Lessons from Ireland

The Republic of Ireland has recently introduced an emergency budget to address the effects of the economic downturn.  It’s the latest in a set of measures in an economy which, to an even greater extent than Britain, has been dependent on speculation and booming property prices.  The contraction of the Irish economy has been savage – official estimates suggest it will be 8% in 2009.  The rhetoric is about stabilising the public finances in order to bring a huge deficit under control, to restore confidence in the Irish economy.

The Irish policy response is interesting because it reflects quite closely the sort of policy framework that David Cameron and George Osborne have been setting out for the UK, in opposition to Gordon Brown’s stimulus package.  So it’s a useful exercise to unpack it to assess what Conservative policy could mean for the UK.

There’s an interesting analysis at Though Cowards Flinch which demonstrates how, despite the rhetoric that those who earn the most should pay the most, some of the changes in the tax regime actually bear down hardest on those least able to pay, by reducing income tax thresholds.

But this follows on from the announcement earlier this year of the Pensions Levy, which is in effect a swingeing pay cut for public sector workers.  The justification is simple; public sector workers enjoy substantially better pension provision than those in the public sector, and should therefore pay more for it.  Understandably it has provoked fury and mass resistance in Ireland, and the recent budget package modified it so that that it did not apply to lower-paid workers.

It’s a measure that fits closely with the rhetoric coming from the British Tory Party and its supporters in the Press.  In particular, the Daily Mail has been banging the drum about featherbedded public servants and their gold-plated pension provision, and individual Tory spokesmen have been making guarded comments on the subject (ever mindful of the fact that there are 600,000 voters in the public sector who have to be convinced somehow that voting Conservative is in their interests).  Others, like London’s Mayor Boris Johnson, have been much more outspoken.

The truth, of course, is totally different.  Mailwatch dissects the poisonous rhetoric about public sector pay here better than I could and some of the specific lies about public sector pensions are nailed by the Secretary General of the PCS, Mark Serwotka, in a radio interview in December last year.  Mailwatch points to the fact that public sector workers – who are overwhelmingly among the lower-paid in our society – have enjoyed years of below-inflation pay increases, while the private sector has forged ahead.  It however forbears to comment on the spectacle of Cameron and Osborne – both of whom sit on piles of vast inherited wealth -denouncing as bloated the average public sector pension of £7000 p.a. – barely enought to equip a member of the Bullingdon Club with tails and waistcoat.

The official Conservative line is that nothing has been ruled in or out.  But if the Tories win the next election, watch for the assault on the public sector.

Harold Pinter 1930-2008

I was very sad to hear of the death of playwright and Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter yesterday.

Pinter was one of those rarest creatures in the British artistic establishment, someone who believed it was imperative to speak truth to power.  Nothing made that clearer than his acceptance speech for his Nobel Prize in December 2005, made at a time when he was already seriously ill.

My clearest memory of Pinter is his performing his own sketch Press Conference at the Lyttleton theatre in February 2002.  Pinter played the former Head of the Secret Police in an unnamed dictatorship who has become Minister of Culture, giving a press conference in front of a group of supine journalists:

“We believe in a healthy, muscular and tender understanding of our cultural heritage and our cultural obligations.  Those obligations naturally include loyalty to the free market … Cultural dissent is acceptable – if it is left at home.  My advice is – leave it at home.  Keep it under the bed.  With the piss-pot.”

How the great and the good of our own British cultural establishment must have squirmed at that one.  He will be sorely missed.

And now – the anti-Green backlash

It’s been quite an interesting few weeks in the world of comment for those of us who consider ourselves on the Green hue of the political spectrum.  Of course the climate change deniers are always good for a few column inches, but there’s a more general sense of an anti-Green backlash, which seems to me to be linked to the growing crisis of free-market capitalism.

We’ve had former UK Government Chief Scientist Sir David King telling the Guardian that Greens are Luddites who want to roll back technological change; we’ve had the spat over the Channel 4 film The Great Global Warming Swindle, and the subsequent OFCOM ruling (more information on the complaint can be found here); and, lower down the food-chain, we’ve had this sort of fairly predictable rhetoric.

So what does this mean?  A lot of ink and airtime and cyberspace are being spent, inveitably, on the current economic problems.  A lot of this seems to me to be about denial – denying that there is something fundamentally wrong, or arguing that this is a blip. It seems to me that we are witnessing something much more fundamental than that.  Over the past quarter of a century, controls on capital have systematically been relaxed, and economic activity has, in my view, become a form of speculation.  It has less and less to do with serving people’s needs.  And it seems to me that much of the current anti-Green rhetoric is about closing off the alternative – about attacking the view that there is something inherently wrong with the market capitalist idea, rather than something that can be fixed without going outside the value-structure of the market.  It is in part about politicians, businessmen, media-owners and media-pundits not wanting to confront the question about whether their value-structure simply doesn’t measure up to reality.

Because the Green discourse attacks that value-structure, it is bound to be in the firing line.  At its heart, it is saying that the psychological assumptions that underpin the market – that are presented as irrevocable fact – are wrong.  It is about recognising that life may really be better lived if we have more fun and less stuff – and that we may be better-balanced and viable as a society as a result.  And it may be about having the rationale for frivolous comfort consumption knocked away from underneath an economy and culture in which that consumption is the principal somatic.  In an article on the Channel 4 film, George Monbiot makes the point with force and clarity:

So why does Channel 4 seem to be waging a war against the greens? I am not sure, but it seems to me that much of its programming – whether it concerns property, celebrities or contestants seeking fame and money – is aspirational. Environmentalism is counter-aspirational. It suggests that the carefree world Channel 4 has created, the celebration of the self, cannot be sustained.

Misuse of the word aspirational is a common feature of market capitalism; to want to have a bigger house or car is aspirational, wanting better schools and health care isn’t, and there’s a vast industry based on that assumption. And it seems to me that this backlash is really about the challenge to the “me, me, me” assumptions that have allowed market economics to gain legitimacy, especially in the eyes of that minority who enjoy the wealth and prestige it has bought them.

So my suggestion is this: when you see a journalist denouncing Greens as Luddite, look for the screaming toddler who doesn’t want to put down his toys.  At heart, it’s as simple as that.

First thoughts

Welcome to my blog.

Why another blog on politics and culture, and where am I coming from? I suppose the real motivation behind this is a sense of growing despair at the ideological nature of political and cultural discourse. I want to challenge some of the easy assumptions of those who exercise political and economic power, to try and get to a bit of reality by asking questions about the general consensus view of the world as it presents itself to one rather disillusioned left-leaning individual writing in Britain in 2008.

I’ve chosen as the title for the blog a quotation from one of the great figures of English radical writing – R.H. Tawney, historian and socialist and Labour Party partisan, who would have been absolutely aghast at the antics of his party today. I admire Tawney for his trenchant clarity, his sense of moral purpose, the eloquence and force of his logic, his ability to cut through the hypocrisy and cant of those who hold wealth and power, and those who act as cheerleaders on its behalf. In my view, those qualities have never been more badly needed, and I hope that, if nothing else, I can capture something of his spirit here.