SOCIALIST UNITY

40 years ago (the visit not the opera)

Owen Jones, author of Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class is appearing on Question Time tonight alongside Ken Clarke, John Prescott, Baroness Kramer, and Julie Meyer.

That’ll be two socialists in the space of a month on the programme. Something must be in the air.

This excellent piece succeeds in cutting through the often times dry political arguments against austerity and neoliberalism to remind us of the cost in real human terms. In the process it puts the case for socialism and socialist ideas better than a mountain of theoretical tracts ever could.

By Suzanne Moore

Guardian

She is there whenever I go the shops. Every time I think she can’t get any more skeletal, she manages it. Wild eyes staring in different directions, she must have been pretty once. I try not to look, for she is often aggressive. Sometimes, though, she is in my face and asking me to go into the shop, from which she has been banned, to buy her something. A scratchcard. She feels lucky. “Maybe some food?” I suggest pointlessly, but food is not what she craves. Food is not crack. Or luck. She has already lost every lottery going.

An addict is the author of their own misfortune. Her poverty is self-inflicted. All these hopeless people: where do they all come from? It is, of course, possible never to really see them, as their distress is so distressing. Who needs it? Poverty, we are often told, is not “actual”, because people have TVs. This gradual erosion of empathy is the triumph of an economic climate in which everyone, addicted or not, is personally responsible for their own lack of achievement. Poor people are not simply people like us, but with less money: they are an entirely different species. Their poverty is a personal failing. They have let themselves go. This now applies not just to individuals but to entire countries. Look at the Greeks! What were they thinking with their pensions and minimum wage? That they were like us? Out of the flames, they are now told to rise, phoenix–like, by a rich political elite. Perhaps they can grow money on trees?

Meanwhile, in the US, as this week’s shocking Panorama showed, people are living in tents or underground in drains. These ugly people, with ulcers, hernias and bad teeth, are the flipside of the American dream. Trees twist through abandoned civic buildings and factories, while the Republican candidates, an ID parade of Grecian 2000 suspects, bang on about tax cuts for the 1% who own a fifth of America’s wealth. To see the Grapes of Wrath recast among post-apocalyptic cityscapes is scary. Huge cognitive dissonance is required to cheerlead for the rich while 47 million citizens live in conditions close to those in the developing world.

This contradiction is also one of the few things we in the UK are good at producing. I heard a radio interview recently with a depressed young man with three A-levels (yes, in properly Govian subjects) who had been unemployed for three years. The response of listeners was that he was lazy and should try harder. Samuel Beckett’s “fail better” comes to mind. Understanding what three years of unemployment does to a young person does not produce a job, any more than the scratchcard will change a crackhead’s life. But pure condemnation is divisive. This fear and loathing of those at the bottom is deeply disturbing.

Three years ago I was on a panel with Vince Cable at The Convention of Modern Liberty, when Cable was still reckoned a seer for predicting the recession. He said then that the financial crisis would mean civil liberties would be trampled on. But what stuck in my mind was a sentence he mumbled about the pre-conditions for fascism arising. Scaremongering? The emotional pre-condition is absolutely this punitive attitude to the weak and poor.

Our disgust at the poor is tempered only by our sentimentality about children. They are innocent. We feel charitable. Not enough, perhaps, as a Save the Children report tells us that one in four children in developing countries are too malnourished to grow properly. Still, malnourishment isn’t starvation, just as anyone who has a mobile phone isn’t properly hard-up. Difficult to stomach maybe, but isn’t all this the fault of the countries they live in?

At what point, though, can we no longer avoid the poor, our own and the global poor? Or, indeed, avoid the concept that frightens the left as much as the right: redistribution, of wealth, resources, labour, working hours. Whither the left? Busy pretending that there is a way round this, a lot of the time.

The idea that ultimately the poor must help themselves as social mobility grinds to a halt is illogical; it is based on a faith for which there is scant evidence. Yet it is the one thing that has genuinely “trickled down” from the wealthy, so that many people without much themselves continue to despise those who are on a lower rung.

The answer to poverty, you see, lies with the poor themselves, be they drain-dwellers, Greeks, disabled people, or unemployed youth. We will give them bailouts, maybe charity, and lectures on becoming more entrepreneurial. The economy of empathy has crashed, and this putsch is insidious and individualised. No more cruel to be kind. We must be simply cruel.

The argument that there is enough to go round is now a fairytale, like winning the lottery. Poverty is not a sign of collective failure but individual immorality. The psychic coup of neo-liberal thinking is just this: instead of being disgusted by poverty, we are disgusted by poor people themselves. This disgust is a growth industry. We lay this moral bankruptcy at the feet of the poor as we tell ourselves we are better than that.

Just a brief note to thank readers and commentors for sticking with us. I have been so busy lately with the strike at Carillion in Swindon that I have had very little time to write, and some big news stories have passed me by; and I know that John and Tony have been very busy lately as well.

I have greatly appreciated the quality of debate over both Syria and Greece on SU, that have both informed me of things I didn’t know, and exposed me to viewpoints I would not have otherwise come across. At its best SU does provide a forum for debate between serious left activists from different traditions and perspectives, that I don’t think really exists anywhere else.

I hope that you have noticed that there have been fewer “flame wars”, less rudeness, and less obvious trolling since Tony joined the team. This has partly been his effective moderation, partly an improved spam filter, and partly Tony telling me to behave and not wind people up!

We are hoping to continue developing the website, and adding the capacity to share through facebook and twitter has helped to spread the word.

I am interested in what readers think.

NEW CRISIS TALKS ON MONDAY 20TH FEBRUARY AT GREAT WESTERN HOSPITAL SWINDON TO AVERT TWO MORE DAYS OF STRIKE ACTION NEXT WEEK

With action on February 14th GMB members have shown the courage to stand up against bullying, harassment and discrimination on the part of Carillion

GMB has been invited to attend further talks with Carillion at Great Western Hospital Swindon at 11 a.m. on Monday 20th Ferbuary to see if it is possible to avert further strike action on 21st and 23rd February in the dispute over bullying, harassment and discrimination of support staff at the hospital.

GMB members employed by Carillion took the first day of strike action on Tuesday 14th February after last ditch talks with private contractor Carillion at Great Western Hospital in Swindon failed. GMB national officials were present at the talks.

GMB members voted overwhelmingly for strike action. GMB then notified the employer that unless progress is made in talks in the meantime that strike action will take place on 14th, 21st and 23rd February. GMB members are demanding that Carillion management act to stop the culture of bullying on the contract and for an end to discrimination in the application of pay and conditions on the contract.

The GMB members work as porters and housekeepers in catering and cleaning and other support roles at the hospital. The industrial action, if it goes ahead will only involve GMB members who work for Carillion. It will not include the more than 200 GMB members who work for the NHS trust or the ambulance service at the GWH.

GMB submitted a formal complaint by 109 staff over allegations of bullying in December. Over the last month over 90 staff members have given evidence of terrible bullying. The manager at the heart of the bullying allegations has still not been suspended by Carillion, remains on site, and is still involved in supervising these staff.

GMB has also written to employment agencies drawing their attention to the law relating to agency workers during strikes.

Carole Vallelly, GMB Regional Organiser said “I am very proud that these GMB members have shown the courage to stand up against bullying, harassment and discrimination on the part of Carillion.

“During the talks on Monday to avert the stoppage, GMB agreed to an adjournment while Gemma Lynch, Carillion contract manager attended an urgent appointment. We now find that the urgent appointment was for her to get her photograph taken for an interview with the media. This about sums its up. The Carillion senior manager takes time out to get her photograph taken rather than priorities resolving the dispute for the benefit of the hospital patients. Gemma Lynch did not return to the talks. This sort of behaviour shows how out of touch these contract managers are from their own workers.

GMB has been invited to fresh talks on Monday. I hope that at these talks Carillion will have got the message that GMB members will not walk away until the bullying, harassment and discrimination has been brought to an end.”

The news that five senior Sun ‘journalists’ were arrested in a series of dawn raids at the weekend will have gladdened the heart of every right thinking person.

It looks very much as if things have reached a point of critical mass for the Murdoch empire, which at one time seemed invincible and more powerful than elected governments. This is especially the case now that legal proceedings are set to begin against News Corporation in the US, a country whose corporate laws are the most stringent in the world.

Senior Sun journalist Trevor Kavanagh has criticised the actions of the police, accusing them of carrying out a witchhunt against the paper and treating its journalists like a criminal gang (sic).

The irony of Mr Kavanagh trying to paint the Sun as a victim of a witchhunt will not have been lost on the countless victims of this miserable, right wing, reactionary, racist rag over the years. Let’s hope it ends up winding up and goes the way of the News of the World.