Virus Death Toll Mounting, But Scum Still Demanding Lockdown Lifted – Because Murdoch Needs His Profits £££

The Scum provided further evidence yesterday of Rupert Murdoch’s utterly loathsome attitude to the Coronavirus crisis. The death toll in Britain was continuing to rise, we had lost young people as well as the disabled and elderly to the disease. I’m sure many of you will have been particularly upset by the fact that one of the new victims was a child of five, who had an underlying condition. We have also lost some of our dedicated healthcare professionals – doctors, surgeons and nurses – who carried on doing their duty despite an appalling lack of proper protective equipment. And yesterday Boris Johnson himself was hurried to hospital. This was supposed to be nothing special. It’s just that Boris’ cough had carried on longer than usual. He was just going to have a check-up. Zelo Street, as perceptive as always, smelled more Tory lies, and said that looking at the situation rather than listening to the flannel, Johnson was in a far more serious condition than the Tories were telling us. He was. It’s now been reported that Johnson had to be given oxygen, and is now in intensive care. There have been more reassurances from the Tories that Boris isn’t in that serious a condition, but the Mirror, and Zelo Street, disagree. It looks like he’s got pneumonia. And Matt Hancock, the odious Health Secretary, has said that he has also lost two people to the disease.

It’s serious, and Johnson’s current condition in intensive care should show this to anyone. It demonstrates how anybody can get the disease, no matter how rich and powerful they are. It also shows how you also have to take it seriously. Johnson, like everyone else, was told not to shake hands as this could allow him to catch the disease. He ignored the advice, and carried on shaking mitts, blithely telling the world that this wasn’t a problem, as all you needed to do was wash your hands afterwards. That didn’t help. Johnson has been hospitalised through his own failure to take the virus seriously, just as the same attitude stopped him from introducing the lockdown weeks earlier and making preparations for the disease, which would have saved hundreds of unnecessary deaths.

But that didn’t prevent Scum hack Trevor Kavanagh yesterday publishing another piece demanding that the lockdown should be lifted. Because the disease isn’t that serious, according to some other modelling by a different group of scientists, and the damage it’s doing to the economy. Similar arguments have been used before against measures to combat climate change and global warming and other hazards. These have been refuted in turn. One of the best arguments was put forward a few years ago in an article in New Scientist. This was the principle that even if something wasn’t as dangerous or harmful as suggested, it was still better to err on the side of caution. Hence harmful substances or processes still shouldn’t be used, and measures should still be taken to stop global warming. But obviously Kavanagh disagrees.

Or rather his master, Rupert Murdoch. When Kavanagh first published this nonsense, Zelo Street suggested that his motives probably weren’t as pure and altruistic as he made out. He wasn’t worried about the bankruptcies, mass unemployment and poverty that have resulted from the lockdown, or the way the country will still be paying for it in the years to come. No, he was rather more worried about the effect the lockdown was having on the fortunes of the Fourth Estate, and particularly the titles of his employer, Murdoch. Print editions of newspapers are down by five million. All of the press is taking a hit, including Murdoch’s. And so Zelo Street concluded that Kavanagh was demanding an end to the lockdown for the simple reason that Murdoch wanted his empire of lies, smears and filth back on track and making money. Or rather, less of a massive loss than it’s made in previous years.

There are other warning signs about Murdoch’s self-interest in this. A few days ago Zelo Street also reported that Fox News and Murdoch were being sued by a group in Washington State. They contended that the network had broken the Consumer Protection Act by denying the virus presented a threat. At the same time, according to other hacks, Murdoch himself and his family had been taking personal steps to protect themselves. Joanna, one of the great commenters on this blog, has pointed out that WASHLITE’s suit has been thrown out of court on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment. That is the right to free speech and publication. That still doesn’t stop the plaintiffs from being morally correct.

If Murdoch really took precautions against the virus, while telling everyone that a lockdown was unnecessary, then it means that he really isn’t worried about the public’s health. It strengthens the argument that Murdoch is really only interested in having the lockdown raised for his own selfish interests, no matter how many people die, including his readers and the country’s own political leaders.

Murdoch doesn’t care about the British public, or the people of any of the other countries in which he has his grotty tentacles. He doesn’t care about their leaders, even if he supports their right-wing programme of destroying the welfare state, privatising healthcare and education, and destroying workers’ rights. He just cares about profit.

By printing Kavanagh’s nonsense at the same time Johnson was taken into hospital, Murdoch has shown that he is absolutely no friend of the Tories. They should treat his rags in that light, and stop reading them.

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/04/sun-pundit-volunteers-for-euthanasia.html

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/04/boris-illness-and-giveaways.html

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/04/boris-johnson-is-unwell.html

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/04/murdoch-facing-covid-19-lawsuit.html

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/03/sun-pundit-lies-about-covid-19-deaths.html

Medical Stunt Tells BoJob his Hospital Visit is a Publicity Stunt

As Mike posted a few days ago, BoJob was booed out of Addenbrook’s hospital in Cambridge, when he turned up for a visit. And one medical student, Julia Simons, was so disgusted by this blatant piece of electioneering that she confronted him with it. This video from the Groaniad shows her trying to question our disaster of a PM as he walks out of the hospital to his limo surrounded by his bodyguards and minders, pointedly refusing to answer her questions. She also gives a brief interview explaining her attempt to confront him to the Groan’s reporter afterward.

She asks him, ‘I’d also like to ask you about your awareness of the health crisis and the climate crisis? I won’t be working in a system like the one today … Have you read the IPCC report? Do you understand that? Have you read it? Do you understand the IPCC report?’

She gets no answer, and slams the car door shut.

She says to the reporter afterward:

Basically, I just came out of clinic and I was told that Boris Johnson was coming, and I was like, ‘Oh my goodness’, like as a normal person you never get that opportunity to say something to someone like that. I really want to ask him, ‘What’s next?’ And I was told I wasn’t allowed to ask him any questions. Which is a really good sign, I think, that this is a PR stunt. People who work in this hospital know the reality of cuts, like I’m a medical student, I don’t know the cuts in the way these people do. They were all really angry to hear he’s coming here for a PR stunt, ’cause we know what cuts have done to our NHS. We know the NHS is being privatised even if it’s not explained in explicit terms.   

The reporter asks ‘What’s the mood among the staff at the hospital having had Boris Johnson come in?’

She replies

Oooh, we weren’t told he was coming, which is a really big sign. As a Prime Minister you should be proud of how you’re leading your country. We were told that we weren’t allowed to know he was here. But I think it’s one of frustration because, as doctors we practice evidence-based medicine and politics should be evidence-based too. And yet the health outcomes from his policy changes evidence-wise, that doesn’t work and we shouldn’t keep doing that. And he’s too much of a coward to talk to any real members of staff rather than some random medical student, who happened to get in front of some cameras about the reality of those cuts.

Very well said!

Of course it was a publicity stunt, just as all the Tories’ visits to hospitals and doctors’ surgeries have been. And I’m not surprised that the staff were told to keep schtumm. They know perfectly well that the Health Service is being privatised, and that it is all driven by ideology. The neurosurgeon, Humanist and philosopher Ray Tallis and Jackie Davis make this absolutely clear in their book, NHS-SOS. Despite all the verbiage about introducing private sector discipline and skills into the NHS, the reality is that private medicine and hospitals actually provide a poorer service than state medicine. But Tory ideology, plus their class interest as people with private business interests themselves mean that they are promoting the privatisation of the NHS for all they and their backers in private healthcare companies can get.

When Simons talks about evidence-based medicine, she means, of course, treatment that has been subject to thorough scientific testing and proper statistical analysis. But these are alien to the Tories, who lie through their teeth and won’t release proper statistics on anything whatsoever, because in healthcare, and so often generally, the proper stats flatly contradict their lies. See Mike’s experience of how Iain Duncan Smith and the DWP tried everything they could to refuse him the stats for the number of people, who had died after being declared fit for work by Atos, then handling the fitness to work tests.

Julie Simons is obviously an extremely conscientious student, who cares deeply for the NHS and the care it provides. She should make an extremely good doctor. She also joins a long line of other doctors, surgeons and medical professionals, who’ve also tried to confront the Tories about the catastrophic effect their vile policies are having.

But I am also afraid that, by daring to confront BoJob, she will also have her card marked as a troublemaker and will be subject to some of the appalling harassment and abuse that the Tories and their troll army have inflicted on others, who have confronted them like this.

The only politician and party that will keep the NHS publicly owned, providing free medicine at the point of use, is Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party. Vote for them, and get the Tories and Lib Dems out.

No, Theresa, Apologising for the State of the NHS Is Not Good Enough: Resign!

I couldn’t let this go. I’m afraid I’m still struggling with the cold that’s been going round, and for several days this week simply haven’t felt well enough to blog. But the appearance of Theresa May on the news just now, blandly apologising for the state of the NHS, just annoyed me that little bit too much for me to want to let it go. Of course the NHS is in crisis, with cancelled operations, increased waiting times and extra strain put on doctors, nurses, surgeons and ambulance crews. That’s the way the Tories want it. And it’s happened every winter, ever since they were elected into power under Thatcher. Thatcher wanted to privatise the NHS, and although she was prevented by a backbench revolt, this is what they’re doing, piecemeal, by stealth. By opening it all up to private competition, handing over hospitals, clinics and other services to private healthcare providers like Virgin Health, Circle Health and others. Meanwhile starving the NHS of funds, in the hope that the crisis in care will cause more people to become disillusioned with this grandest of British institutions, so that there will be little outcry when they finally announce that state healthcare is gone, and we must all buy private medical insurance.

I caught the news about Jeremy Hunt apologising for the state of the NHS this morning. According to Mike over at Vox Political, Jezza was originally unable to be found, but someone decided that he had better put his face before the cameras and try and salvage something from the situation. And so he did a very carefully stage-managed interview.

Now I’ve seen Theresa May do more or less the same on the Beeb. She apologises for the state of the health service, and declared that she knows the situation is difficult.

I dare say she does. She knows, but in my view, doesn’t remotely care. She’ll still carry on with its privatisation, with starving it of resources, with manufacturing resentments among its staff, so that there’s a personnel drain. All to provide a pretext to get more private firms into the NHS. All done with the same glowing fanfare about ‘bringing the expertise of private industry to state the sector’. I’ve heard it so often I can practically write the nauseating script for it.

Enough’s enough. I’ve heard enough insincere apologies from our mendacious leaders, and had more than enough weasel words from Hunt and his vile mistress. Words are cheap. And I don’t trust the Tories to do anything to correct this. Oh, they might make an announcement that they are putting more money into the NHS if people become really angry, and declare that they’re putting more money into it than ever before, and certainly more than the last Labour government. But as has been shown, this is always a lie. The stats are chosen so that they look impressive, but when compared to what spending was like under Labour, they’re always shown to be well below. Meanwhile the Tories dig out once again the well-worn script about how we all must pay for ‘high-spending Labour’, even though it isn’t ‘high-spending Labour’ that’s created the economic crisis. It’s the Tories, pure and simply, and their determination to cut welfare services, privatise the NHS, and grind British working people down, all to give more power and tax money to their friends in big business.

No more insincere apologies. No protests about how awful this is all is, while secretly delighted with the chaos being inflicted on the health service. May is not sorry, as she and the Tories keep on doing this. They only want to appear sorry so that they don’t get voted out.

It’s far too late for that. If we want to save the NHS, then May, Hunt and the rest of this vile, murderous Tory government has to go. Now. And if May wants to show she cares about the NHS, the only thing she can do is resign. And take Jezza with her.

The Difference Between Tories and Labour over Misogyny and Offensive Jokes

Mike’s put up several pieces over the past few days commenting on the recent ‘dead cat’ scandal the Tories are manufacturing over a joke Clive Lewis made at the Labour party conference. In one event, one male volunteer asked if he could take part on his knees. Lewis replied that he could, and jokingly referred to him as ‘bitch’.

This complete non-event, which no-one present objected to at the time, is now the subject of a storm of fake indignation from the Tories and their Blairite enablers in the Labour party, like Jess Philips, who is accusing Lewis of sexism and misogyny. One Tory female MP, Nusrat Ghani, wants an early day motion to debate Lewis’ horrendous comment.

A friend of mine used to be a member of the Conservative party, right up until John Major said baldly that students only went to university to avoid going to work. He was at the same College I was, and worked extremely hard, as did so many other students despite the propaganda pumped out by the press. You can probably remember the stories – students are all lazy, don’t do any studying and just use their grant money to get drunk. Realising that the party he’d supported had nothing but contempt for him and others like him, he left. Discussing the state of the Tory party, he quoted the old saying, ‘the Tory party is an organised hypocrisy.’

And as Mike has shown, it certainly is. In spades. He has provided quote after quote from Tories swearing at constituents, and making racist and very sexist comments. One female Tory MP was caught repeating the figure of speech ‘N***er in the woodpile’. One of the most horrendous hypocrites has been Paul Staines, of the Guido Fawkes blog infamy. Despite his professed horror at the use of the word ‘bitch’, Staines has bandied it around fairly freely himself. Mike quotes a couple of young women on Twitter, who were seriously maligned by Staines and his followers. One was accused by Staines when she was 17 of having got her place in Momentum through providing sexual services, and another was similarly hounded by his slavering followers when she was 19.

In fact, the idea that Staines has any respect for women is incredible, considering his political connections. Back in the 1980s, Staines was part of a Libertarian group on the fringes of the Tory party. This group were so extreme, that one year they invited the leader of one of the Central American Fascist death squads to be the guest of honour at their annual dinner. This were the same death squads that raped women, and sexually mutilated both their male and female victims. But now the poorly fellow is terribly outraged by the jocular use of the word ‘Bitch’.

This government has certainly been no friend to women, despite the attempt to portray the selection of Theresa May of Prime Minister as the Second Coming of Maggie Thatcher. As one of the female commenters on Twitter quoted by Mike has pointed out, the Tories have closed rape crisis centres. They also inserted a rape clause to justify not paying child benefit to women, who had a third baby through sexual violence.

And on the subject of rape and women’s reproductive rights, Jacob Rees-Mogg went off and said abortion couldn’t be justified at all, even when the child was conceived through rape. For which Mogg, now also being touted as the next great Tory leader, was also pilloried.

And the hypocrisy comes particularly thick and fast in the shape of Boris Johnson. Mike’s provided a number of comments from Blond Bruiser, which shows just how deeply prejudiced he is. In one of them, he says that women only go to university to find husbands(!) Well, yes, people often meet their future partners at Uni. But most students, female and male, go to university because they enjoy the subject they want to study, and hope that pursuing it will enrich their lives as well as hopefully lead to better career prospects, if not a career. For example, it has been projected that soon the majority of people in medicine will be women. And it’s very clear from the number of female doctors and other medical professionals that they studied medicine because they wanted to be doctors, nurses, surgeons, psychiatrists and therapists, not because it was simply a nice way of meeting a prospective husband.

The most recent offensive comment uttered by BoJo was about Libya and the prospects for capital investment despite the carnage wrought by the civil war raging there. Boris stated that he had British investors lined up to turn the town of Sirte into the next Dubai ‘after they’d cleared away the bodies.’ This cavalier reference to the police and civilians shot down in a battle with Islamist militants understandably upset a lot of people. It was even denounced in one of the Libyan parliaments. But the last thing I saw about it on YouTube had the headline that Boris wasn’t going to apologise.

He should. But he hasn’t.
Lewis, on the other hand, has. And according to the I today, Jeremy Corbyn has condemned the comment.

And so we’re back to Tory hypocrisy, as amply supported by Mrs Nusrat Ghani.

For the various comments and Mike’s response to them, see

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/10/22/never-mind-clive-lewis-what-about-the-racism-and-sexism-alleged-of-these-scottish-tories/

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/10/21/this-is-not-the-state-of-british-politics-but-you-should-still-be-sickened-strong-language/

Panorama Documentary on Unnecessary Operations in Private Medicine

This should annoy and frighten the Tories’ friends in the private medical industry. Next Monday, 16th October 2017, the BBC’s documentary programme, Panorama, is examining the issue of unnecessary operations performed by surgeons in private hospitals. The programme’s entitled ‘How Safe is Your Operation?’, and the blurb for it in the Radio Times reads

Jailed surgeon Ian Paterson profited from hundreds of unnecessary operations, but do his crimes reveal wider failings in Britain’s private healthcare? Reporter Darragh MacIntyre investigates whether some private hospitals – and those working within them – have put profit before patients. (p. 74).

The programme’s on at it’s usual time of 8.30 pm on BBC 1.

I’m not remotely surprised by this. Private medicine pays doctors and surgeons according to the operations they perform, and so there is a financial incentive to perform unnecessary operations to boost the doctor’s or surgeon’s pay. American surgeons perform far more operations than their British counterparts because of this. And this problem has always been there. I can remember a similar documentary being shown when I was a schoolkid back in the 1980s.

Apart from this, private medicine is also much less efficient than state medicine. It’s more expensive, and because of the financial costs involved in treating the long term sick or disabled, which risks a corresponding lack of profits, it tends to concentrate on providing care to the healthy. Private hospitals are smaller than those of the NHS, and have fewer patients. On its own, there’s very little demand for it in the UK, which is why the Tories and Blairites have been running down and privatising the NHS piecemeal, in order to generate artificially a demand for private medicine.

End Workfare Now! Part 2

Arguments for Workfare

The arguments trotted out to support the workfare policies are these.

1. Everyone has a duty to work. Those who take money from the state have a reciprocal obligation to work for the support they have received.

2. Following Moynihan in America, it’s argued that part of the problem of poverty in society is communities, where there are families, which have not worked for generations. In order to break the cycle of poverty, these people must be forced into work.

3. It’s also argued that many individuals have also been unemployed for so long that they, too, have lost the habit of working. These people must also be forced to work.

4. The unemployed are also socially marginalised and excluded. Workfare helps them, its supporters argue, become integrated into society and so become productive members of the community once again.

5. It is also claimed that workfare allows people to acquire new skills. In 2012 a report was published on the exploitation of the people forced to work for free as security guards for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. A spokesman for the ConDem coalition responded to the claim by stating: ‘The work programme is about giving people who have often been out of the workplace for quite some time the chance to develop skills that they need to get a job that is sustainable.’ As Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols sang back in 1977 ‘God save the Queen and the Fascist regime.’

6. Workfare somehow reduces government spending on welfare programmes. Liam Byrne, New Labour’s advocate for workfare, who was quoted in the first part of this article, said ‘The best way to save money is to get people back into work.’

In fact there are serious arguments against just about all of these points, and some of them simply aren’t factually true. Let’s deal with each of these arguments in turn.

The Duty to Work

If people have a duty to perform free work for the goods and services that are provided freely by the state, then the middle classes and the elite should particularly be targeted for workfare, because they use the state infrastructure and its services more than the proles and those at the bottom of society. But the middle and upper classes most definitely are not required to perform these services. One of the worst policies of Mao’s China during the ‘Cultural Revolution’ of the 1960s and ’70s was the policy of taking skilled workers, intellectuals and artists away from their work to perform manual work elsewhere in that vast nation. It was bitterly resented, although at the time it was in line with the idea of creating a classless ‘workers’ state’. The respected TV critic and broadcaster, Clive James, in his column for the Observer, reviewed a programme that exposed this aspect of Chinese Communism. James was horrified at the effect this had had on breaking the health and skills of those sent to labour in the fields, such as a dancer for the state ballet. But if such forced labour is unacceptable for the middle and upper classes, it should also be so for those, whose only crime is to be without a job.

Furthermore there are also strong objections to performing workfare for a profit-making company. Those who do so, like those poor souls working free of charge for the big supermarkets like Sainsbury’s, are helping to make these companies even more profitable. It isn’t society that profits from their work, but extremely wealthy individuals like David Sainsbury and his shareholders, and the people running his competitors, for example. This parallels the exploitative nature of Stalin’s gulags and the Nazis’ use of skilled Jewish workers by the SS. The gulags were the immense archipelago of forced labour camps used to punish political prisoners and other victims of Stalin’s regime. Over 30 million Soviet citizens are estimated to have been imprisoned in them at the height of the terror. The vast majority were totally innocent. The system was used to industrialise the country, whose economy had formerly been dominated by agriculture. Under Stalin, the heads of state enterprises would supply lists of the types of workers they needed to the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, the state secret police. The NKVD would then arrest workers with those skills, and supply them to the businesses as requested. In Nazi Germany, the SS also formed an enterprise to exploited the skilled Jewish workers, such as jewelers, they had imprisoned. They were put to work producing luxury goods, which were then sold by the SS. They even produced a catalogue of the products made by these slave artisans.

This claim also implies that low income people have a duty to work in an inferior position for the benefit of their social or economic superiors in a master-servant relationship. This is a distortion of the concept of duty. The same idea also leads to the view that if you are unsuccessful in the labour market, you therefore have a duty to work for nothing, a view of society that is both regressive – harking back to some of the worst aspects of the Victorian era – and alienating. On the other hand, if you are performing work that is unprofitable, then there should be no duty to perform it. If it is genuine, valuable work, then the people performing it should be paid the current market rate, not simply provided with unemployment relief.

Standing also makes the point that the concept of duty has led to the belief that people should be forced to find work. But the use of coercion is divisive and actually undermines the commitment to work. He also argues that it actually amoral, because it takes away from workers their ability to choose for themselves whether to be moral. Plus the fact that workfare is not levied on the idle rich, or the friends and relatives of the politicians forcing it on others

Multigenerational Families of the Unemployed

The number of families that actually fit this description is so small as to be negligible, both in America and over here in Blighty. The academics T. Shildrick, R. MacDonald, C. Webster, and K. Garthwaite examined this issue in their Poverty and Insecurity: Life in Low Pay, No Pay Britain (Bristol: Policy Press 2012). Their research revealed that only 1 per cent fitted the description of a family in which two generations were unemployed. Official attempts to find these pockets of intergenerational unemployment have similarly turned up next to zilch. The whole idea is rubbish, but that hasn’t stopped papers like the Daily Fail claiming it’s true.

Getting People out of the Habit of Not Having a Job

Researchers have also looked at this one, too, and guess what? Yup, it’s similarly rubbish. There are very few people like this. But rather than acting as an incentive to find work, actually being forced to work unpaid in poor conditions may actually act as a deterrent. The Anarchist activist and writer, Alexander Berkman, made this point about work generally in his 1929, What Is Anarchist Communism? He made the point that much poor work was caused by forcing unwilling workers to perform jobs that they did not want and weren’t interested in. He pointed to the experience of prison labour, as an illustration. In prison, those workers, who were forced to perform such jobs did so badly. However, if they were given a job they enjoyed, then their work rapidly improved. He also made the point that Standing also makes about poorly paid but necessary work, that instead of forcing people to do it, wages should be increased to encourage workers to do them, and increase the social respect for those, who did those jobs. In a very stretched comparison, he described how both road sweepers and surgeons both helped keep people health. Surgeons, however, were given respect, while road sweepers are looked down upon. He felt this was simply a question of money, and that the social stigma attached to cleaning the streets would be removed, and the two professions given equal respect, if road sweepers were paid the same amount. This is too simplistic, as the surgeon is far more skilled than the road sweeper. But sweeping the streets and related dirty jobs would undoubtedly be more attractive if they were better paid.

Integrating the Jobless Back into Society

Far from being calculated to help the long-term unemployed back into society, the type of work that they are forced to do under workfare is humiliating. In many cases, this is quite deliberate as part of the government’s ideology of ‘less eligibility’ and dissuading people from going on benefits. And studies by the researchers and the DWP itself have also found that workfare makes absolutely no difference to whether a claimant gets a job afterwards.

Enabling the Unemployed to Acquire New Skills

This is also rubbish, as the type of menial work people are giving under workfare, in which they sweep the streets or stack shelves, are by their nature unskilled. And if a skilled worker is forced to perform them for months on end, this type of work is actually like to make them lose their skills.
Workfare Cuts Government Spending

This is also rubbish. In fact, workfare increases government expenditure on the unemployed, as the government has to pay subsidies to the firms employing them, and pay the costs of administration, which are actually quite heavy. And the work those on the programme actually perform doesn’t produce much in the way of taxable income, so money doesn’t come back to the government. Furthermore, most of the people on benefits are actually working, which makes Liam Byrne’s statement that the best way to save money is to get people back into work’ a barefaced lie.

In addition to demolishing the government’s arguments in favour of workfare, Standing also provides a series of further arguments against it. These are that the jobs created through workfare aren’t real jobs; workfare is unjust in its treatment of the unemployed; it stops the unemployed actually looking for jobs for themselves; it lowers their income over their lifetime; it also acts to keep wages down; it keeps the people, who should be working at those jobs out of work; it’s a dangerous extension of the power of the state; and finally, it’s a gigantic scam which only benefits the welfare-to-work firms.

Workfare and Real Jobs

According to the ideas of the market economy developed by the pioneer of free trade, the 18th century philosopher Adam Smith, workfare jobs don’t actually constitute real jobs. Smith believed that the market would actually produce higher wages to entice people into performing unpleasant jobs. On this reasoning, if workfare jobs were real jobs, then they would have a definite economic value. They would be created through the operation of the market, and the workers in them would also be paid proper wages for performing them.

There are also moral problems in the definition of what constitutes a ‘real job’ that someone on workfare should have to perform. If it is defined as one paying the minimum wage, then workfare is immoral as it puts downward pressure on the wages and conditions of the people already performing those jobs, forcing them into poverty. If those ‘real jobs’ are defined as those which are dirty, dangerous, undignified or stigmatizing, and so unpopular, they would have the opposite effect of what the advocates of workfare claim – that they are encouraging people to find work.

The solution for progressives is to make the labour market act like it is supposed to act, rather than it actually does in practice. Adam Smith was quite wrong about wages adjusting upwards for unpopular jobs in a market economy. The wages provided for work should match both supply and demand, and people should not be made into commodities as workers. They should have enough economic support to be able to refuse jobs they don’t want. Instead of assuming that people need to be forced to work, there should be the presumption instead that most people actually do. It is arbitrary and ultimately demeaning for all concerned to try to identify people who are somehow ‘undeserving’. Genuine supporters of equality should want the wages in unpleasant jobs to rise, until there is a genuine supply of willing labour.

Secular Talk on the Alabama Textbook Defending Slavery

This is another fascinating video from the atheist/secularist news programme, Secular Talk, commenting on an Alabama school history book that taught students in the state for a generation that slavery was beneficial to the enslaved Black population. Clyde Smith was a high school student in 1971, and he posted online pictures of the textbook used in the state schools. It was called History for Schools by Charles Grayson Somersell, and was taught from 1955 to well into the ’70s. The book told its young readers that slaves were given good quality clothes, and were better off than contemporary free labourers, White or Black. They were given the best medical care that the times could offer by their masters. The book didn’t mention the regular whippings, nor the frequent rape of enslaved women by their masters, who then did not take care of the children – a fact that is notorious to Black Americans. Kulinski makes the point that slaves weren’t viewed as people, quite literally, and were forced to work long hours. The textbook also explicitly stated that ‘Slavery was the earliest form of social security in the United States’, and states that it was illegal for a master to emancipate a slave after he was too old to work. Kulinski points out that this meant that elderly slaves remained in chains, and slaves were worked until they died.

Kulinski makes the very good point that this shows the basic, unspoken beliefs of Whites in the Southern US, the kind of ideas they express only among themselves in private. It also explains why so many of them were shocked and outraged by demands to remove the Confederate flag. To them, rather than the symbol of evil and oppression, it represented a good and beneficial order, which looked after its enslaved workers and gave them excellent healthcare, in contrast to the poverty of free workers in the North.

Finally, Kulinski explains why he’s talking about this now: because the battle is never over. You have to explain and keep explaining certain basic points about human dignity and freedom, because to people raised on this propaganda, they were the good guys and slavery was not necessarily an evil system.

I put this video up because it boggled my mind how anyone could approve of slavery, or present it as essentially beneficial as late as the 1970s. it explains some of the racism in the Deep South, as well as some of the other weird and bizarre attitudes held by the American Right. I did wonder how far the equation of social security and healthcare with slavery explained the bizarre attitude of the Libertarians that the welfare state is also a form of slavery. There was a prize exchange on American television from Congress when Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul were talking about universal state healthcare for Americans. Rand Paul, a Libertarian Republican, started spouting nonsense that state healthcare reduced doctors and other employees to slaves, and that they would be woken up in the middle of the night by people breaking down their front door to get them to treat patients. This was done when the two were taking the testimony of doctors involved in the state medicare programme. Sanders, who wants a universal healthcare like the NHS, dispatched that piece of stupidity by simply asking one of the doctors if she’d ever had this happen to her. Obviously, she hadn’t. In Britain doctors, surgeons, nurses and other employees are paid employees with all the rights of free people. They do have to treat patients, but no-one’s going to break down their doors except in emergencies, and they are perfectly free to leave the profession. Unfortunately, their status, pay and working conditions is declining, thanks to Jeremy Hunt and the Tories, who wish to destroy the state system and replace it with private enterprise.

As for the conditions slaves endured, the Alabama text books is right on some points. Defenders of slavery in both America and Britain pointed out that slaves were frequently treated better, and enjoyed better working conditions, than the ‘factory slaves’, the free workers employed in the factories of the northern US and in Britain. They’re probably right. Factory workers worked long hours in appalling conditions for miserable pay, and in some ways their condition did tremble on the edge of true slavery. Tony Robinson in an episode of Time Team devoted to industrial archaeology pointed out – with justifiable anger – how factory masters purchased children from orphanages to use as young workers. Also, when the British were seeking to improve the conditions of slaves in the Caribbean in the 1820s, they were also forced to pass legislation forbidding masters from freeing slaves who were too old to work as a way of avoid the expense of maintaining them. This was a period when the British government was passing legislation demanding that slaves were properly fed and clad.

This does not, however, make slavery any better. Slaves were worked to death. There was a debate in the 17th and 18th centuries over whether it was more profitable to work a slave to death quickly, and so make a massive profit quickly, but then have to go to the expense of buying a new slave; or whether it was better to give them moderate amounts of work and keep them working steadily so that they lived longer.

They were not given good quality clothing. The slave laws provided that the men should receive yearly a pair of drawers – that is, underpants – and the women a petticoat or shift. But that’s it. Now much did depend on the attitude of the slave masters. Archaeologists examining the material of the slaves on Ben Franklin’s estate found that the slaves there had a very high standard of living. They were well-fed, had fine crockery, and played instruments like the violin. But there were no doubt many more cases where the slaves were given very little. Visitors to the Caribbean remarked on the enslaved workers labouring naked in the fields. And Kulinski is right to talk about the flogging and sexual exploitation, though he passes over some of the other, more extreme and vile forms of punishment that existed, such as mutilation.

It’s a fascinating, grim insight into the mindset that was instilled in a generation of southern US schoolchildren, and which is still being regurgitated by Republicans across the US today.

The I: ‘Private Hospitals ‘Put Patients at Risk’

I just found this article in today’s ‘I’ newspaper for 30th November 2015, reporting the findings of the Centre for Health and the Public Interest that poor standards at smaller private hospitals are a risk to patients’ health. The article by Paul Gallagher states

‘NHS patients sent for treatment at smaller private hospitals are being put at risk because of unsafe staffing and facilities, according to a report by an anti-privatisation think-tank.

Nurses without specialist training, high levels of agency staff on post-operative wards and hygiene weaknesses were also among the patient safety risk identified by the Centre for Health and Public Interest (CHPI).

Analysis of 15 Care Quality Commission (CQC) investigations into hospitals from each of England’s six main private hospital chains found serious problems even in hospitals rate “good” by the regulator. Care UK’s Barlborough NYHS Treatment Centre in Chesterfield was given an overall rating of “good” and a rating of “good” specifically for surgery. Yet in the previous 12 months there had been four “never events”, defined as “serious, largely preventable, patient safety incidents that should not occur”.

Dr Howard Freeman, of the NHS Partners Network, said: “The overwhelming majority of NHS care delivered by independent sector hospitals is safe”.’

I dare say the treatment at most private hospitals is safe, but that does not mean that it is necessarily particularly high or of the same quality as that supplied by the NHS. In America, there is a very high incidence of iatrogenic disease. In the case of surgery, this is built into the system through the profit motive. Doctors and surgeons get paid if they treat. Therefore, they will offer or suggest treatment, even if its unnecessary. Way back in the 1980s Panorama did an edition on medicine in America, at the time when Maggie was considering its privatisation, and revealed the very high rates of unnecessary operations in the Land of the Free. This adds further evidence to corroborate existing information on the detrimental effects of private healthcare, no matter what Bliar and Cameron have told and are telling everyone.