Layer 321 . . . Contempt for New Labour, Finding A Purpose, Radical Education, Schools, Teaching & Learning, The Case for Working With Your Hands, The Buddha, and Peace

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Madeleine Bunting's latest column is, as ever, well worth reading.

There can be no short-circuiting Labour's essential backroom stocktake

New Labour's contempt for its own party's history now makes the central task of opposition all the more difficult

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/30/labour-leadership-opposition-values-debate?

This is precisely the point when politics becomes really interesting. Away from the glare of intense media coverage, and the carefully packaged soundbites and polished evasive formulations, glimpses of a real political debate are emerging among Labour and its fellow travellers. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, it feels it could become the most searching debate on the left for a generation. I can't remember a time in my adult life when discussions on what leftwing politics is really about have been so open-minded. Perhaps it was like this in the 1980s, but then New Labour emerged and vigorously closed down debate and distanced the party from its history; both helped hollow out the party, and contributed to it becoming a highly centralised and relatively effective vote winner. Now, it is not even the latter. So what is it?

This is a subject of passionate interest to a relatively small proportion of the population. People will start listening again when Labour has something interesting to say. In the meantime, it is a time when Labour can't avoid a degree of introspection because it is faced with a series of big questions – and on none of them is there any settled consensus.

All of these debates are difficult for leadership contenders to navigate. How quickly can you disavow the policies that you were passionately defending a few weeks ago? There is a screech of brakes and U-turns. How can you passionately argue for something now and have done so little to advance it when actually in power?

All that the contenders have to offer are their political skills, they are all creatures of New Labour. That makes them likable, good communicators and very clever; but the drawbacks are equally evident. They are all youngish men who have grown up inside the distortions of the adrenaline-fuelled life of government. Rethinking assumptions on which you have built a career is never an easy task, it takes time, mental agility and considerable emotional maturity.

You can see them struggling to find a new language to replace the managerialism and technocratic competence that deadened the nation's soul.

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One thing I never want to hear again is that Blair and New Labour had a brilliant electoral strategy to win the 1997 election.

In 1997 the landslide victory wasn't a vote for Blair and Brown and New Labour - we didn't give a damn about Blair and Brown and New Labour - we voted against the policies that had ruined industry and under-funded public services, sold off social housing, neglected schools, politicised education and health, supported casino banking and created so much poverty and inequality. Maybe Labour could now try standing up for the things that so many people voted for back then.

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Education

There was an excellent piece in yesterday's Observer by Peter Hyman, who's now a deputy head of a comprehensive school, having previously been 'a political strategist to Tony Blair'. Some of us still remember the very week he decided to quit the thick of it and get a proper job - initially as a pupil mentor, prior to becoming a teacher.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/peter_hyman/profile.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/feb/26/highereducation.politicalbooks1

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2007/jun/24/schools.education

Are the school reforms really going to improve education?

Here, experts discuss whether this shake-up will benefit those who matter most – our children

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/30/schools-academies

The point about the Tory reforms is not that they amount to a revolution but, rather, that they are a missed opportunity – a modest extension of one part of New Labour policy. What will be frustrating for many schools is to find a new government once more ignoring the vast amounts of evidence that shows that the best school systems in the world are best for one reason above all else – the quality of teaching. The other big factor is school leadership.

So a radical education policy should start with teaching and learning. It is striking that the schools minister who understood this best in the last 10 years was David Miliband. He realised that what went on in the classroom was more important than anything else and his ideas on personalising learning for each student are, several years later, at the heart of many good schools in the country.

To raise standards, there needs to be a renewed focus on literacy. For [many] students . . . the basics [are] not embedded early enough.

But we need to do more. The area ripe for reform is the curriculum. We have got to have a rethink of what students learn and how they learn it. There needs to be a revolution in science, maths and computer-science teaching so we have a cohort of students who can truly compete with any in the world.

There is not enough thinking in schools and it appears that the Tories are in danger of making things worse by insisting on even more cramming of facts in a return to didactic teaching methods. It's time we started to test skills other than the ability to write a two-hour exam: creativity, analysis, team work, communication skills.

All these things would help students  – catch-up sessions at the age of 16 are not enough, however good. What matters is improving the quality of teaching, the richness of experience, the joy of learning and the grounding in the basics from an early age. There is a real opening in British politics for the politician who understands this.

There's not just an 'opening' in British politics - there a desperate need for the children of England (bearing in mind that these things happen differently elsewhere in Britain) to be given back their rights to a proper childhood, and an unpressurised, meaningful education that's worthy of the name. This is more or less what Oxzen's been saying for the past two years.

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History of the World

Today's History of the World in 100 Objects considered a statue of the Buddha. Hopefully, with today being a Bank Holiday, lots of people will have been able to listen to it.

The programme considered how artists have tried to represent "the limitless, the boundless".

We were reminded that the Buddha was a wandering ascetic who devoted his life to apprehending the roots of all suffering, and the nature of enlightenment.

Images of the Buddha are meant to help people reflect on the qualities of Buddha's speech and mind, as well as his physical composure, and not be objects of worship in themselves.

The Buddha insisted on renouncing material states for immaterial states. But he also insisted that dreams, mirages and fantasies should be replaced by a proper grasp on reality.

"The Buddha statue is a thing that leads to no-thing, and the greatest sound of all - silence."

Podcast and 'listen again' here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/ahow

Seated Buddha of Gandhara

One of the earliest images of the seated Buddha. Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, looks at how Buddhism set about creating the classic image to represent the real life Buddha, who lived and roamed around North India in the 5th Century BC. It was not until over five hundred years later that the classic seated image was first formulated. The Dalai Lama's official translator, Thupten Jinpa, and the historian Claudine Bautze-Picron help explain how the image came about.

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Peace In Our Time?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2010/may/31/israel-troops-gaza-ships

More bad news from Gaza.

At least 10 peace activists have been killed in boats carrying humanitarian aid towards the coast of Gaza.

Peace. Activists. Killed.

I can't be the only one who thinks that killing humanitarian peace activists is hardly . . . necessary? Appropriate? Proportionate? Moral? Politically astute? Even if they happened to be the most naive and misguided people on the planet.

By all means let the armed forces of Israel set about restraining them, arresting them, thwarting them, imprisoning them. But KILLING them?

I picture myself feeling motivated enough and brave enough to join with a convoy of ships taking aid to children, sick people and destitute families in Gaza.

I picture myself being killed for my non-violent and non-threatening actions and beliefs.

I wonder whether any of these activists were in fact physically agressive and determined to resist arrest. And I still wonder whether actually killing them could ever be justified.

My support is for non-violent Palestinians. My support is for non-violent liberal Israelis who despise the violence and the over-kill of their government, which only delays and makes more difficult a proper peace process, and a 2-state solution.

To support violence and aggression on either side, and even to condone and excuse it, would be no different to supporting any of the violent factions in Northern Ireland back in the days before the peace process started.

It would be no different to supporting the killing of either whites or blacks in South Africa prior to De Clerk's decision to release Nelson Mandela. What a pity there's no obvious Mandela figure in the Middle East.

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Start The Week - Attitudes to Work

Matthew Crawford - "The Case for Working With Your Hands".

On Start the Week this Bank Holiday Monday, Andrew Marr gets his hands dirty with the philosopher and mechanic Matthew Crawford, who argues that satisfaction comes from skilled manual labour. Iranian artist Shirin Neshat discusses her new film, Women Without Men, Sheila Rowbotham muses on the role of women in transforming ideas about work at the turn of the 20th century and the President of the Royal Society, Martin Rees, explores scientific horizons and discovers the limits of our understanding.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00sj4vn

Aristotle begins his Metaphysics with the observation that “all human beings by nature desire to know.” But the philosopher and mechanic Matthew Crawford contends that real knowledge arises through confrontation with real things. In his book, The Case for Working with Your Hands, he argues that a skilled trade brings a satisfaction that can be missing from office work. He believes that we uncover a sense of agency by shaping the world around us, and explains why he found working as a mechanic more intellectually challenging than a job in a think tank.

The Case for Working with Your Hands or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good is published by Viking.

http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780670918744,00.html

Our society has pursued the separation of thinking from doing. We see ourselves as divided between white collars and blue collars.

Mass production and the pursuit of profit is based on dumbing jobs down, and creating electronic sweatshops.

University graduates expect to go into white collar 'office' jobs.

Whereas being an electrician and a mechanic can be far  more challenging intellectually. And also, in many casses, better paid.

Jobs that don't have 'physical' components are easily outsourced abroad

The core of the argument - the ethical dimension - is that it's superior to do work that involves head, heart AND hands . . .

To become genuinely skillful requires humility, coping with failure, and relying on judgement that comes only with experience. (See previous Layer on Samurai skills and football.)

'Know-how' can't be downloaded from the Internet - it only comes with experience.

We all need and benefit from the experience of seeing the direct effect of our own actions.

Complex material culture is infantilising - we're unable to do our own maintenance on vehicles, eg.

Our culture is more and more one of passivity and dependence . . .

We should put more stress on learning through experience and human contact.

Tacit knowledge is gained from doing physical things, not sitting at screens.

So many things are now too complicated. Eg mobile phones. So we have feelings of dependence instead of self-reliance.

Whilst doing physical work, using our hands, we become absorbed into a state of 'flow' in which we're gripped by the physical elements, and given time for relaxation, reflection and meditation. From the physical flows the metaphysical and the spiritual.

'Scientific' management doesn't grasp the creativity of workers or the intrinsic value of what they do and how they do it.
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Layer 320 . . . More on IDS, Work, Pay and Pensions, David Laws, Magazines, Trivia, and Books of Your Own

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As I was saying on Friday, Iain Duncan Smith is certainly talking the talk. On today's Andrew Marr programme he showed with his sweating upper lip and his lack of charisma why he's not natural party leadership material. BUT he explained very well why he thinks it's right to make the benefits system much easier to understand for claimants, and why it's right to make sure that nobody who takes a job should immediately lose their housing and other benefits.

It's the responsibility of the State, in other words, to make damned sure that nobody who takes a job should be worse off than they are unemployed - and in fact the system needs to ensure that people get to keep most of what they earn, on top of their existing benefits, for some time before benefits are gradually and incrementally withdrawn. By which time, we can expect that people will be settled into worthwhile jobs in which they also enjoy others' company and a place in the wider world - enjoy being part of a team, perhaps - even if their salary is pretty modest and their position fairly humble. Believe it or not, it IS possible to get job satisfaction in spite of being on low pay, or in a part-time job - providing you believe in the usefulness of what you're doing and you feel a valued member of a team.

Not that IDS said any of this job satisfaction and fulfillment stuff today, although he has done elsewhere. I hope he takes the trouble to emphasise these aspects of his strategy as time goes by.

No - he only had time to state the case for ensuring that work is not only worthwhile from a financial point of view, but also the need for government to ensure that people can clearly see that it will be worth taking on low-paid and/or part time work if it's available, without fearing immediate loss of benefits, without which they can't even keep a roof over their heads and put food on their table.

Obviously all of this ought to be seen as socialist policy - for the state to make sure that everyone is guaranteed the basics of life in return for a willingness to work -  but if IDS wants to claim it for Liberal and Progressive Conservatism, then that's OK with me, since New Labour couldn't see the need to offer it.

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Dear, oh dear, David Laws. There was a bit of a hint in Layer 302, just after the general election, to keep an eye on him, but nobody could have predicted that he would be so quickly outed as . . . completely lacking in integrity and honesty. For a multi-millionaire like him to NOT own or rent his own flat in London is . . . incredible. Especially when he could have claimed for it on his MP's  expenses! Maybe he thought he was being kind and generous by handing over so much 'rent money' to the person that people will no doubt be calling his rent boy.

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I hate magazines. I hate the paper they're printed on. I hate their advertisements. I hate the  pages of adverts for ludicrously expensive watches, clothes, food, cars, furniture, holidays, sunglasses, cameras, perfume, televisions, airlines, banks, booze, computers, jewellery and a thousand other things I'm not interested in and don't want to buy.

I hate their stupid articles. I hate the restaurant reviews, the lifestyle features, the celebrity fawning and pimping, the diets, the recipes, the trivia . . .

In last week's Guardian Weekend magazine, which I rarely read, I noticed in Oliver Burkeman's "Mind & Relationships" column ( "This column will change your life") his thoughts on why trivia is important . . .

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/may/15/change-your-life-trivia

In yesterday's magazine his column was headed

Make a book of your own

Don't know where to store all those random bits of information you scribble on Post-its, and then lose?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/may/29/change-your-life-information-storage

I highlight books compulsively, bookmark websites, tear out magazine articles and scribble quotes on Post-its, with the vague idea they'll be inspiring or useful at some future point. Then I reshelve the books, forget about the websites and mislay the Post-its.

I suspect I'm not alone. We tend to lack good systems for storing the kind of information that can't be assigned an immediate, specific purpose, even though it may be the most important information. The gas bill gets paid, then filed, while the life-transforming philosophical insight gets jotted on an envelope and promptly lost.

What to do with this category of information is one challenge of the modern field of "personal knowledge management", but 18th- and 19th-century literate types had a pretty good answer: the commonplace book. John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Coleridge and Jonathan Swift all kept such books, copying down proverbs, poems and other wisdom they encountered while reading. So did many women, often excluded from public discourse at the time. By appropriating others' nuggets, writes cultural historian Robert Darnton, "you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality".

In a recent Columbia University lecture, the writer Steven Johnson drew parallels between commonplace books and the web: blogging, Twitter and social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon are often held to have sparked a renaissance of the form. (His focus is the way some iPad apps obstruct this, by forbidding highlighting.) As with commonplace books, this linking and sharing creates not just a hodgepodge, but something coherent and original: "When text is free to combine in new, surprising ways, new forms of value are created… We have all the tools at our disposal to create commonplace books that would astound Locke and Jefferson."

Yet the reason I've started keeping a real, pen-and-paper commonplace book is that the social power of the web, awesome though it is, doesn't confer the same benefits. There's something important about exploring ideas privately as well as collectively.

The real challenge of handling stray nuggets of information isn't how to collect and organise them. Commonplacing is about internalising that information: engaging deeply, processing it so that it becomes part of you. Writing by hand seems to help; so does not instantly sharing everything. If the web is a wild, furiously creative ecosystem – a rainforest, say – the commonplace book is a private vegetable patch. Different things grow best in each.

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Countdown to the World Cup
Already I'm irritated by people driving around with an England flag or two (Cross of St George) flapping from little posts mounted on their car and van windows. What is point?

We have to face facts. The team that will represent England is crap. By the eighth minute in today's game against Japan they were a goal to nil down, thanks to being unable to defend a simple corner. They were still one nil down by half time, and hadn't even looked like scoring. Lampard missed another penalty kick, thanks to completely scuffing it.

By the end of the game they still hadn't scored, in spite of much huffing and puffing by the likes of Bent, Gerard and Heskey, all of whom were crap. Thank goodness they will now be forced to play Rooney partnered by Crouch in S. Africa.

Unfortunately for Japan, their excellent team scored two more goals - unluckily in their own net.

By coincidence there was a screening of The Last Samurai on TV last night. In it the Tom Cruise character is humiliated when he's first introduced to sword-fighting, but by the end of the film he's slashing, chopping and stabbing with the best of them.

The idea seems to be that with genuine effort, experience and application anyone can become good at performing skills and arts that demand high levels of fitness, balance, coordination, anticipation and flair. The Japanese football team seem to have taken hold of this attitude. Shame about the English.

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The UK's contestant (who came last) in yesterday's Eurovision Song Contest apparently says it's been the best experience of his life.

That's the spirit. Next stop Johannesburg.
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Layer 319 . . . John McDonnell MP, the Labour Leadership, the Socialist Alternative, and IDS

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Let’s start this piece with a little quiz. Which politician said the following:

"The present benefits system is so complex and unfair that no one understands it. It leads at the bottom end to one of the most regressive tax and benefit withdrawal rates that it is possible to imagine. 

"We ask people to go to work for the first time and then tell them to pay back 70%, 80% and 90% back to the state. These are levels none of the wealthiest bankers are asked to pay – they are moaning at 50%.

"If you are unemployed, and you come from a family that is unemployed, all you can see when you think about work is risk. It is a real risk because for all the efforts you make the rewards are very minimal and in some cases none at all.

"Socially, everyone says: 'You are a bloody moron – why are you doing this? You don't have to do this.' So taking responsibility is a real risk for you."

Got it yet? Yes – it’s the former leader of the Tory Party, Iain Duncan Smith, who’s saying things that are completely bleeding obvious and yet no Labour party politician seems to have said them – ever. Certainly no member of the Labour government has said anything like this.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/may/26/coalition-welfare-reforms-duncan-smith

IDS and his Centre for Social Justice got stuck into this issue sometime last year, and this latest quote is from the front page of the Guardian yesterday, which had a heading, “Duncan Smith starts welfare revolution”. Basically, what he’s now proposing to do, as the new minister for work and pensions, is allow people who are on unemployment benefits to keep those benefits until they are well established in a new job and until they are earning a decent amount, after which there will be a gradual withdrawal of benefits. Sounds sensible? More below.


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Another World Is Possible

In the meantime, this is part of an interview with John McDonnell, one of the declared candidates for the Labour leadership, by John Spence of TheVibe.co.uk

http://www.the-vibe.co.uk/2010/05/23/spenny/another-world-is-possible-an-interview-with-john-mcdonnell-mp/

JS: It’s clear from the interview that McDonnell is one of those old fashioned things – a principled politician. His time in parliament has been characterised by the unwavering articulation of those principles in word and deed, which has seen him branded as one of the ‘awkward squad’ by members of his own party.

It’s also clear that McDonnell is a politician who has not forgotten who he represents and who put him into the position he holds. What struck me most was that in the interview he seldom referred to himself with the terms ‘I’ or ‘me’; it was almost always ‘we’ or ‘us’. I don’t think this is an accident. As the interview shows, McDonnell is a staunch socialist, and thinks of himself in terms of his place amongst a groups of people and workers, not distanced from them.

JM: The reason I didn't vote for Gordon Brown was political. It wasn’t personal.

I can’t support people who have voted for things like the Iraq War, for privatisation, for cuts in welfare and benefits, for the implementation of the renewal of Trident. I can’t support candidates like that because I think it undermines our credibility, and what we’ve got to do is keep a clear distance from those people who have brought about a Tory government (sic) because of their support for these policies.

JS: Turning now to the [general] election; what’s your assessment of the election result, firstly, in terms of the Labour Party?

JM: The Labour result was better than expected, because what we saw was an element of class solidarity where people went to the ballot boxes and decided they wanted to keep the Tories out.

So it was clear that there was a positive Labour vote on the basis of opposing the Tories, but it wasn’t by any means, certainly in my constituency, and based on discussions I’ve had with others across the country, it certainly wasn’t an endorsement of New Labour policies. It was one of solidarity against the Tories and, in places like Dagenham, against the fascists with… regret… about what New Labour has done to the Labour Party.

Now, if you look at what happened in the election itself, it was exactly what we predicted: the coalition of people that we put together, as we always do when Labour is elected, was systematically alienated by New Labour policies – public sector workers alienated by privatisation; trade unionists alienated by a lack of trade union rights and the failure to address the issues of their wages and conditions and the security of their work; students alienated by tuition fees; pensioners alienated by a failure to address pensioner poverty and a refusal to restore the link between pensions and earnings; peace campaigners alienated by the Iraq War and Afghanistan; people who came to us because they saw us as the party of honesty against Tory sleaze alienated by expenses.

So you can see how every element of our coalition was alienated in some form, and that’s what brought about the breakdown in trust, and people no longer recognised the Labour Party as the party they knew and had trusted over the years. New Labour destroyed that bond between working class people and the Party itself, and it was only anti-Toryism that got us those voters out at the end of the day.

The issue for us now is how we re-establish that trust, and I think what people were saying on the doorstep is they want Labour back. We’ve got to re-establish the ‘Labour Party’ because New Labour has destroyed trust in us.

JS: What is your assessment of the Coalition Government in its early days?

JM: I don’t think people should underestimate the ruthlessness of this government. They will seek to solve this crisis on the backs of working class people; they’ll cut services and be ruthless about it, they’ll come from pay cuts, they’ll come from pension cuts and they’ll come from people’s basic services. I think we’ll see a growth in inequality in the same way that we did in the 1980s, and we’ll also see a growth in poverty and deprivation amongst working people whilst others make themselves richer and more prosperous. The discussion we’ve got to have now is about how we organise the resistance against that.

There will be things done by this government, the part of the Lib Dem agenda, that the rest of us [on the Labour left] have been calling for anyway – the scrapping of ID cards, restoring elements of the right to protest, things like that, but that shouldn’t mask or cloud the class nature of this government. The class nature is about the restoration of the casino economy, restoring profitability to the City in particular on the backs of working people through cuts in public services, wages, pensions and the rest.

JS: Given the policy agenda articulated in the Labour manifesto ahead of the election, can the Labour Party in its current guise actually be an effective opposition to the new government?

JM: The problem at the moment is that New Labour is implicated in bringing about the economic crisis that we now face – the deregulation of the City, the continuation of the policies of Thatcherism from the 80s and 90s, into New Labour and through to 2010.

They’re completely implicated in it and, actually, have completely adopted the ideas and ideology of Thatcherism. They believe in ‘the market’, they believe in privatisation as the best option for the delivery of services, and as a result of that it’s very difficult to see how [the candidates closely attached to new Labour] could have some Damascene conversion to socialism or even weaker forms of social democracy, and I think that’s what is going to hobble them, particularly if we get a new leader like one of the Milibands, or Ed Balls or Andy Burnham. If they come from the New Labour stable then ideologically they’ve adapted themselves to neoliberal policies anyway.

The struggle will be, yes, within the Labour Party from the rank and file, but I think also the struggle will be from within the communities themselves, with trade unions and other social groups coming together to resist what this government seeks to do. Eventually, I think the PLP will catch up with what’s happening in wider society.

JS: Turning now to policy related areas, how will your 2010 campaign differ from the 2007 campaign?

JM: It has moved on. 2007 was pre-major credit crunch. I was arguing the case then in the book that we did ‘Another World Is Possible’ that we needed to come to terms with the world as it then was, which was facing the impact of globalisation, how it had created a new world, new forms of exploitation, the opening up of the welfare state in this country to privatisation and profiteering, how it had undermined old securities in terms of state provision of housing , trade union rights, and how it had allowed the plundering of our environment for profit.

So I was trying to explain, at that stage, what globalisation meant, and how we needed to understand the world before we could organise in a way to combat the impact of globalisation in this country and in others across the world.

That was the intellectual debate we were having in 2007. The credit crunch then hit almost as predicted, in terms of a classic crisis of capitalism. What we are now into doing is sharing that understanding of how the capitalist system has gone into crisis again, but more importantly there is a sense of urgency now about what the implications are of that for working people. I think now it’s about motivating people to recognise they’ve got to stand up and fight back, that there will be a movement of resistance and they’ve got to join it.

JS: What are the other key planks of your policy platform?

JM: What I’m trying to say is, let’s understand the world as it now is, let’s understand why this crisis came about, and let’s have a look at those policies, therefore, that we now need to put in place.

 The most important question that people face now is, “Who is going to pay for this economic crisis?” The government has quite clearly made its decision that working people are going to pay for it.

Our argument is, no, it doesn’t have to be like that, there is an alternative, and the alternative is basically that we start planning and controlling our economy. It means basically that instead of tackling the deficit by cutting services, you tackle it by introducing a fair taxation system where the corporate sector is paying its way, we tackle avoidance and evasion of taxes, we introduce a transition tax, it was called a Tobin tax, we now call it the Robin Hood Tax, and in that way we introduce a system whereby we tackle the deficit straight away, but we increasingly use mechanisms for regulation and public ownership that give us control of our economy in the long term.

At the same time, we do recognise that if people are going to have the opportunity to resist they need the tools to do that, so what we’re campaigning for basic civil liberties and the restoration of trade union rights that can arm people with the arguments with which they can control their lives in the long term.

It’s also about trying to explain to people that there are very simple solutions to our problems. We’re the fifth richest country in the world yet we have a housing crisis with homelessness doubling under New Labour. The question is “How do we tackle it?” and the way we tackle it is by building council houses again in the way we haven’t done in the last 13 years.

We pour money into public services, but see more and more of it laundered out for private profit. The simple solution is that we end privatisation.

We want our children to have the best education possible, but they’re deterred from that, because instead of having free education we’re now charging them for their education. How do you overcome that? You scrap tuition fees.

If you want to tackle pensioner poverty, with two million pensioners in poverty at the moment, you increase the state pension and you restore the link with earnings. It’s the same with child poverty, you simply increase child benefits to the level which cover the cost of rearing a child.

If you want to ensure that families can lift themselves out of poverty, you increase the Minimum Wage to a ‘Living Wage’.

All of these are simple solutions, and they’re all premised on the redistribution of wealth which in turn is based upon primary control of our economy.

JS: The main audience of ‘The Vibe’ will have grown up under the Thatcher government, like me, or the Major and New Labour governments. How would you go about rationalising your policy agenda to that age group, specifically?

JM: The whole point of every political discussion at the moment should be about breaking through the mystification of the economic crisis. We can control the future of our lives. We can control the future of our economy. We can control what happens within our workplaces and our local communities, and the solution is through democratic control of our lives and our economy.

What the Tories have done, and what New Labour have done also, is that… the Tories have told us there is no alternative, while New Labour have told us there is only one alternative, and that alternative is to allow the markets to run free and allow privatisation to happen with limited government intervention at best.

What we have got to reassert for this generation is that it doesn’t have to be like this! What we should be doing now is saying “We should control our lives, and to control our lives we have to control our economy.” To do that we have to band together and use the democratic mechanisms available to us, and if we do that we can control our future.

For three decades now there has been a defeatism inculcated in people. What we have to do is break through that and say, “We’re not putting up with this anymore! We don’t believe the lies. We don’t believe it’s complicated.” There are simple solutions, but they will only come about if we assert control.

JS: Your support for traditional labour elements such as trade unions and public sector workers has been unstinting in the face of wider political, media and private sector hostility. To put it bluntly, what do you think makes you right and them wrong?

JM: Let’s go back to the economic crisis. You can look at this from any part of the cycle you like, but let’s start at the beginning.

If you suppress trade union rights, that allows employers to suppress wages. If at the same time you stop building council houses and you rely solely upon the private market and you create a shortage of houses then that means house prices are going to go up.

If you’re a worker whose wages have been suppressed by privatisation, outsourcing or a lack of trade union rights the one thing you need is a roof over your head. If there is a shortage of housing because no council houses are being built and house prices are going up you have to borrow to buy a property. If at the same time the government deregulates the City and they can lend to you and charge you whatever they want, you’re forced to borrow at en extortionate rate, leading to the build up of a debt bubble which is unsustainable, and then a credit crunch occurs.

That is reality of what happened. It stems from the undermining of trade union rights and the balance of forces between labour and capital being deliberately skewed in the favour of capital. There is a clear analysis there of why the credit crunch occurred, and now we’re having to pay for it, and what we’re being told to do is replicate the same circumstances, – suppress trade union rights, cut wages and public services so the casino economy can spin again.

I think that when the process of how we’ve arrived at this point is explained to people, and people understand what is happening as it reflected in their real lives than I think people will get angry, and they want to vent that anger. Our job politically is to mobilise that anger and use it to make political change.

JS: Do you think you’ll get the space and airtime in the mainstream media to articulate those points?

JM: No. A few years ago someone described me as being like a cult movie – you’ve sort of heard about it, but you’ve never seen it. It’s because most of the mainstream media aren’t interested in any detailed political discussion; it’s all 24-hour, short, sharp, media hits.

Even newspapers like the Guardian, which are supposed to be more liberal and open-minded, are not interested in a proper discussion of radical policies or fundamental analyses of society, so they’re as glib as most of the others as well.

So what we’ve got to do is create our own media. Part of that is using whatever we can in terms of new technology, of course, but also going back to traditional mechanisms like word of mouth, talking at large meetings, small groups, demonstrations, picket lines, climate camps… using the mechanisms that social movements are using all the way across the world to provide an alternative media to enable people, not just to receive information because it’s not about talking down to people, but to get involved in the dialogue and the debate.

JS: Last question; If you were successful in the final ballot, what would be your first action as leader of the Labour Party?

JM: I’d go out to people and tell them we’re now going to produce our own Bill of Rights which would restore trade union freedom, which would restore local democracy, and which would give people social rights – the right to a decent home, the right to a decent health service, the right to a decent education all of which would be enforceable and also the right to have a say, not only in your local community but also when you go to work as well.

I think the whole basis of having a real Labour government is about establishing freedom and that Bill of Rights would establish people’s freedom to control their own lives.

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Re David Cameron, this piece in the MailOnline is actually worth reading.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1218964/David-Cameron-cool-says-Rasta-cafe-owner-befriended-Tory-leader-Oxford.html


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Iain Duncan Smith, again

These quotes are from his interview with the Guardian:

IDS: I will tackle root causes of poverty
Former Tory leader outlines plan to help the worst off

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/may/26/iain-duncan-smith-interview-welfare

A dangerous political force has been let loose in Whitehall: a politician with no personal ambition whose only aim is to preside over the wholesale reform of his patch.

He [will] press ahead with his new task as work and pensions secretary. This is to reform what he regards as Britain's bloated and inefficient welfare system, which he believes discourages many of the 5 million people who rely on state support from working.

“I am here because I want this to be the most reforming government on benefits for a generation. I think we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity."

David Cameron brought Duncan Smith back into the frontline after he rehabilitated himself following his unhappy experience as leader by becoming one of the Tories' most influential thinkers in decades on social breakdown. As leader, the former Scots Guards officer was introduced to searing levels of poverty, and the cycle that is often impossible to escape, when he visited the Easterhouse estate on the eastern outskirts of Glasgow. His experience prompted Duncan Smith to establish the Centre for Social Justice, which produced a lengthy report on Breakdown Britain

These ideas will be informing his work as work and pensions secretary and also as chairman of the first cabinet committee dedicated to promoting social justice by tackling the root causes of poverty.

Thatcherite Tories, who believe the welfare budget is ripe for cuts, may be disappointed by Duncan Smith's language.

"The purpose of my life here is to improve the quality of life of the worst off in society." he says. "If somebody tells me I have to do something different then I won't be here any longer. Tattooed across my heart is that I didn't come here in any shape or form simply as a cheeseparer. What I have come to do is look root and branch at how we deliver welfare which is aimed at groups at the bottom end of society who need help and support, either because they can't work or because they can but they are unable to get back to work, or because they are disabled."

The CSJ report proposes the merger of eight benefits into just two, the withdrawal of benefits much more slowly for low earners, and the removal of rules that stop people claiming out-of-work benefits entirely if they do only a few hours' work a week.

Duncan Smith will chair a cabinet committee on social justice, saying it is ironic that it has taken the Conservative party to set up such a committee.

Ironic indeed.
.