No, I Don’t Want to Meet Peter Mandelson in Swindon

I got an invitation the other day from the Labour party to buy tickets so that I could meet Peter Mandelson at a special dinner in Swindon. It was a repeat of a similar dinner a little while ago, in which they Labour faithful were asked to buy tickets to a similar event to meet certain members of the party’s front bench. I didn’t want to go then. Not just because I couldn’t afford it, and am too sick to travel to Swindon anyway, but also because I objected to it in principle. The Labour party was set up by the trade unions and socialist parties to fight for working people. It should be funded from their subscriptions, not from corporate donations and dinners set up in emulation of the Tories.

And principle says I don’t want to meet Mandelson anyway. He was very clever as the party’s spin doctor and electoral strategist, but he and Blair prolonged Thatcherism well past its proper lifetime. It was Blair’s government that cut of benefits for asylum seekers and pushed them into detention centres, pushed NHS privatisation into high gear, and went about cheerfully outsourcing more state business, introduced the work capability tests, carried on with benefit sanctions, and was very enthusiastic about private management of prisons. Blair also took money from pro-Israel Jewish businessmen, thus ensuring his silence over that country’s flagrant human rights abuses. And then there was a little matter like the illegal war in Iraq. It was under Blair that the party turned away from its working class roots to appeal to middle class swing voters. They condescendingly expected Labour voters to go with it, as they had nowhere else to go. Hence the shock and outrage when Jeremy Corbyn started packing them out at halls, parks and sports grounds up and down Britain. Hence also the rise of UKIP, as White working class voters who felt they’d been abandoned by the both parties turned to Farage’s xenophobia and populism.

If I want to go and see someone from the Labour party, it’d be Richard Burgon, Jeremy Corbyn or that other dissident, ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone. I’d go and see Rosina Allin-Khan, a woman of mixed Polish and Asian heritage, who’s a doctor working in the NHS and concerned, as so many are, about the state the Conservatives have reduced it to. I’d want to hear Black Activists Rising Against Cuts. I dare say they have takes on racism and White privilege that might annoy me, but austerity is hitting the Black community hardest, as is clear from a paper in the collection The Violence of Austerity. I’d go to see the head of Young Labour as she defies the leadership on issues like socialism and Israel.

I want proper, working people back leading the Labour party. I want to see a working mother tell her story about struggling to keep her family fed and their home heated on her and her partner’s wages. I want to hear former students tell how, despite their degree, their now mired in £40,000 worth of debt and are flipping burgers at McDonald’s for a living. I want to hear the people who volunteer at food banks about the starvation and privation they see. I want to see someone from Disabled People Against Cuts talk about how austerity, low wages and welfare cuts is affecting ordinary disabled folk. I want to see Jews like Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Tony Greenstein and Jackie Walker talk about Israeli atrocities and the sectarian anti-Semitic persecution to which they’ve been subjected. I want to see Alexei Sayle, shouty, foul-mouthed Sayle, make jokes about Communism and the Conservatives, celebrating and supporting real anti-racist activists like Marc Wadsworth.

I want to hear the voices of ordinary men and women stuck in dead-end jobs and zero hours contracts talking about their lives and how they can be improved. People on supermarket checkouts, cleaners, white-collar office workers, now being depressed into the rest of the proletariat. As for business, I only want to hear from the small business people, the Arkwrights, who run local stores and corner shops, who are being driven into the ground as the Tories and corporatist New Labour support big business and the supermarkets.

I want to hear from the elderly as they worry about pensions and issues like mobility, as well as the problems they experience as everything goes on line. Many of them don’t have a computer and don’t understand them. They have to rely on their children to sort some of this out for them. What if they haven’t had any, and don’t have younger friends and neighbours to help them?

I want the victims of the benefit agencies humiliations and sanctions regime to tear into that and the cruelty and self-interest of the clerks administering it.

These are the people, I’d pay to see. Not someone like Mandelson, Blair or Starmer, who seem to have only a nodding acquaintance with working people, and see them through the prism of voting and demographic documents with the cool, detached eye of the ad man. Not someone who patronises them with management-speak, who expects Labour grassroots activists and supporters to act as drones reading from specially prepared scripts.

I want that to end. I want it to have ended long ago, when Brown lost the election.

I want to see local MPs for local people, not right-wingers parachuted in against the wishes of ordinary voters.

Those are the real Labour party. Not Mandelson, Blair and Starmer. I want to see proper Labour activists at protests, picket lines and church halls. I don’t want to see corporate closet Tories across a dinner table.

Richard Tice: Cut Benefits to Stop Immigration

Michael 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.

Classical Music Against Boris Johnson

This is another musical video attacking our murderous clown Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. I’ve put up a number of videos from JOE and Cassetteboy attacking Johnson through parodies of various pop hits. Now it’s the time for classical music to make its bow. I found this piece on Ben Comeau’s YouTube page. It’s an important work entitled ‘Boris Johnson Is a Lying Shit’. It appears to be a piece by F.M.L. Bach with this explicit lyric commenting on Johnson’s colossal mendacity fitted to it. Okay, swearing isn’t big and isn’t clever. But putting it to classical music performed properly is.

In the short description about the piece on its YouTube page, Comeau says

He’d have you believe he can be trusted with the NHS… …trusted to deliver Brexit… …trusted to safeguard a livable climate!… (remember when he conspired to get a journalist beaten up?)

This was when Boris was caught talking to fellow old Etonian Darius Guppy, who wanted to know where a particular journo lived so he could get someone to go and beat the man up.

Comeau also asks people to vote, and lists organisations which make a positive contribution to society and the planet. He writes

and you can also support UK organisations who advocate for a more humane society and habitable planet, the opposite of Johnson and his ilk, e.g.: Reclaim the Power (a direct action network fighting for social, environmental and economic justice, with particular recent focus on anti-fracking) https://reclaimthepower.org.uk/ Disabled People Against the Cuts https://dpac.uk.net/ Keep Our NHS Public https://keepournhspublic.com/

Here’s the video:

 

Private Eye on Repeated Exposure of IDS’ Lies

Mike from Vox Political was in the Mirror, the Mail and the Groaniad this Tuesday. Ian Duncan Smith, the Minister for the Creative Murder of the Poor, had got really annoyed about disability rights’ campaigners’ continued demands for the release of the government’s statistics showing how many people had died due to sanctions after being declared fit for work. Smith had therefore made a speech denouncing them as ‘disgraceful’ for worrying the public unduly. And so the ladies and gentlemen of the Fourth Estate had come to Mike, and others, like the head of the disabled rights group, Black Triangle, for comment.

And far from being dismayed at this attack on his character, Mike was instead immensely amused, as it once again gave him the opportunity to make the true facts plain before the public, and point out IDS’ continuing lies, as well as his crass stupidity and manifest incompetence.

If IDS is going to get this upset every time someone challenges the honesty of his department, then I strongly advise him to stock up on all the stomach pills he’s going to need to control his increasingly bilious digestion. Because there’s going to be a very long line of ’em.

Mike and his fellows haven’t been the first people this year to upset the Gentleman Ranker about this. Private Eye, in its issue for the 29th May-11th June 2015, published this article on how a series of campaigners had demanded the information, and revealed how the published statistics that had been obtained very definitely give the lie to RTU’s claims. Here it is.

Dead Quiet Man

So much for work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith’s professed “outrage” when asked about secret government reviews into the unexpected deaths of benefit claimants.

In a televised debate before the election, Duncan Smith denied the existence of such a review and accused the Green Party’s Jonathan Bartley of making “scurrilous” and “cheap” allegations – even though his own civil servants had already admitted there had been 40 reviews of suicides and nine further benefit-related deaths in the previous year.

The Department for Work and Pensions is refusing to publish the outcome of those cases but last week, responding to an FOI request from Anita Bellows, a research for Disabled People Against Cuts, it admitted that 10 of the 49 claimants had been subject to controversial benefit sanctions.

Concern that one in five benefit-related deaths may be connected to the practice of suddenly halting payments – for example, after missing one jobcentre appointment – has increased pressure on Duncan Smith to release the reviews. Now his ministerial sidekick, Priti Patel, has unveiled figures showing that while the use of jobseeker sanctions fell overall last year, that was not the case for those who were ill or disabled. The number of people whose employment and support allowance (ESA, which replaced incapacity benefit as the out-of-work disability benefit) was suddenly halted, rose by more than a third last year to a total of 36,810 – leaping from 2,626 to 3,274 in the final month.

Patel maintains sanctions are used “as a last resort” – just as well if rumours are true that cuts to disabled people’s ESA will be part of Duncan Smith’s £12bn welfare budget cuts.

As a number of whistleblowers have pointed out, sanctions are most definitely not used as a last resort. Indeed, there have been leaks showing Jobcentres awarded prizes, like chocolate Easter eggs and mock sheriff’s badges for workers, who have sanctioned the most claimants. This shows that Patel is also a liar, which should itself come as no shock to anyone. She is, after all, one of the wretched authors of Britannia Unchained, the rabid free-market screed demanding that British workers work longer for poverty wages, without the support of the welfare state, in order for their bosses to get the same profits as their bloated counterparts in the Developing World. Unfortunately, the Eye article doesn’t mention the campaign to get the figures released for the numbers, who’ve died after being found fit for work. But it does show how benefit sanctions are causing people to take their own lives, and that the government is well aware of it. And therefore, through IDS’ actions and pronouncements, how desperate he is, to cover up this murderously failing policy.

As for Duncan Smith calling disability campaigners disgraceful, it reminded me of a philosophical system called Logical Positivism. As formulated by Alfred ‘Freddy’ Ayer, this held that any statement made about the world did not actually describe the thing it was apparently about. Instead, it was a statement about the speaker’s own mental state. For example, if someone was described as beautiful, that did not mean that they actually were so. It meant instead only that the person speaking found that person attractive. Logical Positivism has since been discredited, with Ayer himself stating that it was excellent but for a single flaw: it was almost totally wrong.

Nevertheless, it seems to describe with amazing accuracy Iain Duncan Smith’s own psychology. When he attacks disability campaigners as ‘disgraceful’, it means he finds them disgraceful, because they are clearly a threat to his continued position in government. To everyone else looking at his lies and incompetence, the true disgrace is how he was ever put in charge of it, and the millions of lives of people on benefits in the first place.

And he’d better get used to feeling threated, because the campaigners aren’t going to stop pressing for the information, nor stop trying to discredit him and the vile government he serves.

Demonstration by DPAC Against the Closure of the Independent Living Fund

DPAC – Disabled People Against Cuts – have announced that they are organising a public protest against the closure of the Independent Living Fund. This is the benefit granted to disabled people to allow them to lead something like a normal life with dignity and freedom. The government wishes to abolish this, and turn the payment of such benefits over to local authorities. They claim that this will give the Fund more flexibility and make it responsive to local conditions under their ‘Localism’ agenda. In reality, it means the end of all such funding as councils simply don’t have the funds.

The protest is scheduled for March 12th, at 3-5 pm, outside the DWP headquarters at Caxton House, Tothill, London, SW1H 9WA. Further information on it is at DPAC’s webpage at http://dpac.uk.net/2014/05/join-the-save-ilf-protest-monday-may-12th-london-dwp/.