Self-fulfilling prophesies

Tweet

 

It is a trademark characteristic of the military mind that ‘the enemy’ is always watching, always waiting, just looking for an opportunity to launch a surprise onslaught to seize territory and impose his will on others. Currently, the prime enemy is assumed to be Putin, who is almost portrayed as a live version of a Bond villain, forever plotting world domination (although, as  far as I’m aware, he doesn’t own a cat, which somewhat spoils the image). In the fictional and real worlds alike, the reason for seeking world domination has never been entirely clear to me, but perhaps I over-analyse: a madman seeking to dominate the world doesn’t necessarily need a logical reason. Like the man who wanted to be world king, maybe Putin just wants power for its own sake. And possibly for a bit of personal enrichment on the side; although – in real life, just as in fiction – being the head of a criminal organisation rarely leaves enough time to relax and properly enjoy the proceeds. Permanent paranoia is an essential attribute, even if those around him really are all out to get him.

When it comes to deterrence, if he’s truly mad all bets are off. Deterrence necessarily depends on an assumption that the person being deterred is capable of a rational analysis of the likely costs and benefits of any given course of action so, whilst painting Putin as a madman, the policy of deterrence counter-intuitively assumes that he isn’t. That raises its own problems. If he is indeed rational, then telling a man who (allegedly) is determined to attack and destroy the UK that we’re not ready for him now, but give us three years to prepare and we’ll be able to kill two or three times as many Russians with the same level of armed forces looks more like an invitation to urgent action than a deterrent. Using it before you lose it is far from an irrational position to take if you feel threatened. If he’s not rational, then it has no effect at all. And neither will the additional expenditure on armaments.

In the fictional realm, it’s never entirely clear whether the flunkies and minions who rush to do their master’s bidding are doing so in expectation of some reward for themselves, or out of fear, or out of blind loyalty. They always turn out to be expendable, though. And in most cases, they end up duly expended. In real life, the expendable ones are the foot soldiers, invariably drawn from the working people of all belligerents whilst the ruling elites stay safely out of harm’s way. In a war with a clear conclusion, the elites on the winning side count their profits from the arms industry whilst those on the losing side rue their financial losses. Where there is no such clear outcome from a conflict, the elites on both sides win: the arms industry rakes in the cash all round. Financially, war and peace end up looking quite similar in one important way – wealth gets further concentrated in the hands of the few. In a war which degenerates into a major nuclear exchange, there’ll be no money left to count; just as well, for there’ll be no-one left to count it either.

Nuclear deterrence, they tell us, works. Just look at the fact that there has been no all-out war between two nuclear-armed blocs since the end of the last world war. Maybe. We can’t re-run history without nuclear deterrence to see what would have happened; perhaps there are other compelling reasons why war has somehow been avoided. But even supposing, for the sake of argument, that we accept the lack of war to date to be an indicator of the success of nuclear deterrence, that doesn’t justify an assumption that it will always work. It could be like that little strip of Velcro holding the curtains up, which works really well – until the day that it doesn’t.

The politicians are rushing to agree with the military assessment, and vying to see who can offer to divert the largest sums from promoting the wellbeing of citizens into building weapons of destruction. There is one thing about which they are right – our future prosperity depends on our security. But what they’re not willing even to countenance is the idea that security, in the sense of a lack of war, could be achieved in other ways. De-escalation, removal of threats, negotiation, and building trust aren’t even up for consideration as they continue the slow but inexorable march towards a war. It’s a war which their own actions are making increasingly likely.

Stamping out integrity from the outset

Tweet

 

As pantomimes go, there is little to match the traditional monarch’s speech to mark the opening of a new parliamentary session. One MP from the government benches is surrendered as a hostage to Buckingham Palace as a guarantee that duplicitous parliamentarians won’t simply take advantage of the monarch’s visit to capture and behead the king or queen, and is not released until the monarch is safely back in the palace. One of the few concessions, whether to modernity in general or the belief that the monarchy is suffering from extreme poverty, in the whole ceremony is the fact that the hostage now has to make his or her own way to the palace, rather than being escorted in chains by strangely-titled royal officials. The crowns and regalia get to ride to parliament in their very own special carriage, pulled by its own team of horses. After all, what self-respecting hat would want to travel in the same golden carriage as a mere monarch? It’s all part of the richness of a constitution which prioritises form over content.

The thing which all the glitter and gold attempt to conceal is the utter pointlessness and irrelevance of the whole event. It’s not really even the king’s speech at all; it’s written by the PM, the monarch has no control over the content, and there is nothing in either the rules or custom and practice which obliges the government either to do what is in the speech or not to do what isn’t in it. In practice, a government which can command a majority can introduce any legislation it wishes, whether or not it said it was going to at the opening of parliament – and it can also drop anything which is in the speech on a whim. The goat, on whose skin the speech was so carefully inscribed, ultimately died for nothing. It again epitomises the English parliamentary constitution – all about show and tradition, and completely divorced from reality.

In that context, the amendment proposed by the SNP, and which cost seven Labour MPs the right to be told how to vote for daring not to vote as they were told to vote, was irrelevant. Its failure to pass, obviously, makes no difference to the programme for government but, equally, had it passed, it would have made no difference to the programme for government either. The symbolic vote would have been just that – symbolic, but devoid of any meaning or effect. It highlights two other characteristics of that English parliamentary constitution: a number of parliamentary votes are of null practical effect, but the fuss made over a vote varies in inverse ratio to the effect of that vote in practice. It also makes it a strange place to draw a line, and an even stranger place for Labour MPs who only a few weeks ago were railing against the iniquity of a rule which keeps an estimated 300,000 (and increasing) children in poverty to sacrifice their integrity and credibility on the altar of Tory-set rules about financial rigidity.

Maybe – probably, even – the Chancellor will pull a now past-its-sell-by-date rabbit from her hat (perhaps one of the collapsible top hats which used to be kept under the Speaker’s chair for raising points of order during a vote, but which are no longer required for their original purpose) in her upcoming budget and announce that the government are going to do precisely what they’ve just instructed Labour MPs to vote against them doing, and abolish the two child limit. Telling MPs to vote against something one week and for it the next is yet another of those less-than-endearing aspects of the UK’s approach to ‘governing’. Apparently pointless, but with one important effect: getting government MPs to understand, within just a few weeks of being elected, that their integrity is entirely at the disposal of government whips. Once they’ve been made to stand on their heads once, it becomes so much easier to compel them to do it repeatedly in the future. Integrity, once lost, doesn’t simply grow back again before the next meaningless vote.

According to Sunak, 60% of the remaining Tory MPs are unfit for office, even as shadow ministers

Tweet

 

He didn’t put it in quite those terms, of course, but he might just as well have done so. The reduced number of Tory MPs left after the election earlier this month means that more than 40% of them now have shadow minister responsibilities, and the group is so short of talent, in Sunak’s eyes at least, that some of them have been given two or even three shadow jobs. It's a pretty damning indictment of the nearly 60% who have not been given jobs at all.

Continuing chld poverty is a deliberate choice by Labour

Tweet

 

Yesterday, the Leader of the House of Commons reiterated that Labour have no immediate intention of abandoning the two-child benefit cap, because “the economic circumstances do not currently allow for us to abolish the cap”. She talked about Starmer’s announcement of a taskforce to consider the issue of child poverty and report back at some future unspecified date as though that was some sort of solution to a problem which exists now. But the result of this approach is that those children suffering from poverty now will continue to do so, and more will follow them into poverty as a result of continuing the fiscal policies of the previous government.

As Richard Murphy pointed out yesterday, poverty is, by definition, a lack of money. And the solution to a lack of money is to get more money to those in poverty. It really is as simple as that; and it doesn’t take a commission or a taskforce to tell us that. How we get more money into the hands of the poorest is more complex, but we know that most of the children living in poverty live in households where parents are working. Part of the solution must lie in understanding why work does not provide an adequate income so that benefits are needed to make up the deficit. Those benefits are, in effect, a subsidy to under-paying employers. It could reasonably be argued that solving the problem of low wages is more of a long term project, but allowing poverty to continue unrelieved in the meantime is a deliberate political decision which damages the life chances of hundreds of thousands of children.

It is, of course, true that ending the two child cap would be an incomplete solution because it wouldn’t immediately help all children currently living in poverty. It would, though, lift around 300,000 children out of poverty very rapidly. It’s a simple and straightforward first step which the government could take today, and which it is deliberately deciding not to take. They have elevated their desire to be seen to be ‘tough’ in restraining public expenditure over the interests of the next generation because they’ve confined themselves to working within a wholly arbitrary set of fiscal rules. They talk of hope for the future, but hope for the future doesn’t put food on the table today. The number of children in poverty today may be an inheritance from 14 years of Tory government, but every day they remain in poverty is a decision taken by Labour, for which they can blame no-one but themselves.

Knowing your branches from your roots

Tweet

 

One of the new UK Government’s first acts has been to set up a comprehensive defence review, billed as a ‘root and branch’ review. A periodic look at what the UK’s defence needs are and how they might best be met is never a bad idea, but this one doesn’t look as open-minded as the billing suggests. According to the BBC, “The review will be overseen by Defence Secretary John Healey and headed by former Nato Secretary General Lord Robertson along with former US presidential advisor Fiona Hill and former Joint Force Commander Gen Sir Richard Barrons”.

None of these strike me as being particularly open-minded about possible alternative approaches. They all seem to already *know* what the risks are and what needs to be done about them, leaving me wondering what exactly a process taking the best part of twelve months is going to do, other than add a few details. As Starmer said in announcing the review, “We will make sure our hollowed out armed forces are bolstered and respected, that defence spending is responsibly increased” – meaning that the outcome is already largely determined, and it will involve a significant diversion of scarce resources into additional military expenditure. The only question is how that expenditure is divvied up between personnel, tanks, planes and ships.

In essence, it’s about responding to the risks they have identified by threatening those perceived to pose them. But a truly ‘root and branch’ review would also be asking about the causes of those risks and what might be done through negotiation and diplomacy to reduce them. The possibility that a military build-up might actually increase risk rather than reduce it is not one which any of those involved seem particularly disposed to consider. Starmer may be named after one of Labour’s pacifist giants, but he doesn’t share much, if anything, of the man’s philosophy.

Identifying the real agenda

Tweet

 

It was announced earlier today that Elon Musk has endorsed Trump for the presidency of the USA and committed around $45 million a month to supporting his campaign. It underlines, obviously, the way in which American political campaigning is dominated by money. It’s not so much that votes are directly ‘bought’ in a way which could be defined as corrupt; more a case of the candidate with the biggest war chest being able to promote his or her message more comprehensively and effectively. In theory, one of the differences between politics in the UK and the US is that the UK has stricter rules on who can donate and how much candidates and parties can spend. In practice the rules are fairly easy to circumvent, and one of the later acts of the Tories in government was to dramatically increase the limits in an attempt to give the party generally funded by the richest in society a better chance of winning. And although it’s difficult to prove a clear and unambiguous quid pro quo, ennobling people looks to have been something of a money-spinner for the Tories.

But I digress. When people talk of the nascent fascism of Trump, they are often referring to his views on issues such as migration. It’s not clear to what extent Musk agrees with much of what Trump has to say on those issues. But then, neither is it certain how much Trump believes in that stuff either, or whether he really sees it as just his way of appealing to voters whose economic interests have little in common with his own. I find it hard to believe, for instance, that someone employing as many people as Musk does, with his strange attitudes towards employment rights, isn’t at least partially dependent on the immigrants who Trump says he wants to deport. His support for Trump is probably more about their shared belief about what the nature of economic relationships in society should be. Much of what Trump says tends to avoid that, but if we judge by his actions when he was president previously, he certainly believes that American oligarchs and authoritarians – such as Musk, for instance, to say nothing of himself and his family – should be the ones for whose benefit the economy should be run. It’s probably what makes Trump so fond of Putin as well – another authoritarian who runs his country for the benefit of the richest few, including himself, and has little patience with the idea that people should be allowed to choose their leaders.

It’s not just about Trump, Musk and Putin either (and one could add Farage, Orbán, Meloni, Le Pen, and Fico as well as a number of prominent UK Tories to the list). The common thread that runs though what has become known as ‘populism’ might superficially look as though it’s about nationalism, opposition to ‘wokery’ (to use their prejudicial terminology) and migration, but scratch the surface and it’s really more about the key economic relationships in society. In all those countries where ‘the right’ is in the ascendency, the political discourse is often about the cultural fluff because they think that’s where the votes are, but the real danger lies in the underlying tendency towards authoritarianism, oligarchy, and increased concentration of wealth, undermining the rights of ‘lesser’ individuals in the process. Persuading people to vote against their own economic interests turns out not to be a difficult task. But we should have known that after Brexit.

Don't do as I do

Tweet

 

After more than six decades, it’s hard to remember exactly what I was taught about history in primary school, but such odd strands as come to mind relate more to the stories of individuals than those of peoples and cultures. The kings and queens of England certainly featured a little; the princes of Wales rather less, except around March 1st. For some people, that may be the only sort of history they ever learned, a version based on the idea of ‘great men’ whose deeds are treated as though they drove history rather than as sitting in any sort of wider context.

Whether it’s an accurate way of looking at history is another question entirely. How different, for instance, would the twentieth century have looked without a Churchill? He certainly had a way with words and many found him inspirational during a period of great challenge, although a more rounded picture can’t escape his innate racism, nor avoid wondering whether all his war time decisions were really as brilliant as they have been painted. If he hadn’t been there, who would have been in charge during the second world war, and would it have changed the outcome greatly? Would a different individual have risen to the challenge? We can never know, because we only live history once, and it is what it is. Related questions can be asked about Hitler, or Stalin. Were these uniquely evil people or, given the circumstances at the time, would they have simply been replaced by other, equally evil, individuals?

One of the justifications for political assassinations – a field in which the USA tends to excel, even if normally practiced outside the territory of the USA itself – is that killing evil men protects the rest of the world. And I’ve even seen some argue that if Hitler had been assassinated in the 1930s, the holocaust could have been avoided. Maybe, if the entire Nazi leadership had been ‘taken out’ before coming to power (even assuming that to be possible), things might have been different; but it’s impossible to tell and, by the time they had taken control of Germany, there were more than enough potential replacements. But there are at least two other problems with that scenario, even if we conclude that it would indeed have made a difference. The first is that it really means eliminating people before they’ve committed the crimes, and pre-emptive extra-judiciary execution isn’t something which can be easily justified morally. But the second is a much bigger, albeit incredibly simple, question with no easy answer – who decides?

Whilst Trump appears, at times at least, to be seriously unhinged and whilst he is, for many of us, a deeply unpleasant person generally unsuited to the job of president, his first term in office didn’t put him in the same category as a Stalin or a Hitler. Some of the proposals being floated for his second term have some very unlovely historical precedents but, given his propensity for distancing himself from concepts such as truth, judging him guilty to the extent of deserving to be executed on the basis of what he says today is, at the least, premature. It’s certainly not the sort of decision which any society with even the remotest claims to being democratic and abiding by the rule of law should be leaving to a lone gunman with a rifle.

The condemnation of yesterday’s attack has rightly been near-universal, but the reaction of both Trump and Biden would sound a lot more sincere if there was some sign that it had caused either of them to reflect on the USA’s long-standing proclivity for conducting or facilitating assassinations elsewhere.

Whose economy is it anyway?

Tweet

 

It has been calculated that people in the UK, on average, are living a ‘three planet lifestyle’, which is to say that if the entire population of the world lived the same lifestyle we would need three times the amount of resources available to us on Earth. Now there are, of course, a number of estimates and assumptions used to arrive at that conclusion, at least some of which are inevitably open to challenge. But, even if we quibble about the detail, the conclusion that some of the world’s population are using resources at a rate which could not be sustained if everyone lived the same lifestyle seems a reasonable one. There are choices we can make: we could reduce the population, we could reduce current living standards in the richest countries, we could find a way of sustaining the same living standards whilst using fewer resources, or we could prevent the rest of the world from ever attaining a similar living standard to our own. The third of those is likely to be more acceptable than the rest, although there are questions about how easy it will be to achieve. And the default position of the richest seems, by and large, to be about holding on to what we have.

The 'three-planet' analysis, surely, makes it clear that the debate about sustainability cannot be divorced from considering the size of the human population. As far as I’m aware, no one is suggesting, or ever likely to suggest, thankfully, a cull – although the appalling propensity of mankind for armed conflict might inadvertently have that effect, and unchecked climate change is also likely to add to the human death rate, along with misery and grief. There is, though, a much more benign effect of growing affluence which is likely to check overall human population growth at some future date, and which is already impacting the richest countries. Growing affluence and lower infant mortality lead to a falling birth rate, and some of the richest countries are already seeing a birth rate running below the replacement rate, leading to predictions of falling populations.

From a global and sustainability perspective, this is surely good news, even if the impact is still some way away. It’s not the way that capitalist economics sees the situation though. An economic system predicated on the necessity for growth in order to perpetuate capital accumulation requires a permanently growing population. And an economic system which assumes that wealth belongs to those who are economically active, whilst the rest of us are a ‘burden’ on the economically active cannot see a way of carrying the cost of that burden without a growing working age population, especially as the age profile of societies changes. Supporters of the system can only imagine responses which involve a higher birth rate, more immigration, increasing retirement ages, or higher taxes on those who work.

But what if we instead reimagine the economic system in different terms? An economic system is a human construct; there is no ‘invisible hand’, only a set of rules drawn up and operated by humans. Current rules work first and foremost for the benefit of those who own and accumulate capital and rent-seekers. That’s exactly what they were designed to do (and it’s no coincidence that capital accumulation and rentier income are taxed less highly than wages and salaries). The alternative is to see the economic system as a social construct, and design it to meet the needs of society as a whole. Human society isn’t only composed of workers and capitalists; there are also some unable to work, including the young, the old, the sick and the disabled. Those groups aren’t a ‘burden’; they are part of a complex social structure, and the productive output of any economy needs to meet the needs of all of its members, including those groups. It might be argued that taxation is simply the practical mechanism by which that is achieved, but capitalist ideology has created a belief that starts with an assumption that the productive output belongs primarily to those who are being taxed, and that taxation means that it is somehow being taken from them. The demand for lower taxes – and in consequence for less expenditure on meeting the needs of those considered to be a ‘burden’ – is a direct result of that ideological economic perspective. And those who claim that we are in a post-ideological politics have bought into that perspective, hook, line, and sinker.

Different meaningless slogans

Tweet

 

Moving away from the empty sloganizing which characterised the previous government for a number of years can only be a good thing. And in some ways, the Starmer government has made a good start – today, for instance, it was announced that the meaningless phrase ‘levelling up’ will be dropped from the title of the minister for housing and local government. It was, as they say, only ever a slogan. They do, however, seem to be coming up with a number of meaningless slogans of their own, which does not augur so well.

Starmer has repeatedly said that it will be a case of ‘country first, not party’. It sounds very grand but what does it actually mean? He probably wants us to think that it means that he will put the interests of the country ahead of the interests of the Labour Party, but who decides what the interests of the country are, and on what basis – and what does he mean when he talks about the interests of the Labour Party anyway? It sounds suspiciously similar to another phrase that Labour have been using, which is that it is about policy not ideology, apparently reworded somewhat revealingly by Tony Blair earlier today (a man who seems increasingly determined to drive the car from the back seat) as being about ‘taking politics out of policy making’.

In truth, unless one sees politics as being just about the machinations of politicians seeking personal advantage and advancement rather than a clash of different ideas and world views, all policy decisions are inherently political. Taking politics and ideology out of policy doesn’t mean that the decisions are being taken free of any political or ideological bias, it simply means that they are being taken within the constraints of the current ideology. In effect, that assumes that capitalist ideology is the norm and all views based on alternative opinions can be axiomatically rejected. Now that will hardly come as a surprise, given that Starmer has been making it clear for many months that his main differences with the Tories are about competence rather than direction. The surprise is – or should be – that such meaningless banalities are being treated as profound and meaningful statements.

It might reasonably be argued that what they mean is that they want to do ‘what works’, but that inevitably raises two questions. The first is whether what prevents other options from working is that they are inherently unworkable, or whether they have been rendered unworkable by an acceptance of unnecessarily imposed ideological constraints. And the second, and perhaps even more important, is ‘for whom do they work?’. These are not questions which they have any intention of asking, let alone answering. But without asking them, we are doomed to more of the same. Just a bit more competently executed.

Labour likely to miss an opportunity for electoral reform

Tweet

 

The now former PM’s Tory Oblivion Project failed at the last fence, leaving his party with more seats than he had hoped, and himself unable to make the planned getaway to California to be reunited with his fortune – for a few months at least. His only consolation must surely be that there are enough Tory MPs left for them to fall into multiple sects, groups, and schisms rather than unite behind a clear successor.

In terms of seats won, the scale of Labour’s victory is stunning, and under the antiquated electoral system used in the UK, it’s only seats that count. Scratch the surface, though, and start looking at the votes cast and the story is rather different. Winning 63% of the seats on a mere 34% of the vote gives absolute power to a party which could only persuade a third of the electorate to vote for it. Democracy it ain’t. Outside Scotland, Labour’s vote share rose only by a tiny margin overall in England, and actually fell in Wales, but those averages disguise differential movements in different constituencies which led to the votes being concentrated where they were most effective. Even then, had Farage plc not taken so many votes, mostly, one suspects, at the expense of the Tories, the result would have been very different.

It's a mistake, of course, to simply assume that Reform voters would otherwise have voted Tory. Some would have voted Labour, others for Plaid, the SNP, the Greens, or even the Lib Dems. But supposing for a moment, for the purposes of illustration, that all those who voted for either the Tories or Reform had actually voted for the leading contender of the two in every constituency, Wales would have woken up to a very different landscape yesterday. We would have 18 Labour MPs, 10 Tories, 2 Plaid – and 2 Reform, namely Llanelli and Maldwyn. There were special circumstances in both those latter 2 seats, of course, but ‘special circumstances’ can’t be used as an excuse for results we might not like. Whilst the assumption that Tory and Reform voters would have voted for each other’s parties is hopelessly over-simplistic, the illustration does serve to underline just how shallow Labour’s ‘landslide’ really is.

The Electoral Reform Society has done an analysis of the votes, and produced some numbers for how the result might have looked had the election been fought on the basis of the Additional Member system which has been used to date for Senedd elections (although it’s now being scrapped for a closed list system). Whilst it would have made no difference to Plaid on 4, and little difference to the Lib Dems who would have had 77 rather than 71, the impact on Labour, Conservative, Reform and the Green Party would have been huge, giving them 236, 157, 94, and 42 seats respectively. Starmer would today probably be negotiating with the Lib Dems and possibly the Greens as well, before forming a government. Caution is needed here, of course, not least because a different voting system might lead to people making different choices; assuming they’d simply vote for the same party is not an entirely valid starting point. If the Tories and Reform agreed to some sort of coalition, that would take them past Labour’s total, but then they run out of potential allies. Labour would have had far more viable paths to a working majority. I don’t really want to see 94 Reform MPs in the House of Commons, but I want to keep them out because people vote against them, not because of a rigged electoral system.

The ERS are promising to produce an analysis of the probable result based on use of STV, the proportional representation system favoured by many of us. It will be interesting to see the outcome of that work, although working out where people might have placed their second and third preference votes is even more fraught with assumptions than the analysis which they’ve done to date. I suspect that the overall picture will not be hugely different – at headline level, Labour would still be without a majority, the Tories would still be a larger group than they are today, and there would still be substantial numbers of Reform and Green MPs. And Starmer would still be trying to negotiate some sort of coalition.

The obstacle to electoral reform remains that both Labour and the Tories have demonstrated that the current system can give them absolute majorities on a minority of the vote. As long as enough Tories believe that swinging towards Farage’s position will make Reform go away, they are unlikely to change their stance. And while Labour, as a party, has adopted proportional representation as policy, the apparent scale of this week’s victory makes it unlikely that they’ll invest much effort in pursuing it. It wasn’t in their manifesto, and Starmer himself seems at best lukewarm on the idea. It would be a mistake, though, and one which could all-too-easily allow the return of the Tories in five years time. Those arguing that the scale of the victory means Labour will be in power for at least a decade need to remember that what was done in a single election cycle can equally be undone in another, and a mere 34% of the vote isn’t a very good starting point for any government. It’s in Labour’s own interests – and any sense of democracy and fairness demands – that the system is changed whilst they have the power and the numbers to do it. I’m not optimistic that they will, though.