Gary Younge on working class Romney supporters
27 May 2012 2 Comments
in Opinions, Philosophical Meanderings, Politics
Gary Younge’s article about the failure of Democrats to persuade white working class people to vote for them is definitely worth a read if you missed it. It’s a theme he has discussed eloquently before and he raises a number of pertinent questions that are relevant on both sides of the Atlantic. Working class people in the UK aren’t as wedded to guns, god, and gay-bashing as many of their American brothers and sisters but both countries pose a similar dilemma for any aspirant left-wing party or politician: why do working class people vote ‘against their interests’ in such great numbers?
I think there are a number of linked issues here.
1) Younge is right to argue that it is the height of condescension to simply suggest that working class people who vote for the right are thickos who don’t know what’s good for them. Other issues are at play when someone makes a decision about how to vote: religion and morality are the two obvious ones particularly in an American context. People have been conditioned from birth and often fed outright lies in the media and if all your reference points tell you to vote Republican/Tory then can any of us honestly say that we would turn out differently to the Alf Garnetts and Joe Plumbers of this world? I’ve been lucky to grow up in a progressive environment where intellectual inquiry was encouraged and I’ve been given free rein to explore ideas as I have seen fit. Progressive and socialist reading material is widely available to me and I have been given the tools to look at both sides of any debate. Not everyone has had that good fortune. It isn’t a question of stupidity. It is a question of one’s environment.
2) Where Younge really hits the nail on the head however is in supposing that understanding one’s ‘objective interests’ should automatically lead one to vote Democrat. The Obama administration has been a huge disappointment in exactly the same way that Labour’s last period in office was. The Democratic Party has historically certainly been no friend of ordinary working class people:
“It was Bill Clinton who cut welfare, introduced the North American Free Trade Agreement and repealed the Glass-Steagall Act – which helped make the recent crisis possible. If you were going to trade your religious beliefs for economic gain, you could be forgiven for demanding a better deal than that.”
I’ve discussed the failings of the last Labour government ad nauseam on this blog, but if you needed the definitive verdict on the New Labour cabal and in particular Tony Blair’s disdain for ordinary people you could do worse than read Nick Cohen’s latest here. While the Democrats and Labour are marginally less reactionary than the Tories/Republicans, there isn’t a great deal in it right now.
3) This raises a wider point about how ‘left-wing’ political parties should proceed. Here at the Mambo, we think the situation is quite simple: there is a crisis of political representation for ordinary people. Government right now serves the interests of the rich more than ever. There probably hasn’t been a qualitative change but there has been a significant quantitative change in recent years. In order to reverse that Labour (for the purposes of this article) needs to shift sharply leftwards economically and put forward a programme for the democratic transformation of society (abolition of the Lords and the Monarchy, PR, cuts in MPs salaries, exclusion of all corporate interests from decision-making, complete separation of church and state, to take just a few examples). It is liable to provoke a ferocious reaction from the media and opinion-formers in the short term but that is a price worth paying in my humble view. It is easy to berate working people for supporting the right but if no alternative is being offered to that intellectual consensus then why are we surprised that people continue to vote that way? If we continue to play the right’s game on their territory when why are surprised when they keep winning?
However, in Labour the prevailing pressure is always to shift rightwards and Ed Miliband has done very little to challenge that consensus, regardless of what you have read in the Telegraph. When Liam Byrne, Frank Field, David Miliband and Jim Murphy, or in America the likes of Rahm Emanuel are setting the intellectual tone then why are we surprised that people aren’t interesting in voting for the centre-left?
4) The brief period when the BNP were making some headway is illustrative. Part of the appeal was clearly in blaming foreigners for the nation’s ills. But another part was in highlighting Labour’s years of failing ordinary working people, treating their views with contempt and taking their votes for granted. The socialism part of national socialism featured heavily in BNP propaganda, which highlighted that there was an appetite for the sorts of ideas that should be bread and butter for Labour (I’m referring to the anti-cuts, pro-public services ideas, not the racial war ones, obviously…….)
When working class people vote Republican or Tory the left should be blaming itself, not them. Right now we are failing to offer an alternative and failing miserably to make the case for that alternative.
Birmingham City Ladies win the FA Cup
26 May 2012 Leave a Comment
in BCFC, Football, Individuals worthy of contempt
Many congratulations are due to the Birmingham City Ladies team for triumphing in today’s FA cup final against Chelsea. The cockneys played pretty well and it took a penalty shootout to separate the two teams.
It’s the club’s first trophy in 44 years (sexual equality clearly exists when it comes to BCFC…….) and is richly deserved. The club faced meltdown less than a decade ago so it is quite some achievement .
It’s also a testament to all the hard work that chairman Steve Shipway has put in over the years in helping the club back from the brink. His unstinting efforts cannot be praised enough, and is quite a contrast to the shitbags that pollute the men’s game.
I mentioned this a few months ago but if we have one thing to be thankful for at Blues it is that Carson Yeung has actually backed the women’s team, unlike the parasitic mercenaries Brady, Gold and Sullivan, who weren’t interested as there was no money to be made from it. Cos that’s what football is about, obviously………..
Sadly the BBC didn’t show it on TV. I suppose the F1 qualifying was a far bigger priority and as Arsenal weren’t playing, in London, it wasn’t likely to get our media very interested.
The BBC’s scandalous indifference aside, it’s excellent news for BCLFC and for women’s football more generally. The grip that Arsenal have had over the women’s football in recent years has been suffocating the game and it’s good that someone else is capable of winning something (and challenging them).
It’s boring when the same team keeps winning all of the time.
Hopefully it’ll be the first trophy of many. But this is Birmingham City we’re talking about of course…….
Here we go again………
25 May 2012 2 Comments
There is a worrying predictability about the pre-tournament media cycle with England’s national team. Over-confidence and hyperbole still abounds, and any legitimate concerns about tactics and selection are swept under the carpet and forgotten. The flags come out, the morons start singing ‘Rule Britannia’, any critics are dismissed as unpatriotic and rationality is thrown out of the window.
Recent history has seen this cycle being completed with abject failure at the first significant hurdle when the tournament proper arrives, then a few weeks of recriminations and much high-minded talk of ‘learning lessons’, all of which abruptly stop when the Premier League circus starts again and the real business, making loadsamoney, begins again in earnest.
The dismal performance of England in South Africa was merely the latest in a long line of disappointments. The ‘English way’ of playing doesn’t work and it is high time that we stopped trying to persist with it.
But we don’t stop, and the cycle is beginning all over again.
The first moment of confirmation that normal service had resumed was Roy Hodgson’s appointment and conservative squad selection. Many of the same old faces have been retained, with no explanation provided to answer the obvious question: why will they now fare any better than in previous tournaments?
Otto Rehhagel, formerly the coach of the Greek national team, persisted with his inexplicably triumphant Euro 2004 players for far too long. He at least had the excuse that he had actually won something with them. What’s Hodgson’s excuse?
And this frankly ludicrous puff-piece that appeared in the Guardian acts as the rather neat second type of confirmation. England’s new boy-wonder (there always has to be one) Andy Carroll produced a stellar performance in a training match amongst the England players. He was up against Gary Neville. Who as we recall isn’t actually in the squad, because he has retired from professional football and I’m guessing wasn’t particularly match fit. What with not playing anymore.
Carroll, who I have discussed before in less than flattering terms, is only in the squad on the strength of a couple of not-too-abject performances at the back-end of the season, allied to the fact that the rest of the eligible English strikers are shit. And yet now he is poised to lead England’s attack in the absence of the suspended Wayne Rooney.
One bit of the piece amused me greatly;
“You don’t have to use short passes,” the new England manager could be heard shouting at one point. “Not if you want to use your big man up front.” Carroll put the ball past Joe Hart and Hodgson nodded his head appreciatively. “Well done, son.”
How very Roy of the Rovers (no pun intended by the way). It’s good to see that the lessons of Spain’s and Barcelona’s recent pre-eminence have been completely ignored. The commitment to the brand of football that has failed us so utterly time and again remains impressively steadfast.
Does anyone really think that Europe’s best defences are going to be quaking in their boots at the prospect of facing a team who belts it long to a slow, clumsy donkey?
Have we really learnt nothing?
I finish with this largely rhetorical but important question: just what is it going to take to shake England’s insipid football culture out of its mindless arrogance and collective complacency? How many more humiliations do we need?
Planned Police Privatisation: A Void of Misinformation
25 May 2012 Leave a Comment
Robocop leads 150 protesters from UNISON and Unite opposed to the privatisation of Police services outside Lloyd House on 24th May 2012
How to sell the £1.5bn privatisation of Police services to the public was the main subject of discussion by members of West Midlands Police Authority when they met yesterday. Chris Sims, the Chief Constable said ‘when we start to talk about the offer we will excite the public, what fills the vacuum is negative views.’
Adrian Beecroft
24 May 2012 2 Comments
in Current Affairs, Individuals worthy of contempt, Opinions, Politics
The absurd attacks on Nick Clegg and Vince Cable that I discussed yesterday (actually well worth a read before you lap this one up incidentally) have been rightly condemned as laughable. It’s tempting to leave the matter at that but I thought I would dwell briefly on Adrian Beecroft, the man who has labelled Vince Cable a ‘socialist’.
The absurdity of the suggestion that Cable is a man of the left, and the equal stupidity of what Beecroft is proposing, is summed up well by Dave Osler over at his blog (and he’s got it published over at Liberal Conspiracy, the lucky dog…..)
Coming at a time when the Tories economics policies are being shown to be the height of folly, one would have hoped that Beecroft and his co-thinkers would have the good grace to keep their gobs shut.
But Adrian isn’t that kind of guy. Adrian is a ‘venture capitalist’, one of the great ‘wealth creators’ that we are told every day that we should be emulating and lionising. Without the Beecroft’s of this world, where would we be? And quite naturally we need to hear their opinions all of the time, as they are just so damn smart, purely because they have lots of money.
So how did Beecroft make all of his money? What ‘wealth creation’ schemes has he come up with that have benefitted the rest of us as much as him?
Well, the company he has invested in that you are doubtless most familiar with is Wonga.com, probably the best known of the payday loan specialists currently exploiting the most vulnerable. The cute adverts with the puppets hide an unpleasant truth; that the APR rates these parasites charge on their loans can be in the region of 4,000%.
Wonga.com and companies like them are engaging in usury, pure and simple. And usury of the most wicked sort, targeted at those most vulnerable and desperate who often have literally no one else to turn to and who are faced to pay back their loans at mind-bogglingly extortionate rates. Even by the standards of most modern capitalist enterprises they are scum, and can be quite justifiably bracketed with crack dealers, pimps, owners of strip clubs and those bastards who sold me a pirate copy of Transformers 2 that turned out to be a dud.
Even by his own standards he isn’t a ‘wealth creator’. Sucking the blood of those at the bottom and leaving them with even less than they had before hardly represents any kind of ‘wealth creation’, does it……..
Beecroft is also well known for his role in the recent history of the Somerfield supermarket chain, detailed thoroughly here by the Mirror. Read the article yourself, but to sum it up they made loads of staff redundant, cut the wages of the staff that they retained (after all those supermarket workers are earning a fortune aren’t they…….) and then sold the firm on for a £500 million profit, of which Beecroft no doubt got a substantial wedge of.
Ergo, Adrian Beecroft is a sordid, greedy, amoral wanker. And yet this sordid, greedy amoral wanker who has donated over half a million pounds to the Conservatives (presumably in exchange for an unwritten undertaking to do nothing about the payday loan industry………..) has been appointed by the Tories to draw up a series of proposals, with no evidence base whatsoever to justify them, that make it easier to sack people (proposals that are also taken apart well here). His expertise in the subject has never been explained, and his main two characteristics seem to be a vastly over-inflated ego and a grasp of political theory that makes Richard Littlejohn look like the Albert Einstein of socio-economic commentary. He wants government policy to directly reflect his material interests, i.e. for it to be easy to sack people and attack their conditions.
The narrow-minded conceit of the man is terrifying.
It’s quite sad to think that obnoxious, stupid loudmouths like Adrian Beecroft are influencing government policy. But that’s how it works in 2012. He who pays the piper calls the tune.
Thank you- all of you!
24 May 2012 Leave a Comment
If last night was presented in a script, I would have thrown it back at the writers as being too contrived and corny for words. Just minutes before the BBC broadcast “Rangers- The Men Who Sold The Jerseys” the @rangerstaxcase twitter feed exploded with activity: this blog had won the 2012 Orwell Blog Prize.
I had been asked to prepare a statement in the event of winning and the following was read out by the writer…
Everyone’s a communist!
23 May 2012 1 Comment
The Marxist revolutionaries holding a knife to the throat of our Conservative government. Vince “Uncle Joe” Cable and Nick Clegg, aka “Nick Turpin”
You may recall a few months ago I discussed the habit of many in the Tory Party and their entourage of labelling anyone who disagrees with them as ‘trots’. Anyone who opposes their cruel and economically illiterate policies has to be a Marxist of course. This government is using the term almost as liberally (and inaccurately) as Joe McCarthy did.
It’s an unbelievably crude way of trying to close off the debate. Here at Representing the Mambo we don’t consider such terms to be insults, but some of the people who have been victims of anti-left Tory ire in recent days probably do!
The latest targets of Tory and establishment ire are Nick Clegg and Vince Cable, who have been labelled ‘communist’ and ‘socialist’ respectively this week.
It’s great that such dogmatic and hardened left-wingers are in government. Actually, wait a minute…..
Cable’s great crime is in thinking that Adrian Beecroft’s proposals to make it easier to sack people are probably a bit shit. Which they are, obviously. But according to Beecroft the business secretary in probably the most ideologically right-wing government this country has had since the Second World War is a ‘socialist’ because he questions the evidence used to justify a set of proposals that no one apart from the handful of people who will benefit from think are a good idea.
I’m still waiting for someone, anyone, to try and explain how making it easier to sack people will aid Britain’s economic recovery. Even the most brainless member of the Keith Joseph Appreciation Society would surely baulk at trying to come up with an argument to try and justify what’s being advocated by young Adrian.
Beecroft reckons failing to implement his proposals will hold back growth by something in the region of £50 billion. A massive sum of money. And a number that has just been plucked from the sky. It’s almost as if he’s taken his IQ, multiplied it by a billion and used that as his number. He’s suggested these policies because him and his mates want them. There would be no economic benefit but that isn’t what this is about of course.
His proposals are pure class warfare. There is no other way to describe them. Fortunately though it seems that they are too extreme even for this government.
Beecroft asks an important rhetorical question about the government’s failure to adopt his suggestions:
“why can’t the government be more robust? I don’t know what the answer is. But it is disappointing.”
Well Adrian, here’s a bit of a clue; the Conservatives didn’t win a fucking majority, have no mandate for anything that they are ramming through and maybe you need to remember that you conceited half-wit.
And now on to my mate Nick Clegg. We really love the guy here at the Mambo. I had no idea that he was a Communist though. But Tim Hands,
“master of the private Magdalen College School in Oxford and chair elect of the Headmasters and Headmistresses’s Conference, which represents elite private schools,”
no less, has said that Clegg is in favour of an
“old-style communist creation of a closed market, to try and deal with the problem after the event”.
The ‘problem’ is that Britain is becoming a more unequal and class-ridden society than ever before and that our education system is entrenching that division.
Clegg made a speech saying that he doesn’t like that and that maybe allowing students from poorer backgrounds to get into elite universities with lower grades than those educated at private schools might be a good idea.
Over the years Clegg has made a lot of speeches that sound great and lovely and cuddly and like well progressive and right-on on paper but mean nothing in practical policy terms, but let’s just assume for a moment that he means to carry this one through.
In the first instance I think it’s possibly a slight exaggeration to suggest that this distinctly modest proposal is ‘communist’. Considering that Mr Hands is one of Britain’s leading figures in education his understanding of fairly basic political terminology seems shockingly weak.
And secondly, let’s just think this through. Private schools are supposedly better than their state equivalents, or so we are always told. Therefore if we took two students with exactly the same academic abilities the one educated in a private school will obviously get better grades. How is it fair that that student gets to go to Oxford or Cambridge and the other doesn’t, merely because of their background? Isn’t what Clegg is proposing the definition of meritocracy, that ever-popular word among our intellectual elite?
So what is Tim Hands actually arguing in favour of when he rejects these proposals? He doesn’t dare say it, but he wants the working class to be excluded because they are working class. What other reason could there possibly be for excluding students of exactly the same abilities but different backgrounds?
(And yes I know Hands went to a comprehensive but Gary Bushell used to be a Marxist. One’s past means nothing when it comes to these debates……)
The shrill, abusive response to even the slightest criticism or opposition to their proposals or worldview highlights that the Tories and the free-market ideologues that dominate so much our national discourse know that their intellectual edifice is built on sand. How sad that they are never properly challenged.
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