How British feminism has to change
(I was asked to give a speech, yesterday, at the Housmans Bookshop in London. This is an extract from what I said)
A sea-change is taking place in contemporary feminism, particularly in the cities. Feminism is moving out of the universities and back onto the streets, as women of all backgrounds realise that practical action, class agitation and the rights of ordinary, working women are, and always have been, the future of the movement.
Midway through writing this article on Monday, I had a pregnancy scare. My period was a couple of days late, I was spotting but not cramping, I was off my food… I panicked.
It didn’t take me long to decide that I would want to terminate the pregnancy, and that meant a litmus test for my socialism: should I spend my limited savings, money that could be going towards vital schooling, on a quick, safe, private abortion, or should I go through the stress and psycho-physical trauma of asking for an abortion on the NHS?
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We need a new Manifesto
I have the good fortune to live just down the road from Ripping Yarns, a north London secondhand bookshop that specialises in vintage children’s literature, but also has a neat line in radical books, newspapers and pamphlets. It is run by Celia Hewitt, the actress wife of the poet Adrian Mitchell.
It’s a wonderful place, brimming over with old Rupert the Bear annuals and old copies of the New Musical Express. If you pop in now you can probably still pick up an old copy of Tariq Ali’s 1968 newspaper Black Dwarf.
My best recent find was an orginal copy of the 1967 New Left May Day Manifesto, priced Two Shillings and Sixpence from 41 years ago.
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The return of working class militancy?
Personally I’ll only believe that there is really an upturn in the class struggle at the point of production when Leicester Square is knee-deep in rubbish, at least a dozen bodies remain unburied, and the ghost of Red Robbo bestrides the now presumably deserted Longbridge car park once again.
But as someone schooled in the quasi-syndicalist brand of Marxism that sees industrial action as the first step to imminent world revolution, the co-ordinated public sector stoppages involving 350,000 workers does have a sort of seventies retro ring about it. Just in time for the Rock Against Racism 30th anniversary gig, too.
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A weak Prime Minister is good news
For those of us who believe that the current economic climate is exactly the worst time to consider raising the taxes of those on meagre incomes, yesterday’s u-turn compromise by the Chancellor is a victory of sorts.
There were no certainties or specifics, and suspicion surely remains that this ‘compensation package’ will be aimed at the more politically-appealing pensioners and families rather than any single people and under-25s who’ll lose out.
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Using the boot to generate news
Boris Johnson brushed clouds of doubt aside yesterday as The Sun newspaper endorsed him for Mayor of London. In a double page spread, Britain’s highest-selling paper told their readers to kick out “Caracas” Ken and vote in “Mayor Race Favourite” Boris.
The London edition of the paper also devoted their entire Sun Says column to the race, urging their readers to pick “a new and fresh Champion for London”. And just in case their readers still didn’t know how to vote the paper included a handy how you can vote section.
Of course The Sun’s endorsement of Boris Johnson should come as little surprise. Boris is in many ways the ideal Sun candidate. Here is a public school toff posing as a friend of the working class. A man who speaks almost entirely in mockney puns without actually saying anything even mildly offensive to Murdoch and his chums.
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Defending the indefensible
Northern Rock proved that “irresponsible” lending is dangerous game for banks to play. If a bank has too many debtors who are over-extended, then it leaves itself wide open to punishment if suddenly the economic climate cools. In America, where mortgages are traded between banks and investors like coffee beans, bad debts have created a financial crisis on a gargantuan scale, with the entire US economy peering over the precipice of a long and painful recession. It’s now very easy for all and sundry to point at the banks and crow that their chickens have finally come home to roost. Everyone, it seems, is desperate to see the first banker throw himself 34-floors to his splatterriffic death.
But is this fair, and is this a progressive position to take?
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Why I’m in favour of British jobs for British workers
Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ diatribe, and any resulting debate on immigration cannot pass without hyperbole and hand-wringing that gets us nowhere.
No surprise that the right-wing dinosaur Simon Heffer was found squealing that accusations of racism levelled at that great chap were “a deliberate lie”, despite the fact he was specifically warning that allowing non-white people into this country would destroy it. There’s a more reasoned piece here on centre-right but to no surprise the commenters have shouted him down as a closet-communist.
Right-wingers aside, we’re also plagued by a whole section of nutbags who call themselves libertarians except when it comes to the free movement of people between countries. Irrelevant they may be in the wider population, they are annoyingly over-represented on blogs though.
Problematically, there is already too much conflation in this issue between immigrants and 2nd/3rd generation Britons. This isn’t made helpful when the media start scaremongering either. This weekend Trevor Phillips made a speech that was blown up into a “cold war” by the Sunday Times when the actual text of his speech is far more measured.
I think the problem with immigration is partly that the liberal-left doesn’t have a narrative on the issue. As Phillips rightly says, Enoch Powell made immigration controls into such a tabboo that no one excplicitly wanted to talk about it even if they tried their best to implement them.
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“Grandad, what did you do during the Great Credit Crunch of 2008?”
Back in the day, when I were a lad in a grimy northern town, &c. &c. we used to give stuff up for Lent. Or, any road, we talked about it. I don’t recall actually giving much up personally, apart from Ferraris. continue reading… »
Labour MP resigns over 10p
The Guardian reports:
A Labour MP is set to resign as a ministerial aide in protest at the government’s decision to scrap the 10p starting rate of income tax, it was reported tonight. Angela Smith, the MP for Sheffield Hillsborough and a parliamentary private secretary to the chief secretary to the Treasury, Yvette Cooper, is said to have told colleagues that she will quit her post because she cannot support the tax change.
Nick Clegg also goes in for the attack:
Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, echoed Osborne’s attack.
“Gordon Brown’s government is starting to unravel before our eyes as Labour MPs see the full extent of the prime minister’s betrayal of the most needy in our society,” he said.
“But it is a pity that it has taken Angela Smith a full year to react to Gordon Brown’s callous decision when we warned the government of its consequences on the very day it was announced in the budget.”
Iain Dale think they’re like “cornered rats“.
But, taking a line different from many other lefty bloggers, Don Paskini recently said:
So how did the budget affect someone who, say, is 30 years old, working full time at the minimum wage, but is a single adult with no kids? Everyone’s criticising Gordon Brown for raising taxes on people in low paid work, so they’d be worse off, right?
Wrong.
If you take the income tax, national insurance and working tax credit changes into account, they’ll be £7.12/week better off.
…
But the figures do highlight the amount of misinformation that there has been in the coverage of this issue, with claims that all low paid workers will be losing out when that is manifestly not the case.
Will the housing crash hurt Gordon?
The coming collapse in the UK housing market largely flows from events outside New Labour’s control. That’s a sharp contrast to the last crash, which was the direct consequence of the economic incompetence of successive Conservative governments.
Remember the late eighties and early nineties, when hundreds of thousands of people lose their homes, as mortgage repayments became just too much for them? When millions more learned firsthand the meaning of the phrase ‘negative equity’? Much of the blame attaches to John Major, who as prime minister oversaw the policies introduced during his stint as cabinet minister and chancellor.
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Immigration is also a feminist issue
Every single candidate for the London mayoral elections in May – even Tory Boris Johnson – supports an amnesty which would allow illegal immigrants living in the UK for four years or more to follow a “path to citizenship”, The Independent reported yesterday.
Last month Mr Livingstone called for a “fresh start”, with a one-off amnesty for migrants without “regular status”, in spite of his party’s stance. “Migrants contribute hugely to the economic, civic and cultural life of London and the UK,” he said. “To have a substantial number of them living here without regular status because of deep-rooted failings in the immigration system, some dating back over a decade, is deeply damaging to London as well as to them.”
This is really good news.
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Credit crunch losses could hit $1 trillion
Losses from the credit crisis by financial institutions worldwide are set to balloon to almost $1 trillion (£500 billion) threatening to trigger severe economic fallout, the International Monetary Fund said today.
Immigration and evidence for it
The Lords’ report on the economic impact of immigration is better than I’d feared. But I’ve still got two problems with it.
One is this:
We found no systematic empirical evidence to suggest that net immigration creates significant dynamic benefits for the resident population in the UK. This does not necessarily mean that such effects do not exist but that there is currently no systematic evidence for them. (par 69)
But absence of proof is not proof of absence.
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Immigrants on benefits
Let’s say it nice and loud, people – IMMIGRANTS DO NOT COME TO THIS FAIR NATION TO TAKE THE PISS. It is simply inhumane to create a society where there is no safety net for those in need – even those who weren’t born here.
Kitchen worker Vanildo Fernandas, 29, was waiting for a bus on Fulham Palace Road late one night after work in October 2006 when two complete strangers walked up to him and tried to kill him with a couple of knives. He still isn’t sure why they did that; maybe for for the hell of it?
“Maybe for a robbery?” Vanildo’s wife Claudia, 37, asks a couple of times. She doesn’t really buy the robbery theory, though.
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Why are all these lying liars lying to us about tax cuts?
I mean, when was the last time there was such consensus between the Tories and Labour? (Small voice in back of head: Er, Thursday, wasn’t it?) No, no, no, Small Voice, I mean about tax cuts, of all things!
Labour have laid out their spending plans for 2009-10 and tax cuts ain’t part of the deal. And the Tories, while protesting that of course the world is about to fall apart and if they aren’t allowed back to the economic helm we’re all going to end up living on rubbish tips and eating roadkill, have nonetheless quietly accepted them. No tax cuts for at least the “first term” of Tory government, we learn from the laughably hubristic Mr Philip Hammond in the Sunday Telegraph.
Boring…but not bad
I had thought of doing a blog-boycott of this year’s Budget, so narcoleptic was the content, but on reflection…there are some positives to be taken from Mr Darling’s package from a progressive/green point of view.
As the driver of a Vauxhall Zafira who likes the odd drop of Scotch, I am probably going to be among the people worst hit by today’s announcements, but I’m entirely content that it should be so. The 55p a bottle increase in whisky duty will in act cost me the princely sum of around £3.20 a year, which seems a small price to pay to help curb the binge-drinking culture and do my bit towards lifting 250,000 children out of poverty.
And although I only drive a people carrier out of necessity in order for me to be able to take my growing family away for weekends along with all their assorted clobber, I think it’s only right that people like me should pay more to alleviate the effects of our environmental pollution.
That said, it was undoubtedly the most politically unexciting Budget since 1997, and some papers may well not even lead on it tomorrow. Maybe that’s the government’s intention though.
I liked James Forsyth’s take on it at Spectator Coffee House. “l suspect that the government will be quite pleased if this Budget is nothing more than a one day story…..Darling must be hoping that by hopping on the Mail’s ban the bag bandwagon, he has guaranteed himself favourable coverage in at least one paper.”
I have some sympathy for Mr Darling in that Gordon Brown really “stole” this Budget last year, by pre-announcing the 2p cut in income tax. That said, had Brown not announced this a year ago, it is a fairly moot point whether it would have happened at all, as it’s hardly now the time for big tax reductions amid all the “global financial turbulence.”
Labour’s schoolgirl crush on the super-rich
Peter Mandelson famously proclaimed in 1998 that New Labour was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’. One decade later, the government’s mood is not just chilled out but positively euphoric. That’s the clear message in a speech that business and enterprise secretary John Hutton – pictured – will deliver tomorrow, anyhow:
Rather than questioning whether huge salaries are morally justified, we should celebrate the fact that people can be enormously successful in this country
… he will tell a meeting of the pressure group Progress.
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Minimum wage to be raised
The national minimum wage will rise to £5.73 an hour in October, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has announced. It will rise by 3.8% from £5.52.
Update: Lee Griffin has more.
What’s wrong with nationalisation?
£25bn here and £25bn there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money. It has been absolutely apparent for at least five months that nationalisation represents the only realistic means of safeguarding the astonishing sums of taxpayer cash shovelled into Northern Rock to rescue the bank from the consequences of managerial incompetence.
Finally Alistair Darling has gotten the message. The erstwhile bearded Trot himself has brought the UK’s number five mortgage lender within the ambit of proletarian property relations. Only another 199 of the top 200 monopolies to go and Britain becomes a workers’ state, comrade. Shame the government didn’t see things the same way when Rover was going tits up. But in the financial services-driven British economy of today, grubby little manufacturing concerns seem somehow not to count.
What this episode proves is that nationalisation really is no worse than, say, bestiality, ebola, paedophilia, diabolism or any given combination thereof, and could at least be seriously discussed in other contexts.
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Taxing the rich
The people who are giving Alistair Darling stick for his U-turns on Capital Gains Tax and taxation of non-domiciles are missing an important point – that his problems should never have arisen.
Truth is, there is a very simple solutions here: don’t tax incomes or capital gains, but land values and consumption instead. If we had more of these taxes, non-doms and hedge funds managers would be taxed upon their Kensington mansions and dinners at the Mirabelle whilst incentives to work would be preserved, insofar motives for doing so were not to have lavish lifestyles. This would be, potentially, both more equitable and more efficient than current arrangements. If we had them, Darling would not be in the mess he is.
So why are neither more progressive consumption taxes nor land value taxation being even considered? Part of the answer, I suspect, lies in a peculiar pathology of politicians’ thinking – namely, that problems must have complex solutions.
But why? In our everyday lives, most problems are solved either easily or not at all. And yet politicians hardly ever believe this is true in politics. Their response to the endless “crises” that characterize managerialist politics is hardly ever either “there’s nothing we can do about this” or “this one’s easily solved in principle – just give us a few weeks to sort out the details.”
Why is this? Part of me thinks it’s the representative heuristic – people think that because problems have complicated causes, they must have complicated solutions. Another part, though, thinks it’s to do with politicians’ self-image. To believe that one is wrestling with complex issues – in an fast-changing modern globalized world of unprecedented challenges of course – is to cultivate a heroic self-image. No such image is projected by believing that solutions are easy or just unattainable. In this sense, Darling’s troubles are the result not (just) of personal individual failings, but of our political class in general.
* Cross-posted from Stumbling and Mumbling.
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