I am Daniel Blake

Watching I, Daniel Blake I am not ashamed to say I was moved to tears. I left the cinema still welling up inside. It does take a lot to make me cry, but an overwhelming sadness was not the only thing I felt. The other feeling can only be described as white-hot fury. I can still feel the heat of that burning anger now.

It’s not that the film shows us what we didn’t know, it’s that the film conveys the reality some of us know all too well. Dan embodies the suffering and humiliation of benefit claimants. Katie and her children stands for the single-mums and their plight in these dark times. I thought of my mother as I watched Katie go hungry to feed her children — as my mum so often did.

We know what it was like to live in damp houses without proper heating or appliances. We know what it was like to live from hand to mouth with the fear of not being able to make the rent and the bills. We know how to fill a bath with water boiled in a kettle because there is no hot water. We know how to get to sleep on bare floorboards.

Truly morally-stunted people will dismiss I, Daniel Blake as just a work of fiction from an old left-wing filmmaker. These people are irredeemable. You can’t expect people like Toby Young and Kwasi Kwarteng to see the truth that they are paid not to see. There is no point trying to persuade these people of the scale of misery in this country. It is no accident the degradation of poor people escapes their purview.

It’s not like it is common for a film to take the side of the benefit claimant, one of the most demonised figures in British society. We live with Benefits Street and Jeremy Kyle, where the unemployed are presented as a bunch of free-loading scumbags. People who need a dose of tough love. By contrast,I, Daniel Blake has been criticised for showing us an unemployed man, who is not dysfunctional and struggling with addiction.

Daniel Blake is out of work because of no fault of his own. His bad heart means he can’t work, yet he is found fit for work by the job centre. He comes across Katie and her kids, who have been sent to live in Newcastle having been evicted by a landlord in London. We follow Dan and Katie through hungry queues at food banks and the bureaucracy of the benefits system. Yes, people do live like this in real life.

This is not a saccharine depiction of working-class life. It is not ‘sentimental’ to portray an unemployed man with a moral compass. Middle-class people are often shown on film as upstanding, moral citizens with few problems (except maybe a break-up or the odd murder). Meanwhile the only problem facing the super-rich is what to do with all their ill-gotten gains, as we see in movies like Wolf Of Wall Street.

In this regard, Ken Loach has succeeded in capturing the travails of working-class people without concessions to the gutter press and its view of poor people. It would be inappropriate to show Dan smoking dozens fags and drinking his way through six packs of cheap lager every night. Not to mention the fact that the man suffered a major heart attack.

So we’re meant to expect an irresponsible feckless stereotype as a representative of the out-of-work poor. Shell suits, Burberry caps and roll-ups are in order. Cans of watered down lager, obligatory. Anything short of this tabloid image is ‘unrealistic’. This is what we’re led to believe by the chattering classes. It’s almost as if working-class pride has been erased from public life.

Working-class people are regularly stripped of their dignity. You can see this whenever you turn on daytime television or open a red-top newspaper.I, Daniel Blake covers the form this humiliation takes at the job centre. Ken Loach and Paul Laverty are not obliged to play to the middle-classes and how they view less privileged people.

The critics who deny the film’s accuracy confirm its truth in doing so. The media response shows you why I, Daniel Blake is accurate and why it had to be made. It is a fictional account of what happens to ordinary people, both good and bad. The point is that if you are a respectable member of the ‘deserving’ poor, the system will not spare you. There are no exceptions and the odds are stacked against a happy ending.

If there weren’t thousands of Daniel Blakes across Britain, this film would have never been made and it would not be dismissed if it weren’t true. Too many people don’t like the truth. It’s inconvenient and often painful to accept. Like many great film makers Ken Loach raises a mirror and demands that we look at ourselves. So he should. And we are obliged to do so.

This article was originally written for Notes from the Underclass.

It's very expensive being poor!

I was meant to get my first payment of Universal Credit today. I checked my account online with some anticipation (though not much) only to find nothing there. I’ll be calling Scotland soon, listen to canned Vivaldi once again. Eventually I’ll get a dour voice telling me something. But even if I got the money, it wouldn’t be the answer.

Some have no idea what it’s like. Try paying your rent without a job. Try covering your travel costs. Try paying your Council Tax too. Try eating healthily. Try saving up for anything without disposable income. Try paying your bills. Try all of this on just £57 a week. That plus housing benefit, if you get it in time. Try it. Go on.

All of these things are hard enough when you’re working a minimum wage job. You will be lucky if you’re getting by with £100 leftover in your bank account. If you’re a recent graduate, you might be lucky enough to still have an overdraft without the charges. Feel free to dip in and go for a swim. You can sink in for days, before resurfacing at the end of the month.

That’s if you have a pay day, a monthly wage, an annual salary, with the taxes taken out by your employer. An existence as an intern or free-lancer can be highly stressful. In any case, life on what used to be called ‘the dole’ is much less simple. You can find yourself trapped financially. It’s supposed to make you “get off your arse, get on a bike and get a job”. It is true, after all the system is so shit it does give you an incentive to work.

Nevertheless, if you live on benefits — you can barely travel and eat properly. The propensity to depression is natural. You’ll soon find yourself waist-deep in despair, and sinking fast. Once you’re there, you’ll find it hard to motivate yourself to apply for jobs. Fortunately, the job centre may sanctionyou for this, so you have fear to motivate you and, I’m sure, you will apply to the best of your abilities under such intolerable conditions.

Wages have been stagnant since the 1970s. That’s why we’ve had a huge explosion of private debt — the only way to raise demand without high wages — as people relied more and more on credit cards, mortgages and loans, to stay afloat. The credit crunch and the subsequent financial crisis did not end this trend, but rather entrenched it further. We can thank ourpolitical leaders for a low-wage, low-growth economy with huge amounts of debt and unaffordable, lousy housing.

Since the credit crunch in 2007 the UK has seen wages continue to fall, in real times, putting us next to Greece. Real earnings have fallen by over 10% between 2007 and 2015 in Britain. According to the OECD, the average wage rate has risen by 6.7% in Europe — but not in Great Britain — as we find in France (11%), Germany (14%) and Poland (23%). This is what the Conservatives mean when they say they are “making work pay”.

Meanwhile the UK’s top bosses have taken home a 10% raise — on an average salary of £5.5 million a year. Wages for the average worker rose by just 2% in 2015. That’s after years of falling wages. The highest paid CEO isSir Martin Sorrell at WPP, taking home over £70 million quid last year. It may sound good for aspirational types, who stupidly imagine they could earn that much one day. The brutal truth is the poor works so these people don’t have to.

Profits are what you make when you don’t work. Except, if you’re in a dole queue — that’s scrounging! If you can digest this thought, ask yourself: How did that taste? Was it disgusting? It should be.

This article was originally written for Notes from the Underclass.

New Project: Notes from the Underclass

Hold onto your nuts, I have started a new blog on Medium called 'Notes from the Underclass'. Pretension and procrastination continue to be my main skills. I intend to rejuvenate this platform too, and generally refocus my efforts.

As I am unemployed for the time being, I thought I would blog about the arduous task of applying for universal credit and chart the process (which could take up to six weeks). I also intend to interview people who have been living on benefits for far longer than I have. The point being to get the insights of ordinary people completely overlooked, marginalised and vilified by the media and political class.

This is not meant to be a long-term project, as I intend to get hired soon, but it is meant to provide some illumination and humour on unemployment. It's not enough to be morose about the state of affairs in the world. Though it is certainly understandable.

The Joy of the Job Centre

Four days into my workless life, I head to the job centre early and ask to apply for Jobseekers Allowance. They tell me I can’t speak to someone, so I should use the computer instead. The computer tells me I’m eligible for Universal Credit, but not JSA. I apply for Universal Credit. At first, it tells me I am not eligible for Universal Credit before suggesting I apply for JSA, and call the following number… So I decided to go home and try again.

This time the virtual form worked. I filled out everything for Universal Credit and the ball appeared to be rolling. Pleased with this, I went about my workless daily life. I was out drinking with a friend the next day when I got the phone call: the job centre has penciled me in for 9.15am on Friday. On the surface, the process was fairly efficient. Rolling all benefits into one may have resolved the bureaucratic logjam after all. No, not quite!

On Friday, I go back with all my papers (IDs, bank statements, passport, tenancy etc.) for my 9.15am appointment. I’ve been assigned a work coach, but he’s nowhere to be found. Let’s call him Dick for the sake of anonymity. Dick is late, and, for whatever reason, there is no one else around. So I sit around until 10 when I finally get to talk to Dick about joblessness. But he can’t find one set of forms I filled out online. Apparently, the form went ‘missing’ in transit somewhere between the internet and the job centre.

The centre itself is a long corridor of desks, which you descend into by a short set of stairs, each little unit with its own phone and computer — and a camera watching over the work coach. The decor is bland, even the brightest fabrics of blue and red have been discoloured with age. The walls carry notices for recruitment drives and adverts proclaiming the virtues of the DWP: ‘Making work pay’. One notice is from the local council and it lists the attributes of a suitable candidate: 1) professional, 2) ambitious, 3) responsible and 4) human. I wonder what life must be like for an unemployed amphibian.

The job centre would be Kafkaesque if it were more intelligent. I’m told to call a new number, and after five minutes of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons I get to talk to a dour Scotswoman — who has all the warmth of a death march. I’m given an appointment for next Friday. I might get my money in 4–5 weeks. Or, I can ask for an advance… if I can make it past the endless recording of the Four Seasons. This is why the job centre has a camera at every desk, just in case one of the claimants decides to tear a chunk out of someone’s head!

The good news is that the payments will be backdated to when I first made my claim. Unlike most benefit claimants, I have savings and enough money in my account to make it through the next few weeks. As I’ve got two years of experience as a journalist, I’m also more likely to find work again. Even still, this new project isn’t really about me — it’s about the experiences of people living on benefits long-term.

Over the coming days and weeks, I aim to compile just some of the experiences of people getting by on so-called ‘hand-outs’. The system needs unemployment and poverty. This is the so-called ‘underclass’, those who live on virtually nothing. These are the people spat on by middle-class journalists and career politicians. I hope not to do them a disservice in what I write here on Medium.

This was originally written for Notes from the Underclass.

A master of everything.

The title of Bukowski’s second novel is actually stolen property, pilfered by English, like so many others, from Latin. The implications are worth noting for a factotum is a “master of everything” and in the case of Henry Chinaski this means not just repairing bicycles and factory work, it means gambling, drinking and womanising. Just as Karl Marx viewed production as a sensuous human activity, as much a part of our species-being as it is our alienation, Bukowski seems to take a more literal line – he is production.

Henry Chinaski makes his way across the States often desperately penniless and drunk. He works any job he can find and hangs his hat wherever he can. We follow Hank as he sleeps on park benches and rides the rails from place to place. The only thing going for him, in the world of work, is the time he can afford to sell and the sweat he can shed for meagre wage-packets. Inevitably Chinaski is propelled forward by crises. He never seems to hold onto anything for too long, whether it’s jobs or a place to stay. In a society where everyone is supposed to be middle-class, or working to be, Bukowski writes about the gutter and for the gutter.

All in all, I found Factotum (1975) was a much more focused piece of work than Post Office (1971). What do I mean by this? It doesn’t wander too far from its themes. Perhaps because the latter was the first completed book it was inevitably going to encompass a lot. Both read as aimless, staggering odysseys through American society. But it’s Factotum which takes aim at work.

To the reader Bukowski levels his anti-work ethos and prods and pokes the assumptions we hold about work and its demands on us. At one point Bukowski writes: “How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?” It’s a good question.

In one chapter Henry loses his job and pushes the boss to make sure that he gets his welfare payments. He speaks as ‘the working-man’ here, not the poet of skid-row. The moment fits well. After all Bukowski stands out from the petty-bourgeois universalism of American society, – pretentions to meritocracy, individual liberty, and even democracy – it’s all up for grabs in this world. Chinaski is in one way an exemplar of the Protestant work ethic. He proves his father wrong by being able to go from job to job. But the story is hardly an advertisement for the ‘American Dream’.

Of course, the narcissism of the dirty old man is on show in the work. He’s both proud of his life as a working-class Joe, but he’s also imbued with self-love over his knowledge of just how worthless it all is. He feels he has profound insights to offer. And even as Hank leads a meaningless life, as we all surely do, his prose makes it meaningful. This is the heart of the heartless world.

"You mean like North Korea?"

As I've written about Bill Gates before (back when he was blubbering about 'creative capitalism') I couldn't help but find this clip quite interesting. He seems to be saying inequality has brought us great advances, while also suggesting that the situation hasn't worsened in terms of growing inequality. He scorns distributional efforts, but says he's for certain tax increases (though he claims to be in the dark about Scandinavian tax precedents). He shows his true colours in his obnoxious denial of Microsoft's record of avoiding tax (which you can read about here). We know he's for health-care reform in the US and he's against a raise in the minimum wage. Meanwhile he makes it clear that his preferred method is charitable gestures. On this matter some have been inclined to question his interest in genetically-engineered seeds to be distributed in the developing world.

Bad-Looking Narcissists.

"A narcissist is someone better looking than you are." - Gore Vidal

It was quite something to open The Evening Standard on the day that the Queen shook hands with Martin McGuinness and find columns penned by Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Bob Geldof. Blair stands as a living monument to everything wrong with British politics, one of the few pimps to be his own prostitute complete with the moral fibre of an open sewer. And then there is Clinton, a wretched primate standing atop the post-politics of personality and nothing more. Both men are the end products of a process that has hollowed out the discourse in countries where there was barely anything of political substance to desecrate in this way. Thrown into this mix is the white Knight, a mediocre musician, who saved the deserving and left the undeserving to die for our redemption. These spurious progressives know the

Third Way

to rape the developing world. Naturally they write with worry of the Arab’s push towards democracy against the old dictatorships and temper this anxiety with feel-good stories about the steps forward the black African has made.

Don’t forget when Mr Blair praised Mubarak as a ‘force for good’ just before he fell; thoughthe Clintons had always regarded Hosni as family. At least there was never a famine in Egypt, so Sir Bob never had to pose as the redeemer of mankind and toss millions into the mouths of leathery generals swimming in the Nile. And yet Blair has plenty of words to pen, with the blood under his fingernails, when it comes to lecturing ‘barbarians’ on how to run a democracy. He has no time to go into the details of the soft coup that has been carried out to neuter the officials elected to high office. It was seen early on that the outcome of the elections would be a marriage between felools and fanatics. But Blair seems blissfully ignorant. Really the stage is set for democracy in the Middle East, Blair salivates at the possibility of it all falling apart. If it ends up as a military junta “We told you so!” If it ends up as a theocracy, even better!

Of course, Blair has to pat the Arabs on the head for dethroning his friend – a man who held ‘terror suspects’ kidnapped by the CIA in chambers where their children could be tortured – what else would we expect of him? He’s too proud to concede defeat, let alone failure or wrongdoing. The poodle is always in the right, even when he says he’s on the Left. He reminds us “People often say: learn the lesson of Iraq. Actually, I have.” He says so only to draw an analogy between the bombing of Baghdad and the uprising in Cairo. He knows no shame in his capacity for self-love. Now he warns of a religious obstacle in the pathways to new heights of progress for Arabs. Oh he’s aware that Washington is perfectly happy to foster a marriage of convenience between the corrupt military establishment and Islamic conservatives. The idea is to buy-off the Egyptian masses and secure the status quo, namely a tacit alliance with Israel. And Tony Blair is most definitely preoccupied with the affairs of the Jewish State.

Blair wants nothing more than to hold a ‘special place’ in history and make a lot of money in the process. He’s already working to finger Palestinians out of oil found off of the coast of Gaza. It’s clear that Blair was anointed to the Quartet in order to look out for Israeli interests in the Middle East. This was the conclusion drawn by Tory journalist Peter Oborne. As Blair insists that he has visited the region 86 times and has an office in Jerusalem (that he barely uses) he maintains that the only workable solution is “an Israel secure and recognised by the region, and a viable independent State of Palestine.” It’s not common knowledge that the Arab states (with the support of the PLO) accepted the right of Israel to exist within secure and recognised borders. This was part of a platform for a two-state settlement in 1976 with Palestine confined to the occupied territories. The US vetoed the UN resolution and it was wiped from history.

 

Bob Geldof exudes a sense of great achievements when he writes of the “unprecedented effect of connectivity as the largest mobile phone market in the world took off”. A pattern seems to emerge as Bill Clinton has words of praise for mobile phones too.Apparently all over “cell phones are being used for banking, helping refugees find lost relatives, and allowing small producers such as fishermen find the prevailing market prices commodities.” Neither of them mentions the possibility that African countries could well do with major infrastructural investment. The construction of a landline network of phones could potentially create a lot more jobs than what precious little good banking does for Africa. The more it would seem Bob and Bill are just spewing sentimental guff crafted to fill the reader’s head with a soothing warmth. We don’t have to worry about changing the world, just wait for the moment for a feel-good shout. Surely poverty is a gift from the heavens. After all it gives us something to make us feel better about living in a society of moral degenerates.

Never mind what Oscar Wilde said about the beggar you encounter, if you don’t want to be bothered by him then you need a system that can end homelessness. Look on the bright side of the Chinese running the gamut when it comes to ringing Africa dry of any profit that the white man might’ve forgotten to soak up. You can forget about Mugabe and the US bombing of Somalia! Listen to Bob’s statistical bragging and swallow it for the pablum it is. Who wants to know what the great white Knight means when he says that Africa is ‘open for business’? Did you know that out of ten of the fastest growing economies there are six African countries? The International Monetary Fund, that beloved friend of the black man, predicts the African continental economy will grow by 5% in 2012. Perhaps it’s time to drag Geldof down to Golgotha and nail him to the cross. Surely it would raise a package big enough to choke the reptiles who pick at the bones of the famished African.

All the while Geldof barks on about a ‘new Africa’ as he reassures us that we can all prosper from its newfound exuberance. He just barely resists the urge when he notes that the majority of Africa’s people are under 16. Someone should tell Nike where these young  and energetic workers can be found. Perhaps Gap and Primark have already had a go at them, Shell has probably hung a few of them. The truth is Geldof needs black Africa to remain an impoverished basket-case for his career. What else can a musician of his calibre do? Back to the pressing issue, the Chinese creators of ‘jobs’ and ‘wealth’ for Africa. It’s true that Chinese investment leaped from £30 million to £1 billion, with Chinese-African trade leaping from £5 billion in 1998 to £53 billion in 2008. Chinese investment in Zambia is just as suspect as the interest Tiny Rowland showed in the country’s mines decades ago. Overall the influence of China in Africa is a malign one, plenty of dough for the kleptocracy in Zimbabwe and genocide in Sudan. Soon that’ll be the tip of the iceberg.

Where are the Police?

Would you agree with the following statement?

"That's crap, I don't buy that for a minute. Calling a riot an irrational expression of rage is such a cop-out, it's opportunism at it's worst, it's just a bunch of people grabbing any excuse they can find to go out and loot a store. Nothing more. The fact that these people ripped off the stores in their own communities, all that reflects is the degree to which these people have absolutely no respect for the law at all and certainly no concept of like community or civic responsibility."

I hope you don't agree with this line because it is never simply the case that a riot is just the decision of free individuals to go out on a rampage, there is always something bigger going on regardless of what the media will tell you. The quote is lifted from the film American History X and specifically the words of Derek Vinyard, played by Ed Norton, on the LA riots of 1992 which were sparked by the assault on Rodney King by police officers. I refer you to the good words of Bill Hicks on that particular affair. The reactionary birdsong around the riots we are witnessing are not so different from this line, though the racist element is subsumed beneath words such as "scum", "thug" and so on. The Right are going completely bat-shit over the riots, consistently arguing that the riots are completely unrelated to the death of Mark Duggan and simply we're witnessing the rational actions of free individuals. This has been pointed out about Twitter by Richard Seymour and the same is true all over the web. It is being fueled by mainstream rags of the Right.
 

I was in a recent argument on the Facebook group 'R.I.P. Mark Duggan' with a member of the EDL, who has since been banned for racist remarks, and another user who described his political views as "common sense". I initially got involved to shoot down the EDL mouthpiece who claimed that "No Muslim nation would tolerate this?" so I responded "No Muslim nation would tolerate this? I thought you want us to be different from Muslims??" At the same time, the proponent of "common sense" was arguing that the riots began because "an armed criminal called mr duggan did whether he fired his gun or didn't he still had it in him." He then exclaimed that the army should be sent in to "fuck up these idiots". When I gave these guys a prod about Mark Duggan and Charles de Menezes the immediate line was that both of them deserved to die because Duggan was an "armed criminal" and Menezes was an "illegal immigrant". Beware "common sense"!

Of course, when I pointed out the facts that Mark Duggan fired no shots at the officers and the gun he had on him was in his sock when he died the purveyor of "common sense" had another line to spew. The words he had were simple "He had a gun end of legitimate shoot", the logic was clear: a young black man was shot to death by cops, so it must be a good thing! We now know that the weapon Duggan was a replica that had been converted into a working gun, bare in mind that the bullet which was fired into a police radio turned out to be 'police issued'. I pointed out some of these facts in the argument and witnessed an interesting response "if he hadn't been carrying a gun he would be alive he made a choice." I even said I think Mark Duggan should've been arrested for possessing the weapon (though we now know it was hardly a weapon at all) but it was not enough and apparently I just had no problem with men carrying guns on the streets of London. The thought-process was clear "your an idiot if you carry a gun you are making a choice to live outside the law."

My response was "An idiot who thinks a man who has a gun in his shoe should be arrested and not shot repeatedly by officers who then try to make it look like self-defence... Interesting logic there again." Naturally this commonsensical fopdoodle continued to accuse me of condoning the possession of firearms. The Right has no room for the context of the situation that we're in today, for them it is simply a bunch of yobs going on a crime spree and the police or army need to restore order. These riots would have never have happened if Mark Duggan was not killed and there were serious efforts to resolve the grievances of the community. We'll no doubt see more riots before the decade is over. Finally I had him cornered "I don't think it's okay for people to carry guns, I'll repeat to you: Mark Duggan was carrying a gun and should've charged for doing so. What's so difficult to understand about my position? You think he should've been killed and, from what I gather, you'd like to see more people killed in this way." I'm still waiting for that response.

Angry White Men in Riotous Tottenham.

I Predict a Riot!

The riot in Tottenham has been all over the news since last night, though it initially had to compete with the recent polar bear attack in Norway especially at the Mail's website. Perhaps it is because the source of the rage was not adequately covered at all, the death of just another black man at in a city of over 7 million people was insignificant. Even though it was the police who fired four rounds into the mini-cab, the media seemed baffled at first. Of course, The Daily Mail has since jumped at the opportunity to go on about how Mark Duggan fired on a police officer and therefore forfeited his human rights. The killing of a white student by a bear in Scandinavia seemed to deserve a higher level of coverage than the death of a black father at the hands of police officers. Yet it should be noted that the death of a young black man only lit the match, Tottenham already has an unemployment rate of 8.8% and the community is being subjected to a series of huge cutbacks. Keep in mind a history of racism and police brutality that precedes the riot of 1985.

The exact details of the death of Mark Duggan are not clear, the police were from Operation Trident - the unit that deals with gun crime "in the black community" - who stopped the cab and shot him four times in the midst of an arrest. Incidentally, Operation Trident largely goes by the 'stop and search' approach when it comes to young black men and the point of the unit is to police the black community which requires "special policing" of course. The police have since let the media know that the shots were fired in self-defence because Duggan fired on them first. The police officer who was supposedly shot was in hospital over night and then the police claimed that the shot was absorbed by the officer's radio. An eyewitness claimed that the police had restrained Duggan on the ground when the shots were fired. It wouldn't be the first time the police have killed a man in this way, as we have seen with Charles de Menezes who was shot seven times in the head as he was restrained on the tube. Both men were excluded as targets which could be legitimately killed, by the police and chunks of the media.

Update: The bullet lodged in the police radio was a police issue bullet. So much for the claim that he was a 'stone-cold gangster' who shot at a couple of innocent 'bobbies' only to get what was coming to him. Apparently, the gun was still in his sock when he was killed and the weapon is only capable of firing blanks.

The protest outside the police station was a peaceful one at first. It turned violent after the police set upon a 16 year-old girl with batons. Apparently she had come towards the police lines yelling something about "justice", though the The Daily Mail is currently running with the line that she threw a rock at the coppers. Then there is the police claim that the violence started when the protesters began throwing missiles at police cars and vans, which some might say were 'bait' left there to provoke an attack as seen in the student protests. Of course, the Right are running with the line that the looting is not an expression of a 'legitimate grievance' and not only was it right that the police killed Mark Duggan but these people just wanted to go ape. The looting of shops and burning of houses is not an expression of anything, it is just the cheap opportunism of people who have no conception of community or civic duty. It's a line that has a lot in common with what Derek Vinyard said about the LA riots in American History X.

Karl Marx says "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." The Right will never understand this quote because they adhere to a conception of free-choice which eliminates all room for even the minimal level of context and determinants. For them these people simply chose to trash their own community, if Mark Duggan was still alive and there was no history of police brutality would this have happened? I think not. The legitimate grievances are socio-economic as well as racial and that is undeniable given the nature of events, unless you subscribe to 'free-choice' in which case it was just coincidental that the riot followed the death of Mark Duggan. This is bigger than Tottenham as poverty is not just ghettoised into a neat section of the City waiting to explode, which is the reason for fears that this could spread to other parts of London.

Heretical Truths about Thatcherism.

The rise of monetarism came in the 1970s when Keynesian economists were baffled by stagflation. The orthodoxy of the day was rattled by the continued rise of inflation, alongside a rise in unemployment, and monetarism provided a theoretical answer to the crisis. It was the consequence of spending more than we produced and inflation was caused specifically by too much money chasing too few goods. The transition from Keynesianism to monetarism came before Thatcher, Callaghan began to use the theory to explain the problem of inflation that had wracked Britain since the war. The purpose of economics began to shift from job creation to combating inflation as Britain accepted a loan from the IMF in 1976, which stipulated huge cuts to public expenditure and deficit reduction. As a result interest rates were lowered, the value of the pound increased and the balance of trade began to improve because of new oil revenue. The crisis forced Labour to consider scrapping nuclear weapons.

In 1979 Callaghan was booted out of office and Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister. Inflation had risen over 10% and unemployment was continuing to rise, monetarists argued that higher interest rates and lower spending would lead to less inflation. By 1980 under Thatcher the cuts to public spending led to even higher unemployment and inflation doubled in spite of the fiscal squeeze. By 1981 interest rates had to be lowered in order for the exchange rate to be reduced, the hope was that this would lead to an increase in exports. Thatcher opted to cut even more in order to keep up appearances with monetarism, which it could not publicly dump for the sake of rational expectations. These expectations demanded consistency of government, as a way of maintaining the illusion of integrity and avoiding bad press. As a consequence of rising unemployment, as well as the strain of inflated prices on citizens, the country was shaken by riots.

When inflation finally began to fall the money supply was actually still rising and it could be that the rise in unemployment led to the fall in inflation. In 1982 it appeared as though the Thatcher government was walking into the election equivalent of an abattoir, wherein the Thatcher cabinet would have been slaughtered for the economic destruction of the preceding 3 years. The Falklands War is what doubled the popularity of Thatcher, which left 910 dead, as the rising tide of nationalism gave them something to ride into the election against socialist Michael Foot. The War became a football match with guns, the people were mobilised through 'national pride' to save Thatcherism. In a post-colonial era of decline Britain was particularly vulnerable to despair, especially given the reliance on tradition to uphold the fabric of society rather than a constitution as in the US. So it should be a surprise that the Thatcherites were able to surf on a tidal wave of jingoism into a second term in 1983.

Triumphantly the Thatcherites then moved to privatise gas, electricity, telecommunications, steel and the airline. The government effectively declared war on the unions, the point at which the ideological battle shifted in full to the favour of government was when the Miners' Strike was finally brought to an end in 1985 with the defeat of the NUM. The concerted effort to crush the unions went as far as M15 surveillance . The impact of the defeat could be seen by 1990 when the working-class were subject to some of the biggest wage-cuts in the world and the number of poor in Britain had increased by 100% throughout the Thatcherite era (1979-1997). The gap between rich and poor peaked in 1991, though Britain is still far more unequal than it was in 1968 and the impact of inequality has been seen in various forms of social deprivation. It has been estimated that the costs of the increased inequality and unemployment to lie within the range of 5% to 8% of GDP, compare this to the productivity (which increased alongside wages before Thatcher) gains of 5% to 10% under Thatcher.

Inflation finally dropped to 3% in 1986, but monetarism had been quietly discarded by the Thatcherites long before. It was in 1985 that Margaret Thatcher claimed to have never subscribed to some of the theories of Milton Friedman. The theories of monetarism would be replaced by Goodhart's Law which held that if the government ever adopted a particular theory or doctrine as a basis for policy, the relationship between theory and policy would quickly fall apart. The government was incapable of creating a better world, therefore it should not disturb the markets too much and leave individuals to make the best of the situation. Later the destruction caused by the policies would be "justified" by a boom which ultimately led to the Crash of 1987 and ended in the recession of the 1990. The financial crisis in 1987 came just after the election and Thatcher was safe until 1990, when events would lead to her being ousted so that John Major could lead the Tories to victory once more in 1992.

The neoliberal theories of Milton Friedman came to influence policy and were the expression of a convergence of particular interests manifested in government, in order to devastate the working-class that had done so well in the post-war settlement. By raising unemployment and crushing the unions Thatcher succeeded in creating a reserve army of labour that would be desperate enough to work for stagnant wages. Similarly the work of Adam Smith was used as window-dressing. This can be seen in 1990 when some of the biggest wage cuts hit the working-class in Britain, which could generate greater profits. The selling-off of council houses and the deregulation of finance opened up possibilities of investment for the future, just as manufacturing began to go into decline, where money could be made from money and not wasted on unprofitable ventures. This has been the source of boom years ever since the late 80s, property and finance have taken the place of industry.

The boom of the 80s was a result of the deregulation of finance, a huge increase in arms deals and a property boom created by the selling-off of council houses. The low interest rates were conducive to the property boom. The tax-cuts increased the wealth of the richest 10% of the population, majority of investments were made in property and finance where there were stupendous profits to be made at the time. Manufacturing went into decline and employment in that area declined by 30% between 1979 and 1990. Though it should be noted that the boom had little to do with Thatcherite cuts, the recovery had a lot to do with international events as there was a supply-side stimulation in America that helped keep Britain afloat for a while. Similarly the deregulation of finance in Britain coincided with a new regime of accumulation kicking off in South-East Asia. It was only a minority of people who benefited from the boom, rates of growth might have fluctuated around and above 5%, but the growth was not unprecedented by historical standards.

The fall of Thatcher in 1990 came after the Poll Tax demonstrations descended into riots in Trafalgar Square, unemployment reached around 7%, working-people had been by some of the biggest wage cuts in the world as inflation began to rise into double figures once again. Without the leader that had never been as popular as her own party the Conservatives secured one last victory and remained in office until 1997. After 18 years of Thatcherism the public expenditure had returned to slightly over 42% of GDP, which is what it was when she took over. Just as the rates of growth had not been spectacular (though profits were stupendous) nor was the "reduction" of debt and the "rejuvenation" of Great Britain, which was left broken and unequal. The images of the 80s as crass and flamboyant, that we all know, represent the zenith of Thatcherism which had made a minority of citizens very rich from privatisation, deregulation of finance and the exploding cost of real estate.

Breakfast in the Big Society.

The Evening Standard has recently boasted of having hit the £1 million milestone as part of efforts to establish the Dispossessed Fund, the paper also featured a list of leading donors including the asset-stripping retail tycoon Philip Green and Maurice Saatchi - who one wrote If this is Conservatism, I am Conservative. The front page story brought to mind the phrase "Big Society" churned out by David Cameron's campaign machine. If you've forgotten about the term, since we've had over 100 days of a Con-Dem Coalition, it was a pillar of Cameron's speeches as the Conservative Party walked into the General Election on a campaign of "Change". The Tory vision of a "Big Society" includes community action and social responsibility as it's foundation. In raising £1 million for London's dispossessed, the Evening Standard has demonstrated such social responsibility.

The notion of the "Big Society" is in stark contrast to the "Broken Britain" phenomenon the right-wing press has spat out to bring popular anxieties - of welfare dependency, teenage pregnancy and binge drinking - together under a party-platform on which a leader can rail against 'New Labour'. The Conservatives have latched onto the idea that Britain is broken and have used it to propel themselves forward, presenting a vision of society which is "big" in the sense that government is "smaller" than it used to be. The logic of the "Big Society" is that charities, community organisers and volunteers will take on the tasks of "Big Government". This explains Gove's "free schools" paid for by tax-payer money siphoned from the funds for free school meals, let alone the talk of "milk-snatching", as a desire to "empower" communities by letting them "decide" (and pay for) what their children eat for lunch - not so rich kids can have access to the best resources that tax-payers can buy, of course not.


The Dispossessed Fund is not an instance of the cuts-driven "Big Society" but it is an example of the kind of community action which David Cameron is in favour of, which would clarify why he praised the fund - a meaningless gesture in itself. The Dispossessed Fund will raise money to help London's poorest via hundreds of grass-roots charities active in five key areas: education; getting people into work; improving mental/physical health; helping the homeless, pensioners and the working poor; tackling gang-related crime. Notice that all of these areas should be the duty of the state, as well as society, and charities are an insufficient means to such problems as poverty. Yes, charitable giving and voluntarism are better than nothing. But there is more at work in the kind of charity that the Evening Standard is indulging in, the kind praised by the Con-Dems.

This is not the kind of "creative capitalism" practiced by George Soros and Bill Gates, in their day jobs they accumulate wealth and property - benefiting greatly from the public-sector and enormous tax-cuts along the way - but give away some of the money to charity in their private lives. It is closer to the kind of consumerism which has redemption, in the form of charity, built into it - the kind practiced by Starbucks and Waitrose. In buying fair trade goods, organic food, clothes from a charity shop etc, you feels better about being a consumer and taking part in passive consumption. This is part of propelling the system onwards as it exploits. Starbucks might be "fairer" to the coffee farmers and the children of Guatemala, but such "fairness" is limited and insufficient in improving the conditions to which such children are born to. It is itself dependent on the exploitation of places like Guatemala to increase revenue, there needs to be impoverished people to give charity to in this system.


This sort of consumerism is almost obligatory in today's world, especially as a leftist or even a liberal you are obligated to engage in consumerism to redeem yourself of living in a capitalist society. Even though the aim of the social democratic reforms, out of which the welfare state emerged in Britain during the late 1940s, was to ensure that the people would not have to rely on the "kindness of strangers" to survive if they themselves could not afford adequate health-care and food etc. Whereas buying a coffee from Starbucks to help the impoverished prolongs the suffering of such people, it does not tackle the real conditions which resulted in their poverty and ultimately is part of the problem. Despite the best efforts of the Evening Standard and Starbucks, among others, the improvement of conditions for the poor does not justify capitalism as even in the slave trade some slaves were treated better and conditions improved.


If we were serious about ending poverty and dealing with the inequalities that plague our society, we would be pushing for full employment, a rejuvenated welfare state, the tight regulation and taxation of "Big Business". The kind of "Big Government" that has existed under 'New Labour' was not a progressive force in British society, it exerted state-power at the benefit of private-power. The "Big Society" is at best an example of "liberal communism", in the sense that it is proposed to achieve radical goals of equality (e.g. solidarity) through liberal means (e.g. public spending cuts). Essentially a utopian idea which quickly saw it's own arm off when put into practice. But that is a very generous and forgiving description to say the least, it might be more apt to sum it up as an instance of Cameron's conservatism - "One World Conservatism" - or, as I like to think of it,  Thatcherism without the penis.