Of deep-meaning philosophies where only showbiz loses.

Ed Miliband first disappointed me – I knew it wouldn’t take long – in his post-victory interview with Andrew Marr in which, in addition to discarding the ‘Red Ed’ tag (which is fair enough in realpolitik, although I like it and I’m going to use it, even if ironically), he further emphasised the theme that ‘You don’t have to be left-wing in order to [think access to and funding of health/education/housing is important]‘.

To some extent, of course, he has to do that. But I get so tired of and so depressed by the rightward drift of political discourse in this country. The Tories and the media have always presented every Labour leader as potentially STALIN, and made it their first and most important task to prove that they aren’t. Further, they have ensured that anything that could be described as left-wing also = STALIN, and this has made Labour – since Kinnock especially – scurry away from describing themselves as left-wing, leading to the absurd sight of our newest leader claiming that you don’t have to be left-wing in order to think that state welfare provision is a good idea. I mean, fair play, I only have theoretical and practical knowledge of the subject, but I think you kind of do. I think you do have to be left-wing in order to think that, and I think that a better long-term tactic might be to campaign on the basis that ‘If you do think x, y and z issues are important, then you might just be left-wing’, and go from there. Shift the centre ground of political debate back from where it’s currently hanging off an actual right-wing cliff.

(He also, I suppose, has to bang on about Hard-Working Middle England Families, just in case this pampered and cosseted Daily Mail-reading bunch may scent the merest suspicion of any other sector of society getting in on the act and start squealing in defence of their second homes, cars, and holidays. God, I fucking hate every Hard-Working Middle England Family I’ve ever met. The cunts. [/mild self-parody])

I wasn’t aware that Red Ed had Kinnock’s backing for the leadership. It makes sense, and despite my dislike of Kinnock it hasn’t put me off. I mean, Kinnock’s occasional bumptiousness, arrogance and bloody-mindedness tend to pale into insignificance when compared to what we’ve endured since him.

I’ve nothing to say in their defence / But I think it’s time you forgave your parents

This whole trend towards intergenerational warfare, then. What do you think?

I think it’s a complete red herring. Just the latest ostensibly attractive way for a thoroughly fucked society to take out its anger – which, not to Godwin myself or anything, is a bit of a slippery political slope. I do wish this was a cause I could believe in, but the greater the volume of ink and cyberspace I see devoted to this spurious blame-game, the more it irritates me with its obvious logical inconsistencies. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I think the Sixties were shit. I may know, and like, but I have great difficulty in respecting, any fucker who calls themselves a hippie. I do hate ‘baby boomers’, but only as much as I hate anyone else. And I have been non-specifically annoyed lately anyway, so here we go, in vague order of importance:

1. Blaming one’s parents’ generation is a very obvious distraction from the actual conflict of interests that currently exists: that between the very wealthy and the rest of us. Just like the whole debate over whether men or women would suffer worst under the recession and under the consequent government cuts. Just like the artificial divisions being drawn between the ‘deserving poor’ or ‘hardworking families’ and Scroungers Living Large Off The Welfare State. They’re all distractions and they’re distracting by divide-and-rule. I can’t believe people are swallowing it. The Tories must be laughing their arses off.

2. Too much of this debate is framed in laughable, patronising, Rik from The Young Ones ‘kill your parents’ schtick, which apart from its rhetorical shortcomings is a really bizarre argument. Look – I understand that if you’ve got middle-class, home-owning, highly-educated professional parents and you now find yourself in rented accommodation and in debt from your student days and without a white-collar job, then you’re entitled to be pissed off. But a) you are in a minority and b) how on earth are your parents, specifically, to blame for the economic and political decisions which brought this about? I assume ‘parents’ is used mostly as metaphor, but it’s very hard to tell.

3. I’m not you, and my parents aren’t your parents. My parents did not vote for Thatcher, did not jump on the buying of council homes, did not squander the post-war settlement and did not benefit from anything that went on in government over the past thirty or so years. I’m not blaming my parents for this shit, and if you’re going to blame my parents, then mate, let’s step outside.

4. But most of all, jesus christ. I am indescribably hard-pushed to feel a shred of sympathy for any ‘generation’ I might be part of. My generation is wildly overprivileged, entitled, solipsistic and drowning in conspicuous consumption, and the majority of us have done absolutely nothing but take what we have for granted. I have neither the time nor the mental energy to properly explain this, but here’s one example: I was at the heart of what little fight there was for free education, from the loss of the grant to the imposition of top-up fees, and do you know who some of the most active proponents of a paid-for education were? Do you know who visibly Sold Us Out? Yeah, it was my fellow sabbaticals, my fellow union officers, who were playing the long game and who wanted a foot on the ladder at Labour HQ when they got into the real world. And do you know how they got away with it? Because the vast, overwhelming majority of their membership knew fuck-all about the political issues affecting them, cared less, and were mostly concerned with cheap pints and School Disco nights. Fuck off. We are the generation that think oppression means having our smartphone nicked while we’re pissed in soi-disant directional London pretending to be avant-garde, and by Christ we get what we deserve.

Badly-Digested Reads: an occasional series

I précis:

Bret Easton Ellis, Imperial Bedrooms (out now):

So I was watching the highly inaccurate movie of my life, drinking and talking in a desultory manner to an acquaintance we all thought was dead. That black jeep had followed me here and was parked out front. A Nameless Horror had happened in New York and I obliquely referred to it. I took a drink. We all avoided specifically mentioning any detail of our previous lives that would render the narrative easier to follow. I ignored thirty-four bewildering texts from my ex-girlfriend asking me when I was coming back to New York. The wife of another aquaintance appeared and we drove to a hotel and had desultory sex. She said ‘I thought you were dead’. Taking my drink to the window, I saw the black jeep parked out front. The phone rang and then went dead. I obliquely remembered the horrible death of another acquaintance, who might be the same acquaintance I was talking to on the first page. I drove to another party and the black jeep followed me. My ex-girlfriend sends another forty-two texts and things arbitrarily shift into the present tense. I have desultory sex with an acquaintance. I remember my ex-girlfriend is actually dead. ‘What’s happening to us?’ I say. She says, ‘I can’t tell you. Hey, what’s that black jeep doing here?’ Perhaps the Nameless Horror is the fact that we are all now middle-aged.

Oh Bret Easton Ellis, never change. Remain the Elvis of Existentialism.

Bluntly put in the fewest of words: cunts are still running the world.

I might just stay drunk until the next election. (How will you tell the difference?)

Nick Clegg is a pipsqueak, and will get his in due course.

Prime Minister Bumface Eton-Bullingdon. There’s not enough booze in the world.

… Nah. I am one of those who was born under the Tories and their born-to-rule, bumptious, smirking, arrogant, south-east England weight. I grew up in a country run into the ground by them, and I am one of those who made it out regardless. I am one of those who shook them off, who fought them, as I will again. I am one of those who were not only taught to, but who recognised the Conservative Party for themselves as the enemy, and I prevailed. I am still here.

I am here to see them come around again, and I will see them fall.

The Standing at the Back Dressed Stupidly and Looking Stupid Party: no votes.

I have never had to queue at a polling station before last Thursday, or seen queues like it, even when I was a kid watching Old Labour roll the vote out. Turnout was actually what, though, 65%? Good, but in no way ‘unmanageable’ and no excuse for the incompetence and mismanagement which prevented thousands of votes being cast.

According to the BBC, ‘people are calling this a Mick Jagger election’ (no they aren’t – what, superannuated, clapped-out and needing to be pensioned off?). This is of course merely a ruse for commentators to reference the lack of SATISFACTION it brought all parties and the nation.

Satisfactory stuff as far as I’m concerned:
- BNP comprehensively dished in Barking & Dagenham, Epping Forest and Stoke. Wiped out at the local level, as will tend to happpen because, historically, even if you vote for these people on the basis of “”"giving them a chance”"”, they get Found Out relatively quickly because they always fuck it up through absenteeism, incompetence and being generally unable and unwilling to conduct themselves within democratic boundaries. Fuck ‘em.
- My home seat in Wales has been retaken by Labour from that ‘independent’ clown.
- Labour have retaken Bethnal Green from the idiot George Galloway, who also failed to get elected in Poplar.
- Only one Tory in Scotland. Shame the same couldn’t be said for Wales.
- Naomi Long becoming the (highly progressive) Alliance Party’s first MP, unseating Peter Robinson in the process.
- Caroline Lucas becoming the first Green MP – this’ll be interesting, I’ve already had one Brighton correspondent rubbishing her on the basis that she didn’t campaign in and generally isn’t bothered about the more deprived and less picturesque bits of Brighton. We’ll see.
- In general: many of the nastier and richest blondest most hotly-tipped-for-Cabinet-places Cameronites failed to get in. Aww.
- Gordon Brown’s constituency vote actually went up: GOOD. (Some other time I’ll write about the rage induced in me by seeing tabloids and image consultants telling a grown man the sort of thing that fucks up socially anxious children, viz. ‘No one will like you unless you smile, you know – no, no, smile properly, come on, god, you’re so weird, no wonder no one wants to play with you’ etc. Oh look, I have.)

Otherwise:
- Gutted re. Evan Harris losing his seat – done for by boundary changes and a baffling number of votes wasted on the Green candidate, it appears?
- And astonished re. Lembit Opik losing his, although I’d imagine a highly lucrative career doing reality tv awaits.

Liberal Democrats: an infantile disorder?
And now what? The Liberal Democrats will seriously disappoint me if they pile in with the Tories, although it won’t exactly be a suprise. I hadn’t said this amid the Liberal Moment premature rejoicing, because of course I’d prefer a vote to be cast for them against the Tories, but the Liberal Democrats did very well to spin themselves as a ‘new’ alternative when what they are is the offspring of the Whigs, for fuck’s sake and the Social Democrats, the latter being a horrible little rump of a party which jumped ship from 80s Labour (thanks, guys!) in order to attempt to cosy up to the Thatcher government. A sizeable amount of that party won’t have a problem with governing alongside the Tories – although I’m assuming that many will.

If they join a coalition without getting a time and place for electoral reform, the Liberal Democrats are fucked, though, aren’t they? At any forthcoming election they’ll be associated with whatever draconian economic measures the Tories go for, and in Wales at least their vote will be squeezed in favour of Labour or Plaid. Trading away a commitment to reform – as opposed to Cameron’s current ‘Yes, yes, we’ll set up a committee and review the situation – oh alright, if you insist, we’ll set up a committee and thoroughly review the situation, now, about knifing the BBC and carving up the remains of the welfare state…’ – in exchange for seats in the Cabinet is truly old-style political venality and short-termism. I wish I could say I’d expected better.

Never Mind the Ballots.

I am duly pessimistic about the upcoming election. I fully expect the Tories to be narrowly elected, and I find that thought a grim, grey fireblanket of a prospect, extinguishing any spark of hope I might have for the personal and collective future. I find it very, very hard to articulate just how much I DO NOT WANT to live under a Conservative government again. That isn’t really what this post is for, though.

Please register to vote by April 20th, and please vote on May 6th.

There isn’t a party I’m sufficiently happy with to encourage others to vote for. However, the main reasons I think it is important to vote are these:

1. The BNP. This election will have neo-fascist candidates contesting several seats. In the last set of European elections, the BNP vote didn’t substantially increase; what happened was that overall turnout decreased, allowing the existing level of BNP support to ensure that this country is now represented in the European Parliament by two neo-fascists. This disgusting state of affairs is, fortunately, very easily avoided on a national level, viz: if there is a BNP candidate standing in your constituency, vote for someone who isn’t them.

2. Do not let antagonism be deflected into apathy. A low turnout can be made to mean anything: it won’t be heralded as a sign of your disenchantment or disgust with the choice of parties or the voting system, because you won’t have done anything to let that be known. If there’s no one you can bring yourself to vote for, and there’s no one you have a duty to vote against, then get out there and spoil your ballot. Spoiled ballots don’t get counted, but all the candidates will be shown them. Write something you’d like them to see. Or just draw them a knob; knobs of course are intrinsically hilarious.

3. On a related point: few things get my goat politically more than the idea that not voting is some superior, coolly nihilistic act of rebellion. It isn’t, it’s selfish and lazy and it buggers things up for the rest of us – it is, in fact, a purely Thatcherite act. And here’s the thing: the right are always, always more likely to vote than the left. The right very rarely withdraw in disgust; if anything, when dissatisfied with their nominal party, they find someone more extreme to vote for. Tories and neo-fascists love it when you stay at home and whinge. Do something less boring instead.

4. And on a related point from that point: if anyone of your acquaintance says anything along the lines of ‘I don’t vote, it only encourages them’, or ‘It doesn’t matter who you vote for, the government always gets in’, or ‘If voting changed anything, they’d abolish it’*, please briskly clip them round the ear so we can all make for a better Britain.

* You too, Ken.

Stand and deliver?

At the end of this week, postal workers across the UK will probably be on strike, and I will certainly be supporting them. The reasons for the strike, as I understand them, are that postal workers have had their wages frozen for the past two years, are being pressured by Royal Mail to work harder for less and are having their job security and conditions increasingly buggered about with in the name of ‘modernisation’.

As happened during last summer’s industrial action by London Underground staff, workers who chose to strike will be pilloried by the Government and the press. We’ve already seen an absurd amount of pearl-clutching over the strike’s potential to disrupt deliveries of Christmas post when, for the sake of goodness, it is only mid-October. As Victoria Coren points out: We hate it when the shops put decorations up in October, yet, somehow, suddenly, now is exactly the right time to start thinking about posting a Nintendo DS to cousin Johnny and complaining that those selfish bastard postmen won’t jam it through the letter box in time.

Ironically enough, the complaints over postal disruption serve the same purpose as the strike itself: to highlight the importance of a well-maintained and regular postal service, not one so underfunded and undermined as Royal Mail currently is. Those most reliant on a functioning post for, say, medical and financial information tend to be those without access to or fluency in the technology which has increasingly superceded it. This demographic – the poor, the elderly – have most to lose from Royal Mail’s impending push into the jaws of privatisation where quality of service will be sacrificed to cost-cutting and standards will fall on a permanent and irrevocable basis, rather than the disruptive few days which the strike will cost.

If you’re interested in the background to the strike, please read this excellent piece by a postal worker who explains it better than I can.

I don’t like linking to the Spectator, but I’m not sure where else this story is being publicised. The oil multinational Trafigura, which has an atrocious record on human rights and the environment, has instructed its solicitors to seek an injunction banning the Guardian from reporting on questions asked in Parliament regarding Trafigura’s dumping of toxic waste on the Ivory Coast.

That is: the British press are being prevented from reporting Parliamentary proceedings. And given the nonappearance of this story in any major news outlet, they appear to also be prevented from reporting that they are being prevented from reporting. This is sinister Kafka-esque fuckery and an awful precedent to be set. Please read the links and keep an eye on this.

Covert racists in overt racism shocka.

Link to the News of the World going useful-idiot on the BNP.

Working poverty: beyond the breadline

As the recession continues to bite, commentators continue to scrap over which of us bears the most impressive teeth marks: part-time and temporary female workers, those stuck in Britain’s post-industrial wastelands, or the Eighties-redux ‘lost generation’? The media’s preoccupation with the recession’s impact on unemployment, rather than the wage cuts, increased workloads and greater insecurity heaped upon those still in work, has been reflected in the response of both main parties. Labour in particular have ramped up their championing of paid work as panacea, chivvying the jobless into employment in an increasingly bloody-minded fashion with no apparent concern for what awaits us there. This Stakhanovite drum-beating is at odds with the reality of both poverty and work in modern Britain.

Under Labour, the National Minimum Wage has had a positive effect on the gender pay gap and, together with Working Tax Credits, has significantly raised the incomes of millions of working households. However, the problems of working poverty persist and are only increasing under current conditions. A trawl through IPPR research shows that almost six in ten poor UK households have someone at work, more than ten percent up on a decade ago. In 2006, more than one-fifth of all UK workers were paid £6.67 an hour, equivalent to 60 per cent of full-time median earnings. Handwringing over increased unemployment obscures that section of the population who cannot sufficiently stretch their wages to cover their cost of living, and who endure conditions which can be as stressful and soul-destroying as the full-time search for a job. The modern worker is subject not merely to financial hardship but also to insecurity, long hours, low pay, exploitation and sexual and racial harassment. The TUC’s Commission on Vulnerable Employment reports that over two million people endure “intolerably poor” working lives. As UK unions have been systematically defanged, so protection from increasingly unscrupulous employment practices has been undermined or disregarded.

In addition, any party which aims at the emancipation of labour must recognise that material security, and the space and energy it grants us, is a cornerstone of creative and intellectual fulfillment. An insidious effect of working poverty, and the relentless, low-level grinding routine which accompanies it, is its theft of mental as well as physical resources. This article, for instance, was researched and written in snatches during breaks in my 40-hour working week. I earn just enough each month to cover my rent and my bank loan repayment, and doing so leaves me exhausted, with little capacity or inclination for leisurely or creative pursuits. Those without my relative advantages – no credit cards, no childcare fees, no vehicle to run, no mortgage – are being squeezed far harder.

Concentrating on driving us into work at any cost, Labour ignores that work is not a guaranteed escape from poverty. There has been little debate on what would constitute a fair wage, or what combination of regulation and support should be available to workers and employers. In politics and media, the issues of low pay, bad conditions, and the many inadequacies of Tax Credits and other attempts to tinker with the basic injustice of wages which fail to keep pace with the cost of living, are overshadowed by issues surrounding the jobless or those in long-term receipt of benefits. While the latter group are sensationalised and demonised, the working poor are almost entirely absent from the arena of debate, and too busy or exhausted to shoulder our way into the spotlight.

This is a situation in which resentment is effortlessly bred, and in which it is easy to lose sight of what unites us. The Labour Party was founded on a desire to prioritise the needs and interests of workers, and, in today’s neo-Victorian socio-economic landscape, these ideals are once again glaringly relevant. Labour must accept that a job is currently not enough to secure a reasonable standard of living, nor is it a safeguard against exploitation, stress and insecurity. Government policies on wages, taxes, credits and benefits must acknowledge the existence of working poverty, identify the problems inherent in employment alongside those of unemployment, and devote a similar amount of resources to tackling them. When the working poor are able to live rather than existing, Labour will have succeeded not only in regaining the support of a core demographic, but also in making employment an appealing prospect in itself rather than a dead-end into which it is obliged to force us under threat of destitution.