Slash and Burn!

Some of you may remember The Sun has actually gone as far as to claim that the unemployed are to blame, that New Labour was too soft and gave too much to the jobless. And this is the reason for the cuts according to the toilet-paper press. This is the only kind of representation for people on benefits in this country, these people have no voice and are easy targets for little Eichmanns in the right-wing media. Supposedly the reason we need cuts is because Labour gave too much to benefit scroungers and we can tell because newspapers say so. The real reason is that there was a financial crisis in 2008, the culmination of an unregulated banking sector which ran on recklessness, as a result the banks had to bailed out in order to prevent an economic depression. A recession could not be overted as the Crash had sent shockwaves throughout the economy, many businesses went bust and thousands became unemployed. This led to a fall in tax-revenues to the Treasury, which meant that spending that would normally be sustainable became unsustainable.

In other words a banker, a Daily Mail reader and a benefit claimant are sitting at a table sharing 12 biscuits. The banker takes 10 tells the Daily Mail reader "Watch out for the benefit claimant, he wants your biscuit!" The right-wing newspapers and tabloids distract the public from serious problems, playing the poor against one another with lies and exaggerations about benefits and immigrants. The issues that are agreed upon are marginalised from the public discourse so a harmless narrative can be continued. The alternatives to public spending cuts are not even acknowledged, but there's plenty of talk about benefits, immigration and overseas aid. The only exceptions are when the BBC let's an alternative view slip through only to dismiss it. All the while the richest 10% of Brits own £4 trillion in wealth and could contribute £800 billion to the Treasury from a one-off wealth tax of 20%. This proposal was one of the few to be briefly acknowledged by the BBC, but only to dismiss it as a "crazy idea". Still you will rarely, if ever, read of the cost of tax-avoidance and evasion in this country which could be as high as £125 billion.

Instead of a wealth tax we're looking at a systematic programme of deep cuts and market reforms for public services and the welfare state. The Con-Dem Coalition has set strict targets to job centres which incentivise sanctions, with the aim of driving claimants into the workforce. The target: sanction three people a week so that benefits can be cut off for a period of time, which ranges from a week to six months. This leaves claimants to survive on hardship payments which are half the normal payment from the social. Sanctions are meant to be used to punish claimants who have refused employment or are not trying hard enough to get a job. But as there is a high level of subjectivity involved, if you don't apply for a job that could lead to you being sanctioned for six months. Since the Coalition was formed in May the number of claimants deprived of benefits have sky-rocketed and had reached 75,000 by October 2010. This is only the beginning of the cuts and it has only been mentioned in the pinkish end of media.


There is such a thing as benefit fraud, it accounts for £500 million and about £3 billion is spent on "over-payments" all of which falls far short of the £18 billion reduction being pursued by Iain Duncan-Smith. This means that the vast majority of people penalised by this government will be those who either can't work or can't find work. As for the big idea Iain Duncan-Smith had for benefits, it was an investment banker David Freud, appointed by New Labour, who recommended that the crumbs thrown to the poor - housing benefit, incapacity benefit, disability allowance etc. - be replaced with a single payment that will function as an "incentive" to work. The constant attempts to drive the jobless, particularly single-parents, into the work force is regularly cheered on in the press. Yet there is no mention that the cut in national insurance effectively subsidises businesses to hire unemployed labour at the bare minimum wage. The fact that this could drive down wages across the workforce is also conspicuously absent in the media.

The rest of the cuts programme is best summed up in the words of a Conservative MP, to quote Greg Barker "We're making cuts that Margaret Thatcher, back in the 1980s, could only have dreamt of." Barker cheered on the slashing of government departments by up to 30% and the way in which the welfare state is being undermined. As the deficit is reduced, taxes for business are going to be slashed along with regulations. The core mission of the coalition government, according to Barker, is to "get government off of the backs" of business. This is a government of business and not of the people. Just from the established links with banking and Rupert Murdoch we might conclude that the Coalition is acting in the interests of business. From the words of Greg Barker we can tell, what we already knew, that the Coalition is rolling back the state for the benefit of business. Note that this is virtually ignored in the mainstream media.

What does AV stand for?

Despite what you may believe about AV, after reading the works of James Herriot, it does not stand for 'artificial vagina'. Oh no, certainly not! It actually stands for alternative vote, which is a system by which the voter can rank the candidates in accordance with the amount of evil they represent. Essentially it is a way of electing officials through preferential voting, with candidates with the fewest votes being eliminated. The issue is divisive for the political class, with the Conservatives in opposition and the Liberals siding with Labour in favour of the reform. We've got the chance to vote for or against the reform on May 5th, this is one of the few promises kept by the Liberals. Some are voting "Yes" out of a passionate hatred of all things Tory, while others are voting "No" out of disdain for those Lib Dem sell-outs. The famous have already jumped on board with the "Yes" camp, including Stephen Fry, Eddie Izzard, Joanna Lumley and Colin Firth. So if you trust Jeeves, Patsy Stone, Eddie Izzard and Mr Darcy on politics vote "Yes!"

The opposition campaign emphasise the cost of implementing the new system, which could be as much as £250 million. According to that logic we ought to scrap all benefits because fraud costs £500 million a year. Reform can be costly, but that is not a good enough reason alone to oppose reform. Though cost can be an important variable, the details of the proposal and the context in which reform is proposed matter more. For the Left there could be advantages from a system of proportional representation, as it could enable each party to reflect a particular base and leave room for leftist parties to coalesce against the Conservative Party. But that still assumes that the Left will benefit from AV. Labour may still be salvageable from Blairism and a resurgence of the Labour Left under the current electoral system would be difficult to marginalise at the ballot box. Under the first-past-the-post system the results of elections can be distorted, which is why the Thatcherites won "landslide" victories in 1983 and 1987. In that case 42% of the electorate was translated into 61% of the available seats.

When we're met with a Lib-Lab alliance over reform we ought to recall the words of Earl Grey on the 1832 Reform act "The Principle of my reform is to prevent the necessity of revolution... I am reforming to preserve, not to overthrow." After all Labour and the Lib Dems hardly represent working-people anymore, even though there are social democrats amongst the neoconservatives and market liberals in each of these parties. Social justice is only sought in order to buy-off socialism. The Con-Dem Coalition have tried to dress up the same old programme with the glossy image and rhetoric of "progress", the aim being to buy-off the public with PR instead of policy. At the same time, it could be seen as a simple manoeuvre of self-interest on the part of the Lib Dems. AV is the only hope for the Liberals now, under the first-past-the-post the Lib Dems would be easily marginalised in 2015. But the majority of Lib Dem and Labour voters would be unlikely to rank the Conservatives second-place. This is where leftist parties, like the Greens, might benefit greatly under the AV system.

And then there is the ugly side of the working-class, the BNP could be strengthened by electoral reform, though this is often exaggerated. Especially as the BNP appeals to working-people disillusioned with the Establishment. It should be noted that the BNP have been in tatters as a result of the emergence of the EDL, to which many BNP members have defected and the EDL as a political party might be a bigger worry than the BNP. Whilst it remains unclear whether or not fascism would be enabled by electoral reform, it seems fairly certain that the UKIP would benefit from such reform and gain greater seats in Parliament. From this a rightist bloc could emerge to corner any left-wing resurgence in Parliament along populist lines, with a cynical emphasis on the EU and immigration. Though the links between UKIP and the Conservatives would be in clear sight, with the two parties essentially only disagreeing on the fine details of policy rather than issues at large.

At the same time it might be difficult to resurrect the Labour Party as the party of the working-class and the labour movement. Proportional representation, to which AV is a step towards, would lead to more seats for the likes of UKIP and could institutionalise coalition governments. So even a progressive coalition could be pushed around by a rightist bloc of opposition and that has the potential to be as stagnant as the current system, if not more so arguably. It would be easier for a party platform to be diluted as part of multi-party alliances and coalition agreements, which would exclude the public as demonstrated in the 2010 General Election. With the kind of outcomes from the last election it is inevitable that people will vote to hurt either the Liberals or the Conservatives, but it is quite likely that the Lib Dems will be railed against and the proposal opposed because it is advocated by Liberals. Genuinely, it will be interesting to see if the Lib Dem voters can be rallied around electoral reform after the sell out of 2010.

"Socialism is Theft!"

When will the Libertarians learn?

At the national demonstration on Saturday I encountered a man wearing a V for Vendetta Guy Fawkes mask and was on a one-man counter-march, who was carrying a sign that read "Socialism is Theft". At first we thought it was a joke, or some kind of ingenious troll, it turned out the slogan was intended in the same sense as "Tax is Theft". In reference to himself as a libertarian, though he soon informed us that all forms of government are "socialist" because a state taxes and the tax on the income earned by free individuals is theft. The definitive means of socialism are forceful. So we might describe him as a right-wing anarchist, who are opposed to the existence of the state but not capitalism and would like to see everything privatised. After we had our talk, a member of the Socialist Workers' Party confronted this proponent of the free-market. The sign and the mask soon disappeared, and the little Rothbard moved on claiming to have been spat on. I doubt he was among the "black bloc" who passed through Trafalgar and onwards to Oxford Street for a spot of anti-establishment vandalism.

The view of the world held by the little Rothbard entails a particular interpretation of history, into which a tacit consent remains and onto which all assumptions about the actions of individuals can be made. Each individual is responsible for their own lot in life and must act accordingly, by working the individual earns a living and can become prosperous. So taxation is just a form of theft, which deprives people of a chunk of what they have earned. This sees the individual as living on an island and the tax-collector as a force from another world looking to rob him. It is absurd. Not even Bill Gates is a self-made man. At the same time, the debt of liberalism is quietly kicked under the rug. I refer to the debt owed to slavery and feudalism, without which there would be no material pre-conditions on which liberalism could be built. Prosperity under capitalism would not be possible without slavery, this is the reason that reparations are overdue. Without capitalism there could not be socialism, but the historic break with exploitation is not theft and no reparation is owed to the beneficiaries of slavery.

Rothbardian anarchism could be best summed up as a radical interpretation of classical liberal ideas going back to John Locke. The origins of this form of anarchism are pre-capitalist, which might explain why it is ignorant of authoritarianism in the marketplace whilst also opposing any form of government. The anarcho-capitalists of this world want to see all forms of government and public property torn down and handed over the market. In a essence to replace all forms of state-power with private-power and unaccountable tyrannies which are not democratic in any sense. Though to the libertarians and anarchists, of the free-market persuasion, the democratic process is flawed compared to the forces of the market, according to which the strong will rise and the weak will fall. In that sense we vote whenever we buy a product and a successful business will be elevated over failing competitors. Of course it fails to provide an account of how a business leader can be held to account and forced to give up his position in the same way that an elected official can be.

For the right-wing anarchists and libertarians the state seems more tyrannical and oppressive than businesses, big or small. Not only is this overlooked, the efficiency of markets is a major assumption. Theoretically, a park would be better run if it was privatised because there would be invested interests in it remaining clean and safe. Of course in reality it might be more profitable to tear up the park and build a shopping centre over it. Not that the little Rothbard would disapprove of this, he might even cheer it on as providing opportunities for jobseekers and small-business owners. The market is not efficient, as supply and demand are in near constant change there can never be an equilibrium. This is the fallacious assumption underpinning the utopian idea of laissez-faire capitalism, which holds that there can be endless economic growth. It also adheres to a negative conception of freedom so limited that it is realised in the free choice of 285 varieties of cookies at a supermarket. As bourgeois democracy leaves the citizen with a limited range of political choices, bourgeois anarchism leaves the citizen with no political choices at all.

In selling off a state-owned industry, the inefficiencies and bureaucratic systems in place are merely dismantled to be replaced by a private-sector bureaucracy with it's own array of inefficiencies. The difference is a state-managed system can be changed via public policy, which can be influenced by the people, a private company can't be influenced as easily and can lie about it's inefficiencies. To end the state's monopoly over economic planning through such means would leave planning to the decentralised forces of the market. There is a great deal of planning that goes on internal to business. In both instances this transference of power, not the abolition of power, it can't be influenced by the population. A society without a government in which the capitalist system remains intact would quickly become an extreme tyranny. It would be a society in which corporations have the power to crush trade unions and eliminate unruly citizens with a privately owned police force. Effectively the government would still exist in the form of various private companies and the problems of government would be exacerbated in a world without any kind of democracy and accountability.

The argument that an enlightened self-interest among business leaders would prevent such a thing from happening. We should separate a person from the institutional role they role in society, which could range from a missionary to a slave-owner and is distinct from what makes them human. A business is not a moral agent, in that it has no consciousness or rationality, it has no long-term goal and in the short-term only profit matters. The energy industry has consistently supported candidates in US elections who are sceptical about climate change and suspicious of "Big Government". A perfect instance being George W Bush who opposed the Kyoto Protocol and then later came out as a "believer" in global warming. The rationale here is that once the ice-caps melt oil companies can have easy access to the enormous oil fields, which may or may not exist, beneath the seabed. The pursuit of short-term profit is actively opposed to the common good of the environment and humanity, though it's easier to swallow if you tell yourself climate change is just a liberal hoax.