Why the Tory economic ‘recovery’ doesn’t help ordinary people

Last weekend the Sunday Times published it’s annual list of the richest people in Britain.  Apparently the total wealth of the richest 1,000 individuals and families in Britain has more than doubled in the last 10 years to £547bn.

The scandal of this is that these wealthy people’s rising fortunes IS George Osborne’s much vaunted ‘recovery’. The increasing wealth of the most wealthy in our society shows up in the economic figures as growth, papering over the stagnation that ordinary people experience in the parts of the economy that they participate in.

Perhaps there is growth on average, but the ordinary voter isn’t benefitting. Why? Because the wealthy have no need to spend much if any of their gains in the real-life economy, so they just add it to their hoard, boosting the economy only in areas like banking and finance or the superinflated London property market, where it works mostly to benefit others who are already wealthy. So growth does exist, but it’s quite tightly limited to the rarefied world of the wealthy, while the rest of the country’s barely ticking over.

Don’t be taken in: it is not success when very few people take in such vast sums of money that their huge wealth outweighs the poverty of millions to make the country look like it’s getting richer.  That’s not a healthy picture.

The huge political con trick the Tories are pulling off is to claim credit for this “growing economy” and disingenuously claim this means their savage counterproductive cuts are working and delivering prosperity for all. Austerity is simply a ruse to re-engineer the country to benefit the wealthy and powerful and disempower ordinary people, an excuse to strip away those public services the wealthy don’t need and wouldn’t dream of using, but the rest of us depend on.

Of course Labour isn’t much better. Although they didn’t cause the economic crisis, when in government they too had been facilitating widening inequality, i.e. letting the wealthy fleece the rest of us because it looks good on paper economically.

An economy that is really working properly benefits everyone, so that there are plentiful well paid jobs, so that everyone has money to spend, and taxes to pay. And the best foundation to achieve this is the best possible public services and strong regulation to curb the worst excesses of rapacious market forces. This way the workforce are healthy and secure with happy and stable lives, not desparate wageslaves struggling through a hand-to-mouth existence, using foodbanks and claiming benefits.

It’s no coincidence that those countries who do run things that way, like the Scandinavians for instance, are also the ones that are the most successful and resilient economically, and have the best quality of life for their citizens.

The way economic performance is currently reported, a trillion pounds of turnover among a few wealthy people in the city of London counts the same as a trillion pounds across the whole of the rest of the country, but the difference in terms of the number of people sustained and benefitted are worlds apart.  Only that tiny proportion who are involved in the superheated London economy see the benefit.  We need a more equitable metric that measures the performance of the economy at ground level across the whole country.  The goal should be prosperity for all.  Shouldn’t this be how the people’s government should be measured?

Capitalist neoliberalism is founded on the pipedream that financial success is a virtuous circle that creates wealth from nothing, so that growth can continue ever increasing ad infinitum.  Our planet is bountiful and can sustain us all, but its resources are finite.  Successful people’s competitive nature makes them imagine they are deserving of their rewards, that they must have worked harder or been cleverer and are therefore justfied in taking more than their share of the resources we share, but this simply doesn’t stack up.

The distortions of inequality are worsening, and our society is becoming more and more disfunctional.  The inconvenient truth is that for every huge winner there are an awful lot of huge losers.  The fact is that each of us has our talents and a similar number of waking hours, and nobody ever made a fortune except by leveraging the efforts of others.  Sure, those who are skilled and able and committed and put in a lot of effort deserve to be rewarded better than those who simply turn up to work and do as they’re told, but how many multiples is reasonable?  How can any person’s contribution be worth many thousands of times that of someone else who works a full week?

What’s wrong with The Sun and it’s Page 3?

Nobody’s arguing for censorship – the whole campaign against Page 3 of The Sun about appropriateness.  The Sun is mainstream newspaper and part of the British media establishment.  There may well be appropriate settings for sexualised images, but the pages of a mainstream daily newspaper definitely isn’t one.  It’s not just Page 3 either – while men are depicted engaged in normal activities in The Sun, women are almost exclusively presented in a sexualised and passive way.  Women are just as capable as men in any intellectual sphere of endeavour, so why does The Sun almost never portray them as such?

When women’s bodies are used for decoration, for men’s titillation, it contributes to the attitude that this is the purpose of women in the world.  Men are not represented that way – the idea of a man posing in a thong in every issue of any mainstream paper is obviously inappropriate, and would be immediately unpopular.

A healthy attitude that facilitates people succeeding happily in their lives is one of appreciating a person for their achievements, capabilities and personality, rather than their appearance – i.e. valuing people for who they are and what they can do, rather than admiring them as decorative.

Social norms in Britain today outlaw sexist behaviour: it’s accepted that outside a romantic, sexual situation, overtly viewing people sexually is completely inappropriate.  Yet The Sun persists in undermining this and blurring the line, presenting sexualised images that objectify women as if to promote viewing women as sexual objects as a completely normal, innocuous and acceptable part of everyday life.  Page 3 is a daily campaign encouraging men across the country to ogle young slim women who are naked save for a skimpy pair of pants, and to do so in public, over a café breakfast, on the train or bus.  Surely the wrongness of such degrading lecherousness is obvious nowadays, but somehow The Sun and it’s supporters seem to be either wilfully blind or indifferent to it.

This daily infusion of sexism encourages and legitimises the habit of viewing women as passive sex objects and judging their appearance and sexual attributes.  This is not a healthy habit, and can do nothing but harm to men’s capacity to view women respectfully as capable people, and to interact normally with them.  Women are people with feelings, abilities, rights and minds of their own – they are not things that exist for men’s entertainment and gratification.  It’s much easier to disempower and abuse a thing than a person, so the cumulative effect of constantly presenting women as objects is pernicious, subtly encouraging men’s sense of superiority and entitlement over them.

In the distant past, it was commonplace for women to be routinely disempowered and treated as property, but nowadays we know better. The portrayal of women in The Sun is an anachronistic throwback to the bad old days, and really has to end.

Imagine for a moment if Page 3 were a new idea, being presented now for the first time: it would be very obviously unacceptable and there would be universal outrage. Page 3 must end, and the treatment of women in the rest of The Sun, not to mention the wider media, must be more empowering, and much more equal to that of men.

A letter to Scotland from Wales

Scotland the Brave, be brave – vote YES, for all our sakes.

Cameron and the No campaign are responsible for most of the unanswered questions in the debate that are being billed as reasons to vote no. They could only have been answered by the Cameron government pre-negotiating the answers with Yes Scotland, which they of course refused to do, aiming to exploit the resulting ‘uncertainty’ to make independence seem riskier, so as to have a better chance of keeping Scotland under their control.

There will be serious work to do to construct your new nation, but you have a flexible grace period to do so and everything to gain from a fresh start. Sure, it’s a leap of faith, and I sympathise with those who are seriously worried about the impact of the disruption, about trusting your own politicians, and about unexpected issues, but really, when you consider the massive problems with the status quo that are a certainty with the no vote, surely putting yourselves in the driving seat of a newly invigorated nation offers far more opportunity than a risk? The British state has always neglected us, and today has less to offer than ever before – really you have little to lose.

A Yes will give you real influence over how your nation is run – don’t allow the establishment and corporate stooges who want to keep that control for themselves, to cheat you out of it with their pessimism and scare stories that don’t even stack up. Change might seem scary, but without it, nothing can improve. Be bold – the sky will not fall. You’d be doing the rest of us a favour too: the complacent British state is failing most of its people. Scotland’s exit would force a constitutional reset that is desperately needed – if you stay, nothing will change, and the inequality, corporate carve up and cronyism will continue.

Vote YES, and leave the door ajar for we Welsh!

Should Wales be following Scotland’s tilt towards Independence?

Ever since the industrial revolution, the British state profited from stripping Wales’ resources to fuel its Empire. Wales bears the scars, but retained none of the benefit. That industry ended 50 years ago, but almost nothing has been done to replace it.  Through my entire lifetime, Wales is increasingly an economic husk left to rot by the British state, so that we now languish at the very bottom of the poverty tables, while South East England boasts world class levels of wealth.

Media polls seem to suggest that Wales remains strongly unionist, but then it was similar in Scotland a few short years ago.  It’s quite telling that since the independence referendum giving the Scottish public the opportunity to properly consider the situation and make their own assessment, independence is no longer a fringe view, despite the best efforts of the British establishment, supported by an overwhelmingly British nationalist media.

For the moment, most Welsh people seem to have swallowed the notion that Wales’ poverty is a natural state of affairs, structural and inevitable, and that the union is our saviour, funding us and keeping us afloat. Can that really be true?  Is the Welsh population really hopelessly incapable of supporting themselves?  How did we come to stop believing in the abilities of our own nation?

The ubiquity of the London/corporate/establishment media, even here in Wales, means that the vast majority of media news tends to have an Anglo-centric, British establishment perspective, in which Wales is perpetually written off as a liability that should be grateful for the British state keeping us from destitution.  What effective economic solutions has Westminster provided for us these last 50 years though?  Westminster should be running the economy so that it works for the whole UK, not just London & the South East, and not just corporations and the already wealthy.  What makes anyone think Westminster will ever prioritise redressing the balance to Wales’ advantage, given that this would have to be at the cost of the wealthier parts of England, particularly when it has its own problems?

The Holtham Commission reported in 2010 how badly Wales is underfunded, and that situation has worsened since then to over half a billion a year. The truth is that Wales and Scotland are very ill-served by the union, and if the Scots vote for independence this will become impossible to ignore. Were Wales and Scotland already independent, the case for the status quo would be impossibly weak.

As a Welsh speaker I am very aware of how the dominance of England-centric Britishness has long worked to overwhelm and supplant Welsh culture. Often this is subtle and perhaps accidental, but in some ways it’s blatant and arrogant. The unforgivable long-standing poverty and neglect of Wales are the main issue though. As a direct result of the lack of opportunities here, we haemorrhage many more of our young people to England than is sustainable, further entrenching our problems. This loss of our youth is the greatest threat to our indigenous language and its rich culture. The persistence of Welsh in recent decades (it’s still a lot stronger than it was 20 years ago, despite the small dip in the recent census), despite all the pressures, makes it crystal clear that were it not for the abject lack of opportunity in Wales, we and our culture would be thriving.

As far as Wales is concerned, Westminster democracy is fundamentally broken, and doesn’t serve our needs or reflect our values. The Westminster consensus (all 3 main parties) has for decades been to promote London-centric neoliberal economics, structuring things to benefit corporations and the wealthy and powerful, at the cost of ordinary people, in pursuit of growth regardless of massive imbalances. They show no sign whatsoever of moving away from this model anytime soon. It’s difficult not to agree with Yes Scotland that opting out and going your own way is the only viable option for a better future in our lifetimes.

There’s no need to fear a Yes vote though. Change might seem scary, but the sky will not fall. A Yes would invigorate Scotland, giving them a more accountable democracy, while facilitating positive constitutional change for the rest of the UK that is sorely needed. It won’t all be plain sailing and that there will be significant challenges to deal with over several years, but these offer more opportunity than threat. Centuries of shared history and culture won’t disappear overnight though – Scotland isn’t going anywhere, and will remain compatriots and collaborators with the rest of the UK in very many ways, but able to do so on their own terms as an independent partner. They’re not going to pull up some drawbridge and stop working with us, just because they want to fully run their own affairs.

I think come 2020, we’ll all look back with different eyes.