The End of the Opposition

Yesterday the official opposition gave up. In a packed room at The Insititute for Education Ed Balls finally confirmed what many of us have been thinking for a while: The Labour Party aren’t the alternative.

As the cuts continue to bite, the wages of workers remain stagnant and the economic outlook for the UK remains gloomy you’d be forgiven for thinking that the official opposition might just step into the breach and make a stand. You’d be wrong. Yesterday Ed Balls capitulated to the most ruthlessly pro-market government we’ve had in many years. The Labour Party, he said, would not reverse any of the Tory cuts or tax raises if they won the next election and they’d keep the freeze on public sector pay.

Credit: Coalition of Resistance

The reason given for the capitulation – and we heard this time and time again at yesterday’s Fabian Conference – is that the Labour party must be “trusted on the economy”.  In the main plenary Chukka Ummuna MP, the pollster Deborah Mattison and the former economic secretary to the treasury Kitty Ussher clambered over each other to proclaim the need for policies that look sensible to the public. Later in the day Polly Toynbee suggested that the Labour party must look tough on the economy now in order to gain power and do the things they really believe in.

The state of our parliamentary democracy could hardly be more dire. We have three parties who are singing off the same orthodox hymn sheet. The official opposition, lying down to die in the face of focus group studies and opinion polls which suggest the public believe cuts are necessary, have given up making the case for doing things another way. The few dissenters who remain, like the single Green parliamentarian, are accused by the Labour party of ‘playing into the Tories hands’. The cuts, we are told by all three main parties, will continue, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Instead of providing political leadership Ed Balls is using the public’s fear about the economy as a starting point for his party’s policies.

Let’s be clear: The Labour Party have hardly been a shining light of independent thought and radical ideas in their time in opposition. But Ed Balls’ rather sudden lurch to the right is still hugely disappointing. Defending public spending, while the government spew bile about a ‘bloated state’ and ‘extraordinarily levels of debt’, was hard enough already. But now, with the Labour Party abandoning the hope of persuading the reluctant public of any alternatives to austerity, those of us still calling for a change of course are set to become more marginalised than ever.

It’s all about looking like a party of government they say. But what the Labour leadership fail to see is that they are just looking like a less enthusiastic version of the Tories. The choice for the electorate will be between a party who sound convincing while they make cuts and one who look guilty while they do it. The promise is that once they’ve seen the destruction of many of the services upon which people rely, they’ll reshape the economy to a fairer form of capitalism. It looks to me like the Labour party have run out of ideas.

Austerity isn’t working. The Labour Party have been saying it for months. But somehow, after an all-to-close analysis of the polls, Britain’s second biggest political party have done a monstrous u-turn. They’ve let down their members, many of whom must be questioning why they’re still in the party. They’ve let down the left, whose battle has just become ever more difficult. But mostly The Labour Party have let down the British public who will now be blindly led down the path of ignorance to austerity, with no-one in parliament fighting their corner.

HOW TO WIN AN ELECTION

With both the London mayoral post and Venezuelan presidency up for grabs next year, there is a lot aspirational candidates can learn from veteran racer, Hugo Chavez.

For all of you out there warming up for the big race, the gold chain and the hottest seat in Town, the festive season is the perfect time to start wooing your electorate. Why not take a leaf out of Hugo’s little red book and send every cellphone owning Brit a festive text: A personal touch with a modern, youthful twist. It could be short and sweet, like “Merry Christmas”, or if you are angling for a more inclusive, secular appeal how about a simple, “Happy Holiday, love [insert name here]”.

However, if you want something with more substance and are a little short on inspiration have a peak at what the charismatic, once, twice, three times a winner, Venezuelan President, sent his electorate this year:

            ”Each December, during all this time, we have celebrated our victorious and unstoppable march towards the Good & Pretty Fatherland… full of happiness, justice and social equality. Merry Christmas companions. Hugo Chavez.”

With cell phone penetration in Venezuela at 104%, this message reached every single Venezuelan of voting age. That’s over 29 million texts. Infact, Chavez had to send so many text messages that they took 3 days to leave his outbox, with some citizens receiving the message as late as the 26th of December. By then, however, for an unfortunate few too many, the march towards justice and social equality had already stopped and Hugo’s message still sits in their inbox unread, awaiting their resurrection.

Photo Alejandro Tarre

With 385 recorded homocides to date, this December is prooving to be Venezuela’s second bloodiest month of the year.  To put this in perspective, the number of people murdered in Venezuela this December alone, makes up for 60% of the UK’s total homocide figures for this year. So whilst Chavez celebrates his victorious and unstoppable march towards the Good & Pretty Fatherland, Venezuela marches with an ever increasing pace to the top of the UN’s list of most dangerous countries in the World. Since Chavez was elected in 1999, annual homicide figures have risen from 4,550, as recorded that year, to 19, 336 as recorded this year - the most violent since records began. In other words, in Hugo’s twelve years in office homocides alone have quadrupled.

Despite the governments failure to address crime levels, Hugo’s approval ratings in the lead up to next year’s October election are looking strong, with many pollsters showing approval ratings of 58% to almost 69%. His renaissance is hardly a surprise following announcements like this month’s unveiling of the “Great Sons of Venezuela” mission.  The scheme, in itself a very honourable one, is another short-sighted, pre-election cash giveaway. It will enable low-income families to claim from the Goverment the equivalent of £64 per month for each child, for up to three children per family, and £90 for disabled dependents.

So for those of you aspiring Mayors sweating over your policies and pulling your hair out over making promises you are bound to break, if Chavez’ success is anything to go by, you are wasting your time. The key to winning elections and selling ideologies isn’t good, long-term policies or kept promises.

So get texting quick! And if you are worried your message won’t get to your electorate in time for New Year (the next festive opportunity in the calender), don’t worry, unlike Chavez, you only need to send 7.825 million texts to ensure you welcome every Londoner into the New Year.

Spills and Spin

For some unknown reason I had always thought of BP as the ‘least bad’ oil company. Then they spilt nearly five million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Then I read Spills and Spin.

Tom Bergin’s first book, which begins with thick mud raining onto the deck of an offshore supply vessel in the Gulf of Mexico, chronicles the thirty years of BP history leading up to the spill. As such, it is as much page-turning thriller as it is an historical account.

Read the rest on Ceasefire

If I Must

I haven’t blogged for a while. There’s a reason for that – I’ve been busy working in a Students’ Union at a time of year that gives little respite. This is only one reason though. The other is a lack of inspiration. This blog isn’t about much apart from that – but maybe you’ll recognise your own experiences in some of mine.

My blog pieces here have been reactionary. From the riots to solar panels, they have tackled issues that have interested me, usually by angering me. I’ve tried to take the argumentative fight to the forces driving regressive social change. A useful exercise – predominantly, perhaps, for me – but research heavy, time consuming, and sadly negative.

I don’t want to write a relentlessly negativity. Overarching political trends – austerity, European democratic degradation, failure to progress in climate negotiations, relentless commodification (to name some) – remain uninspiring and morale-sapping. To be professionally responsible for resisting an instance of the latter (in the form of the government’s disastrous Higher Education white paper), against political odds, does little to invigorate. By only writing to arm myself with greater and greater detail, I run the risk of slipping closer to the devil.

In the shadow of this silence has run my ever-evolving self-examination and purpose-seeking. I know that I enjoy my job. It affords me freedom and experience unique so soon after graduating from a university (and it yields something perhaps rarer: a salary). Being, I think, at least capable at what I do, I derive satisfaction and reward from helping create a better University world for students to thrive in. But I also know it doesn’t sate an opaque and visceral tug to be acting out as fully as possible my values in what I do.

Since October I’ve had little chance to reflect on this. This is not a good thing, quickly leading to frustration, uncertainty and, at times of fatigue, transient despondency. Instead, looking for an information-based practical agenda, I’m overwhelmed. Not only is there too much to know and care about, there’s too much to read, listen, watch and say about each, and too many ways of reading, listening, watching and saying. Twitter – a key tool in marshaling information – nevertheless represents this best: approach it with the wrong attitude and it will drown you.

Fatigue and uncertainty combined in a week of contrasts not long ago. On a Wednesday morning I attended an 8am meeting with very senior members of the university to discuss the student growth plan (Bristol plans to respond to the deregulation of AAB+ students with an expansion in student numbers of 20%). I participated and observed. Participated by ensuring as much as possible that a cohort of students too large for the facilities in place, and too soon for those facilities to be significantly expanded, are not as disadvantaged as they might have been. And I observed people with hundreds of millions of pounds worth of responsibility for higher education grapple with the realities of crap government policy – albeit policy that some at the table had supported.

I spent the following night at Occupy Bristol, on College Green. Far from the double-glazed establishment of a biscuit and coffee filled top-floor board-room, Occupy was dark, cold, and hard. Hard to see and understand, hard to imagine, hard to discern clear purpose for, hard to engage with. This is not a comment on Occupy Bristol in any objective sense – I support it and am pleased a motion doing likewise passed into Student Union policy recently – but a comment on my experience of it then. Quick to migrate from one site of political action to another – inhabited by some of the wealthiest and poorest in Bristol – and with little time for thought in between, I’d actually forgotten what I was doing, and why I might be doing it. The ground I thought I laid to tread on had moved.

In neither instance did I feel committed, sure of purpose, or invigorated. Political action is often unclear, and a political life is burdened with this fact. But lack of these three components is a signal to pause. It’s a signal to work out what you want to do before you work out exactly why or how. It’s a signal to focus on yourself and interrogate that opacity, to force light in. It’s a signal to be honest about what you are good at, how you’re built, how as yourself you’re best an agent of a vision. It’s a signal to ignore guilt at not being like other people, to stop worrying that they’re analyses trump yours as an explanation for their surety.

I didn’t choose to write just another blog piece because I accepted I didn’t want to. I don’t want to bury myself in issues obsessively, or act as I feel I ‘should’. I want to live in a way that nourishes me, despite the near-nihilism that can come from serious reflection on the present and future. That means paying attention to myself – blog reticence and all – and to what I feel as if I can properly put energy into. I’ll write another reactionary blog piece again, and meet with the university. No doubt I’ll head to Occupy once more. That doesn’t mean nothing in me won’t have changed. Let the inspiration return.

And Merry Christmas.

Remembering Victims of Road Accidents

This post first appeared on Bright Green

The horrific crash on the M5 earlier this month was a stark reminder of the dangers of road travel- but it was by no means an isolated incident.  The fact is that people die on Britain’s roads every single day of the year – six people – one less than died in the pile up on the M5.

Two years ago this January I picked up the phone to one of my closest friends.  It was one of the worst conversations I could have imagined. On his way home from a night out a car speeding along a main road had ploughed into him and his friends. One of the group, a friend of mine, died instantly.  One died a few months later after never coming out of a coma. One sustained injuries that kept him in hospital for months. One broke his leg. My close friend was left conscious on the scene. The driver fled.

This accident is, one might think, highly unusual. A new map by The Guardian shows us just how common road accidents have been in Britain over the last 10 years. When I zoomed in to see the mapping of my friend’s accident I couldn’t find it because someone else had died there too and covered them up. When I looked to see the spot where my mum was flung across the road by a four by four I couldn’t make out which of the many ‘serious injuries’ was hers as there were so many on the same spot.

33,000 people have been killed on Britain’s roads over the last ten years and nearly 3 million, just under 5% of the population, have been injured.  Add to this the estimated 4000 people dying every year from air pollution in London alone and you begin to get a picture of a desperate situation. The government, you would of thought, would have to act. And they have acted, sort of. They’ve declared an ‘end to the war on the motorist’- a war which George Monbiot points out never actually took place.

The Tories have removed part of the congestion charge in London, removed planning restrictions which limit parking in city centres, publically supported the idea of 80mph speed limits and now, after pressure from The Sun, they are planning to ‘trim benefits’ to stop a fuel duty rise in January.  They’ve also cut the road safety grant, which has led to speed cameras up and down the country being switched off.  At the very time when motor traffic volumes are actually falling the government is putting in place incentives to put more drivers on the road.

The government isn’t solely to blame on this one; the media also have blood on their hands.  For years they have campaigned against this non-existent ‘war on the motorist’.  As they cover multi car pile-ups on their front page their comment pieces attack speed cameras as an affront to liberty.  They heartily cheered the ‘common sense’ policy of 80mph speed limits and lambasted the congestion charge, whose profits paid for public transport.

Today is the world day of remembrance for road traffic victims. But we should not remember them in silence. Plenty of campaigns are fighting with the government about their policy on transport. The London Green Party are attacking Boris Johnson for ‘gluing’ pollution to the road, Climate Rush are fighting back on behalf of cyclists and The Campaign for Better Transport continue to promote trains and buses as safer, greener transport options. In memory of my friend and for the thousands of others who’ve died I’m going to join the fight.

The statistics I used for road deaths have mostly come from the Office of National Statistics.  Sian Berry’s Blog for the Campaign for Better Transport was very useful

Double Hit to the Homeless

This Christmas, once again, the charity Crisis will be giving homeless people a warm place to stay. As always they will serve people three warm meals a day, offer them a haircut and a chiropodist appointment and give them new clothes and blankets. Most importantly Crisis will provide these vulnerable people with advice on housing, benefits and job seeking and give them the opportunity to meet with addiction councillors. The aim is to use those few days at Christmas time to help set ‘guests’ up for the future.

The work that Crisis does is vital. Rough sleepers have an average life expectancy of just 42. They are thirty five times more likely to commit suicide than the general population. 3975 people slept rough at some point inLondonduring 2010/11, an increase of 8 per cent on the previous year’s total of 3673 and of more than a thousand since 2005/06. The situation is set to get even worse.

Credit: Deadly Sirius

In recent months there has been what Crisis are calling a ‘double hit’ that will lead to more homelessness. Firstly there have been substantial cuts to housing benefit for 25-35 year olds. These cuts, which mean single people between 25-35 cannot claim housing benefit for a place of their own, could force as many as 12,000 young Londoners out of their home.

The second hit took place only a few weeks ago when the government pushed through legislation to criminalise squatting. This while 700,000 homes are empty and 40% of homeless people have squatted at some point. This change, as Max reported earlier, is ‘both unjust and socially damaging’.

This Christmas Crisis will give homeless people somewhere warm to stay and some hope for the future. Next yeae the fight against the government’s disastrous housing policies goes on. If you can afford to pay for someone to stay at one of the shelters this year please donate here, it’s certainly a worthy cause.

Into the Void

By Tom Williams who blogs here

It was quickly getting dark as I arrived at the Occupy London Stock Exchange (Occupy LSX) camp on Monday night. The tall, imposing St Paul’s Cathedral loomed over the small rows of mismatched hastily assembled tents that were currently being besieged by a strong wind, their guy-ropes were looped around drain covers and straining in the gusts. Overhead the great dome that escaped some of the most deadly bombs mankind has ever known sat in the night’s sky with uncontested grandeur. The white stone pillars of the front façade of the Cathedral rose high in to the blackening skyline, underneath groups of people sat, huddled on the steps waiting for another general assembly to start. Eventually someone made their way to the front of the crowd, “It’s Monday night and we’re still here” they shouted in to the microphone, “that’s amazing” they added amidst the cheers.

Occupy LSX has become a working village since its chaotic inception on Saturday afternoon. A row of bins neatly labelled for recycling, composting and general waste sat lined up with a nearby crew of cycling binmen with bags balanced on the frames of their bikes ready to transport the rubbish away. Elsewhere an organised team head up the kitchen complete with an erratically tempered chef, and a sagging tarpaulin protects those furiously typing on laptops in the media tent.

As has been well documented, the occupiers are a diverse lot with contrasting ideological opinions and reasons for being camped out in the autumnal elements. What unites them however is that they are part of the majority that loses out to a system built to favour the few over the many. The global reach of the “we are the 99%” message has galvanised support in the most unlikely places from Japan to South Africa. Let us not forget that Wall Street, the place where this all began, is perhaps the most unlikely place where you would find dissent against the capitalist system. Since occupiers first converged on Wall Street now over a month ago, the UK has seen unemployment rates reach the highest levels for seventeen years with young people being hit the hardest, growth forecasts slashed and inflationary rises in the cost of living. Reasons to be cheerful are almost as scarce as solutions to the problems with the government sticking to their chosen programme of deep cuts and no investment, a programme which this week, the New York Times labelled “self inflicted misery”.

The Occupy movement has stepped in to the void left by official opposition parties who are too weak or discredited to stand against the fiscal austerity doctrine. There is a touch of the “Ya Basta” or “Enough of this” sentiment, a refusal to accept the government’s chosen path. But there is also a willingness to build something new. An occupation should always stand against something it wishes to change but also be a representation of a future way of living, a tiny slice of utopia camped out on the pavement. Many have scoffed at the ability of the occupy movement to change anything. However these are the same people who told Polly Toynbee that protestors driven on to the streets by a lack of jobs and opportunities should “start working” as if it was as simple as that. This is how out of touch the right is. They will not notice as an alternative to their capitalist greed is built quite literally right under their noses in Wall Street, the London Stock Exchange and worldwide.

Freezing and Fighting

As the sun began to go down this evening, and the warm autumn day faded into a cold night, most of us will have been sat comfortably at home relaxing before the working week begins. Most of us, but not all of us.

Outside St Paul’s Cathedral a tent city has sprouted and a few hundred people are braving the cold as part of the worldwide movement that has emerged since Wall Street was occupied last month. In a much quieter part of town, tucked away from main roads and tourists another group of people are bravely fighting the cold, and Brent council, as part of a campaign to keep Kensal Rise Library open.

The occupiers outside of St Pauls are an organised bunch. Food from local supermarket bins has been sought out and spread on tables for people to share. Tarpaulins have been erected to create a media space, banners have been painted and long meetings continue to take place to draw up a list of grievances and demands. Some of the protestors are anti capitalist, some are not. One banner read ‘This is Bullshit, I want social democracy’ while another read ‘Capitalism is Crisis’. As we sat in our small group to discuss why we were there the list of grievances with the present state of the world was endless. The system is obviously broken one said, and it’s time ‘we take responsibility and fix it’.

Half an hour away and the protestors outside Kensal Rise library look rather different. Far less facial hair on the adults and far more children hang around outside the beautiful, hundred year old building opened by Mark Twain.  One man asked another ‘So how is your property portfolio?’ But it isn’t just middle class parents with lots of time on their hands who care about this library closing. It was, according to one of the organisers, Paula, a great resource for unemployed people looking for work. The library is now shut and the high court has backed Brent council’s closures. But the fight for Kensal Rise Library certainly doesn’t stop there. When contractors came to board it up last week they were met with one hundred and fifty school children demanding that their library stayed open. The campaigners now have a twenty four hour vigil to ensure that the library isn’t boarded up before an appeal is launched against last week’s verdict.

In some ways these protests couldn’t be more different. One is about the systemic problems associated with free market capitalism; the other is about a place where children can read books. But, more than anything else, I was struck by the similarities. Both are being run by committed groups of people who are giving up their time to fight for something they believe in. Both are a reaction to the financial crisis and the ensuing austerity measures. Both are reflective of struggles that are happening all over the world.  As one protestor outside the library said, after I told him I was off to the occupation in the city: “It’s the same fight…we’re just the thin end of the wedge”.

Both sets of protesters will be freezing cold tonight as they fight against injustice and, for their endurance and their determination, the rest of us should be incredibly grateful.

Poverty isn’t just about welfare

A report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies released today suggests Britain is set to miss its legally binding target of reducing the number of children in poverty to ten per cent or lower by 2020. Absolute child poverty will, in fact, rise to over three million by 2015 and one in four children will be in relative poverty in 2020. Much has been made of the effect of the government’s welfare reforms on child poverty in the UK, but the pernicious impact of parents’ low pay is all too often overlooked when it comes to the well-being of British children.

Read the rest on politics.co.uk

Block The Bill

“I haven’t spent seven and a half years as shadow secretary and secretary of state to see the NHS undermined, or fragmented or privatised… That was never my intention. It is not my intention.” Andrew Lansley, Secretary of State for Health

Three years ago my mum was run down by a 4×4 in North London. She nearly didn’t make it, but, thanks to the wonderful doctors and nurses of the NHS, she was brought back from the brink. Next week the NHS that we know and love is set to be voted out of its current existence by the House of Lords in the form of the Health and Social Care Bill (2011).

These Tory proposals aren’t a healthcare revolution but instead an extension of the slow erosion of the NHS’ founding principles that has taken place over the last few decades. In the 1980s hospital cleaning was sold off, as Dave Prentis of Unison said, ‘to the lowest bidder’. It didn’t stop there. Within three years of taking power in 1997 the Labour Party took us further down the long road of marketising our health service. They set up foundation hospital trusts which were free from the direct supervision of the Department of Health and could set their own terms of service for staff. Foundation hospitals are paid on a ‘per procedure’ basis and compete against one another for patients.

The Labour Party, who are now the self proclaimed ‘defenders of the NHS’, allowed private companies to compete for elective surgery (such as hip replacements and cataract operations) contracts. 25 per cent of the private health sector’s total revenues now come from NHS contracts.

But Labour still hadn’t finished. Their ‘personal budgets’ for people with chronic conditions allowed patients to buy their own care and allowed those with spare cash to pay for more. Inequality in our healthcare system began to creep in. As Colin Leys said:

“In 2000 there were no foundation trusts; no payment by results for hospital treatments; no private health companies already providing NHS acute care and GP services; no independent regulator of a healthcare market (Monitor). Without all these changes, and many others, what Lansley’s Bill now proposes would be unthinkable.”

If Labour’s changes laid the foundations for a marketised health service than this bill in front of parliament is set to start building the infrastructure of privatisation at double speed. Labour let competition slip into the NHS mostly at the level of service provision. This legislation will introduce market forces to the planning and commissioning of these services. The bill will, as Frank Dobson said on the Today Programme this week, allow American healthcare providers, most of who have been successfully sued for defrauding the people they are supposed to be treating, to play a part in our health provision. This disastrous legislation will take power and responsibility away from the Department of Health and place it into the hands of profiteers.

With the healthcare regulator, Monitor, having to ensure that private companies make a profit out of the NHS it likely that more and more procedures will stop being free. As Mark Britnell, previously of the Department of Health, now global head of health at KPMG, and recent appointee to David Cameron’s “kitchen cabinet” of health experts to advise on health service reform said “In future, the NHS will be a state insurance provider not a state deliverer.”

But it’s not just through individual treatments that we’ll be losing money. The cost of this hugely damaging NHS ‘reorganisation’ is set cost the country £2 billion at a time when we’re cutting day care centres for the elderly and school building programs for our kids.

Let us be clear: The selling off the NHS, in the name of efficiency and choice will take us one giant leap towards an unfair, expensive and innefective ‘US style’ healthcare system.

The NHS wasn’t perfect for my mum. After leaving the Royal Free, where her life had been saved, the services on offer began to drop off. She couldn’t get the physiotherapy she needed and she continued to be in pain. But what was lacking from her treatment was not choice. It wasn’t flexibility. What was lacking was investment.

It isn’t just whingeing lefties who think this bill should be stopped. 96% of the Royal College of Nurses voted for a motion of no confidence in Andrew Lansley earlier this year. The British Medical Association say that the ‘bill poses an unacceptably high risk to the NHS in England’ and 400 senior doctors and experts signed a letter condemning the bill earlier this week.

Aneurin Bevan, a Labour politician, once said“The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it”. We Blocked the Bill on Sunday.

Now it’s time to sign a last minute petition