Indeed, they’re also disgusted and angry. I found this brief video of just over two minutes long on the Byline TV channel on YouTube. It seems Tory MP ‘mad’ Nadine Dorries has got herself a job on the side hosting a programme on Talk TV. This is another internet TV channel even lower in quality and right-wing bias than GB News. The video shows her constituents in Bedfordshire giving their reactions to the news. Many of them don’t like her anyway, and so won’t watch it. They also make the point that she’s paid to be an MP, and very well paid at that, and so shouldn’t go for another job. This doesn’t apply to ex-MPs, of course. And one older man simply gives a puff of dismay, and calls her a ‘disgrace to Bedfordshire’. Later on someone says she’s hoping to leave the Commons for a place in the Lords, which they think is the best place for her. I can think of others, like the dole queue being humiliated by the clerk asking her if she’s got a job yet. But it is hilarious seeing how many people are upset at this move. You’d think she would have got some hint of how unpopular this would be from seeing how many people were annoyed at Matt Hancock going on I’m A Celebrity…. But there, the lure of media stardom and money was too appealing to her purse and ego.
Archive for the ‘Unemployment’ Category
Richard Tice: Cut Benefits to Stop Immigration
January 31, 2023Michael Heaver is another hard-right YouTuber pushing Reform and praising Brexit to the rafters, despite the devastation this has wreaked on our economy and the lives and livelihood of British workers and businesses. If Brexit was a religion, his would be the blind faith of the true-blue Thatcherite fanatic. And this morning Heaver posted a video praising the latest effusion from Reform’s current fuehrer, Richard Tice. Tice is upset that 5.2 million people are in receipt of benefits. This, he declares, is one eighth of the working population. But at the same time, there are job vacancies going unfilled, which is why the government is importing foreigners. This is because some people on benefit are doing better than they would be if they were working, and so are leaving their jobs to live off benefits. The welfare state is properly there to support those genuinely in need, but people are using it as a lifestyle choice. We must therefore cut benefits in order to force people back to work so the government won’t import more foreigners as cheap labour.
There are so many falsehoods in this statement that it’s amazing in its own way. Firstly, most people on benefits in the UK are actually working. They’re forced to use state benefits as well because their pay is insufficient. As for people deliberately leaving work to live on benefits – presumably he means jobseekers’ allowance – does he know anybody who’s suffered that humiliating process? My guess is he doesn’t, because otherwise he’d know it was a lie. Actually, on second thoughts, it’s quite possible he knows it’s wrong, and is deliberately lying anyway. For a start, the Tories passed legislation years ago stopping people from receiving benefit immediately after resigning from work. The wait for a claim to come through is several weeks, so if your previous job paid so badly you didn’t have anything left over by the end of the month, the further wait would push you down to starvation level. As does the various sanctions imposed on the unemployed and disabled for the flimsiest of reasons. Welfare researchers and activists, like the excellent Disabled People Against Cuts, have shown that in the case of the Fitness to Work assessments, this is based on an assumption that a certain percentage of cases must be fraudulent. There is therefore pressure on the assessors to find the disabled well enough to work. Hence we have had assessors declaring that people in terminal comas were fit to work. They even asked amputees when they expected their limbs to grow back!
And then there is the humiliating process of claiming benefits itself. This takes its inspiration from the Victorian idea of ‘less eligibility’: receiving state aid must be made so humiliating that it will deter people from claiming it. It’s one of Thatcher’s disgusting ‘Victorian values’. And so you are required to spend so many hours a day looking for a job, keep a log of the jobs you’ve applied for, while the clerk dealing with you keeps asking why you’re still claiming and didn’t apply for that one yet. Claiming benefits is unpleasant, difficult and humiliating.
But this is ignored by Tice, who is simply spouting more of the ‘make work pay’ nonsense pushed by David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith when he was head of the DWP. And then there’s the stuff about immigration.
This is nonsense because Brexit has resulted in a loss of foreign labour. Many of the foreign workers in the NHS have left Britain, including skilled doctors and nurses. I think we also lost the foreign fruit pickers, who used to come here, which is probably the type of workers Tice is thinking of when he talks about cheap foreign labour. But when the issue of forcing unemployed Brits to work as fruit pickers came up a while ago and was being discussed, many of the commenters on YouTube had said they’d tried and been turned down as farmers preferred foreigners. Some of the farmers rejecting British labour said it was because Brits were lazy. Possibly. Or perhaps just not so easy to exploit.
As for immigration generally, I have the distinct impression that the type of foreign workers the government is keen to recruit are skilled workers, particularly in the STEM subjects. They are definitely not keen on importing unskilled labour to add to the number of domestic workers with a similar lack of skills. Though here again, unskilled immigrants do take the jobs Brits don’t want, like cleaners, as shown in Ken Loach’s film, Dirty, Pretty Things. But my guess is that when Tice and the other members of the anti-immigrant right start ranting about low-skilled foreign immigrants, much of their audience will automatically think of the Channel migrants. But these unfortunately haven’t been recruited. They’re asylum seekers, who have been excluded from the official ways of applying for sanctuary in Britain. Hence part of the hostility to them.
Tice’s spiel is pretty much the old Daily Mail directed at the unemployed and non-White immigration jammed together. It’s nonsense, but will appeal to the readers of the right-wing press, who’ve been subjected to the same bilge since before the welfare state was founded. It also bears out Tony Benn’s statement that when a government wants to persecute its working people, it begins with immigrants.
Don’t be fooled. Tice is not a friend of ordinary working Brits. The solution to the problem of making work pay is to raise wages. This is the solution in classical economics to the problem of a shortage of workers. But this would cut into the already bloated profits of the obscenely rich that Tice, the Tories and the other hard right parties are pandering to.
They want to keep working people poor, starving and desperate, whatever lip service they give to the welfare state. And they’re using the old spectre of foreign labour to do it.
Breaking News from Arise: Firefighters Vote Overwhelmingly for Strike Action
January 30, 2023Just got this from the Arise Festival of Left-wing Ideas:
‘BREAKING: Firefighters deliver emphatic mandate for industrial action
Hello David
We are writing to share the breaking news that Firefighters have delivered a decisive mandate for strike action, with 88% voting Yes on a 73% turnout. You can:
- Read the FBU news release here
- Watch & share Matt Wrack explain the result here
- Hear Riccardo La Torre of the FBU on what the results mean and how we can offer our solidarity at #BuildingtheFightback online this Wednesday (Feb,1) at 6.30pm. Full details are below.
Yours in solidarity.
The Arise & Labour Assembly volunteers.‘
This is so overwhelming that the vote would still be valid and binding even under Sunak’s proposed cruddy legislation to stifle strikes. We’ve seen the firefighters before lock horns with the government over pay and redundancies. This is shows how massively discontented they are, and with good reason.
So maximum support to our firefighters, and out with Sunak and the Tories.
The Economic Falsehoods Behind ‘Expansionary Austerity’
January 23, 2023Expansionary Austerity is one of the discredited and utterly falsified economic theories the Australian economist John Quiggin attacks in his book Zombie Economics (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2010). It’s the idea that savagely cutting government expenditure will somehow restore economic growth. It was the policy adopted by governments across the world, including Dave Cameron’s Conservative administration in Britain, to save the global economy after it had been comprehensively trashed by the banksters in 2008. It was based on the theories of Albert Alesina and a number of co-authors, most notably Sylvia Ardagna and their study of how austerity had supposedly benefited various countries, Tales of Fiscal Adjustment: Can Austerity Be Expansionary. One of the countries examined in their study was Quiggin’s own, Australia. He went back and looked at what they said about it, and found that it was riddled with inaccuracies and errors. He gives the following examples to show how seriously, seriously flawed their study was:
*Alexina and Ardagna attribute the policy of austerity to “a leftwing government elected in 1985.” In fact, the government was elected in early 1983 at the depths of a severe recession. It implemented an expansionary fiscal policy. The recovery was well under way when the government took measures, beginning in 1984, to wind back the budget deficit.
- Alesina and Ardagna assert that the main budget savings came from “cuts in transfer programmes …. mainly concentrated on unemployment insurance.” Spending on unemployment benefits fell but not because of cuts. The unemployment rate was falling, and expenditure on benefits declined as a result. This is the standard Keynesian “automatic stabilizers” at work.
- Most strikingly of all they write, “Australia is a clear case of an ‘expansionary fiscal contraction.’ GDP grew faster during and in the aftermath of the adjustment, both in absolute terms and relative to the G7 countries. A private investment boom was associated with profits and easier access to credit following the financial deregulation process that took place in 1985-6. ‘ This is like the story of the man who jumps off a tall buiilding and says, as he passes the 25th floor, “All good so far.” Writing a decade later, in 1998, Alesina and Ardagna must surely have been aware that, almost immediately after their story ends, Australia entered the worst recession in postwar history.’ (pp.225-6).
Quiggin continues
‘Australia’s recession was triggered by contractionary monetary policy, but its severity resulted primarily from the collapse of the investment boom mentioned by Alesina and Ardagna. The boom was dominated by speculative investment projects undertaken by so-called entrepreneurs who took advantage of financial deregulation to build conglomerate empires that failed in the crisis, almost taking down the banking system with them. The Australian experience of the 1980s was a preview of what would happen in the United States and Europe in the 2000s.
To sum up, the tale told by Alesina and Ardagna bears no relation to the actual history of Australia in the 1980s. The most revealing point about their account is their eagerness to shift the burden of adjustment to a crisis onto its most vulnerable victims-the unemployed. In this respect, the literature on expansionary austerity of which this paper was a part might have served as a warning of the brutal policies that were to be adopted in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis.’ (p. 226).
Quiggin then goes on to discuss the global financial crisis and the austerity programmes that followed, showing how they were failures. These policies were nevertheless pushed because they allowed the 1 per cent elite to expand their wealth and power against everyone else. The chapter concludes by showing how the crisis could have been solved using Keynesian economics.
Despite the Tories’ pronouncements that austerity has ended, I’ve seen no evidence that this is the case. They continued to cut public expending catastrophically until forced to do the reverse by the Covid pandemic. And now that the world is going back to some semblance of normality, they’re going to return to it.
The working people of Britain and the west have been forced into poverty and starvation through nonsensical policies based on bad, massively inaccurate and biased research. It’s time austerity was discarded and Keynsianism, with a proper welfare state, was restored.
John Bird and John Fortune Skewer the Iraq Invasion: Yes, It Was All About Oil
January 10, 2023The satirist and actor John Bird passed away just a week or so ago over Christmas. As well as appearing in the short-lived BBC comedy series Chambers and Absolute Power, he and John Fortune appeared on Bremner, Bird and Fortune on Channel 4 as ‘The Long Johns’, whose satirical dialogues expertly lampooned the rich and powerful. This had the same view Private Eye’s Ian Hislop stated on a radio 4 show some time ago, that satire should also have a serious intent and show what was really going on underneath the surface. It was incisive, witty stuff that revealed the reality behind the fine words uttered by politicians, businessmen and elite bankers to show the greed, double-standards and predatory exploitation underneath. Many of the dialogues had a simple formula. They took turns playing George Parr, who changed his profession to match the topic of the day. One week he could be a general, another an admiral, or a senior civil servant. Other characters included Washington diplomats and the dictator of an anonymous African country, who was happy to see his people mired in starvation and poverty so long as he could take the money from the Chinese building his nation’s infrastructure. The other John would play a journalist interviewing him. The questions would result in bizarre denials from the official, which would show the contradictions in the official’s story or decision and lead to them actually revealing the real reasons for the decision or policy in spite of themselves.
In this piece from 2007, posted on theDossier’s YouTube Channel, the two discuss the-then recent admission by Alan Greenspan, the head of the Federal Reserve in America, that it was embarrassing to have to admit it, but yes, the Iraq invasion really was all about oil. As everyone knew. The official denies that this was the case, pointing out that before the war Blair had passed a resolution stipulating that the oil reserves should stay in Iraqi hands. This was revoked a year later after the war, when Blair passed another resolution saying that the allies should have it for safekeeping or something. As a measure of generosity, the allies allowed the Iraqis to keep 17 oil wells out of a total of 80, and promised to give 20 per cent of the profits from their oil fields to the Iraqi government. Iraq nevertheless contains an extremely large proportion of the world’s oil, whose worth is in the trillions.
The former Guardian journo Greg Palast amply demonstrated in his book, Armed Madhouse, that the Iraq war was an attempt by the American and Saudi oil industries to seize the Iraqi oil fields and their wealth, as well as the Neo-Cons attempting to seize the country’s state industries for America and create the kind of low tax state founded on free trade they wished to see in America. The result was the absolute collapse of the Iraqi economy with soaring bankruptcies and unemployment. Not to mention the chaos and bloodshed caused by the war and the sectarian violence that followed it, and the unrestrained, murderous, Nazi criminality of the private military contractors – read: mercenaries – who were hired by the Americans as part of the peace-keeping forces.
This is political satire at it’s best, and some of the commenters on YouTube have compared Bird and Fortune with the superb BBC comedy, Yes, Minister, which is also still relevant even after all these decades. John Fortune died some years ago, and was much missed, as John Bird will be, for his part in these dialogues. You wonder what they’d have to say about Sunak and the present government. It, and it’s equally incompetent and corrupt predecessors, would have been excellent material for them to send up.
Richard Tice Claiming that Immigration Responsible for Low Wages, Not Thatcherism
January 3, 2023I just caught the headline of a video on YouTube, which I think was posted by GB News. They’ve been plugging Reform’s head honcho, Richard Tice, who has been claiming his party would beat the Tories and Keir Starmer at the next election. I’m doubtful of that, as no matter how Tice may talk the party up, Reform is basically the reheated leftovers of UKIP. And despite the way Farage and his party were hailed by the media as a threat to the mainstream, traditional parties, like the SDP in the 1980s it significantly failed to break the mould of modern politics. Indeed, UKIP imploded when Farage bailed out and he was replaced by Gerard Batten, who invited far-right YouTubers Mark Meacham and Carl Benjamin to join. All the genuinely anti-racist members left, the Swindon branch protested against Benjamin being appointed their candidate for the parliamentary elections and the Gloucestershire branch broke away altogether.
From the headline it appears that Tice is now blaming low wage immigration for keeping wages low. He may have a point, in that plentiful unskilled labour means that employers don’t have to worry about offering high wages to attract workers for those jobs. But this seems to be part of a general Brexiteer, right-wing accusation that elite liberals are in favour of mass immigration as it provides them with a source of low paid labour. You find this attitude stated every so often, but there’s never any evidence cited for it, and I’ve never come across it from the left. I have come across the assertion, stated in a book published nearly 20 years ago attacking the Neo-Cons, Confronting the New Conservatism, that the Neo-Cons of both the left and the right are in favour of affirmative action programmes, so long as they don’t affect their children. I’ve also seen the argument that immigration is good for the country because on average immigrant workers pay more in tax than they take in benefits – contrary to what you’d hear from the right – and so support the state and welfare system with their taxes. Also, they do the jobs White British tend not to want to do.
So if immigrants aren’t responsible for low wages, who is? Easy – Margaret Thatcher and the Tories. Thatcher preached wage restraint and freezes in order to keep inflation low. This is leading to millions of working Brits, of all colours, now earning literal starvation wages, well below the rate of inflation. Many families are only keeping their heads above water through food and warm banks, where they have a choice between eating, heating their homes or paying the rent or mortgage. The Tories in particular have offered pay rises well below the inflation rate, so that they are in fact cuts. Hence the current wave of strikes as workers are fed up with it. Also, the 19th century classical economists from whom the Tories take their ideas recommended that the government should keep ‘a reserve army of the unemployed’ in order to keep wages low by providing a ready source of labour. I’ve got a feeling Blair and Gordon Brown had much the same idea when they talked about the need to keep the labour market fluid.
It is Thatcherism that’s really responsible for the mass impoverishment of this country’s working people. Tice is merely trying to divert attention away from this by playing the race card against immigrants. Don’t vote for him, and don’t vote for the Tories.