Theresa May vs People

The British General Election has entered an unexpected phase for the Tories - weak and wobbly, as it has been oft-lampooned these last few days, rather than the strong and stable narrative originally envisaged and carefully packaged and promoted by the dark powers that are party strategist Lynton Crosbie. For even with the pause in campaigning following the Manchester bombing atrocity, the fall of Theresa May's always rather flickering star has continued relentlessly.

First there was the decision to call the election at all after her repeated insistence that there wouldn't be one. Then came a slew of disastrous policy announcements possibly intended to show her as decisive, but in fact radiating the hubris and arrogance at the heart of the Tory agenda: no assurance of no tax rises; dropping the triple lock on pensions; ending free school meals; and of course the utter confusion of new charges for homecare for older people and the inclusion of property in calculations for eligibility - May's attempts to row back (or clarify as she put it) simply served to illuminate her panic.

Given that the central premise of the Tory campaign, and indeed of the whole purpose of the election, was to supposedly cement this allegedly powerful, charismatic and "strong and stable" leader's authority to speak for The Nation ahead of the Brexit negotiations, due to start a few days after the 8 June vote, it is little surprise her ratings have tumbled, with her party sliding along behind, steadily if not as precipitously as its leader.

Corbyn is having a good campaign.

By contrast, Labour's Jeremy Corbyn has been having a good campaign. Polls show that while people's main memory of the Tory manifesto launch is the negativity of the social care plans, Labour's launch of policies such as nationalising the railways, taxing the rich and funding the NHS and abolishing university tuition fees have stuck in the collective mind in very positive ways. Similarly, to the confused surprise of many rightist commentators and the Blairite wing of his own party, Corbyn has often seemed far more calm under pressure than May. Faced with a slew of slanted and at times ill-informed questions by BBC attack-dog Andrew Neil, he parried well, unflustered and measured in his responses, as he also was with a speech linking the threat (not the culpability) of terrorism with adventurist foreign policy. May's coterie's screaming denunciation of the latter highlighted their own weaknesses rater than any of Corbyn's.

But perhaps the most interesting and most telling things about Theresa May these last week's haven't been the policy muddles and the campaign wobbles, but rather what we have learned about her as a person. And given the almost Erdogan-like elevation of her as the National Leader in the Tory campaign, the contrast between the Image and the Reality has rarely been as nakedly apparent as it now is.

Tory candidates around the country have clearly been instructed to subsume themselves to her: in Batley & Spen, a Tory prospect at the start of the campaign though somewhat unlikely now, their candidate at a hustings last week introduced herself not as the Conservative but as "Theresa May's candidate." Similarly, in the tight Labour-held marginal next door in Dewsbury, the Tory candidate's Freepost leaflet has no mention or photograph of the local candidate but simply pictures of the PM and the injunction to "Vote for Theresa May." These are not at all untypical examples of a strategy founded on the Prime Minister's personality; a strategy that is clearly now sited in an earthquake zone.

May - posturing at home; ignored abroad.

Repeatedly and ridiculously central to the Tory message has been an almost Trump-like claim that May would be a "good negotiator" for Britain in the Brexit talks. Yet quite aside from the fact that she will not be undertaking any of the actual negotiation discussions in any case, what evidence is there to support this assertion?

First of all, her actions on Brexit have been, frankly, counter-productive. There was the frankly bizarre threat to withdraw co-operation on counter-terrorist intelligence if she didn't get the trade terms she wants with the EU. Next she followed up with a fictitious and hysterical "crisis" over the sovereignty of Gibraltar where she clearly thought it a good idea to let some of her party grandees mutter loudly about going to war with Spain. No friends nor partners nor any influence were won in either debacle.

A rare occasion - confronted by a real person.

But perhaps the most striking thing about this allegedly smooth operator with her supposed abilities to influence and foster "win-win" situations is just how dreadfully awkward she seems to be with other people. Time and again, other than in carefully scripted, party-planned events which have minimised and even eliminated all human contact, she seems completely outside her comfort zone. Whether guffawing irritably in an extremely laboured manner when challenged in the Commons, or uncomfortably trying to eat chips in the street, or accidentally confronted about the impact of Tory policies on her life by a disabled woman who left her stammering and furious-faced, May gives the impression of a rabbit caught in headlights rather than a cunning fox in the hen coop.

Her refusal to meet any other party leaders in any of the TV debates - she is sending the ever-irritable Amber Rudd to represent her at the BBC one this week - simply adds to the impression of someone ill at ease with people whose views and lives don't accord with her own. In the difficult days ahead, as we negotiate our future arrangements with Europe, we need a Prime Minister with a rather more balanced mindset, someone who can relate to others and seek a lasting, beneficial deal that works for all sides. We need someone able to venture beyond their hermetically-sealed bubble to accept, deal with and embrace people with different views, needs and outlooks to their own. Both within our divided country and as we forge new relationships overseas, we need Government with a genuine human touch.

We do not need someone who fantasises about being Nelson or Churchill. Especially when she is neither.

Contrast

Wake Up! The Tories are coming...

As the Government splutters towards its final weeks in office, concern mounts about rumours of increasingly desparate Tory Party tactics after an alleged candidates' training video is unearthed.

Thatcherism After Thatcher - Challenging the Legacy

Nelson Mandela is invited to Mrs Thatcher's funeral - but some of her supporters wanted him dead years ago.

The last week has seen a surge of controversy as Britain stands totally divided on how to mark the passing of former Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.

The Coalition Government recalled Parliament specially to eulogize her and in spite of our austere financial times has also found over £8 million to pay for her funeral (most of it on security arrangements, in itself a telling statistic of her ability to divide even after life). By contrast, the Left has been left somewhat bamboozled on how to respond. A few have taken to the streets in apparent celebration, with a handful of instances of violence; while others have preferred the option of downloading a song from the Wizard of Oz, Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead, in such numbers it is expected to reach the top of the charts.

Most of the Left have been somewhat more restrained - Miliband, if he counts as left at all, unsurprisingly giving her qualified praise in the Commons debate, whist others have been rather subdued, cravenly overawed perhaps by the bullishness of the press in granting Thatcher a sort of Diana-esque beatification in death.

One in memoriam stands out, however, for being apposite in marking her passing not by gloating over the death of another human being, however flawed and unpleasant she was, but rather looking to the impact of her continuing legacy.

This was the statement issued by the National Union of Miners, the legitimate union which she once smeared as "The Enemy Within", ironically at the same time as criticising the Polish Government's suppression of the Solidarity trade union movement.

"To her family our condolences.

The legacy of what the Conservative Government did to British Industry under Thatcher is not one to be proud of if you really did want the best for the people. Of course Thatcher was the symbol of “free enterprise” and set out to serve those whose interests were profit for the few. The coal mining industry is not on its own in suffering the decimation of a world class industry in the name of the “free market”.

Thatcher lived long enough to see her beliefs demolished when the “free market” collapsed and came running to the State for support.  Unlike the Banks who gambled, cheated and were bailed out – Coal mines were closed and communities were left to suffer.

Margaret Hilda Thatcher is gone but the damage caused by her fatally flawed politics sadly lingers on."

And of course, with us now reeling under the oppressive boot of the most rightwing Government in history, this analysis is as pertinent as ever. The Coalition parties are rolling back the State further than Margaret Thatcher ever tried, but working fully in the spirit of her neoliberal ideology with its concept that Government should do as little as possible while profit-making should be introduced into every conceivable social transaction. It must have been with some satisfaction that in her final days she witnessed both the near destruction of the social welfare system and the effective privatization of the NHS with nearly all frontline services being put out to compulsory competitive tender from 1 April.

But of course, as with so many leaders, there are many myths about her which do not quite bear up to scrutiny.

- Contrary to myth, her Government borrowed vast amounts of money whilst preaching parsimony, needing it first to pay for  the record unemployment caused by her initial monetarist economic policies; and then to pay for tax cuts when she finally gave up on the doctrine so she could court re-election in 1987. She did reduce borrowing for a short time artificially by one-off sales of privatized state assets like the telecomms, energy and transport sectors, a policy castigated by her One Nation Tory predecessor Harold MacMillan as "selling off the family silver." Only in her last two years out of ten in office did she balance the books paying off £8 billion of the national debt, barely a quarter of what Gordon Brown managed (but for some bizarre reason never seemed to speak about in the 2010 election - we forget that just as she was the Iron Lady, Brown was for some years titled the Iron Chancellor).

Borrowing by Governments - since the war, Labour's financial record has bettered the Tories on running surpluses until having to bailout the banks. (Source - Guardian Newspaper)

- Contrary to myth, the Tory regime did not conquer inflation: it was suppressed to low levels for some years by her inducing a recession which put millions out of work, but overall it was just above 10% when she came to office, and just under 10% (and on an upwards spiral) when she left. 

- Contrary to myth, in spite of "hand bagging" the European Community, it was Thatcher's government that passed the Single European Act ushering in free movement of labour and capital across the Union, the single biggest step towards the Europe we have now. She also took us, albeit with reservations, into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, the precusor of the single European currency. She was no Euro-federalist, but in spite of the rhetoric and image, her support of the EU defies her adoption now as the masthead of the Eurosceptics: the EU we have now is in no small part down to her actions in office.

It was her Government that began the process, continued by the Major Conservative Government, of moving the long-term unemployed off the unemployment register and onto long term disability benefits. Disability/sickness benefits nearly trebled in pounds cost under Thatcher, rising from 15% to nearly 22% of the total social security bill (and to 26% under her successor John Major) as the Tories massaged the unemployment figures for political ends. This supreme example of statistical manipulation, as well as the manipulation of the lives and wellbeing of millions of vulnerable people, has now reached a viciously twisted denouement with her successors' assault on people they now decry as the LTB - lying thieving bastards. 

We could also remind the public that, as the ailing political giant Nelson Mandela, who led his nation to remarkable reconciliation, is invited to Mrs Thatcher's funeral, they might reflect that some of her supporters were keen to hold his funeral many years ago. After she derided Mandela as the leader of a "terrorist organisation" and refused to boycott the apartheid state, Mrs Thatcher was content to permit the Federation of Conservative Students to campaign for his execution by hanging.

By their works shall ye know them - and so we did and should continue to. This then is her legacy.

And yet, rather than partying at her death, the real challenge for the Left is to disseminate that legacy. The privatization of the NHS, for example, has been decades in the making - it was Thatcher who first brought in the internal market in health and ever since then hospitals and doctors have been pushed into ever-decreasing circles of both chasing the lowest price and proving their worth in terms of money rather than quality of care. Administration costs have nearly tripled while billions of pounds of public money have been robbed from the public coffers in the form of the Private Finance Initiative, yet another child of Thatcherism.

The risk now is that by courting controversy with tasteless "death parties" and the like, the Left allows her politics to be converted into some sickening hagiography that belies the truth of it : how many times have you heard ordinary members of the public saying things like Maggie would have sorted out the bankers or how she would have stopped the mess the Coalition have got us into? 

These of course could not be further from the truth - Thatcher led the way in deregulating banks and breaking the mutual building society sector; and more widely the Coalition are simply fulfilling the process which she began (and Blair continued), taking it to its next, ideological stage. Like Thatcher, they laud inequality and seek to destroy the social bonds between people, just as she once declared that there is no such thing as society. Britain under her Government became a place which was less kind, less united, where sterling replaced community. Memorably, her bleak take on the parable of the Good Samaritan had more to do with cash than care: “No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he'd only had good intentions - he had money too”

It is what she leaves behind that we should be debating. Instead, by focusing on (and, even worse, publicly celebrating) the death of an elderly woman, someone whose place would simply have been taken by someone else had she never existed, we cede the real debate about now and the future of our society. The anger may be real, understandable and shared, but it is tragically misdirected. And, in spite of all the fluster in the right wing press, the Iron Lady herself would doubtless have thoroughly approved.

Her Legacy Remains

The Froth of Deception

Some years ago, sitting in a Starbucks outlet in a northern city (well, it was a long time ago!), I heard an elderly gentleman remonstrating with the "barrista" that his cappuccino needed topping up.
"Look," he complained, "It's half empty and I've not even had a sip!"
"Ah, sir," the barrista responded, trying seriously to blame the customer,"You've let it stand too long. It has settled. You see sir, 50% of the product is hot air."
The customer's reply was unprintable, even here, and he immediately became an ex-customer.

Apparently, Starbucks seem to be masters of deception, a trait never more in evidence than when two of its senior executives haltingly tried to explain to British MPs earlier this week how in 15 years operating and expanding in Britain, they have made losses in all but one year and have consequently paid virtually no corporation tax at all. On sales of £3,100,000,000, it has paid just £8,600,000 in corporation tax - that's a meagre 0.2 (yes, zero-point-two) per cent. Along with Amazon and Google, who have similar records, it was criticised for failing to pay its "fair" share of tax - and so now it is likely that tomorrow it will make a pledge to pay more tax in the future.

Well, sorry if I am not partying, but how generous of them... They pledge to pay more in future. What does that mean? What about this pledge instead - they declare their true profits rather than hide them behind a charade of in house cross-charging and pay their proper whack. Starbucks had briefed their shareholders that their UK operation was making a 15% profit on turnover - very broadly, if that was the case over all 15 years, it would have generated around £450 millions profit with around £100 millions due to be paid in Corporation tax; not a mere £8.6 million. But of course the story they have given the HMRC and now MPs was rather different.

We hear endlessly from the giant corporations and their mouthpieces in the Lib Dem and Tory parties about the need for Britain to cut its already near worldwide low corporation taxes - even though it seems most of them pay a fraction of their dues (if indeed anything at all). A further reduction is pending for the next tax year. Otherwise, apparently they might go elsewhere and we would lose the alleged benefits of their presence on our shores.

Benefits? Tell that to the the countless perfectly good local coffee shops put out of business by Starbucks' undercutting them; or the bookstores - independents and even the once powerful Borders UK shops - put out of business by the march of Amazon.

And just this week, as Starbucks was finally caving into the bad publicity about its tax record, it implemented a fine wheeze to appear to be contributing to the community that succours it with one hand, while taking away with the other. The fig-leaf of its already piss poor corporate social responsibility record has never been more precariously worn.

On Monday, all its staff - mainly low paid, part-time barristas (their employment protection rights slashed since April by the Lib Dem Ministers of the Coalition), were told to sign away their contractual rights to a 30 minute paid lunch break and to some of their sick pay or face the sack. Rubbing salt in the wounds, they also told their pregnant staff no longer to expect a complimentary food hamper when their babies are born - instead they can look forward to a handy, Starbucks branded baby-gro and bib. Useful for wiping away all that deceptively frothy baby sick.

The Indian Parliament is currently debating whether to open up the third largest economy in the world to foreign direct investment (FDI).  This would open the doors to overseas corporations - with supermarket giants Walmart, Tesco and Carrefour leading the charge - to open up and start undercutting and destroying an economy currently 97% owned by small businesses, families and self-employed people. The western neoliberals and bankers claim that this will unleash a wave of creative competition in India; but the track record elsewhere shows the lie of these claims. India beware.

We can only hope that India resists the threats and charms of the multinationals; and, though sadly very much more in vain hope than genuine expectation, we can dream of the day that Britain's HMRC clamps down sufficiently on the tax games of the corporations that they do indeed depart. Because, whilst some of these mega-multinationals use their proxies in the popular press to peddle lies about immigrants, the EU and even political correctness having wrecked our way of life, it is in truth large, state-less corporations that have destroyed whole local economies, emptied our high streets and plundered our national wealth. As their tax and employment records show, they are totally self-serving and without conscience - the psychopaths of Joel Bakan's opus magnus - and we continue to treat with them at our own risk.

We have lived well without them before; we can easily and happily do so again. Just imagine if they were indeed gone, and all we had left were...bookshops, local cafes, and independent music stores.

And no more hot air in our mugs.

Adolf Hitler's Day Out At Dale Farm

Today has seen the violent eviction of some 80 Irish Traveler families from their homes on the unapproved portion of the Dale Farm settlement. Police and bailiffs used tasers and riot batons to force their way through barricades to seize the site from the people who have lived there for over ten years. Basildon's Tory Council, carefully stewarding council taxpayers money to avoid any waste of public finance, have spent over £18 millions pursuing their "final solution" (their words) of evicting people and leaving them with nowhere to go.

A wide range of political, rights and faith groups had campaigned to keep the site, but the Conservative Council with the aid of the baying right wing media have hounded them out. Children attending local schools who lived there will not be able to complete their education; sick people have to leave their homes, while one family with a baby barely a fortnight old are tonight on the road...to nowhere.

Why has this been done? What on earth has possessed this Council to expend so much time, money and effort on removing people from half the site? Why has it been so important for them to reclaim what they have decided to be "greenbelt" land, but was in fact previously a scrapyard filled with rusting metal car wrecks, a site greatly improved by the travellers who made it their home? Indeed, why have the Council been prepared to risk the people they evict ending up in far less suitable locations across their district, rather than let them be where they were? Why, when half the site is fully legal and will remain in place, has it been so necessary to remove these families? When 90% of retrospective planning permission applications in National Park areas are approved and the Conservative Government has just proposed new planning laws which automatically presume in favour of development of greenbelt, why has it been so important to reclaim the Dale Farm scrapyard?

How to get retrospective planning permission in Basildon

The Council and the local MP vehemently deny that anti-traveller feelings or incipient racism were anything to do with it. On the BBC news Channel this evening, local MP John Baron (Conservative, of course) spluttered that in Basildon, they are "used to living with travelers" - indeed, they have almost 120 legal pitches for caravans (perhaps, at a push, 450 people out of Basildon's population of 175,000!), ignoring the fact that over half of these are in the legal part of Dale Farm. The Travellers would be welcome to live anywhere legally, he declared (ignoring the refusal of the Council to grant permission to a new site although one had been identified and would have been fully funded at no cost to local people). Pressed as to where they might go, he proposed Liverpool, at the other side of the country.

Dale Farm Scrapyard - the "greenbelt" in 1998

Take one look at that doyen of right-wing raving prejudice, the Daily Mail, and you soon see the true reason for this and who the Tories are trying to appeal to as the economy reels from the impact of the recession - read the frothing readers' comments under the article about today's evictions and you see how truly skin-thin civilised attitudes and values are among some of our compatriots, and how totally ostracised as "The Other" Travelers are in the eyes of "middle England" (the spelling mistakes are the Mail readers', not mine by the way!) :


I thought the definition of Romany is to roam ? ..Not pitch for 10 yrs ........ Fancy a nice drop of Tarmac on that there drive ?

- hank, Milton Keynes, 19/10/2011 22:10

I am recording all the news articles on this story and when these unwanted people are finally removed and there is no sign that they were ever there I am going to sit down with a nice bottle of my favourite malt and watch these news reports with a contented smile on my face.....Ahhhhh. Heaven. - Bob, Barnsley, 19/10/2011 14:12..

If you need someone to open the gate....

- middle_class_warrior, Durham City, 19/10/2011 7:28

Good and about time too. Whilst they are at it perhaps the police could provide an escort all the way to the nearest ferry docks, help them load their possessions and wave goodbye to them as they depart for their houses in the Irish Republic.

- Saundra, Herts, 19/10/2011 10:47
About time... there right belong to travelling and some how they havnt travelled.. so travel on back to Irealnd and the other places where you seem to sponge from

- Graham L, UK, 19/10/2011 8:31

At last the stupidity of the courts has ended and we can fnally put the rubbish out, funny that we have still not seen the men of Dale Farm fighting for their alleged rights, leaving it to their big mouthed wives as usual? As for the activists stick them 10 to a cell as they like being with each other so much, bunch of half wits with no jobs fighting lost causes and using state benefits to fund their actions.

- None too tightly wrapped, Somewhere in debt ridden UK, 19/10/2011 9:10

I must express my indignation at the police brutality at DaleFarm. There just isn't anywhere near enough being dished out...........

- Paddy Field, Belfast, 19/10/2011 11:48

Dale Farm before yesterday - home to 80 families

And so on...These are the most popular comments of over 1,500 posted in just the last few hours, nearly all dripping leaden poison about people most of them have never met but about whom the loaded prejudice of journals like the Mail and the Sun have legitimised as targets of stereotypical hatred.  The violent evictions at Dale Farm also come just days after the Conservative Mayor of Prestatyn in North Wales told a council meeting that Adolf Hitler's Nazis, who exterminated over 1,500,000 Romanies in the Holocaust, "had the right idea about how to deal with gypsies." 

Prejudice? More than a little evident. Racism? Absolutely. Justice? Absent. Basildon Council's insensitive (though perhaps revealing) reference to a final solution for Dale Farm may not involve the utter horror of Nazi Europe, but in truth how far removed from the sentiments of that time are the motives of many of those behind the eviction? And how important indeed it is for progressives and decent people of all hues to stand against such appalling bigotry and inhumane prejudice as has been unleashed by the removal of people from an old metal scrapyard which they had tidied up and turned into their home.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out --
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out --
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out --
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me -- and there was no one left to speak for me.

Pastor Martin Niemoller, 1937     

The Trials of Doctor Fox

Tories in trouble - always a time to celebrate

More - click here

So Conservative Secretary of State for Defence, Liam Fox, has a tangled web of arrangements and business dealings with a range of Conservative Party donors who just might be seeking Government contracts, brokered by a pal who is/was a business partner in a company that had other Tory MPs as shareholders and was involved in lobbying for big business clients.

Yes, it all stinks to high heaven. But tell us something we didn't already know.

Sick Tories - Dying To Be Green

In recent years, "green", eco- or natural funeral options have become pleasingly more and more widespread, one welcome benefit from the loosening of regulations about the disposal of our earthly remains - there are many choices, such as woodland burials, eco-coffins and more. Rather than headstones, memorial trees are often planted over the burial site, nourished in time in a natural way, bringing new life from old.

Woodland burial site in Lancashire

Yet one insensitive, piss-taking, penny-pinching, cold-hearted Conservative Council has proposed this week possibly the worst and most tasteless case of deceitful greenwash in history. Redditch Tories have come up with the wheeze of using the heat released from a council crematorium to warm up the local swimming pool, with up to £14,000 p.a. to be saved in costs to local taxpayers.

Council leader Carole Gandy defended the plans, saying ,"It will save the authority money and, in the long-term, save energy which is what we're all being told we should do." (The Guardian)

More than a little understandably, local trade unions have described the plan as sick and one funeral director said he found the idea "ghoulish" - yes, indeed it is. But Mr Hull from the Federation of Burial & Cremation Authorities supports the plans as supposedly, "From an environmental point of view, it makes sense."

Does it really? Of course not. Aside from the ethics and taste of it, or the sheer psychological impact on the bereaved ("uncle's gone, but he's keeping the pool warm for you"), the FBCA are being ingenuous in suggesting cremation ever makes environmental sense. For cremation (now the favourite funereal form in the UK), bodies have to be incinerated at temperatures of up to 1,150 degrees centigrade, creating a massive carbon footprint. The industrial-scale effort expended by modern crematoria is something that simply can't ever be pollution-free.

Burial in graveyards might seem a better option, but modern coffins are no low-tech, low-resource beasts either. They often come in chemically-treated hardwoods, but even if faster-growing woods are used, the metal and other synthetic fittings involve significant processing as well as often being non-biodegradable. In addition, the embalming of bodies involves the use of toxic chemicals you wouldn't dream of allowing to touch you while still breathing. Consequently, longer term, these can leech into the surrounding soil and poison the environment. And graves themselves are often reinforced with concrete - a material exuding one of the heaviest carbon footprints of all during its manufacture.

So the funeral business is a long way indeed from being remotely eco-friendly. What should be a very natural process of reassimilation into the Universe has instead become a significant contributor to the degradation of Mother Earth.

It would be far better to deregulate land use further and encourage burials in eco-friendly coverings or biodegradable, non-intensively manufactured coffins. Instead of selling off our national forests as the Conservative Government is proposing, we should use them as natural cemeteries, where people could visit the trees and shrubs that could be living testimonies to their deceased loved ones. Then, rather than causing damage to the planet from which we sprang, our passing can be marked as a celebration of our own life and the new life that our end forges in the biosphere around us.

Never Had It So Good? The Accidental Truths of Lord David Young

The Tories' paper-thin mask of faux social concern slipped this week when Lord David Young of Graffham, Coalition Government adviser on health and safety at work law, was quoted pontificating over a good lunch on how the "so-called" recession was nothing really. The former right-hand man of Margaret Thatcher held forth on how the half million jobs set to be lost in the public sector were "within the margin of error" and how home owners "have never had it so good." There was a howl of outrage from a wide spectrum of the public and media and, in spite of an apology from Young, Prime Minister Cameron dismissed him within hours. He described the peer's words as "offensive and inaccurate". 

Offensive they were without question, but how inaccurate or not were they?

The way we were: Young and Thatcher, 1980s

No lost jobs can be dismissed as marginal errors - these are people's livelihoods, but his Lordship happily supported the disposal of several million jobs under the Thatcher Government of 1979 to 1990, when his roles included chair of the Manpower Services Commission and Employment Secretary. So job losses of any number may indeed be of marginal importance to him as he views the world from the lofty heights of the Lords, atop his fortune made in the construction industry.

Likewise, from the perspective of the people who actually matter to the Conservative Government, there is some truth in his words about mortgages. Interest rates have indeed been at a historic low for some time now, making mortgages and loans for those who have them cheaper than they have been for several decades. In particular, if you are one of the significant numbers who invested in property and especially in "buy-to-let" schemes over the last decade, the chances are you will indeed be quids in.

Buy-to-let schemes began in earnest under the Major government, significantly fuelling the boom in property speculation. In spite of widening the gap in wealth between the haves and have nots, making buying property well beyond the reach of many younger people, this phenomenon expanded greatly under New Labour. Now, more and more people face a serious struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Unable to buy, they are facing higher and higher rents - including the innovation in some areas of making sealed bids on their rents to prospective landlords. With housing benefit and social housing tenure reforms in prospect and likely to make tenancies ever harder to maintain, the rented sector is becoming more and more profitable for predatory landlords - or residential entrepreneurs, as Tories would call them.

So if Lord Young is guilty of anything, it is certainly not of being a liar: for the people he meets and spends his time with, for the people the Tories exist to serve, they indeed have never had it so good.

But what this episode does brightly illuminate is the real strategy behind the Government's actions. Young referred to the recession as "so-called", contrasting our current economic circumstances pretty favourably to past recessions. This betrays the Big Lie at the heart of the Con Dem Coalition - that massive, urgent cuts in public spending are necessary to avoid imminent national bankruptcy.

In sharp contrast to this, Young has confirmed what many critics have  suspected for months - that the hype around the deficit is just that; and that the cuts to welfare, to health and education and a range of other services are a political choice, not an economic necessity. And it is a choice which will indeed ensure that a significant, better-off slice of the populace does have it good, quite contentedly at the cost of the rest. This is a tactic they used successfully throughout the 1980s and which our archaic voting system allows to continue even in the face of the opposition of the majority of the electorate.

The way we were: 1981 revisited?

Tellingly, Young also said the Coalition Cabinet is far narrower politically than the Thatcher Government of 1979. In spite of the Lib Dems' supposed moderating presence, the unity around this new social project is greater and more far reaching than even the Iron Lady's right wing revisionism. Then, several million jobs were sacrificed, along with the hopes and dreams of millions of people. This time, who knows where we are headed, with at least an initial million jobs set to go over the next year or so? Although the Government claims that "we are all in it together", the mere fact that 23 out of 29 Cabinet Ministers are millionaires makes it hard to see how. Nearly every major move since their taking office has been regressive - on the budget, on welfare, on cutting back on resources to tackle tax evasion, it is clear where this regime's loyalties lie.

So Lord Young is an offensive man making offensive comments about the stark realities facing millions of ordinary Britons. But perhaps his words were also the most unintentionally accurate representation yet of the arrogant disdain and detached world view of our Cabinet of Millionaires.

Lib Dem Leopards and their Changing Spots

The British press has been awash with stories this weekend about the shenanigans surrounding the creation of our first proper Coalition Government since 1945. In May, by a fluke of electoral arithmetic, the election produced a "hung parliament" where no party had an outright majority over all the others. So the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats agreed a deal to govern together.

Nick Clegg, Liberal Leopard?

Two books have just been published about the deal - one by a Conservative MP, Rob Wilson, and the other by a Lib Dem MP, David Laws - and both show how the Coalition involved the smaller, originally centre-left Lib Dems in making massive compromises to create the rightist ,Conservative-dominated programme for government. From welfare reform, through higher education to the deficit, it is hard to identify any clear trace of the manifesto the Lib Dems had so effusively put to the country just a few days earlier.

The consequences for the Lib Dems appear to be disastrous so far - down as low as 9% in the opinion polls from their 23% in the election and a very bitter reaction from now former supporters. Students in particular have understandably turned angrily on the Lib Dems for cravenly reneging on their flagship pledge to abolish tuition fees, agreeing to nearly trebling them instead.

The Lib Dems, under leader Nick Clegg, have floundered to explain themselves: firstly, they claim that they didn't know how bad the deficit was before the election (although this is hard to sustain - the forecasts prior to May in fact indicated a larger deficit than has turned out and economic growth has been marginally higher than expected). Next they argue that they did not win the election themselves and so have no mandate to implement Lib Dem policies. Compromise, they say, is essential in such a situation.

No doubt it is - to an extent. But the Lib Dems have compromised with vigour: there has been no reluctance shown in surrendering anything to the Conservatives. Wilson's book reveals how the they secretly identified a whole range of negotiable policies during the election campaign. While Mr Clegg was busy harvesting student votes by signing his pledge on tuition fees, his lieutenant, Danny Alexander, was busy writing that the party should not press this as an issue in any negotiations - advice clearly heeded in due course.

Deputy PM Nick Clegg with PM David Cameron, 
12 May 2010

Laws' book, meantime, shows how the Lib Dems' negotiating team kept the Labour Party falsely talking for five days, with the astonishing connivance of the Royal Household, while they fixed up their deal with the Conservatives. In an utter charade, in complete bad faith, they held out the prospect of an agreement with what Laws calls the "decaying corpse" of the Brown government.

These are the same men who throughout the election battered on and on about how they would deliver a new, honest politics after the litany of disasters around the MPs' expenses scandal. But by their gleeful, schoolboy-like revelling in their grubby dealing, they betray their inability to rise above their narcissistic isolation from the world outside their "Westminster Village". All to what end? Seats at the Cabinet table, and little more. No great reform of politics; no more equal society; no great move to a green country. We will have a thoroughly Tory Britain, with even the Post Office privatised and nuclear power stations under construction.

I was an active member of the Lib Dems for many years, including as a parliamentary and European candidate. I served on several national policy working parties and from 1994 onwards felt a slow but determined drift away from any ideological position in anticipation of a possible pact with the pragmatism of Blair's New Labour. A raft of radical, centre-left policies on industrial democracy, citizens' income and overseas trade were quietly dropped. Next, Clegg, Laws and Chris Huhne published the "Orange Book" seeking to embrace the free market in public services. For myself, in 2005 I left and joined the Greens, attracted by their commitment to social justice as well as to the environment.

Shortly afterwards at a friend's birthday party I was introduced to a Lib Dem councillor. My friend explained my recent switch, at which point the councillor became extremely agitated. Why would I do such a thing, she demanded. The Lib Dems had a much better prospect of power. I explained that the Greens were where my principles lay. Her response was telling - principles were superfluous because "if you ever actually get any power, you'll soon find that it's all about compromise - compromise for breakfast, lunch and dinner!"

And that is why we are where we are - they are a party no longer with any moral compass. While there remain hardworking, well-intentioned individual members, nothing matters that much to their leaders - so consequently, everything is up for review. They no longer have any abiding vision or radical imagination, no idea that anything much needs to change. The concept that politics is the infinitely flexible "art of the possible" has been raised to their sole ideology.

Nick Clegg recently told the radio programme "Desert Island Discs" that his favourite film is Visconti's "The Leopard." This epic, a powerful story of the time of the Italian risorgimento, is certainly wonderfully done, and it includes a stunningly apposite line when the Prince of Salina, played by Burt Lancaster, observes laconically, "Something has to change so that everything can stay the same."

Establishments survive by first neutralising and then absorbing any challenge to them - and we are witnessing such a moment unfold before our very eyes. 

"The Leopard" - Something has to change so that everything can stay the same

"Why don't they start with the bankers?"

The British Government has announced its programme of cuts in public spending today. Carefully crafting a wide range of substantial reductions in spending so that the average cuts per Government department come in at 19% over four years rather than Labour's planned 20%, the Con Dems betray the essential unity of the three main parties around a monetarist, free market agenda. Their little school boyish prank may make waves in the Westminster Village, a bit like waving condoms about in a Prefects' Room, but the impact on a wide range of poor and vulnerable citizens will be even worse than feared, with £7 billions more than expected off disability payments - £50 per week taken from people on Incapacity Benefit for more than 12 months - and a 50% reduction in the social housing budget. At the same time, precisely nothing is done to tackle the massive tax evasion and corporate tax exemptions that plague Britain.

So amidst the gloom, it was good to see this video (below) of Green Party leader Caroline Lucas MP railing passionately against the cuts as socially damaging and economically illiterate - worsening the crisis of the deficit rather than tackling it. Clearly angered by the Chancellor's approach, she calls for action on investment in sustainable jobs and action against tax evasion. Government led spending on a range of activities such as improving public transport and developing renewable energy would pay dividends in a multiplicity of ways - generating jobs and tax revenue, cutting the deficit, reducing our dependence on foreign energy and cutting our carbon emissions.

This type of Keynesian economic theory,on which the "Green New Deal" is based, used to be the economic orthodoxy that worked for a coherent society. By contrast, Monetarist theory adopted by right wingers in the 1970s onwards changed that - placing economic objectives above social ones and seeking to reduce government involvement in the economy and socirty as a whole. As Nigel Lawson, Thatcher's Chancellor, explained on BBC Radio 4 last night, "I wasn't much bothered about damaging solidarity and social cohesion." All he was bothered about was creating space for tax cuts for the wealthy and a chance to flog off the national assets.

As the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats contemplate the biggest sale of public assets ever, as well as cutting deep into the welfare state, the Con Dem regime is emerging as one of the most avowedly ideological governments in British history, rolling back the shrinking public sector further than Mrs Thatcher ever dared imagine.

At least, hearing Caroline Lucas' speech, there is clearly a voice in Parliament showing that there IS an alternative to an agenda that turns citizens into numbers and shuts its eyes to real human suffering. Let's hope it keeps getting louder. And heard.