Layer 198 . . . Mansfield, Empathy, Duncan Smith, Work, Benefits, and Happiness

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Mansfield, Identity and Empathy

What makes an outstanding individual? (see also blog on Maslow - Layer 20  Fully Evolved Human Beings)

Michael Mansfield QC on Radio 4's Midweek today was promoting his autobiography and talking about the need to 'identify' with the people he's representing in court, as Libby Purves put it. He spoke about 'being able to get inside someone's skin”. Actually this isn't identification – it's empathy. You can empathise with someone who may be a completely different sort of character, living a completely different lifestyle, with very different attitudes and behavior, without needing to feel any sense of common identity, providing you have the ability to imagine what it might be like to be that person and providing you can understand why and how they do things.

Words are very precise, and we ought to make an effort to use them properly.

Empathy is the essential component of social intelligence – the ability to relate to others, to understand their feelings and motives, and to form positive relationships. Mansfield is highly successful in what he does, partly because he's able to make positive relationships with his clients, partly because he is able to empathise with them, partly because he has a strong sense of compassion, and partly because he has a burning desire to see justice done, and to make sure it's seen to be done.

He's also an effective, persuasive, convincing and fearless communicator. It's a powerful combination of social and spiritual intelligence that makes Mansfield outstanding in his field. No-one doubts he also has a very clear grasp of the complexities of the law, and all the professional knowledge that goes with the territory, plus first-class thinking skills and powers of analysis. But no-one even knows or cares about how successful he was academically. Education policy makers please note.

http://www.city.ac.uk/whatson/2009/9_sep/100909_mansfield.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/michael-mansfield-meet-britainrsquos-boldest-barrister-821976.html
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article6818799.ece
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Mansfield


The Quiet Man, Empathy and Social Justice

"On 7 December 2005, Ian Duncan Smith was appointed Chairman of the Social Justice Policy Group which was facilitated by the Centre for Social Justice. The group's aim was to "study the causes and consequences of poverty in Britain and seek practical ideas to empower the least well-off."

There was an amazing interview with Ian Duncan Smith in the 8.10 slot on the Today programme on R4 this morning, in which he talked convincingly with passion and conviction about the need to invest more money in the process of getting unemployed people into work. His point was that there's a tipping point that arises when someone is considering taking on a job and declaring earnings, since the system as it stands allows people to take home virtually no more when they take on a low-paid job than when they were unemployed but free and time rich. What does it take to make people go beyond the tipping point? At least that's my interpretation of what he was saying.

I've been thinking about this very thing for some time now. Our stupid politicians say they're desperate to get the unemployed into the habit of paid work, but they totally fail to take into account, and to factor into the equation, the loss of freedom and the reduction of time for personal and family pursuits when someone takes on a poorly paid and possibly boring job. Those things are actually worth something to the unemployed, and must be taken into account.

The answer therefore, if I heard IDS correctly, is to not ìmmediately reduce all of a claimant's benefits when they start work, so that their income becomes significantly boosted even when they're working for a minimum wage rate. I can hardly believe I heard a Tory saying this. I must go immediately and look this up on the internet, assuming IDS has published these thoughts elsewhere.

My own solution is along slightly different lines. When someone takes on a new job, especially if it's a dull and poorly paid job, neither the worker nor the employer knows whether they're going to be suitable and successful in the job, and during that period of uncertainty, when both are making up their minds whether the employment is going to be long-term, the benefits the individual has been receiving should not be cut. Neither should the new earner be taxed at the standard rate. There should either be a period of exemption from tax or the tax should be at 10% of earnings.

After a suitable transition period the new employee would lose the benefits income, since you can't expect double bubble indefinitely. By that time, though, relationships in the workplace will have been established, job prospects checked out, new workmates become pals, and the habit of getting up in the morning and commuting acquired. When faced with the financial, social, emotional and spiritual benefits of the new lifestyle versus returning to the old one, the vast majority are going to opt to stay in the job and not go back on unemployment and jobseeker benefits.

In a sense we'd be rewarding the unemployed just for making the effort to go out and start work, for giving up time for themselves, and for getting into the work habit – and why not? As things stand there's very little in the way or incentives or rewards for giving up one's liberty and taking on crappy, low status, poorly paid jobs, ie becoming a wage slave.

Faced with a choice of being a wage slave (and a very poorly paid wage slave), and a dropout, is it so surprising that so many choose to just drop out? Especially if they can make some money by ducking and diving. We clearly need to pay people to give up ducking and diving, or being a drug user, or being a slacker and a slob, or someone who just can't face the hassle of 'signing off' and losing benefits when they suspect they might be very quickly back on them but having to face a period of no income whatsoever whilst a new claim is processed.

I suspect very few politicians have bothered to look very closely at the predicaments and the lifestyles of the poor and the unemployed, let alone feel able to empathise with them, so respect! to IDS for spending time thinking of ways to actually help such people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iain_Duncan_Smith

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_for_Social_Justice

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/sep/03/conservatives.uk

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Sarkozy and the Quality of Life

"A great revolution is waiting for us," [Sarkozy] said. "For years, people said that finance was a formidable creator of wealth, only to discover one day that it accumulated so many risks that the world almost plunged into chaos."

"The crisis doesn't only make us free to imagine other models, another future, another world. It obliges us to do so," he said.

Measuring well-being would make France's economy, famous for its short workweek and generous social benefits, look more rosy.

"If leisure has no accounting value because it's essentially full of non-market activities like sport or culture, we put productivity below human fulfillment," Sarkozy said.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/2009/09/14/2009-09-14_president_nicolas_sarkozy_wants_happiness_used_as_economic_indicator.html

It was interesting that Keith Floyd, as a bon viveur, and having written a brilliant book on French cuisine, bought a house in France and chose to spend a lot of his time there.

"Endorsing the recommendations of a report given to him by Nobel prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, Sarkozy said governments should do away with the "religion of statistics" in which financial prowess was the sole indicator of a country's [or an individual's!] state of health.

"For years statistics have registered an increasingly strong economic growth as a victory over shoperation and Development. "We need better measures of people's expectations and levels of satisfaction, of how they spend their time, of their relations with other people in their community."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/sep/14/sarkozy-attacks-gdp-focus

http://www.canada.com/Sarkozy+looks+bright+side+life/1995470/story.html

http://www2.canada.com/nanaimodailynews/news/story.html?id=1992519

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jD5xKXpv1EwzOwaST9Hphv8GD0AQ

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/09/15/sarkozy-wants-the-french-to-pursue-more-happiness.aspx

Layard and the Greatest Good – Tackling the Happiness Question 

Lord Layard is at it again this week:

"What is progress? That is the question President Sarkozy of France has posed to a distinguished commission. It is exactly the right question, and the future of our culture depends on the answer.

GDP is not the answer, and the Stiglitz commission – whose report, What is Social Progress?, is published today – is clear about that: progress must be measured by the overall quality of people's lives. At this point the commission identifies two possible approaches. One is to focus on how people feel: are they happy and contented? (This idea goes back to philosophers of the Enlightenment, such as Jeremy Bentham.)

The other is to focus on people's objective circumstances: do they have the capabilities (as Amartya Sen calls them) that are conducive to human flourishing? The commission does not choose between these approaches, and both are infinitely superior to GDP. But it matters greatly which way we choose.

It would obviously be convenient if we could identify one overarching good and, together with many Enlightenment philosophers, I believe that good is happiness.

There are many things that are highly desirable: health, freedom, love, and so on. But if we ask why they matter, we can have a discussion: if you are ill, you feel bad. The same if you are enslaved or unloved; it makes you unhappy. But if we ask why it matters if you feel bad and unhappy, there is no answer. It is self-evident.

So it is time to reassert the noble philosophy of the Enlightenment. In this view, every human being wants to be happy, and everybody counts equally. It follows that progress is measured by the overall scale of human happiness and misery. And the right action is the one that produces the greatest happiness in the world and (especially) the least misery. I can think of no nobler ideal.

So I propose a campaign for the Principle of the Greatest Happiness. This says that I should aim to produce the most happiness I can in the world and, above all, the least misery. And my rulers should do the same. This principle would lead to better private lives and better public policy. We desperately need a social norm in which the good of others figures more prominently in our personal goals. Today's excessive individualism removes so much of the joy from family life, work and even friendship."

I can't be bothered at this point to go over again the arguments in favour of making Zen enlightenment (as opposed to 'Enlightenment' enlightenment) our goal, and not the pursuit of happiness.

I'll just say this – people pursue money and material things because they believe those things will make them happy. Governments pursue the generation of money and the production of goods because they believe people need lots more of those things in order to be happy. It all depends on what you think is going to make you, and other people, happy. Chasing after happiness is dumb behaviour. There – I've said it.

Still, Layard's thing is 'happiness' – and it's his hobby horse, his political franchise. No point in arguing with him.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/13/happiness-enlightenment-economics-philosophy


Stiglitz and Wall Street

Nobel prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote an excellent piece this week, on the anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse. It's worth taking time to read it in full.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/14/lehmans-one-year-after1

What went wrong? Have the right lessons been learned? I fear that our collective response has been mistaken and inadequate – that we may just have made matters worse.

Lehmans was . . . a consequence of flawed lending practices, and of inadequate oversight by regulators.

Bailing out the US banks need not have meant bailing out the bankers, their shareholders, and bondholders. We could have kept the banks as ongoing institutions, even if we had played by the ordinary rules of capitalism which say that when a firm can't meet its obligations to creditors, the shareholders lose everything.

Unquestionably we should not have allowed banks to become so big and so intertwined that their failure would cause a crisis.

[Our government] has failed to take adequate steps to restrict institutions' size, their risk-taking, and their interconnectedness. Indeed, it has allowed the big banks to become even bigger – just as it has failed to stem the flow of profligate executive bonuses.

After the fall of Bear Stearns, with rumours that Lehmans was next, the Fed and the Treasury should have done a serious job of figuring out how to manage an orderly shutdown of a large, complex institution; and if they determined that they lacked adequate legal authority, they should have requested it.

They appear, remarkably, to have been repeatedly caught off-guard.

After saying that they did not want to bail out Lehmans because of a concern about moral hazard, they extended the government's safety net further than it had ever been. Bear Stearns extended it to investment banks, and AIG to all financial institutions. Perhaps they were doing the best they could at the time; but that is no excuse for not having anticipated the problems and been better prepared.

Lehman Brothers was a symptom of a dysfunctional financial system and regulatory failure. It should have taught us that preventing problems is easier, and certainly less costly, than dealing with them when they become virtually intractable.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/14/lehmans-one-year-after1

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Carter – Obama – Racism

"The former US president Jimmy Carter has condemned as "dastardly" and "based on racism" a southern Republican's outburst during Barack Obama's big healthcare speech to Congress last week. Carter said the "You lie" interjection by Joe Wilson showed there was "an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president".

The 84-year-old said the case was part of a disturbing trend directed at Obama that has included equating the president to Nazi leaders. "Those kind of things are not just casual outcomes of a sincere debate on whether we should have a national programme on healthcare. It's deeper than that."

In an interview with NBC News, Carter attributed much of the conservative opposition to Obama to his race. "I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man.”

Dick Harpootlian, a former Democrat party chairman in South Carolina, said he did not believe Wilson was motivated by racism but added that his actions encouraged racist views. "I think Joe's conduct was asinine, but I think it would be asinine no matter what the colour of the president." Harpootlian, who has known Wilson for decades, said: "I don't think Joe's outburst was caused by President Obama being African-American. I think it was caused by no filter being between his brain and his mouth."

Surely they're both correct in their assessments.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/16/jimmy-carter-you-lie-racist

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Interesting comment on the Guardian film blog on David Lynch:

“There are too few living directors out there who can successfully translate the craziness inside their heads into compelling movie-making. Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang still inspire devotion from beyond the grave. Lynch, at 65, is only getting started.

Which is why it worries me that he's so stuck on meditation. I don't want his silence. I want his noise. So if anyone out there finds his voice, could you please hand it in?”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2009/sep/10/david-lynch-tribute-films-art


Chavez and South America

“I would be worried if they spoke well of me.”

Hugo Chavez –  Oliver Stone - South of the Border

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/sep/03/oliver-stone-south-of-the-border-hugo-chavez

Retirement

Max Mosley shared some interesting thoughts in an interview with Donald McCrae in the Guardian yesterday. He's agreed to stand down from the presidency of the FIA and his leading role in F1 at the end of this season, after being put under huge pressure by the F1 teams to do so, following the revelations in the New of the Screws about his sex life in S & M cellars and dungeons. (has anyone turned it into a Playstation game yet – Dungeons and Dragracers?)

He's a fascinating guy, and you have to say very gutsy (and wealthy) to fight back against the Screws and win his right to privacy case. His family background is unbelievable – Oswald and Diana Mosley as parents, involvement in his father's post-war Union Movement (successor to the British Union of Fascists) from an early age, and the loss of his only child, Alexander, from a drugs overdose, just a few months ago.

In the paper he's quoted as saying,

“Retirement will be a big relief. The work is absolutely non-stop and I always feel I haven't really done what I should've done. And I am tired of the battling. It's more or less, in different guises, the same problems with the same people and you're never going to finish. At a certain point it's time to stop. You've only got a limited amount of time left before you drop off – and do you really want to spend it solving other people's problems?"

“I'm dying to have a bit more time for myself. There are so many books I want to read and maybe I will write a book myself – because there is so much to tell."

That could be a book worth reading. I seem to be developing a strange regard for high-profile right-wing characters – IDS, Sarkozy, etc. Worrying.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2009/sep/15/max-mosley-formula-one-fia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Mosley

Today's musical treat, for no particular reason, is Seasick Steve:

http://www.foxytunes.com/artist/seasick_steve

click on the 'Live on Jules Holland' video. Doghouse Blues Boogie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUzmZvwMNsw&feature=related

This version is probably even better, apart from the quality of sound on the voice PA.

Steve decided at the age of fourteen that the quality of life he had at home was so piss poor he'd do better to hit the road and go out on his own. There's never been a lot of money in playing the blues and boogie, unless you get very lucky. Steve's been materially poor most of his life, but rich in spirit and attitude.

Taoist Thought for Today:

Free of self-focused expectations, one is free of disappointment.
Free of self-focused motivation, one is free of regrets.

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Layer 128 Plodwatch, Lansbury, the T word, a More Equal Society, Creativity & Culture.

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Springwatch 5 . March 1st .First day of Spring.

The crocuses in the churchyard on Friday were amazing - a huge carpet of purple and mauve spread out in 15 degrees of beautiful Spring sunshine. There was one solitary daffodil in bloom. Tiny hints of green leaves on one or two of the trees, and the first signs of blossom were on just one tree.

Leaving the space, peace and beauty of the churchyard, strolling along the main road, just ahead of me I saw two unmarked cars suddenly switch on sirens and their concealed blue lights, stopping a car that was sandwiched between them. (It makes you wonder how many of these unmarked plodmobiles are on the streets at any one time. That’s another aspect of the surveillance society that’s never mentioned.)

A bunch of ugly looking and scruffy young guys, presumably drugs squad, got out and started pulling 4 young guys from the target vehicle. Three of them were suitably shocked into meek compliance, but one - the head honcho? - started to protest and struggle.

He was pushed against the car’s bonnet, and held there, shouting, cursing and complaining. Someone had called for uniformed backup, and screaming sirens and more flashing blue lights signalled the arrival of reinforcements.

Within a couple of minutes the original vehicles were surrounded by three police Astras and three police vans of varying sizes. The original six plain clothes guys were augmented by fourteen uniformed men and women, all of them standing around, surrounded by a large crowd of onlookers like me. Was this real? Were there film cameras shooting this scene?

With the main road completely blocked, the traffic backed up in both directions, causing complete chaos and gridlock. At one point, outside the church grounds, there were 5 stationary double-decker buses nose to tail, forming an unbroken cliff of red metal. And all because one of the bad guys had over-reacted to the police.

It’s possible these things are happening all the time, unbeknownst to the likes of me, living our relatively cocooned lives. Maybe chaos and disruption is the price we have to pay for our police running to ground the drug dealers and gangsters.

We presume that the guys who were taken away in the vans were indeed bad guys.

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The Wire

I’ve been catching up with Series 1 of The Wire - essential viewing I’d say for all students of today’s gritty inner-city realities. A very mixed bunch of plain-clothes policemen and women - some brilliant and brave, but flawed; and some flawed but well-meaning. They try to bang up drug dealers and other sorts of bad guys, some of whom are just trying to get by in life and have some very decent aspects to their attitudes and behaviour. The cops generally have a great liking and need for alcohol, their drug of choice.

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George Lansbury

Last week there were events taking place in the East End to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of George Lansbury, the ‘forgotten’ leader of the Labour party, whose four years as leader slotted between Ramsey MacDonald and Clem Attlee.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lansbury

He was an idealist, a pacifist, an anti-war campaigner, and a man who was prepared to go to prison for his support of the poor and the disenfranchised. He supported the suffragette movement and insisted on redistributing taxes to the poor.

On Friday evening there was a public meeting at the delightful Bromley Public Hall, next to the lovely Bow Bells pub on Bow Road. Tony Benn was one of the speakers - an incredible guy - still turning up for these sorts of meetings, paying respects to his forebears and their remaining grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The man’s in his mid eighties, and still as sharp as a tack, still personable and patient and passionate. Inspirational.

The New Labour bastards have done their best to obliterate all memories of the founders and former leaders of the Labour party, so thank goodness there are still some people who are prepared to honour their memories and the history & traditions of the party. Lansbury was from a time when working class MPs still lived in their constituencies and the places where they were born, and still served their families and communities. Anyone could go to his house in Bow, knock on his door, and let him know something or other they wanted to bring to his attention.

Nowadays we have the Home Secretary telling us that the bedroom which she uses a couple of times a week in her sister’s home is actually her main residence, on which she claims a massive payment from the public purse.

Lansbury, on the other hand, though often thought of as the best-loved MP of his generation, and by people of all political persuasions, was born poor, grew up poor, and died poor.

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Thatcher

This history and memory of Thatcherism was examined on TV last week, in a long one-off retelling called Margaret, and even though it was an effort, I forced myself to watch it. Linsey Duncan was too good for the role - she made Thatch look kind of normal and attractive, at least physically. It seems the BBC is now so scared of the Tories and accusations of political bias that they cut out certain scenes which showed the old bag’s darkest side.

The producers did a brilliant job in casting the male characters - finding actors who both resembled and sounded like the vegetables in the Tory stew. Tebbit, Howe, Gummer, Heseltine, Whitelaw, Major - what a mob. Dark days indeed.

Plus ca change. Blair, Brown, Prescott, Blunkett, Blears, Straw, Mandleson, Miliband, etc.

12 wasted years. Those that didn’t actively pursue the neo-conservative agenda just sat on their hands whilst the opportunity to transform our politics and our society was squandered.

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A More Equal Society?

Polly Toynbee wrote another excellent column yesterday, commenting on the fat cats and the recent report: “Towards A More Equal Society?”.

Sir Fred Goodwin defies public disgust. He just doesn't get it, and why should he? It's not his fault, it's a bad upbringing among grab-what-you-can and eat-what-you-kill predators. His feral overclass thinks it owes nothing to society: the notion of citizenship is incomprehensibly alien. You could write a "Gee, Officer Krupke" song about him: it's not his fault, he has a social disease.

Like the smirking hoodie who sticks one finger up at the judge's sermon on antisocial behaviour, Sir Fred is a product of Britain's winner-takes-all culture that Labour never attempted to civilise. The two extremes here in Europe's most unequal country mirror one another in the social dysfunction they cause. Sir Fred's mob thieves from fellow citizens and their pension funds by avoiding tax and snatching monstrous "remuneration" instead of mugging and looting, but "everyone does it" is how they would each explain their milieu.

Directors of failed banks and companies are all scuttling off with mighty swag. The law is on Sir Fred's side: probably nothing can be done. It's no use Gordon Brown bleating about it now. Over many years plenty of us at the Guardian, and many in his own party, have questioned him about his craven treatment of obscene City booty. He would shrug it off with irritation as an irrelevance and go back to boosting the City. To whisper higher taxes or strict remuneration controls was anathema.

Brown had never protested about the bonus culture until he was outflanked by the Tories. He had never suggested raising the top tax rate to 45% until Obama won on that ticket. The people were always miles ahead of Labour: for years polls have shown that some 75% consistently feel the gap between rich and poor is far too wide. But Labour was "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich", revelling in the bubble that is now over. Even if some have yet to get that message.

Read the rest of it at

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/27/sir-fred-goodwin-labour

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Death of a Child

There was an excellent letter in the Guardian yesterday from a certain Martin Wyness:

“Gordon Brown is right when he says the death of a child was an unbearable sorrow that no parent should ever have to endure. I hope he and other politicians remember this truth the next time they back an illegal war, only mildly chastise the Israelis over Gaza, . . . Sadly it only highlights how they care for their own while being willing to sacrifice people in foreign lands to abstract notions. Iraq has seen thousands of innocent children killed, Gaza saw hundreds . . .

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Marina Hyde’s Saturday column was terrific, as usual.

“Give to the rich to help the poor? An idea worthy of Bono.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/28/tax-avoidance-aid

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Creativity & Culture

Mark Lawson reported yesterday on participation in creativity and culture, and on Venezuela’s scheme to provide musical instruments and tuition for all children - a subject I’ve written about previously:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/28/mark-lawson-art-society

“In late spring, the Simon Bolivar National Youth Orchestra of Venezuela will take part in a series of events aimed at popularising here El Sistema, the pioneering music educational scheme which took the country's slumdogs and gave them hope and employment through participation in an orchestra: a Scottish version of the Sistema is being attempted near Stirling.

And the UK - in which the availability of musical instruments to state school children has been low and slow in recent years - should be deeply shamed by the fact that the example of best practice in musical education was forged in one of the poorest parts of the world.”

I’ve tried to think positive things about Mark Lawson, but I’m inclined to think that he’s a cultural snob, who makes a nice living from his cultural commentaries, but doesn’t really get it. He end his piece with this crappy conclusion -

“Doing” (art & creativity) “must not be seen as more important than viewing.” MUST? NOT? Really?

Well Mark’s the eternal voyeur, so he would say that, I guess. His own creativity consists of telling us in his usual gushing fashion about the creativity of proper artists, so of course he’s not going to attach much importance to the arts and crafts of the little people. The more we pay attention to enjoying and fulfilling ourselves with creative pursuits, the less attention we pay to pundits like him, which will never do.

As for his idea that Chavez and Venezuela’s ‘art for all’ approach amounts to “the most direct attempt there has been to use creativity as social engineering” - what ridiculous bollocks. In what way?

Some sort of dangerous revolutionary stuff, I suppose, allowing, enabling and encouraging people to enjoy creating their own music, instead of sitting back and worshipping classical music played by elite professionals.

Whatever next? Jazz? Rock? Blues? Heaven help us.

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Hoots Mon

Meanwhile the turgid Ian Jack writes about the fact that the majority of people involved in the ongoing UK financial and banking crisis are Scottish, including Brown and Darling, of course.

His point is that ‘refined’ Scots accents have apparently, until now, been perceived as a mark of honesty and integrity. But no more, clearly.

“Sadly, remembering that neither nationhood nor social class is a barrier to incompetence and greed, the rest of the world may have to adjust the inferences it draws from a Scottish voice.”

I well remember a former Scottish colleague who frequently uttered the stock phrases, “To be honest wi’ you . . .” and “To be perfectly honest . . . ” which always made me think that anything which wasn’t prefaced by these hackneyed clichés - these verbal mannerisms - ought to be treated with great suspicion, and with the assumption that he was a two-faced bastard who habitually lied through his teeth. Which indeed he was.

To be perfectly honest, I never believed a word of what he said.

Thank goodness there are lots of perfectly lovely Scottish people. None of them bankers.
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Layer 124 The Working Classes

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It’s obviously a zeitgeisty thing, but Radio 4 started a series on the working class today.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00hkl7g

Class consciousness is definitely making a comeback in Britain. It’s surely impossible NOT to think about Us and Them when most people are feeling fucked over by the bankers and the financiers, and have become acutely aware of the fact that there’s a whole group or class of people who manage to avoid paying their fair share of taxes whilst simultaneously paying themselves phenomenal amounts of money in salaries, profits and ‘bonuses’.

No doubt many of those people work hard, but it’s not necessarily ‘work’ as we know it, Jim. And many of them only work because they feel driven to get seriously rich - like, mega rich. Many of them don’t work at all, of course, and this is also becoming clearer to many - that there’s a rentier or property-owning class who have become richer and richer on the basis of their families having bequeathed to them property and share portfolios which they pay other people to manage, whilst they themselves swan around the place and live the life of Reilly.

Not that anyone would seriously want adopt their useless and pathetic lifestyles, their parasitical and trivial existences. As someone said in the programme, even if he won the lottery he’d still want to live near his family and mates, use the same pub, and go to football at weekends.

But this is something the footloose and aspirational middle classes have difficulty understanding - ‘up there’ in the midlands and the north there are people living happy and fulfilled lives who are not driven by a restless quest for life behind suburban walls, behind electric gates, thinking that’s where happiness and contentment lie.

You can’t buy community, you can’t buy lifelong friends and a loyal extended family. Money doesn’t bring happiness, especially if it’s used in ways that cut you off from those who bring joy and friendship into your life.

Of course we’d all like a year’s sabbatical and enough money to go traveling - but ultimately there has to be more to life than being idle. Prince Siddharta found meaning in life, and ultimately enlightenment, by becoming a bodhisatva and striving to serve people in need.

According to the programme:

More people now identify themselves as working class than they did 40 years ago

Engles was shocked by the conditions of the working classes in Manchester.

For many years it’s been ‘unfashionable’ to talk about class

Who now speaks for the working class? (Certainly not NuLabour)

Unfortunately they interviewed Hazel bleeding Blears, “one of the few senior politicians from a working class background”, blathering on about having a string permanently around her neck as a child. It turns out the string held a latch key. There’s quite a few of us who’d like to see the string back round her neck.

So how do people define their class? Is it about attitudes?

“There’s only one way to get money, and that’s to work,” said somebody. But that’s so not true. There are now thousands of people who live off inherited wealth. Trustafarians abound in the wealthier parts of London, for instance.

So is a working class person someone who works for a living, or someone who HAS to work for a living, because they have no choice?

There’s also the issue of identity - identification with a section of society, such as the working class, plus whether you need to work for a living.

The programme made the point that in Australia & the USA it’s different - since people there usually have a sense of being able to (and wanting to) reinvent themselves. Invariably as better off and more aspirational beings. Nobody in those places apparently wants to consider themselves as working class, let alone feels any pride in it.

The programme then focused on how change comes about in society - how working class people can fight back against poverty and exploitation. Pressure from below? Mass movements agitating for social change?

Thomas Paine - England’s greatest radical - was mentioned. "These are the times that try men's souls," declared Thomas, in his pamphlet The Crisis - and indeed they are. Are we also on the brink of a revolution? Not necessarily a revolutionary war, as such, but certainly a revolution in consciousness and political sophistication, leading to the radical economic and social changes the world desperately needs. Perhaps. Who knows where the current turmoil will lead? (see also the bits on Cameron and Chavez below)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Paine

http://www.ushistory.org/PAINE/

Ewan McColl was name-checked by the programme, as was Anthony Burgess - a working class lad who grew up in Manchester and also went to university there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewan_MacColl

http://www.peggyseeger.com/ewan-maccoll
Interesting that there’s such a good section on Ewan on Peggy Seeger’s website, and a coincidence that Pete Seeger’s reputation has been boosted lately by the man himself performing at Obama’s inauguration concert (see below), and by Springsteen’s brilliant “Seeger Sessions Band”. The Boss, as we know, has always been the champion of blue collar folk, in both senses of the words - champion and folk.

(And to digress even further - there was a superb documentary on Seasick Steve on BBC4, or Sky Arts, last week - his life and times. Plus 30 minutes of him playing the blues at the Reading Festival and the Albert Hall - literally rags to riches. Go out and buy Dog House Music if you don‘t already have it.)


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Springsteen_with_The_Seeger_Sessions_Band_Tour


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasick_Steve

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNoPNC3ebYQ

- great video of Steve performing Dog House Blues on 3-string bottleneck guitar on Jules Holland’s prog. Play loud. (great camera work, by the way. Respect to the ‘Later’ team.)

Another coincidence for me was rooting around on my bookshelves last night and coming across Anthony Burgess’s ‘Earthly Powers’, which I bought second-hand for £1.30 several years ago and never got round to reading. It was written in the year of my son’s birth, and has written inside the front cover: “Dear Daddy, Happy Birthday 19/11/81 lots of love Helen xxxxxxxxxx”.

I wonder what Helen and her dad are doing now, and whether he managed to read the book. (see below)

The programme concluded with some thoughts about working class people getting by in life, helping one another out when times are hard, having a sense of community

Whereas middle class & comfortably off people can afford to let things stay the same, and can seemingly live anti-socially, in isolated nuclear units.

Right at the end there was a reference to John Cooper Clark, the Bard of Salford, whose dad worked in car factory. “Working on the midnight shift”, no doubt. Coincidentally John’s about to go back on the road, and had a gig reviewed in the Guardian this week.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/feb/16/john-cooper-clarke-pop
http://www.cyberspike.com/clarke/midnight.html
http://www.cyberspike.com/clarke/poemlist.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7DQRWeTWos

Looking ahead to the next programme the presenter asked: Is it just what we earn, who we identify with, whether we feel a part of a community, and which newspaper we read? Is it in fact a question of values and culture?

Stay tuned.

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There’s a brilliant advert on TV at the moment for the Co-operative movement, showing dandelion seeds floating on their parachutes to a soundtrack of Dylan’s ‘Blowing In the Wind’, letting the lyrics speak their message - “How many roads must a walk down? . . . “How many times must a man look up? . . .“

The message of the voice-over right at the end is simply about the Co-ops’ community projects, sharing profits, fair trade, etc. Excellent.

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1) A Cat Among the Pigeons

David Cameron set a cat amongst pigeons with an article in yesterday’s Guardian, “A Radical Power Shift: Our future depends on putting more political responsibility in the hands of local people.”

Tony Benn once spoke about wanting a fundamental shift of power and wealth to working people. I too want that fundamental shift - to local people and local institutions. Over the last century Britain has become one of the most centralised countries in the developed world as power has been sucked to Westminster. Some might wonder why this matters. After all, isn't politics just about what works? But there is a deep connection between where decisions are made and what works.

When one-size-fits-all solutions are dispensed from the centre, it's not surprising they so often fail local communities. When people experience a yawning gap between the changes they want to see and those they can directly affect, it is inevitable that demoralisation and democratic disengagement follow.

225 responses in CIF so far. Worth a read.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/17/cameron-decentralisation-local-government?commentpage=1

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2) A catamite among the pigeons.

So I started reading Earthly Powers, and was immediately grabbed by it. How many books do you come across that have a word in the very first sentence that you need to look up in a dictionary, or Wikipedia?

A catamite is the younger partner in a pederastic relationship between two males, which was a popular arrangement in many areas of the ancient world.

Kings and Emperors in some ancient cultures had not only concubines but also catamites (male concubines), in addition to their many wives.

The word is also used to describe the practice in early Japan, where monks would have sexual relationships with younger monks[citation needed]; samurai with pages; and noblemen with younger members of the aristocracy.

The word catamite is derived from the Latin catamitus, itself borrowed from the Etruscan catmite, a corruption of the Greek Ganymedes, the boy who was seduced by Zeus and became his beloved and cup-bearer in Greek mythology.

So there. And then we discover that Burgess is having a laugh -

“I have lost none of my old cunning in the contrivance of what is known as an arresting opening.”

A novelist is having a siesta on his 81st birthday. An archbishop comes to visit and the novelist asks his manservant to take him into the bar and pour him a drink.

“The bar was across the hall, to the right, between the wreck of an office where Geoffrey neglected his secretarial work and my own fussily neat study. On the wall between the bar and the study was the Georges Rouault - a scrawled ugly ballerina, impatient thick black strokes and bitter washes. In Paris that time Maynard Keynes had hotly recommended that I buy it. He had known all about markets.”

600 pages to go.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthly_Powers

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/burgess.htm
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Chavez

Hugo Chavez has won his referendum to entitle him to keep on putting himself up for reelection in Venezuela. Say what you like about him, and his methods, but the man’s got a head, a heart and balls. After all that the USA did to the proletariat in South America, after all the killings and torture inspired by the Shock Doctrine, the revenge of the neo-cons and the Chicago Boys against leftists and progressives, it takes guts to stand up to the USA when it’s in the control of Bush and his ilk and is determined to get rid of you, and considers you a threat to its ‘national security’.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Ch%C3%A1vez

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Obama’s Inauguration

Last night on TV there was a broadcast of the ‘concert’ that preceded Obama’s inauguration. A dog’s breakfast of an event, but very stirring in parts. Some naff speeches, but how fantastic to see so many black people taking leading roles in their country’s affairs. Some truly awful music and songs, but some wonderful stuff from the likes of Springsteen and gospel choirs.

After the truly hideous years of the neo-con ascendancy how incredible it all seems - the possibility that the affairs of a great nation are at last being coordinated and supervised by people with intelligence and credibility.
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