts. Surely you are worth more than the profit you can generate for your boss? Capitalists claim that the “invisible hand of the market” resolves all issues. For example, human beings are fishing the oceans clean of fish. Bluefin Tuna is almost extinct. Capitalist theory supposes that if we want tuna in the sea, we should be paying people more money to not fish tuna than they earn by fishing tuna. The argument goes that we clearly don’t care about the oceans or we’d pay for it. As if we can afford it! (It is worth pointing out that attempts have been made to pay people not to fish, using state wealth to fund the payments. Free-market capitalists have generally done their best to stop this from happening through a variety of political and legal methods. The payments should be made by individuals, according to them, not from taxation). The “invisible hand of the market” assumes that all possible options are both affordable and available. Capitalism, through advertising and marketing, creates the illusion of choice, whilst decreasing the amount of real and meaningful choices you have. Capitalism without state intervention to direct it creates stagnant economies, massive wealth inequality, and reduces all value judgements to “will it make a profit”. This is where we are now – massively in debt (both as individuals and as a country), with everything owned by a few corporations who rely mostly on cutting labour costs in order to continue growth.

Of the many ways to create growth, the only one that is guaranteed to work is cutting your labour costs. If you haven’t developed successful new products, found new markets, gotten cheaper parts, etc., then you need to get your workforce to do more for less. You can’t make people buy your products, but what you can control is how much you pay in wages. So below inflation pay rises, or no pay rises at all increases profit for the employer. Getting staff to be self-employed and pretending it’s their choice increases profit. Moving your factory to China certainly increases profits. When all else fails, the workers get screwed, not the shareholders. That’s growth!

It’s cheaper to make these toys and ship them to England, than it is to make them in England.

The pursuit of growth is absurd because it doesn’t reflect reality. Growth is alright, but it isn’t everything.. If my business costs 1 million pounds a year to run, then really i only need to make 1 million and 1 pounds a year. Anything above that is all good. Profits being down isn’t a tragedy, it’s just a bad quarter. You can run your business for years without having significant growth but also without losing money. So why do capitalists pursue growth above all other things? It’s nonsense. It’s just greed.

Profits are greater now than at any time in human history, but they are not growing – the richest people in the country own a bigger share and pay less tax than at any time in modern history. But at the same time, we are living under austerity? How can we be fabulously wealthy and also broke? It is impossible because we are a finite world, and we only have so much to go round. We are seeing capitalism unable to generate new markets any more, and because the rich don’t pay much tax, countries are poorer, which means that their people are poorer and unable to buy as much stuff. So now profit is coming from wealth generated through transferring tax money to the private sector through privatisation, and through cutting wages, and expecting people to do more work, and avoiding taxes. Wages are falling in Britain, but profits are growing because of this. People are not spending more, instead they are earning less. The economy is increasingly reliant on lowering wages to maintain (meagre) growth.

There are many different forms of wage lowering used by employers, with varying degrees of legality. Many businesses transfer their skilled jobs overseas, to countries where wages are lower or labour laws not so strict. Some countries encourage this by creating Economic Zones where business taxes are low or non-existent. Many countries have little or no regulation of work, meaning that they can use actual slavery. How can we compete with that? The results of this “globalisation” is that there is less skilled work available and thus skilled workers are forced to compete with each other to see who will accept the lowest wage, and the worst conditions. This is happening with qualified work as well, and increasingly the university educated worker is discovering that they are unable to find well-paid work that is relevant to their degree..

In a similar process, where work in the UK cannot be moved to where labour is cheaper, competition needs to be created here. This is where immigration comes in. You might have asked yourself why the EU keeps getting bigger, taking in more and more countries, whose people then can move freely to the UK (and the other wealthier countries of the EU) and work? Each extension of the EU opens the job-market to progressively poorer countries, using their workers to provide competition to existing labour, and opening their resources to easy exploitation by EU-based corporations. The mainstream media, both pro- and anti-European, like to give the impression that we allow all these people to come here because we’re nice. Immigration, the message goes, makes us all better people, is a kindness to those who want to come here to work, and all of that. But in reality immigration is used to push down wages at the low end. During the EU referendum debate you might have seen denials that immigration pushes down wages, stats showing that immigration increases GDP and so on. But immigration doesn’t push down wages for the middle and upper classes – for them immigration is an opportunity to work in different places, or to find skilled foreigners to fill managerial and professional roles. But immigration pushes down wages for those of us at the lower end of the pay scale. Who is going to pay us a living wage to pick vegetables when you can pay an agency to ship in transient workers on below minimum wages? And this is happening all across the UK. We’re being told it’s not, but our own lived experience tells us otherwise. Much of the low paid, or seasonal work, is now being done by immigrants from countries where there is no welfare and little work. In London, where cleaners used to be working class mothers, students and grandmothers earning a bit more money, they’re now African or South American and struggling to survive on their wages. In Lincolnshire, where food pickers used to be local, they’re now Eastern Europeans living in barns and bunkhouses, paying rent out of their wages, plus a cut to agent that found them the work. When such jobs are available, the pay is so low you can’t afford your family’s food and rent, so you can’t take the job, and then voices in the media call British workers lazy and talk about cutting benefits unless you work.

What a lot of nonsense.

Some people blame migrant workers for this, which is putting the cart before the horse. The blame has to lie with the person who exploits, not the exploited themselves. Blaming the victims for the conditions imposed upon them is always wrong. People who want you to blame the immigrants rather than the employer or the system are trying to distract you from the real problems in society.

The next way that capitalists create profit from wages is unpaid labour. This takes many forms. Firstly, there are programmes for the unemployed that provide businesses with thousands of hours of unpaid labour every week, every hour of that labour saves them money and increases their profits. Every hour of that labour is work taken away from someone who needs it. This labour doesn’t replace work for middle and upper class people of course. And you need to do it in exchange for your benefits. So in the end you’re doing the same job you did before, but for no money! When they replace a paid job with an unpaid job, that’s a person on benefits and not paying tax. Unpaid labour takes from the state and the taxpayer, and gives to the corporation and shareholder. Likewise, when a job pays so little that the worker needs top up benefits, the taxpayer is subsidising the employer’s profits. If the employer needs state benefits to top up their employee’s wages, it’s a failing business by any meaningful analysis. If it’s a profitable business that can afford to pay better but doesn’t as that would eat into profits, then that business is stealing from us taxpayers.

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Work for free ensures that only the wealthy get work experience.

Other ways in which capitalists create profit from unpaid labour is in prisons, where prisoners work for pennies an hour, redeemable against inflated prices in the prison shop. There are punishments for prisoners who won’t work. Many prisons are privately run, their owners incentivised to cut costs and conditions and create dangerous environments for both prisoners and guards. Remember that capitalists profit from prisoners. Politicians and judges are also business owners, board members, and shareholders that profit from every working class man or woman sent to prison, whilst the wealthy hire expensive lawyers to keep them out of prison at all costs. Justice is not blind. A working class person is more likely to be arrested, charged, and convicted. Middle and upper class people, if convicted, receive lower jail sentences than their working class peers. Meanwhile those who won’t turn to crime have to compete with prison labour to see who can provide the cheapest workers. Whether you’re a criminal or not the prison system harms you.

Prison labour is little better than slave labour, and takes jobs from working class people.

In terms of employment, there’s only really one thing you can do to improve our conditions. Where we have work, we can join unions. Unions are mostly toothless these days, and many of them are run by the same class of people who run the businesses. I know of more cases than I can count where unions have failed workers, either as individuals or as a class. However, they are (only just) better than nothing, and it remains illegal to sack a worker for joining a union, for union activities, or for agitating for better pay and conditions. Sometimes even fighting and losing is better than accepting things as they are.

Not all workers are employed, of course. At any given time there is a group of unemployed workers looking for a job. Where workers are scarce, wages go up. Where workers are easy to find, wages go down. This is another reason why Britain is always importing workers from abroad (not to mention that this saves the British state money, as another country has paid to educate and train those workers). The zero-hours phenomenon has been fantastic for both employers and the state, as it means that a worker can simultaneously be unemployed and working! But zero-hours workers find that they are poorer than ever and competing with their class-peers for the tiniest scraps of work.

As we can see, the end result is always the same. We are poor because our ancestors weren’t rich. We are poor because their system is failing us. We work harder and receive a decreasing share, whilst profits soar. This cannot continue. We are poor because work does not pay enough to live on, because our labour is not remunerated fairly, and we are poor because our poverty is necessary for their wealth.

Why is housing so expensive, part 2

July 6, 2017 / WHY ARE WE POOR? / Leave a comment

Why is housing so expensive, part 2

In this part of the article, I am going to look at three of the important names in politics, whose work has helped to ensure that you can’t afford to buy a house. This covers three different sets of policies, all of which contribute to the price of housing..

Duncan Sandys – as MInister of Housing Duncan Sandys created the idea of Green Belt land, and encouraged councils to enact guidelines in their planning policies to ensure that a permanent ring of undeveloped land existed around Britain’s cities. This was to prevent something called Urban Sprawl, to stop the cities becoming huge and sprawling and spread out. The practical result of this is that our cities are unable to grow, and available land within the green belt circle becomes ever more expensive as time goes on. 13% of England is Green Belt land. That’s more land than the cities themselves. Duncan Sandys didn’t know it at the time (though it could have been predicted) but his system created something called artificial scarcity in city housing. This artificial scarcity further pushes up the prices of land. Over the years landowning groups have encouraged politicians to present Green Belt as an environmental protection, so successfully that most people these days believe that Green Belts are about fresh air, environmental protections, and open access to the countryside for stressed urban working classes! To be clear, I think that we need policies to protect from urban sprawl and to ensure that the countryside doesn’t disappear under acres of concrete, but the current laws create artificial scarcity of available land in the cities and should be reworked..

Moving onward to the 1980s- Margaret Thatcher wasn’t the inventor of Right To Buy^[1], as various councils had used it as a policy since the 1960s. There was nothing specifically wrong with allowing council tenants to purchase their properties, but the conditions attached by Thatcher ensured that the properties could not be replaced.

As a consequence, social housing is now incredibly difficult to get and goes only to very neediest. Many of those needy people may not appear deserving to outsiders. They may have many children, serious mental health conditions, a history of offending due to their mental health problems, they may well be refugees from oppressive states who can’t speak English. All of these factors make it seem like “the deserving poor”, those of us who work, or are too sick to work but not sick enough to receive social support, those of us who aren’t offenders, who can look after our properties, who are British taxpayers who have long paid into the system, that we are not receiving support whilst outsiders are. It seems unfair!

We are turned against each other by politicians and the media, fighting over who deserves to receive state help whilst a third of the properties sold under Right To Buy are no longer lived in by their owner. These are generating income for people who already own property, making it harder and more expensive for poorer people to get somewhere to live.

The mix of leasehold and freehold properties on an estate has created terrible problems in maintenance as well. Leaseholders are expected to pay a share of repairs, but sometimes they refuse (as these repairs can be incredibly expensive), leading to delays whilst legal arguments go on. I have personally seen essential repairs to keep out water put back by years by non-residential leaseholders unwilling to pay their share, whilst children live in damp and unsanitary environments for long periods. I have seen a council being sued by tenants and leaseholders at the same time, one party demanding that works are done and the other demanding that they are not. It was terrible legislation that has caused far more damage than it has done good and continues to do harm today. Just ask yourself, why is that the Tories only gave Council Tenants right to buy? Why weren’t private tenants given the right to buy? Why was it our shared property that was given away? What is the difference between a private tenant and a council tenant that one should have this right and not the other? This is not to say that it is wrong to have bought your house under Right To Buy; but it was wrong for the state not to replace that property to give other people a chance to get on the property ladder.

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Gordon Brown – In order to improve the economy, the Labour governments’ further deregulated the finance sector^[2]. Deregulation is the process of removing legal checks and rules on lending. This made it easier and cheaper for banks to lend money. Millions of people who could not previously afford a mortgage now found it within their grasp, whilst those who already owned a property were able to remortgage it and buy a property (or multiple properties) to let. At the same time they deliberately didn’t build a lot of housing, creating a strong market for property owners, and making property a better investment than keeping your money in a bank. Lending has now changed a bit, meaning that once again the poor are unable to access the housing market. Brown’s economic policies have deliberately impoverished the future generations in order to give a few years of a strong economy.

On Gordon Brown

The housing boom of the late 90s and 00s was created by banks being willing to lend people money easily and cheaply. This enabled a lot of people to buy houses in a relatively short period of time. This meant that sellers upped their prices, and so people paid more for their houses. Now that has stopped, but interest rates are still low and prices are high. This means that people who have houses can afford more houses – they can borrow against their existing properties safe in the knowledge that the rental income is greater than the mortgage repayment costs, not even taking into account the house price inflation itself.

Continuing house price rises indicates that sellers of houses are confident that wealthy people are buying houses; and that buyers are confident that house prices won’t drop. In London especially we are now seeing foreign investors buying up properties and leaving them empty. They are paying what they are asked, so the asking price keeps getting raised. This will keep on happening until someone loses confidence! No longer do sellers have to pitch their price just right, no ordinary person can afford to buy a property now, if it’s too much for a local family, then someone in China or Dubai will buy it. British properties bought by foreign investors and left empty remove that property from the local community, from the rental market, and also push prices up even more, making more people trying to get cheaper properties, and pushing those prices up too!

The winners were those who were able to jump on the cheap credit boom and buy a house, or multiple houses. The losers are those of us who were too young, or too poor to take advantage.

Recently the purchase of houses in fashionable areas by landlords who let out properties to holiday lets via the internet has the effect of removing many properties from the community. These properties are generally bought without mortgages, so that the rental income is all profit (and above what the local rental market would pay for long-term lets). This reduces supply whilst increasing demand, and pushes up the prices of both rental and purchase markets.

So we can see that a series of government actions have created an economy where housing is too expensive for the ordinary person to afford. Roughly 70% of British people own all the property and land in the UK. The 30% that are left have to fight it out amongst themselves. But there is more than enough land to build houses, and there are already more empty properties than there are people without houses. So why are we in a housing crisis? Why haven’t the government changed the rules?

There are a number of reasons why the governments since Brown have done almost nothing to make the necessary changes that will allow us all to afford houses.

Firstly, because the government themselves benefit from this arrangement. Many MPs and Peers are landowners, landlords, or both. Any change to this system would cost them money. Why would they do anything that would reduce their income significantly?

Secondly, and maybe more importantly, because it would be an electoral calamity. 70% of the population are homeowners. Though only 2% of the British population own multiple homes, many properties are owned by foreign investors. The conditions of artificial scarcity I referred to earlier have increased the value of their properties, and made being a landlord very profitable, or meant that their mortgages were for a lot of money. Doing away with the conditions that create artificial scarcity will lower the value of existing houses, make being a landlord unprofitable, and for those whose mortgage is for a high value, it will lead to negative equity (where your mortgage is worth less than your house, so that even if you sell your house you will not be able to pay off your mortgage).

So we see, there is no incentive to make housing accessible to those of us who can’t afford it. Only when we become politically powerful will we be able to demand housing reform. This time will come eventually, as property ownership is decreasing again thanks to these various measures.

Increasingly the wealth and growth (a word for the amount of extra profit created year-on-year) of individuals, corporations, and therefore the country, is based on charging people for access to property and other commodities (rather than sales or manufacturing). This is known as a rentier economy, and is generally considered to be the sign of serious problems in an economy. Wealth can only be created by people having money to spend, and confidence that they won’t need that money later on. Both Thatcher and Brown relied on providing access to credit in order to give people this money – historically this was done by paying people more, providing well paying jobs, and making people genuinely richer. When people are spending all their money on housing, that money isn’t being spent on goods and services, and these sectors collapse. The entire economy becomes about increasing rent or house prices each year, without pay rises for the people. Sooner or later people can’t afford to rent, or buy houses. By marketing property abroad and allowing foreign wealth to drive the economy the collapse is put off for a bit, but the rest of the economy suffers.

By looking at land ownership, we see a system where conditions are skewed in favour of landowners, who receive vast payouts from the state; where it is near-impossible to build cheaply; and where the majority of the electorate and ruling classes profit from high prices.

So why are we poor? We are poor because we have no land, whilst they have land because their great-grandfather took it from us. Then their grandfather invented a law so that they could keep it. We are poor because the landowners are not willing to share, because we are paying for their fields whilst we can’t afford to heat the flats they rent us. We are poor because 2% of Britain are landlords but 30% of us pay our wages or benefits to them, lining their pockets. We are poor because the country’s economy requires it. How is that right?

Why is housing so expensive? Part one

June 7, 2017 / WHY ARE WE POOR? / Leave a comment

This is a big question, so we’re going to break the answer into a two posts. Firstly, we’re going to look at land ownership.

To begin with, a question. Who owns England? Have a think about it. There are a number of common answers to this question, and most of them are wrong. For example, do the people of England own the country? Absolutely not. Not a square centimetre of England is owned by the people of the country. The entire country is owned by The Crown.

The Crown is the name given to the legal entity of the British State. By legal entity, I mean “an association, corporation, or individual that has legal standing in the eyes of law.” A legal entity has capacity to enter into agreements or contracts, assume obligations, incur and pay debts, sue and be sued in its own right, and to be held responsible for its actions.. It is represented in person by the Queen but is also (and at the same time) the British state itself – the government, the land, and the legal system. This is nothing to do with all that Legal Name nonsense seen on billboards over the last few years.

The Crown is the British government, and Britain, and the Queen, all at the same time.

Everyone in England is a tenant of The Crown. This is because our land laws are loosely based on a combination of Anglo-Saxon and Norman feudal laws. (Once the monarch dispensed land to his barons, who owed the monarch obligations in return. The barons divided this land amongst their knights, who owed the barons obligations in return. The knights divided this land amongst their squires who owed the knights obligations in return. The squires divided this land amongst their tenants, who owed the squires obligations in return. These obligations took the form of tithes (a share of the crops), cash rents, and/or military service.)

The two types of tenure that exist in the UK are freehold, and leasehold. Freeholders own exclusive rights to use their land for set periods (often 999 years, renewed whenever the land is sold); leaseholders have limited rights to use their land for shorter periods, and often have to pay service charges or land rent to the freeholder. When we talk about landowners, or homeowners, we’re actually talking about people who are tenants. Their tenancy is long, and generally they can do what they like with their property, so to all intents and purposes they own it. But nevertheless, the British state, that is The Crown, sees them as tenants (and probably has the same attitude toward them that your landlord has towards you).

this is the basis of our current land ownership and laws in the uk.

So now we understand that The Crown owns England, and everyone else is a tenant of The Crown, we need to look at landholding (landholding refers to the people who own or manage land or property) more clearly. From now on, when I talk of ownership, I mean the freeholder of any piece of land. In almost all cases, the freeholder is the effective owner of land and they reap all the benefits of ownership. We could also use the word ‘control’ to describe their relationship to the land.

About 32% of Great Britain is owned by the Crown Estate (on behalf of the Queen and Royal Family), the aristocracy, the titled nobles such as Barons, Lords, and Duchesses), mostly land granted to them by various monarchs from 1066 onwards. That’s a third of the country, still in the hands of the ancestors of the original thieves. There used to be land in the UK that was known as common land, and all were entitled to use this land. This common land allowed landless British people to survive by being able to graze animals and maintain themselves. However,between 1604 and 1914 laws were made to gift this land to the aristocracy and other wealthy citizens, and made huge numbers of the rural poor unable to feed themselves.

At much the same time many of the ruling classes had urban factories that they needed labourers to work in. Some historians have suggested that these two facts were connected, whilst others claim that the two were completely unrelated and a matter of coincidence.

Once there were millions of acres of open fields and common land, now those commons exist only as fragments and no-one can use them to support themselves. The ancestors of those who took the land often still own it, whilst the descendents of the rural poor are generally still poor themselves. The land and wealth are as linked now as they have ever been.

Land in the UK comes under three categories: Agricultural (farms etc); Urban (homes and shops and factories – including cities, towns, and villages); and “natural waste” (mountains and other land unsuitable for farming). There are 42 million acres (an acre is about the size of half a football pitch) of agricultural land. There are 12 million acres of natural waste. There are 6 million acres of of urban land (of which about 3 million acres are actual homes).. As you can see, urban land takes up very little space in the UK.

Britain isn’t over-built. We just need laws that favour the best use of land.

If you are the owner of any of that 42 million acres of agricultural land you qualify for a handout from the taxpayer, whether or not you grow crops, raise animals, or leave it alone. This amounts to £5 billion pounds a year (in 2010). This goes to the landowner. It is called the Single Farm Payment, sometimes described as a subsidy to protect farmers from cheap foreign imports (which is doesn’t do very well), but in reality it is a reward for owning land, paid for by the rest of us through our taxes. It is unconditional, which means that it doesn’t matter how rich you are already or what you are doing with your land, you still receive it. Compare this to means-testing of benefits. In fact, the more land you own, the more money you are given. As a point of comparison, in 2014 the government spent £3 billion pounds on unemployment benefits. How can it be right that more of our tax money is spent on rewarding landowners than preventing the unlucky from starving? I thought Britain was supposed to be broke.

As we see, Britain spends a huge amount of money of rewarding wealthy landowners. Many of these are people who bought that land as an investment, because of this income and from the increase in land values over time. We don’t know exactly how much each person gets, because the government won’t tell us. But we do know that the average is about £20,000 each. Not bad, eh? In Scotland we know that the single biggest payment in 2009 was £1.2 million. The smallest landowners receive very little – that’s 65,000 people who have farms of 2 acres or less. They don’t get much. But the biggest get a lot. So how does that affect the price of houses?

This creates a system where land is valuable for reasons other than its use. Without this reward, landowners would have to decide on the most economical use of their land. With it, the land becomes more valuable than its actual worth. It becomes a good investment to own this land rather than build on it. We are, in fact, paying the wealthy not to build on their land at a time when housing is desperately needed.

this farm might earn more money from the Single Farm Payment and subsidies than it does from farming

One tiny ray of light – because this payment is arranged by the EU through something called the Common Agricultural Policy, it may be that after Brexit this payment no longer takes place. If we are lucky it can be replaced with something sensible that protects the smaller farmers without rewarding land ownership and distorting land prices across the country. The current Conservative government however has claimed that they might increase it after Brexit. We can only hope that this does not happen.

It gets worse though. Despite the best efforts of the Land Registry, roughly half of British agricultural land is either unregistered, or is registered to offshore companies. This makes it almost impossible to know who really owns the land, or what they are doing with it, or intend to do with it. This in turn makes it very difficult to plan towns and estates. It allows landowners to effectively volunteer their land in exchange only for huge amounts of money. By only releasing land in small plots for high prices, Britain’s landowners massively inflate the price of housebuilding.

It gets worse though. To understand how this is, we need to go back to two previous Prime Ministers – Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, and even earlier than that, to 1950s Tory Minister of Housing and aristocrat Edwin Duncan Sandys.

To be continued…

Hard Work, Poverty, and Reality.

May 9, 2017 / WHY ARE WE POOR? / Leave a comment

Why are we poor? Is it because we don’t work hard enough?

We all know that hard work equals success, don’t we? On the TV, in the papers, on the internet, the message is everywhere. If you work hard you will get rich. If someone is poor, surely then it is because they didn’t work hard enough, they didn’t want enough to be rich. Therefore anyone poor obviously doesn’t care about being rich, they don’t want to work hard, they’d rather not put in the hours necessary to get rich.

Isn’t it easy to believe this? Certainly, rich people believe this to be true. Self-made rich people definitely believe this to be true – and for them, it IS true. They worked hard, they got rich. Therefore everyone can do it. But can they?

First of all, we need to define “hard work”. What does “hard work” mean?

Does it mean the same as heavy physical labour – work that is physically hard to do? If you do hard work, will you get rich? Looking at some of the hardest work possible, that of labouring, we see that it definitely won’t get you rich. Up and down the country, outside DIY stores and similar places, we see groups of men waiting, hoping to be hired for a day’s work. The rates are below minimum wage, often as low as £20 for a day of lifting and carrying, clearing building rubbish. This hard work won’t get you rich. But this is illegal, of course. Both worker and boss are breaking the law, and that might be why the pay is so bad. Surely legal hard work will get you rich?

Work doesn’t come much harder than being a hod carrier. Bricks are heavy! Searching today (I wrote this in 2016) on indeed.co.uk, we can see that there are 130 hod carrier jobs being advertised. Just over two thirds of them (67%) have wages of less than £20,000 per year, and only 6% have wages of over £35,000 per year. Only 1 of these 130 jobs are advertised as permanent. So you can see, it’s possible to do OK as a hod carrier, but you won’t get rich.

There are plenty of other hard working jobs though. Warehouse Operative is a very common job these days, and is widely accepted to be heavy labour. Searching for the word “warehouse” on indeed.co.uk we can find 10,749 jobs available, of which 80% offer less than £20,000 per year. It seems like you won’t get rich this way either.

Perhaps “hard work” means using your body to develop physical skills – footballers are paid a lot. Perhaps you can get rich that way.

Well, if you’re out of school and not already a footballer, it’s too late, and even if you are, the Professional Footballers Association state “Of those entering the game aged 16, two years down the line, 50% will be outside professional football. If we look at the same cohort at 21, the attrition rate is 75% or above.”* You need to have made that decision as a child and worked towards it from there and even then you’re almost certain not to be a professional. The same applies for all other sports. Hard work might get the best of the best very well off, but for most sportspeople it’s done for the love.

Perhaps “hard work” refers to jobs that you need to be clever and put in long hours to do. Nursing is a job for clever people, and they work long hours. Yet of the 35,000 or more jobs advertised using the tag ‘nursing’ on indeed.co.uk, more than a third (35%) of them pay under £20,000 per year. You can do better nursing than you can as a hod carrier though, as senior workers in the private medical sector can do better than £45k per year (according to indeed.co.uk). Teaching perhaps? You could earn up to 50k per year as a senior teacher, perhaps even more in management. Even though £50,000 is rich to us, it’s certainly not rich by the standards of wealth. We can see that if you were lucky enough to grow up with a home life that meant you could concentrate on your studies, and a good education, and then made the right career choices, worked hard and didn’t get ill or unlucky, you could earn a decent living. That’s a lot to ask, isn’t it?

So when people say that hard work gets you rich, they don’t mean all hard work. They certainly don’t mean hard work on its own. They mean hard work combined with the right conditions. And those conditions are not available to everyone. If some of these conditions aren’t in place, no amount of hard work will make you rich. And, as we’ll see, the important factor in getting rich is not actually hard work, but the other conditions. Hard work is actually a meaningless factor for most of the rich, but one which they usually say is the reason for their wealth. They claim to have worked hard, whilst ignoring the other factors. It means they can make themselves seem deserving, rather than lucky. It means they can blame people’s poverty on laziness and poor life choices, rather than to bad luck or systemic** factors.

It is clearly a lie that hard work is why the rich are rich. We are poor not because we don’t work hard, or because we are lazy. We are poor because the system is not designed for us to get rich. We are poor because only the luckiest individuals can get rich, individuals with the right connections. We are poor because we were born into a society which is set up so that most people always get a raw deal, where the possibility of getting rich gets smaller every year, and where the myth of hard work keeps us working hard for wages that are not enough to live on, or shames us when we want to work hard but there are no jobs for us.

* http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/28950665

**systemic when I talk about “systemic factors”, i mean factors relating to the different systems that make up the society we live in. For example, business and trade, education, the economy, health, and the law are all systems, as is the government.

A Users’ Guide To Political Parties

May 4, 2017 / WHY ARE WE POOR? / Leave a comment

Our first post is an introduction to the main players at Westminster – the British political parties. It looks at who they are, where they come from, and what they stand for. This knowledge is useful because it allows you to interpret their policies better, and to judge for yourself why they are making that policy and whether they can be trusted.

This article has been written by someone involved in London politics. For those dealing with the politicians in the devolved parliaments of Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland there may be less useful information. Perhaps one of our readers might like to write us a piece about the politics of the assemblies?

A Users’ Guide to Political Parties

We can’t trust politicians to tell the truth about what they are and what they believe. In this, like in all things political, they speak with forked-tongues. Politicians are keen to present their politics and actions as part of a sensible middle ground between left and right. See here, and here.

Not only is this not logical – the ethical thing to do isn’t a central point between two opposing positions, that’s just a compromise position, the ethical thing to do is always the ethical thing, regardless of whether it is a right-wing position or a left-wing position (or neither, or both). As a thought experiment, let’s think about two positions regarding whether or not to set a baby on fire. The compromise position might be to set it a bit on fire, then put it out. Perhaps instead of setting it completely on fire, or never setting it on fire at all, we can set its head on fire every Monday? Whilst this is a deliberately extreme example, it shows that simply adopting a middle ground between two competing ideas isn’t always right.

But the middle ground can be a useful place to be. A voter might be willing to compromise on some things in order to get the law to change on others. So positioning yourself in the middle might seem like a sensible position between two competing ideos, and catching elements of both. Of course, this has led to many politicians claiming their politics are the middle ground – the Tories have recently made plenty of claims to be a middle ground, (though any analysis of their actions reveals the lie behind those claims). This doesn’t just apply to the centre-ground. Some people make a living from presenting middle-ground ideas as radical. The newspapers and comment sections are full of writers who are say they are radicals and socialists, yet an analysis of their policies would show them to be social liberals. So where do the various politicians and parties stand and what do all these terms mean?.

Let’s start with a bit of history. The terms right and left come from the French Revolution of 1789, where the members of the National Assembly (the French Parliament at the time) divided themselves into two political groups according to whether they supported the King or supported the revolution. The king’s supporters sat on the right hand side of the room, the supporters of the revolution sat on the left. For more information on this, see Wikipedia. Whilst this particular parliament didn’t last very long, the idea stuck, and the terms right and left came to mean roughly what they do today. Right-wingers tend to emphasise tradition, private property, respect for the church and monarchy, increased powers of the legal authorities, reduced welfare rights, and unfettered capitalism. Left-wingers tend to demand change, nationalised utilities, the separation of church and state, abolition of the monarchy, expect capitalism to serve the people if it is to continue at all, and support restorative justice. Both left and right generally claim a monopoly on democracy and free speech. In the US, right and left mean slightly different things – the right are the same conservatives, but the left are liberals – centrists, rather than socialists or even social democrats. The increasing comingling of the European idea of left with the American one has helped to push left-wing politics to the right in recent years, led by Tony Blair in the UK and Bill Clinton in the US.

Conservative Party

The British Conservative party, or to give them their full name, the Conservative and Unionist Party, is the most successful of Britain’s political parties. It was formed from a split within the old Tory Party back in 1834, and when that Party dissolved their name was used as a nickname for the Conservatives. The old Tory Party (Tory is an anglicised Irish word, torai meaning ‘robber’, intended as an insult but adopted ironically by a group of aristocratic parliamentarians to describe themselves) was a party of the landed aristocracy, whilst the Conservative Party aimed to be a party for both the aristocracy and the wealthy middle-class merchants. In terms of the modern Conservative Party, there are a number of things that all Tories believe.

The monarchy. There isn’t a place in the Conservative Party for republicans.
The Union. They believe that Britain should be united, that England, Wales, NI, and Scotland are all part of one united state and should not be independent states. Many Conservatives advocate for increased devolution of powers to England, where they have a majority, to prevent Scottish and Welsh politicians from helping to oppose their bills.
Capitalism. All Conservatives are enthusiastic capitalists. But! The Conservative Party has a slightly complex relationship with capitalism. Some Tories subscribe to a philosophy called one-nation conservatism. These Tories believe that capitalism should be a benevolent master to the working classes. Thus one-nation conservatives want a more gentle roll-back of state-funded services, as opposed to a strict one. They believe in reducing the country’s spend on education, health, and welfare, rather than removing it completely. One-nation conservatism arose as a response to the rise of socialism, as an attempt to co-opt the working classes into conservatism. Other Tories believe in a philosophy known as the New Right. They don’t believe that capitalism has any duties towards the less privileged and argue that the state should exist only to provide security and that all other services should be privatised and provided based on ability to pay. This philosophy is often known in the UK as Thatcherism or neo-liberalism (or which more later). Sometimes Tories of the New Right, such as David Cameron, try to present themselves as One-nation conservatives, or are presented as such by their supporters.
- Neo-liberalism can be confusing. For many people liberalism means social liberalism – tolerance, multiculturalism, protection of minority rights and that sort of thing, but this is a modern (and slightly dishonest) use of the term. In this case liberal means liberalisation. This means the removal of laws restricting trade. These laws might be protectionist in origin (which means tariffs put on imported goods to prevent undercutting British manufacturing), or they might be health and safety laws, working rights, minimum pay rates, or laws preventing exploitation. Neo-liberals see people as possible markets to exploit, and as such many are enthusiastic supporters of diversity. There’s no use cutting someone out of the opportunity to give you their money! Here is a good example of Barclays Bank sponsoring Gay Pride and encouraging attendees to use Barclays’ own payment app to donate money and buy stuff. Thus capitalists can appropriate causes and profit that way.

Hierarchies. Conservatives expect ‘natural hierarchies’ to be respected. They think that the natural order of things is having Conservatives and their friends at the top. They would argue that they have experience of leadership and thus are best suited to lead. They argue that the best people rise to the top, and thus the upper classes and those who make a lot of money must be the best people. The obvious flipside of this is that the poor are poor because of their own failings.

Law and order, and the use of the police and prisons to keep offenders in line.
Private property. Land and businesses should be owned by the private sector, for the benefit of the owners. There should be minimal state intervention to direct this. This doesn’t seem to apply to payments from the state to landowners in the form of unconditional subsidies, which Conservatives are strong advocates of. Conservatives advocate property ownership, and claim that their policies encourage this, though this has been achieved not by building affordable private housing, but instead by cheaply selling council housing. This has made a few people homeowners at the expense of those who are not, rather than at the expense of conservative voters and supporters.
There is currently (and has been since the 80s) a division amongst Conservatives between nationalist conservatives (who believe that the British economy should serve British businesses, and that the British parliament should control Britain), and the neo-liberals / Thatcherite / New Right (who believe that the needs of big business and international corporations should come first). You will see this in the divisions over the EU, and Britain’s place in it. The EU Referendum was given to the nationalists in exchange for their support for David Cameron. The EU is one of the world’s biggest and most powerful trade blocs (that is, a group of countries who have agreed to trade with each other at favourable terms and act as a single unified body when dealing with outsiders), but some Tories found themselves poorer and/or politically weaker once we were in it. In particular the old landowners, and those who owned small-to-medium businesses that were now undercut by European businesses found themselves not doing so well. Similarly many Conservatives felt that Britain was made weaker (militarily and in terms of bargaining power) by allying itself with Europe rather than with the USA. The majority of party donors however do very well out of Europe and want that to continue.
Support for the Established Church. The Conservative Party are defenders of the Church of England, and seek to maintain the church’s power and privileges. Whilst there are groups within the party that represent Catholic, Muslim, Jewish etc Tories, as Conservative Party members thet sign up to the maintenance of the establishment. They support the existence of the Lords Spiritual – the 26 bishops of the Church of England who sit in the House of Lords alongside the Lords themselves. No other religious or political groups in the UK have automatic representatives at Westminster, not even the Conservatives themselves. In addition, former Lords Spiritual are invariably given life peerages when they step down, which allows them to continue sitting in the House of Lords.
Conservatives seek to maintain the status quo as it is. By which I mean, they wish to conserve or protect existing power structures and systems of living. This defence of existing power structures is expressed by Conservatives in a support for traditions and traditional values, ‘how things have always been done’, though what these traditions and values are changes as time goes on Under David Cameron the party sought to gain ground from Labour, by presenting himself as socially liberal, whilst still espousing right-wing economics. This has been done by claiming to support equal rights such as gay marriage, paternity pay and such like (though both measures required cross-party support to be passed, showing that not all Tories were on board with this). The tradition of tolerance has been introduced, to sell to old-fashioned Tories the idea of equality in law, and to present the Tories as a party of social tolerance rather than historic intolerance as has actually been the case. Teresa May has followed this policy and it seems to be working for them.

The Labour Party

The Labour Party was founded in 1900 as an attempt to unite the many different socialist and Trades Unions groups by forming a single party to try and get left-wing candidates elected to government. The idea was that they would be better able to achieve parliamentary success that way. Amongst these groups were the Fabians, a middle class intellectual group; the Scottish Labour Party, the Independent Labour Party, and the Social Democratic Foundation. The groups agreed to work together despite disagreeing on many issues, and this broad range of opinions has generally been part of the Labour party ever since. Since 1900 the Labour Party have won just five General Elections outright, three of those under Tony Blair. Labour is historically the opposition party, at least since the 1920s. The Labour Party claim on their website that they are a democratic socialist party, i.e. that they wish to achieve socialism through the medium of democracy. It may be important at this moment to define socialism:

“a theory or system of social organization that seeks to put the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of money, land, etc., in the community as a whole.” (means of production is a term that means the wealth and the land and equipment necessary to create products and thus further wealth). All socialists believe in some form of shared ownership, and that success is based on giving a high standard of living to all the people rather than just delivering profits to shareholders and business owners.

The Labour Party once had a commitment to socialism as part of their constitution, but this was removed in 1995 and replaced with a commitment to “realising our true potential”. That isn’t a joke. At this point the Labour Party stopped being a democratic socialist party and became instead a social democratic party.

. Wikipedia offer a fantastic definition of social democracy. Social democracy is a political, social and economic ideology that supports economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a capitalist economy. The important thing is that you can’t be both socialist and capitalist. Either you are committed to public ownership or to private ownership. A mixed economy, where some things are owned by the state, and others are owned by private individuals or corporations, is not socialism. Many capitalists argue that it is socialism, of course. The internet is full of right-wing commentators denouncing David Cameron as a socialist! Around here we deal with facts! Many Labour MPs would be happy to be described as social democrats. Social democracy looks good on paper, but has failed to deliver since the glory days of the 1950s post-war consensus – when even the Tories came to agree that the NHS and welfare state were desirable. Sadly there has been little in the way of victory since then and the Labour party has only had one winning idea ever since…

Under Tony Blair the Labour Party adopted a political philosophy called the Third Way. This was an import from the USA, where it was a feature of the Clinton presidency. The Third Way is a combination of Thatcherite economic policy and limited social liberalism. Thus privatisations and military spending happened, alongside tax cuts for the wealthy. But also there was increased spending on wider welfare issues such as supported housing and early years care.

Cynics might argue that the increased spending on welfare mostly ended up in the hands of the private sector, and that this was merely a socially acceptable transfer of public funds into private hands.

Blairites make a number of claims about the Blair premiership, for example they claim to have lifted a million households out of poverty (though almost none of these were able to stay out of poverty for a significant period), and they point to increased NHS funding (some of which went of PFI projects that awarded huge and unsustainable contracts to private companies and are now a major cause of NHS underfunding). See here for a news story about PFI /PPP projects in Scotland that show how utterly foolish it was allowing the private sector to build schools and hospitals,

The real argument for the Third Way was that it allowed the Labour Party to get into power, by promising huge profits to businesses in exchange for allowing some welfare reforms. This is what Labour “moderates” and newspaper columnists mean when they talk about being electable. When the billionaires who own the big global media companies wanted more profits they switched their support back to the Conservative party, and here we are. No modern Labour party will be successful without the wider media onside. Gordon Brown didn’t have it, nor did Ed Miliband. Jeremy Corbyn certainly doesn’t have it. This is a fact that many of Corbyn’s liberal-left critics seem to forget – they seem to think that the anyone else will get better press than him, but they seem to have forgotten Ed Miliband being called a Stalinist in the pages of the Evening Standard, or Gordon Brown’s mental health being derided in the Sun. Both of those men offered the same thing that Blair offered, but it wasn’t enough for the businessmen who run the country, and so they were pilloried in the press. Whoever Labour members choose to replace Corbyn, whenever that happens, they will still get the same press until Labour choose someone who is known to the Murdochs etc as a person they can trust (to increase profits).

So it is hard to provide a bullet-point list of unifying tenets of the Labour party. Labour members and MPs represent a cross section of British politics, from enthusiastic neoliberals on the right, who would have fitted into early Thatcher cabinets, through to committed Marxian communists (i.e. those who believe that socialism is desirable and can be achieved without revolution) on the left. Truely is it said that the Labour Party is a broad church. The only thing that they will all agree on is that some sort of social welfare should happen somewhere…( perhaps, depending on what you think Mr Murdoch?.)

Whilst the current battle over the direction of the Labour Party might appear terminal, it’s nothing new. At every stage of its’ history, from its very earliest days, the Labour Party has been fighting itself. Even during the glory days of the post-war consensus, when even Tories agreed to keep the NHS and welfare state, there was dissent in the ranks. It is nothing new. Labour is supposed to be a principled position, and as such it causes strong disagreements. The Labour right have repeatedly purged the party of the Labour left, most recently in the early 80s and again in the mid 90s, but each new generation brings another set of naive optimists who insist that you can’t negotiate with power from a position of compromise. Soon we will no doubt see them again removed from the Labour ranks so as to ensure that international business leaders can again set the agenda and limit the terms of the debate to ones that suit their shareholders, and we can all sleep soundly in our beds again Those of us who have beds, of course. Still, as long as we have a place in a shared shed room that a private landlord can receive the housing benefit on, we’re doing our bit to keep the Cayman Islands the British economy afloat and that’s what matters.

The Liberal Democrats

The Liberal Democrats are a party dedicated to liberalism and democracy, unlike the other two, who are liberal and democratic. What currently marks them as different to the other parties is that whilst both Labour and Tories campaigned for Remain during the EU referendum, the Liberal Democrats have decided to make their pitch to Remainers after the referendum. It is ironic that a party called the Liberal Democrats are thus campaigning to overturn a democratic decision! However, given that they committed electoral suicide during the coalition, committing it again can only benefit them now – they got nothing to lose by it!

The LibDems have a number of key policies that they are no closer to achieving now than when I was a nipper, but it’s nice that they try.

Replacement of the First Past The Post electoral system with something better. During the coalition they managed to get the Tories to concede to a referendum on the matter in exchange for LibDem support. However, they were only able to get the referendum to be about replacing FPTP with AV, which is the only other election system that is as bad as FPTP. The public couldn’t see the point in replacing one undemocratic system with one that is just as bad and more complicated. Replacing FPTP with Proportional Representation would generally be a good thing for democracy, though it would give more power to UKIP, so it would be a bad thing for humanity. Hopefully there will be a Lib-Lab pact at some point in the future and we’ll get a change to PR, but I doubt it.
An elected House of Lords. This is something Labour promised during the Blair years but somehow it never happened. Whilst removing most of the hereditary peerages was a start, appointed Lords make a nonsense of the whole thing. Each new Prime Minister just appoints all the Lords they need to get a majority there. It’s a gravy train unlike almost any other in the UK. £300 just for turning up! So this is a policy that any sensible person would get behind and which won’t ever happen!
The EU. The LibDems are staunchly pro-Europe, and intend Great Britain to rejoin the EU at the earliest possible moment. This is where the two separate liberalisms meet.
Liberalism. I’ve been avoiding this so far, because liberalism has many meanings. The LibDems represent both main types of liberal! They are social liberals and also economic liberals.
- Social liberalism is when you want people to be nice to each other and respect our differences. Social liberals strive for equality of opportunity (and sometimes outcome). They support limited state intervention to ensure this.
- Economic liberals believe in the market economy – free trade (of which more later), limited or zero state interference in the market (ditto), and private property as the cornerstone of the economy -again, by private property, they mean that ownership of industries and money should be in the hands of companies rather than the state..
- Thus liberal can be both a positive social thing and a negative economic thing. Most of the time you’ll find that liberals themselves want you to focus on the first when the second is the important bit – for example, representing their pro-EU stance as about human rights and multiculturalism rather than economic issues. The economic bit is the important one. All mainstream politics is critiqued by the relationship of the player to money. If you’re not following the money, you’ve missed the important bit.
- Social liberals claim to believe in democracy, that democracy is good in itself, and that democracy is the best way of delivering good things to the most people. This doesn’t seem to stop liberal politicians or governments from selling weapons to dictators and undermining democratic governments for big businesses. This is something to do with individual freedom, which is more important than someone else’s right not to be tortured to death
- Neoliberals don’t seem to care about democracy at all, seeing it as just one way of ensuring that they retain power. They write a lot about freedom and democracy, and how freedom can only come from economic liberalism, but there’s nothing to back it up.

Essentially then, liberals believe that the system works, but needs a bit of tweaking. It is important to see this in opposition to conservatives, who believe that the system works and doesn’t need any tweaking, except possibly to ensure that the right people maintain power. It is also in opposition to socialists, who either believe that the system doesn’t work, or is ethically undesirable (or both).

Both types of liberals believe that personal freedom is important and that this freedom comes from the ability to make decisions that affect their lives. This freedom, according to liberal theory, is linked to free market economies, and is itself a good thing. Thus a democracy is better than a monarchy or a dictatorship regardless of the actions of that democracy. Thus someone choosing how their money is spent is better than a state choosing how that money, regardless of what the spending is on. Social liberals generally accept that the state should make interventions where private enterprise is not doing so – so, for example, if no-one has found a way of monetising the care of the mentally ill, the state should step in to prevent people with mental health problems being homeless and / or untreated. Both of these things seem good in principle – obviously we all want democracy and freedom! – but both of these ideas fail in that they treat the tool as the thing… that is, democracy and economic freedom are tools for achieving outcomes, they are not the outcome themselves. Famously, Hitler was elected democratically, and the Soviets turned an agrarian peasant economy into a modern 20th century state and created the second greatest and quickest improvement in standards of living ever seen in human history. Where democracy and economic freedom are not doing good, they are worthless except as excuses. It is far better to live in a good democracy than a bad dictatorship, but to live in a bad democracy where there is no chance for meaningful change is no different, ethically, than living under a dictatorship where the leader changes but the policies stay the same. To go back to the Soviet Union, where there were regular elections but you could only choose between members of the Communist party to elect (sometimes there were others, but these had no chance of winning). In the UK you can only choose between various liberal capitalists, without any other ideologies having any meaningful access to power.

As we can see, all three main parties are economically liberal (though many Labour members and a few MPs are not), all three of them are broadly socially liberal (though some Conservative MPs and many party members are not), and all three have neoliberal strands running through them. When you describe yourself as liberal, or curse liberals for enthusiastically propping up capitalism, it may be important to remember that liberal means different things to different people!

There are a couple of other players in the UK mainstream politics field that are worth mentioning. The most powerful of these is the SNP. UKIP and the DUP are the others whose policies affect Westminster decisions and thus the English political landscape.

Scottish National Party

The Scottish National Party is a social democratic, nationalist party. It’s important to make the distinction here between state nationalism and racist or conservative nationalism – whilst some of the former are also racist, the nationalism as practiced by the SNP is about Scottish independence -the pursuit of Scotland as an independent state. So whilst they compete with Labour and the LibDems for voters, the biggest significant difference is that they aim for an independent Scotland. Both Labour and the LibDems, historically strong in Scotland, do not – an independent Scotland would reduce both parties powers in Westminster, and likely lead to permanent Conservative governments for the rest of the UK. For this reason many English and Welsh liberals and socialists are against Scottish independence. Also for this reason, a Labour-SNP pact to form a majority government (should election results offer such a prospect) would be unlikely. The condition for forming such a pact on the part of the SNP would only be either Scottish independence or possibly a new referendum at best. Considering how close the last one was, and the shonky handling of Brexit by Tories, a new referendum would probably result in Scotland leaving the rest of the UK and a permanent Tory majority in Westminster. The SNP are also a pro-European party, like the LibDems. The SNP are economic liberals in practice, possibly more than social democrats, and despite the powerful and stirring rhetoric of some of their MPs are no more on the side of the working classes than any other economic liberals.

Democratic Unionist Party

The DUP are the biggest party in Northern Ireland. In most areas it can be regarded as allies of the Conservative Party – indeed socially and economically it is on the right of the Conservatives. For the English political amateur that is all you need to know – factor their votes in with the Conservatives.. If anyone reading this wants to write a short essay for their Northern Irish political amateur comrades feel free to send it to me to stick up here!

United Kingdom Independence Party

UKIP. Where to begin with UKIP… Whilst Nigel Farage claims to be neither right wing, nor left wing, but a radical, neither his politics nor that of UKIP are anything other than right-wing populist. Free-market, nationalist, and anti-immigrant policies put UKIP firmly into the right-wing populist camp, and presumably Farage knows this and is lying to us. In order to present UKIP’s policies as radical you’d have to believe that we live in a socialist state rather than a liberal capitalist one. Sadly we do not, and this can be demonstrated simply by going to a shop. Like the SNP and LibDems, the only difference between UKIP and the Tories is that UKIP are not split on the issue of the EU. UKIP represent that small but significant branch of capitalism who suffered under the EU – while the larger businesses were able to increase profits and lower costs by entering the EU, some smaller businesses found that they now had to compete with businesses from across Europe. Similarly, UKIP appeal to both civic nationalists and ethnic nationalists alike. Civic nationalists are basically people for whom sovereignty and control of one’s own laws is more important than profit. Ethnic nationalists are generally those for whom Englishness is categorised by their ethnic background. Many of these people are active or passive racists, and the crossover between civic and ethnic nationalists is unsurprisingly high. To understand UKIP’s appeal however, it is necessary to understand that their supporters aren’t just racists and British Empire throwbacks. It is necessary to analyse where (and who) the EU project has failed, and to look at how the EU has been treated in British political culture. I will do this as briefly as I can – both of these are long essays in their own right so a short version is necessarily lacking detail!

Firstly, since the 1980s British politicians have been blaming everything bad on the EU, presenting themselves as powerless in the face of bureaucratic oppression. Thus a false narrative is created that the EU imposes rules and laws onto a country that the country is unable to negotiate or quibble on. In fact British politicians have been involved in the discussions at all stages, and have had exactly the same say as everyone else. And British politicians can ignore whatever they want. The best example to show that British politicians do not have to accept everything, is shown by David Cameron’s simple refusal to allow prisoners to have votes. He refused, prisoners don’t have votes. So blaming the EU and pretending to not be responsible for its actions has long been a good way for politicians to shift the blame onto something else- the organisation that these politicians are mostly in total support of.
- In turn this has created a feeling of resentment amongst parts of the British population, as well as the idea that things cannot be changed whilst we’re in the EU. This narrative hasn’t been challenged (until recently, at least) in the media, and indeed continues to be put across by those parts of the media who are opposed to the EU. Similarly, the narrative on austerity that has been used to justify swingeing cuts to social welfare has been adopted by UKIP, co-opting people’s unhappiness at Conservative cuts to blame the EU. Both situations have been created by deceitful Tory and Labour politicians but exploited by UKIP.
Secondly, that whilst EU membership brings many economic advantages, these all come at a human cost. When a factory moves from the UK to a European country with cheaper labour costs, many people are made unemployed. The UK’s shift from a manufacturing economy to a knowledge and service economy has least benefited the working classes, who have seen skilled trades and well-paid jobs disappear, to be replaced by semi-skilled and poorly paid work. Whilst some have adapted and improved, many have not. At every level the working classes of the UK, whether skilled or unskilled, well-paid or poorly paid, now have to compete with immigrants from all over Europe – especially Eastern Europe. No other mainstream party have engaged with that issue, preferring to tell people that EU is good for them, that Britain is economically better off (which is of course true, but Britons are not universally better off – the wealth is not going to the working classes), to point out that they could go to Romania and get a job if they wanted, or to call racist those who raises the issue of immigration under capitalism, or to deny that this is happening. This political refusal to engage honestly with the downside of EU membership has allowed UKIP to scoop up support all over the UK, and has created a right-wing echo chamber wherein racism is allowed and unchallenged. The far-right and UKIP have a lot of crossover, with the far-right treating UKIP as a recruiting ground, whereby people’s legitimate concerns are fed-back to them changed into racist ideology. One could hardly have worked out a better way of pushing people to the right.

So UKIP needs to be accounted for. They only have one MP, and he might be defecting back to the Tories soon. Organisationally they are a shambles, with infighting and backstabbing amongst its handful of elected members and paid officers. But they got millions of votes last time. They may get more next time, taking votes from Conservative and Labour alike. Not enough from each to wipe them out, but enough to effect marginals on both sides. Also, UKIP have a newspaper on side, in the Express (and sympathisers at the Mail), and are massively over-covered by the BBC’s Politics team – Nigel Farage appeared on Question Time between 2010 and 2015 more than any other politician except Caroline Flint, giving UKIP significant amounts of airtime to make their case. This is how the window of acceptable public discourse is pushed rightwards. Farage interacts with the far-right in the UK, in Europe, and in the USA, they share ideas and plans, then he presents these policies to the British public who otherwise wouldn’t be exposed to them, on BBC tv! Recently he has been spreading these ideas in the USA to Donald Trump, who presents Farage as an important British politician. Like Trump himself, Farage appears like a clown, a grotesque puppet whose appeal is hard to see. But the two are both much cleverer than they seem, and their friendship can’t bode well for British politics. Where America leads Britain has always followed, for reasons mostly relating to our shared language and ideologies, and so a quasi-fascist strongman can’t be too far away for us either.

So these are the main options laid out in front of us. Three flavours of liberalism, all dedicated to the capitalist economy, disagreeing only on the how little welfare to provide. Is it any wonder then that some people give up quickly on electoral politics when the differences between the parties are smaller than the differences between that person’s values and the parties themselves. Is it any wonder that angry people are channelled to the right, when the left has been so effectively silenced in everyday discourse, and centrist or even right-wing ideas are denounced as socialism? But let’s not abandon ourselves to the moral cowardice of “not being political”, that most weaselly of get outs. We all have politics – politics is just values. Not having politics is the same as agreeing with the existing status quo, or refusing to engage with its critics. And if you’re reading this Beginner’s Guide, chances are you’re not happy with the status quo!

I hope that this essay can tie into the earlier one, to give the reader a sense of what is achievable through mainstream protest and political actions, and what is not. Political realism is important – this is not defeatist. This is to understand why change will not happen because you’re asking nicely, or because you’ve got a good argument. Defeatism is doing the same thing time and time again and expecting it to work, or throwing away your energy on pointless actions that don’t change any minds. Know the parties and the system and you know what you can expect from them, you know best what buttons to press and where their weaknesses are.

why are we poor?

answering the big questions

Author: WHY ARE WE POOR?

Education and poverty

Why doesn’t work pay?

Why is housing so expensive, part 2

Why is housing so expensive? Part one

Hard Work, Poverty, and Reality.

A Users’ Guide To Political Parties