The temptation is to say 'this is where it starts...' but actually it started ages ago.
It started when Gordon's men got an itchy election trigger finger, swiftly followed by a squeaky political bum.
It started when the financial elite needed a new dialogue beyond Gordon's 'sustained growth that has removed boom and bust'; beyond Boris' 'Don't blame the bankers'; beyond Fred the braindeads 'blame me, I ate all the cakes'...
It started when New Labour realised through the Pavlovian masochism of the Ten Per Cent Tax Rate Removal Fiasco that it still had a base to protect, if little else.
There was a need for clear blue water. There was a need for a new dialogue.
...Once our poor benighted government, not so much a ship of fools as a pig in shit, had used its, for once useful, familiarity with global finance, to actually save our banking system (while the Tories tried to play nationalisation politics over Northern Rock and blame Gordon's alleged profligacy for global financial meltdown, which at best Brown was guilty of watching lazy-eyed from the sidelines while the longest consistent period of growth in post-war history gave his party a lengthy political blow job through two unpopular wars and a perhaps unique disconnect between manifesto pledges and Acts of Government - no student loans, no university fees... err whatever "...f**K that was good Gordon, over to you now, I'm off to make some SERIOUS MONEY"]
...De-railed momentarily by Expenses and the Telegraph's uniquely arrogant attempt to flush the toilet known as parliament [by themselves, principally] clean, bi-partisan, non-triangulated out of all linkage to reality, good, old-fashioned, British politics was quietly trying to make a comeback.
...it was time - Time for politics as usual:
So obligingly the Tories are going to stop playing 'New Labour Vintage 97' and get back to cutting propgrammes for the poor (and the middle classes)...
Well lets face it the Tories never represented the mass of the British people did they? But they are on occasion damn good at pretending to.
Still, sometimes they help to clarify things:
Tories to bin pledge to protect Sure Start cash
The Conservatives have announced that they are reneging on their pledge to protect early years scheme Sure Start from spending cuts if they are elected.
Speaking to Haymarket-published magazine, Regeneeration and Renewal Regeneration yesterday, Phillip Hammond, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, is reported as refusing to commit to a previous guarantee that the overall budget of the Labour government's flagship early years programme would be ring-fenced. "We will be looking at individual projects and workstreams, but we haven't made announcements about individual budgets yet," he said.
Last year, at the Tory Party conference, Oliver Letwin, chair of the party's policy review, said that Sure Start would continue under a Tory government at the same level to which Labour was committed (Regen.net, 1 October 2008). "Sure Start is a programme we value and one we intend to continue," he said. "It will not be cut back."
But now Hammond has signalled that the programme would be subject to the same scrutiny and possible ten to 15 per cent cuts subjected to all departments.
He also confirmed to the haymarket magazine that, as previously announced, the Tories would take part of Sure Start's budget to fund health visits to vulnerable families with newborn children.
A spokesman for childcare charity the Daycare Trust said: "We seriously hope that it is not official Conservative Party policy to remove Sure Start's ring-fenced funding. Sure Start has grown into a much needed and valued public service for families, and parents will rightly be angered if its funding is threatened."
Next stop funding the rights and localism agenda, or was that the 'right localism agenda' - lets just see...
Monday, June 29, 2009
Saturday, January 31, 2009
New Labour's Final Ecstasy? - New Labour's leaders have gone from Rabbits in the Headlights of History, to Duracell Bunnies in the Debt Disco
When New Labour came to power in 1997 Blair and Brown were paralysed by fear of a radicalism they never possessed.
They had been rewarded with a huge majority and an unprecedentedly broad coalition of support for, at the very least a programme of social investment, in a country which was literally falling apart, as both society and transport infrastructure creaked after a period of two decades where major infrastructural investment had been limited to a new bankers metro in the east end and even our great national museums were reduced to excluding the poor and charging the rich in order to remain open.
As one senior forex expert of my acquantance put it at the time - it makes more sense for me to vote Labour than to keep buying more expensive alarms for my house'.
This was the first time in the 40 or so years he had been eligible to vote that he had felt that such an action made sense, the excesses of Thatcher and the incompetence and thievery of the Major years when, as his patrician city peers used to put it, 'the shit floated to the top', had horrified him - he saw the future and he didn't like it.
Flying over the Favelas of the Future
'I don't want to end up like a member of the Brazilian ruling class,' he continued, 'flying home by helicopter to my gated compound, to avoid driving through the favelas'.
He had worked across the globe, from the States to Asia, he loved Japan and indeed New York, though more for the salt beef and beigels than for the new Wall Street ethics downtown. He respected the dynamism of the Chinese and hoped that the cultural revolution would be as strong a lesson to the emergent nation as had been the period of warlord dominance, probably the strongest cultural lychpin in the development of the Chinese nation, a sort of outrider of chaos, standing as a warning of what could befall the nation should the unwritten rules of deference be forgotten. He knew the value of money and the fact this was mobile, this after all was his trade.
And he voted Labour in 1997, because, like so many of us, he believed in society, in ethics, in the need for laws as well as returns, for values as well as valuations. Because valuations change, because markets can go down as well as up. Because one of his friends spent the cultural revolution paraded in a dunces cap for the crime of teaching and was then sent to work in the fields - but was now an international banker, employed by the Chinese state.
He was to be fair an experienced man with connections across global business, whereas the leading lights of New Labour had Peter's friends in Notting Hill, their old [Labour] friends in the unions giving them sleepless nights like a sort of postmodernist tsetzuo or bogey man; and a profound lack of experience.
Rabbits in the Headlights of History
So they started not with a Barack-style bang but witha whimper. Two Years of Tory Spending. 'No change while we think of what to do, eh, Gordon,' whispered Tony breathily, 'settle in, find our way around, chat to people a bit, reassure them; really we'll do nothing in the first term, just a sort of creating foundations thing' .
'We can play some of those tax changes Kenneth was planning as 'aid for the forgotten poor', though' says Gordon, 'they will help, after all, those who actually work, and we can do some work around the tax credit ideas I have, to emphasise that. Telling a story of hard work and reward, not scrounging and the rewards of sloth and shiftless inactivity'.
Thus followed a period in which New Labour listened. To lobbyists, to Thatcherites, to deregulators, to American republicans and democrats in equal measures, to Goldman Sachs, to a brash new city which had found ways for international markets to create money without burdening public treasuries. Growth was to be funded through a proper and realistic assessment of risk and the trading and insuring of this risk to spread it. In a curious echo of the old imperialism, the new imperialism consisted of emergent Asian economies buying Western debt in order to fund the consumerist longings of the developed world they were rapidly becoming a fully-paid up part of.
Odd warnings had sounded, banks had occasionally broken throughout this period and indeed before it, the Leeson Barings debacle the clearest parallel, as the trader tried to trade his way out of a derivatives hole in a market which notoriously lacked a ceiling and, he thought, a floor; and operated without either external regulation of any meaningful sort or even the most mundane of internal controls.
Yet New Labour, the ultimate professionals, the managerialists who thought they knew the Rulers of the World and worse still that they had been invited to join the club, took a rationalist approach. The institutions would self-police because it was in their own interests not to suffer the ignominious meltdowns that had befallen aberrant old-timers like Barings. The message they heard was that Barings were old-fashioned, unable to cope with brash new realities. The Banks of the New Church, Jesuit priests of international capitalism would take their boys at five and make them compliance-friendly men.
Duracell Bunnies in the Debt Disco
So for ten years the Duracell bunnies of New Labour danced in the debt disco. Occasionally they would turn to each other asking,
'Any idea whats going on with this economic cycle Gordon? Seems to have been going on rather a long time...'
'Huh, huh, huh, no idea Tony'
pants Gordon, his huge lop ears flopping to the pumping music,
'I doon't really care, but I'm happy to keep dancing as long as someone keeps giving me these brilliant free Es.... sorry dollars'.
And traded debt derivative dollars at that.
The bad news
The bad news is that the derivative-funded industries in the UK don't simply extend to the financial services sector.
A few days ago Home Shopping Direct [Littlewoods catalogues as was] announced huge job cuts.
The really bad news is that cheap credit card debt to fund catalogue shopping you can't afford is just another version of buying houses you can't afford, just another part of the 'debt time bomb' if you like, Daily Express. Leading to the view among some people, not least Foreign Exchange experts that our whole economy may be over-valued.
Better start making something fast, but not cars, please, Peter.
They had been rewarded with a huge majority and an unprecedentedly broad coalition of support for, at the very least a programme of social investment, in a country which was literally falling apart, as both society and transport infrastructure creaked after a period of two decades where major infrastructural investment had been limited to a new bankers metro in the east end and even our great national museums were reduced to excluding the poor and charging the rich in order to remain open.
As one senior forex expert of my acquantance put it at the time - it makes more sense for me to vote Labour than to keep buying more expensive alarms for my house'.
This was the first time in the 40 or so years he had been eligible to vote that he had felt that such an action made sense, the excesses of Thatcher and the incompetence and thievery of the Major years when, as his patrician city peers used to put it, 'the shit floated to the top', had horrified him - he saw the future and he didn't like it.
Flying over the Favelas of the Future
'I don't want to end up like a member of the Brazilian ruling class,' he continued, 'flying home by helicopter to my gated compound, to avoid driving through the favelas'.
He had worked across the globe, from the States to Asia, he loved Japan and indeed New York, though more for the salt beef and beigels than for the new Wall Street ethics downtown. He respected the dynamism of the Chinese and hoped that the cultural revolution would be as strong a lesson to the emergent nation as had been the period of warlord dominance, probably the strongest cultural lychpin in the development of the Chinese nation, a sort of outrider of chaos, standing as a warning of what could befall the nation should the unwritten rules of deference be forgotten. He knew the value of money and the fact this was mobile, this after all was his trade.
And he voted Labour in 1997, because, like so many of us, he believed in society, in ethics, in the need for laws as well as returns, for values as well as valuations. Because valuations change, because markets can go down as well as up. Because one of his friends spent the cultural revolution paraded in a dunces cap for the crime of teaching and was then sent to work in the fields - but was now an international banker, employed by the Chinese state.
He was to be fair an experienced man with connections across global business, whereas the leading lights of New Labour had Peter's friends in Notting Hill, their old [Labour] friends in the unions giving them sleepless nights like a sort of postmodernist tsetzuo or bogey man; and a profound lack of experience.
Rabbits in the Headlights of History
So they started not with a Barack-style bang but witha whimper. Two Years of Tory Spending. 'No change while we think of what to do, eh, Gordon,' whispered Tony breathily, 'settle in, find our way around, chat to people a bit, reassure them; really we'll do nothing in the first term, just a sort of creating foundations thing' .
'We can play some of those tax changes Kenneth was planning as 'aid for the forgotten poor', though' says Gordon, 'they will help, after all, those who actually work, and we can do some work around the tax credit ideas I have, to emphasise that. Telling a story of hard work and reward, not scrounging and the rewards of sloth and shiftless inactivity'.
Thus followed a period in which New Labour listened. To lobbyists, to Thatcherites, to deregulators, to American republicans and democrats in equal measures, to Goldman Sachs, to a brash new city which had found ways for international markets to create money without burdening public treasuries. Growth was to be funded through a proper and realistic assessment of risk and the trading and insuring of this risk to spread it. In a curious echo of the old imperialism, the new imperialism consisted of emergent Asian economies buying Western debt in order to fund the consumerist longings of the developed world they were rapidly becoming a fully-paid up part of.
Odd warnings had sounded, banks had occasionally broken throughout this period and indeed before it, the Leeson Barings debacle the clearest parallel, as the trader tried to trade his way out of a derivatives hole in a market which notoriously lacked a ceiling and, he thought, a floor; and operated without either external regulation of any meaningful sort or even the most mundane of internal controls.
Yet New Labour, the ultimate professionals, the managerialists who thought they knew the Rulers of the World and worse still that they had been invited to join the club, took a rationalist approach. The institutions would self-police because it was in their own interests not to suffer the ignominious meltdowns that had befallen aberrant old-timers like Barings. The message they heard was that Barings were old-fashioned, unable to cope with brash new realities. The Banks of the New Church, Jesuit priests of international capitalism would take their boys at five and make them compliance-friendly men.
Duracell Bunnies in the Debt Disco
So for ten years the Duracell bunnies of New Labour danced in the debt disco. Occasionally they would turn to each other asking,
'Any idea whats going on with this economic cycle Gordon? Seems to have been going on rather a long time...'
'Huh, huh, huh, no idea Tony'
pants Gordon, his huge lop ears flopping to the pumping music,
'I doon't really care, but I'm happy to keep dancing as long as someone keeps giving me these brilliant free Es.... sorry dollars'.
And traded debt derivative dollars at that.
The bad news
The bad news is that the derivative-funded industries in the UK don't simply extend to the financial services sector.
A few days ago Home Shopping Direct [Littlewoods catalogues as was] announced huge job cuts.
The really bad news is that cheap credit card debt to fund catalogue shopping you can't afford is just another version of buying houses you can't afford, just another part of the 'debt time bomb' if you like, Daily Express. Leading to the view among some people, not least Foreign Exchange experts that our whole economy may be over-valued.
Better start making something fast, but not cars, please, Peter.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Taking Sides Against the Innocent – why is the BBC backing Hamas and the men of war?
The BBC [and Sky]’s decision to decline to broadcast the Disaster’s Emergency Committee Appeal for Gaza is wrong.
It reveals some profoundly muddled thinking by its increasingly irrational, defensive and spineless DG, Mark Thompson. Thompson’s actions over both this and the recent Ross-Brand-Voluptua-Sachs fiasco, tell us a lot about why the Senior Editor and DG roles should be separate; but a lot more about why Thompson is simply not up to the job he was given on the back of the BBC’s pasting by HM Government and the noble Lord Hutton*
[*over, you'll remember, the BBC Today Programme's allegedly inaccurate claims that the government had sexed up its Iraq weapons dossiers - which of course we now know didn't happen, after all those WMDs were found in Iraq ...oh, no, sorry... that was in an alternative dimension wasn't it...].
But muddled thinking is not the worst aspect of Thompson’s befuddled decision-making
The BBC is a news and editorial organisation – so everything that its senior editor does and says becomes an editorial statement.
So by arguing that the BBC cannot be seen to take sides, Thompson has accepted the Israeli government’s implicit argument that its well-resourced and powerfully armed ‘Defence’ forces are at war with the whole Palestinian people.
Or at any rate that Israel is at war with the whole population of Gaza, which they have conveniently given the temporary status of an independent state, in order to declare war on it and its population.
Mark Thompson today announced, in effect, therefore, that the targeting of Palestinian civilians by the IDF is reasonable.
Mr Thompson should move to the Hague immediately – after all who needs an International War Crimes Tribunal when Mr Thompson can do the job of deciding whether it is reasonable to use missiles with phosphorous warheads on civilian populations for a fraction of the cost – and indeed in an iota of the time - that it will take to convene the trials which are prompting Ehud Olmert to establish a specialist war crimes defence team, and fund, to protect members of the IDF who may be held to account for their actions in Gaza over recent weeks.
Thompson’s stance is doubly unfortunate given the sterling work being done by Jeremy Bowen, BBC Correspondent, in covering this ‘conflict’.
Worst of all Thompson is accepting the argument of all men of war, terrorist or statist, over the needs, and, supposedly internationally-assured, human RIGHTS, of civilians.
He is therefore implicitly justifying the notion of ‘total war’ which predated the Geneva Conventions and has been exploited subsequently by evil-doers as diverse as Hitler and the militias of Rwanda.
Congratulations Mr Thompson, now maybe you can try yourself for incitement to genocide as the DJ’s and hosts of Radio Interahamwe in Rwanda and the Congo were tried for crimes against humanity, for you are justifying and inciting future slaughter of the innocents as surely as they ever did.
Now perhaps you could also resign while some vestige of the BBC’s independence and moral authority as a news organisation and as an institution committed to the defence of human rights remains. Or are human rights a bit one-sided for you these days, Mark?
Though it really ISN'T about sides, is it Mark? Not at all, as it happens, since I imagine that Hamas would agree with your analysis, as much as the IDF will; for it is they who will benefit, while the civilian population continues to suffer; and with each new slight and signal of your imbalance and lack of care for the conditions of the civilian population of Gaza, greater hatred is bred.
It reveals some profoundly muddled thinking by its increasingly irrational, defensive and spineless DG, Mark Thompson. Thompson’s actions over both this and the recent Ross-Brand-Voluptua-Sachs fiasco, tell us a lot about why the Senior Editor and DG roles should be separate; but a lot more about why Thompson is simply not up to the job he was given on the back of the BBC’s pasting by HM Government and the noble Lord Hutton*
[*over, you'll remember, the BBC Today Programme's allegedly inaccurate claims that the government had sexed up its Iraq weapons dossiers - which of course we now know didn't happen, after all those WMDs were found in Iraq ...oh, no, sorry... that was in an alternative dimension wasn't it...].
But muddled thinking is not the worst aspect of Thompson’s befuddled decision-making
The BBC is a news and editorial organisation – so everything that its senior editor does and says becomes an editorial statement.
So by arguing that the BBC cannot be seen to take sides, Thompson has accepted the Israeli government’s implicit argument that its well-resourced and powerfully armed ‘Defence’ forces are at war with the whole Palestinian people.
Or at any rate that Israel is at war with the whole population of Gaza, which they have conveniently given the temporary status of an independent state, in order to declare war on it and its population.
Mark Thompson today announced, in effect, therefore, that the targeting of Palestinian civilians by the IDF is reasonable.
Mr Thompson should move to the Hague immediately – after all who needs an International War Crimes Tribunal when Mr Thompson can do the job of deciding whether it is reasonable to use missiles with phosphorous warheads on civilian populations for a fraction of the cost – and indeed in an iota of the time - that it will take to convene the trials which are prompting Ehud Olmert to establish a specialist war crimes defence team, and fund, to protect members of the IDF who may be held to account for their actions in Gaza over recent weeks.
Thompson’s stance is doubly unfortunate given the sterling work being done by Jeremy Bowen, BBC Correspondent, in covering this ‘conflict’.
Worst of all Thompson is accepting the argument of all men of war, terrorist or statist, over the needs, and, supposedly internationally-assured, human RIGHTS, of civilians.
He is therefore implicitly justifying the notion of ‘total war’ which predated the Geneva Conventions and has been exploited subsequently by evil-doers as diverse as Hitler and the militias of Rwanda.
Congratulations Mr Thompson, now maybe you can try yourself for incitement to genocide as the DJ’s and hosts of Radio Interahamwe in Rwanda and the Congo were tried for crimes against humanity, for you are justifying and inciting future slaughter of the innocents as surely as they ever did.
Now perhaps you could also resign while some vestige of the BBC’s independence and moral authority as a news organisation and as an institution committed to the defence of human rights remains. Or are human rights a bit one-sided for you these days, Mark?
Though it really ISN'T about sides, is it Mark? Not at all, as it happens, since I imagine that Hamas would agree with your analysis, as much as the IDF will; for it is they who will benefit, while the civilian population continues to suffer; and with each new slight and signal of your imbalance and lack of care for the conditions of the civilian population of Gaza, greater hatred is bred.
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