Layer 332 . . . Duncan Smith, Tory Economics, Gove, Education, Sugata Mitra and TEDGlobal

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Iain Duncan Smith at loggerheads with Treasury over benefit cuts

So says the headline over an article in the Observer. I've written about this previously, and about my support for Duncan Smith's proposals.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jul/18/iain-duncan-smith-benefit-cuts

Duncan Smith's central idea is to increase the "work incentive" by ensuring that there is enough of a financial gain for people on benefits to work. The difficulty is that the way to address the issue is either to increase payments to those in work – which would cost billions – or to withdraw benefits to those out of work or in the lowest paid jobs – hurting the most vulnerable in society.

Before the election, the Centre for Social Justice thinktank came up with proposals that carried a price tag of £3.7bn a year, claiming that the money would be clawed back over time and eventually result in savings.

Sources say officials at [IDS's] DWP [Deparment for Work and Pensions] are "frustrated" that the Treasury will not take into account the potential income raised from income tax and VAT as more people move into work.

Kayte Lawton, research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research, said it was inevitable there would be tensions between the DWP and the Treasury because Duncan Smith's ideas depended on spending money in the short term that could be regained in the long term.

Or, putting it more simply, IDS and his DWP are saying that the key task is to get people who are living on welfare back into work, or into self-employment, and in order to do that we need to continue to pay them their unemployment and housing benefits during their first weeks of work - both as a 'reward' and as an 'assurance' that it will be worth their while to take on the available jobs.

Not surprisingly the bastards at the Treasury - the stupid bean counters and dull accountants - can only see the short-term numbers and can't see the long-term sense of what Duncan Smith is proposing.

The key to this lies with Cameron, and if he doesn't support IDS's enlightened proposals then the mystery will be why on earth he ever appointed him to the job, knowing full well, we presume, that he knew what IDS stood for and what his philosophy would be for getting people back into work. Indeed, we're entitled to assume that this is why he gave him the job in the first place.

http://oxzen.blogspot.com/2009/09/layer-198-mansfield-empathy-duncan.html - this one from way before the General Election

http://oxzen.blogspot.com/2010/05/layer-320-more-on-ids-work-pay-and.html

http://oxzen.blogspot.com/2010/06/layer-322-hopper-laws-ashley-balls.html

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Further to the favourable comments about Cameron in Layer 330 - there was another article praising him and the Coalition in the Observer:

This coalition is proving to be a champion of common sense

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/11/coalition-cameron-clegg

Of course Henry Porter is mainly interested in issues centering on liberty and human rights, on policing, surveillance, civil liberties, etc. And he claims that

"these [government] actions should be given more than a grudging welcome by those who argue that cuts are the only way to assess the coalition. Let's remember that there is just 1% difference between Labour and coalition proposals on cuts."

Personally I doubt this figure. Tory economics are the opposite of enlightened and wise, as is their determination to privatise everything in sight, including health and education.

Even Jackie Ashley points out that Cameron is cutting whereas Obama understands that creating a recession or another depression is unnecessary and evil. It's making the poor pay for the excesses of the rich.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/19/cameron-us-trip-ritual-substance

So what is the kernel of the ["Special"] relationship now? What makes it so special?

Certainly not economics or domestic policy. Obama's strategy is going in almost exactly the opposite direction from Cameron's. He has been spending heavily, creating a fairer healthcare system, and regulating Wall Street with a toughness the UK government has so far shrunk from. He is worried about the depth of European spending cuts, and Cameron's are as deep as any. In most key areas, Obama has been behaving more like Brown than Cameron.

Gary Younge, as ever, also gets it:

The coalition doesn't want to heal Britain's broken leg, but amputate it

The left must show this for the elective surgery it is: cuts born of ideology, where the many pay for a crisis created by the rich

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/18/british-budget-deficit-coalition-cuts

The first point is that this situation was not brought about by excessive public sector spending in Britain, but by an almighty binge in the private sector that sparked an international banking crisis. Far from government getting in the way of business, at the point of collapse it was governments – across the world – that rescued business from itself through massive bank bailouts. Indeed, the crisis was made possible not by too much state intervention in capitalism but too little.

Given its global nature, it defies logic to blame any one government or even country for this crisis, let alone a single party. And while it can be argued that Labour made the country vulnerable to the fallout through its deficits, it is not an argument David Cameron can honestly make. For most of the time he was opposition leader he was committed to matching Labour's spending plans. Only when the crisis was in full swing did he abandon them.

In their place he has introduced an agenda that is, by any standards, extreme. Osborne has floated cuts averaging 25% across almost all departments. In Germany, the eurozone's primary deficit hawk, the government department taking the steepest hit will suffer an 8% cut.

Far from being economically necessary, these particular cuts represent an ideological choice. The Conservatives want to shrink the state to a lower proportion of the economy than Margaret Thatcher did. Not even the markets are demanding austerity on this scale, or at this pace.

This is elective surgery. The trouble is that the country didn't choose this. True, Labour lost. But no party won. There is simply no mandate for such an extreme agenda. Opposition to this agenda represents not the reflexive response of malcontents but the considered appraisal of a broad swath of the economic community. The US, France, the Financial Times and the Economist have all argued against such a scale of fiscal tightening at this stage. Even the IMF earlier this year said: "For most advanced countries, some fiscal and monetary stimulus may need to be maintained well into 2010."

It is also widely acknowledged and easily proven that, for all the talk of fairness, these measures will have a disproportionate effect on the poor. "The looming cuts to public services are likely to hit poorer households significantly harder than richer households," said Robert Chote, the director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies the day after the budget.

Not only are these measures not necessary, there is every chance they will make matters far worse. "The historical precedent," argues John Philpott, chief adviser at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, "would suggest that the application of stronger fiscal discipline to an economy in too weak a state to bear it will both slow the rate of economic growth and stem the pace of job creation."

It was not those with low-paid final salary pensions who got us here, but those raking in multimillion dollar bonuses. The wealthy created this crisis, and now the coalition is making ordinary working people pay for it by playing politics with the livelihoods of millions. These are cuts of choice from a government we didn't choose. A softer landing is possible; a crash landing is imminent.

Even Ed Balls has something sensible to say on the subject:

Don't repeat the 30s folly

Those rushing to cut the deficit have not learned from the past. Labour has to set out the alternative

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/18/deficit-cuts-dont-repeat-30s-folly

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Gove was back on the radio this morning, sounding as chipper as ever. Clearly ministerial life and the trappings of power agree with him.

Of course he's rushing to legislate to get all schools turning into 'Academies' (bloody hateful word) and effectively abolish local authority governance and responsibility - also known as interference -  which, as I've said before, many times, many of them thoroughly deserve, and good riddance to all their useless bureaucrats. It's not difficult to make the case for giving schools the money and letting them employ their own advisers and 'consultants'. LMS in the early '90's effectively started this trend, and it's only in the New Labour years that bureaucrats have again grown in numbers and fat-cat salaries.

What's still not completely clear is whether Gove really does want to liberate schools from outside interference and imposition, or whether he simply wants control of schools to be effectively direct from Westminster.

A couple of weeks ago he took part in a radio discussion about the merits of 'reviving' the art of 'deep thought', which seems to suggest we used to have it but somehow lost it.

In terms of curriculum reform, there was general agreement that narrowness and specialisation in the curriculum does not promote creativity and originality - and in fact tends to work against these things. We can't make connections between disparate things if we're not aware of disparate things.

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Back in March Oxzen picked up on an article in the Guardian about the work of Sugata Mitra:

http://oxzen.blogspot.com/2010/03/layer-266-teach-yourself-everything.html

In yesterday's Observer there was another reference to him in a two-page article about TEDGlobal:

TEDGlobal conference: where ideas have sex

What happens when one idea meets another idea? They have idea sex. And, when the conditions are right, they conceive and spawn little baby ideas, which go on to have ideas of their own. Or at least that was the theory proposed by science writer Matt Ridley, speaking at TEDGlobal in Oxford last week.

Given that TEDGlobal is a conference at which 60 speakers have 18 minutes each to explain their big idea to an audience of 750 individuals, all of whom have had to apply and provide evidence that they are ideas-type people . . .

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jul/18/tedglobal-ideas-conference

One of the most stunning presentations came from the educationist Sugata Mitra, who has discovered that children are capable of teaching themselves almost anything, up to and including biotechnology, in a language they cannot even speak.

Education, he says, is a self-organising system and learning is an emergent phenomenon. What Mitra has so brilliantly demonstrated is that children actually like to learn. If they can figure out how to do it among themselves. And adults, too, it turns out. They're having idea sex online. With an Oxford professor in quantum physics. The net's dirtiest secret yet.

See also this piece from the BBC:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10663353

Using computers to teach children with no teachers

It really is about learning . . .
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Layer 322 . . . Hopper, Laws, Ashley, Balls, Conservative Pretenders, Gaza, Deficit Hawks and Lessons in Economics

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Style and Substance

Dennis Hopper died this week. A strange guy. I'd never heard of him before Easy Rider, and his character in that film was certainly HIM - a money-oriented bastard making lots of cash from flogging hard drugs whilst masquerading as some kind of spiritual freewheeling hippy on wheels.

Whereas the Peter Fonda and the Jack Nicholson characters clearly had depth and something  to say about life, about freedom and the state of humanity, you had the feeling about Hopper that he didn't really give a shit about anything except taking care of business and looking after himself. He reminded me of quite a few people who were students at that time - growing their hair and dressing in denim but essentially on their way to making as much money as possible through the pursuit of cruddy careers in accountancy and business.

In real life Hopper spent many years addicted to hard drugs and booze, and was an anti-liberal paid-up Republican far-right-supporting nihilist. He also liked guns. Not a very attractive character. What the hell's a 'hell-raiser' anyway? A loud-mouthed drunken egomaniac. About as far from hippy ideals as you can get.

Hardly in the same class as Hopper, but David Laws is another anti-liberal dressed up as a Liberal caring sharing good guy. He's a City man through and through, an Orange Book believer in Chicago-school neo-liberal economics. It seems it was only his sexual proclivities that kept him away from entering politics as a Conservative.

And then there's the strange case of Jackie Ashley, who this week shed her left-wing political make-up and came out as a defender of the indefensible - Sex and the City 2. This film has been widely panned as a total dog of a movie - about four women who used to be strong characters in favour of freedom and fun, now reduced to hankering after marriage and endless shopping trips in places like Abu Dhabi. Ashley is a waste of space. She defends these women's indulgence in frivolity and air-headed materialism on the grounds that such escapism is no worse that men's indulgence in football and gadgets.

Nobody sensible should be mad enough to pay extortionate amounts of cash to see a bunch of millionaire footballers running around a football pitch for 90 minutes, agreed, but nobody should enjoy the sight of grown women doing stupid stuff either. Weird, Jackie.

And finally we come to the other weirdos of the week - the other style over substance attention-seekers vying for the leadership of the Labour party. A feature on Ed Balls in G2 was just as vacuous as the man himself, who had nothing interesting to say at all. This is a man who didn't even realise that you need to go to Paddington and not Euston in order to catch a train to Swindon. Duh!

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/01/iain-duncan-smith-ignorance-welfare?

Lots of interesting comments here, prompted by this piece, and by Iain Duncan Smith's proposals.

It's surely a mistake for those who see themselves as anti-Tory to attack someone like IDS when he's a lone Tory voice making at least some constructive points about work and poverty.

For example, when he says, "If you are unemployed, and you come from a family that is unemployed, all you can see when you think about work is risk", he's surely not mistaken. He's talking about thousands of people who receive benefits and are likely at present to lose those benefits as soon as they take a job, no matter how temporary that job may be, no matter whether they will be able to cope with its demands, and therefore could soon find themselves having to go through all the hassles of re-applying for their benefits.

IDS seems to be saying, let's allow people to keep their benefits for some time until it's established that they have some job security, and are doing work for which they have some capacity, some aptitude and perhaps even some liking. I know from personal experience within my own family just how hard it can be for people to cope with being laid off several times within a matter of weeks or months from jobs they'd understood to be long-term .

Secondly, the author of this piece says, "In fact, very few are materially better off unemployed, as there are numerous financial incentives to ensure that taking a job is financially rewarding. Jobcentre advisers are trained to offer "better-off calculations" that detail claimants' potential earnings from these benefits."

What this is failing to address is that financial benefits are only part of the equation when someone's deciding whether to take certain, usually low-paid, jobs. Being unemployed and cash-poor, but time-rich, for example, which might permit a poor but pleasant lifestyle, especially if it involves being able to offer more care for one's children and elders, may also be a key factor. And we shouldn't forget that those who are unemployed, time-rich and claiming benefits also have more opportunity to do odd days of work for cash in hand.

If I understand him correctly IDS is proposing to help create a fairer society partly by persuading parliament to approve measures that will allow those on benefits to keep most of what they earn when they take a job, without any fear of losing their benefits, for a reasonable stretch of time. This is surely the only way to get people to give up an unemployed and cash in hand lifestyle - to make work pay and to make people significantly better off by taking even a low paid job.

It's only by finding a niche in the world of work that people can acquire the habit of working and a desire to acquire further skills. I believe IDS, through his work with his Centre for Social Justice, genuinely believes that it's worth the state spending more on the unemployed, or rather, not immediately grabbing back state benefits when people start work, in order to spend less on unemployment in the long run. He sounds to me as though he means it when he says that it's wrong for people to pay back proportionately more to the state when they start work than even those on 50% income tax are paying.

If I'm wrong about this, then maybe this is an idea that the Labour party ought to consider, and maybe should have considered already. If I'm right, then let's give IDS the credit he deserves.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/01/labour-leadership-hustings-john-mcdonnell


Labour leadership hustings: Lead resistance to the cuts

We must again become a grassroots social movement

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/01/labour-leadership-hustings-diane-abbott

Labour leadership hustings: I voted against the Iraq war

We need to rediscover our sense of moral purpose

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/may/31/deficit-hawks-social-security-wall-street

Why should we listen to deficit hawks?

Calls to cut social security come from economists who want to line Wall Street pockets with money from ordinary workers

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/31/david-laws-cuts-agenda

David Laws's life goal was to cast people out of work

I regret the manner of his fall, but he wasn't honest with public money, while his cuts agenda is terrifying to contemplate

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/22/lift-the-gaza-blocade-nick-clegg

Lift the Gaza blockade

The suffering is shocking. And nobody will benefit from the radicalism that confinement engenders

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/31/israel-peace-activists-murder-sanctions



http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/01/attack-on-gaza-aid-flotilla

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/01/gaza-blockade-bloodshed-editorial

Gaza: From blockade to bloodshed

Nothing has done more to establish Israel's status as a pariah state among its neighbours than the actions of its armed forces

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/31/state-market-nothern-rock-ridley

This state-hating free marketeer ignores his own failed experiment

Matt Ridley, the former head of Northern Rock, is peddling theories riddled with blame-shifting and excruciating errors

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/may/31/world-crisis-economic-experimentation

In a financial crisis, what counts is what works

Free-market capitalism has imploded, and Europe's moment has not come: big-picture explanations of the world rarely hold good for long

This is an excellent piece by Larry Elliott, the Guardian's economics editor. Heavy stuff, but worth persevering with for the quality of his analysis and his conclusion:

The postwar era of strong trade unions, full employment policies and capital controls produced stronger, more equitable growth than three decades of deregulation, liberalisation and flexible labour markets. The more integrated Europe has become, the worse it has performed.

China and India prove that it is possible to thrive without a meta-narrative. Both countries have systems of managed capitalism fully in the tradition of the mixed economies that prevailed in the west during the heyday of social democracy. What counts is what works. There is a lesson in that somewhere.

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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.
.