Essay - A History of Modern

A History of Modern

“Time is a river, the resistless flow of all created things. One thing no sooner comes into sight than it is hurried past and another is borne along, only to be swept away in its turn.” – Marcus Aurelius, “Meditations”, c.150

From time immemorial, humans have pondered on our place in the Universe and the purpose of our lives, at once pregnant with such great potential and yet so painfully transient. For many centuries, the differences between each succeeding generation were normally of little apparent or immediate effect. Empires rose and fell, religions came and went, but for most humans, toiling in subsistence level agriculture, little changed. Even the impact of new technology, such as the adoption of the stirrup and the changes it drove in metallurgy, horse farming, trade, military tactics and wider social relations took decades if not centuries to make itself felt.

This is not to say that everything was fixed in stone – the periodic insurrections of the peasantry from the days of the bacaudae at the end of the Roman Empire through the Thessalonican Zealots of the 1340s to the Reformation and beyond demonstrate a far from settled consensus of society's functioning. Yet, many aspects were relatively unchanging until the Mercantilist era from the late fifteenth century through to the eighteenth. In western Europe, the Catholic Church usually buttressed the existing feudal order and so the mass peasantry remained in thrall, owing their duties - their feu - as servants to their noble Masters, who in turn pledged allegiance to the King, whose legitimacy was derived from God alone. For example, in spite of the killing of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the great English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 repeatedly looked to the King for salvation from the excesses of his nobility rather than sought to undo the system itself.

But with the Europeans' circumnavigation and eventual conquest and colonisation of much of the globe, the Mercantilist era created new understandings and possibilities that began to challenge long established concepts and social structures. The learning of the Renaissance was to spark new thinking and challenges to the teachings of the Church, ultimately spawning the Reformation and the collapse of the Catholic and, in time, Christian monopoly on European faith.


As organised religion incrementally lost its grip on society and the growing merchant classes began to assert their economic power over the declining feudal nobility, new ideas about the rights of men (but, as yet, far less frequently women) emerged – though “new” may not always be the correct appellation. In many cases, ideas were revived from ancient days as Renaissance learning borrowed concepts kept alive and developed by Byzantine and Islamic scholars through western Europe’s long Dark and Middle Ages. In particular, classical Hellenic concepts of democracy and the legal equality of citizens were re-oriented to the new age. 

The technological possibilities created by the invention of machines and, in particular, the harnessing of steam, drove forward ideas of new ways of life and living. Finance- capital - became the predominant force in the new Capitalist society. Factories were built to transform raw materials into hitherto unknown products for a growing middle class of merchants and industrialists - the bourgeoisie. Remarkably quickly, a commercialism that would be far from unfamiliar to people in the early twenty-first century emerged: albeit initially for a small class of people, shopping became a combination of leisure and status, nearly an end in itself, almost before Queen Victoria ascended the British throne in 1837. And, amplifying this phenomenon, much of the subsequent progress of both the Victorian Age and following eras has been measured by the availability of increasingly sophisticated consumer goods, to a wider group of people, but still deeply skewed between rich and poor.


The Great Exhibition of 1852 epitomised the spirit of this new age, celebrating as it did the burgeoning cornucopia of produce and goods from around the Imperial British domains, the first truly global power, brought in tribute to be displayed to an astounded public under the swirling iron and glass of the Crystal Palace in London. This most esoteric of buildings was the first of its kind and was to assume an almost mystical significance to Russian dissidents like Dostoevsky in representing the modernity denied them by the Czarist authorities. Yet, in a touchingly pertinent example of the kitsch of the times, its groundbreaking significance has been degraded over the decades as its design has been used, adapted and incorporated into tens of thousands of mundane PLC headquarters buildings as corporate lobbies and faux atriums - all to show that they "do modern".

Peasants, released from feudal obligations, were obliged instead to earn their living through waged employment in cities and towns where they became one of the three key resources - labour, plant and capital - that drove the new, increasingly urbanised industrial age. In theory, they were free to sell their labour to whomsoever they pleased. Yet in practice, the economic imbalance between the owner-employers and their workforce rested on a grossly unequal foundation, one much aggravated by the appalling working and living conditions of the newly emergent proletariat or working class. In workplaces bereft of any health and safety considerations and cramped into cramped and dreadful, high density housing, the poorer classes existed in dire poverty, with men, women and children working and dying in the most hellish of conditions.

In England, as elsewhere, the continuance of the Master and Servant laws even to this day as the legal underpinning of the employment relationship clearly betray its fundamental inequality of power. The development of trade unions and the socialist movement towards the end of the nineteenth century would only partially - and temporarily - mitigate what Marx would later call "the dull compulsion of economic relations."

Nevertheless, technological and social change encouraged a more enlightened, questioning society, one marked by the idea of constant progress – in learning, in culture, in technology, in living. The short and brutal lives of the past could be set aside and in their place, through science and reason, the modern age could - eventually- offer more and more humans (who eventually would include women as well as men) all manner of new possibilities, both individual and collective. Hence the brutal period of industrialisation and its attendant ills was held to be an unpleasant but necessary rite of passage in the transformation of society.

This stripping away of old norms – principally about deference to a hierarchical order of society held to have been set in place by Divine Will – and their replacement by new concepts, by default, had to concede at least some theoretical equality among humans. The classical Athenian notion of citizens with collective, democratic sovereignty over their state, coupled with the need for new economic relationships to permit the fullest exploitation of both colonies and coal, destroyed centuries of ossified social relations. With ever faster and powerful industrial developments creating more and more ever-changing needs and outcomes, the illusions of the ages, cracked for centuries, were finally shattered as the French Revolution of 1789 was followed by the English Reform Riots of 1831 and the Continental Revolutions of 1848.

Karl Marx: foreseeing our times

And it was in that last, seminal year that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels issued their powerful call to arms, “The Communist Manifesto” which lyrically caught the zeitgeist of the times with its analysis of the rise of the new capitalist economy and its impact on the old order:

“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men.”

Marx and Engels were writing over a century and a half ago, but their words could be applied to almost any period since, including now. The pace of change our world has seen, entirely driven on by humanity, has been breathtaking in both scale and speed. Consider someone of ten years of age watching the Wright brothers precariously taking to the air on their rickety-looking airplane, Kittyhawk at the turn of the twentieth century – the same person would still have been short of their eightieth birthday when Neil Armstrong stood on the surface of the Moon.


And so for the last two centuries, uniquely in human history, a new idea of humanity’s place has come about, both in terms of our relationship with our species’ past and our hold over our world and its resources, and all that means for us. In a word, we have become “modern”. This term was first used to describe contemporary humans by the French writer Baudelaire in the early 19^th century. It is a phrase that at once marks current (and recent) generations as being distinctive and, by implication, better than those that came before.

The Price of Progress?

In his great work, “All That Is Solid Melts Into Air”(1982) , the American writer Marshall Berman takes a long view of modernity. While it is a conceit of the modern age (at any juncture in its existence) that modern is the immediate period of "now" alone, Berman shows how concerns about modernity and the impact of the choices made flowing from its many possibilities have existed almost as long, indeed even longer, than the concept itself.

In its broadest terms, the Modern Age set out on two parallel but quite separate tracks - the essentially materialistic scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment and the equally progressive but more spiritually pluralist and humanistic tenor of the Romantic Movement. Whilst the former saw the rapid progress of modernity, the immediacy of its demands and possibilities, as both the challenge and the fruit of empirical Knowledge and Reason, the latter held to more ecumenical truths. The Romantics, whilst equally disavowing traditional Christianity and exploring ever wider aspects of learning, nevertheless found meaning in the senses, in feeling and spirit as much as logic. If the Enlightenment had found a new God in the deductive science of mathematics and physics, the Romantics found their gods in the creative arts, in literature, theatre, music and painting. And so, while both embraced the fruits of the Renaissance, unbound by ancient restrictions, their objectives were quite divergent, and from the outset, they were frequently at odds with each other.

Berman explores in depth the seminal work of one of the earliest Romantic writers, Goethe’s Faust, to examine the ancient parable of how a man might lose his soul to inherit the earth and how even well-intentioned development with the aim of improving lives can in truth destroy the very things humans value most – the relationships we cherish and our place in nature. 

The climax of Faust, completed in 1831, astoundingly foresees a myriad of subsequent technological, social and political changes. In the story, the giving over of a vast pastoral paradise by a feudal King to Faust and Satan to build massive new cities and factories, all with the ostensible purpose of improving the lot of the people, kills tens of thousands in its creation but Faust relentlessly develops for as long as any space remains untouched. Even the creations he has made are frequently torn down and rebuilt almost as soon as they are erected. Ultimately, with the murder of two kindly old people who refuse to move out of their original homestead – the very last piece of undeveloped land – Faust is exhausted and Satan finally snatches him away to his eternal torments.

Berman uses this analogy to show how, contemporary to Goethe, Czar Peter the Great conceived his capital city St. Petersburg as a completely artificial creation (built on a swamp) and how it sat apart as a beacon of modernity in what remained the essentially feudal state of Imperial Russia. With Peter’s successors admitting little in the way of socio-economic or political change, the great city while having the appearance of modernity was in effect sterile, with “the paradox of public space without public life.”

Berman - seeking a new modernity

By contrast, subsequent events in Paris, as Hausmann and Napoleon III smashed great boulevards through the twisted old lanes of the medieval city, fed ever more development, both of political change and what was seen as economic progress. Berman shows how this course was embraced by both capitalists and radicals – the boulevards became the veins drawing the lifeblood through this most revolutionary of cities, transmitting news of events and ideas and leading to hitherto unknown social mixing and aspirations.  Some of this thinking would reach a neo-faustian apogee in the early twentieth century, when architects like Le Corbusier developed ideas and designs for massive, entirely planned cities, like St Petersburg begun anew rather than developed on from or even grafted onto existing polities. Social engineering - ranging through varying ideological constructs - sat at the heart of these concepts.

It is this aspect of modernity – the thinking and morality behind the design and architecture of our cities – that has almost certainly had by far the greatest impact on the modern world and humanity’s relationships with both our environment and ourselves. How space is used, how buildings function, what they permit and what they prevent are key to our social discourse, or lack of it. In the public domain, architecture assumes a huge significance in what its form represents - from the broad expanses of Hausmann's multi-purpose boulevards to the solid, brutal, controlling edifices of Stalinist realism through to the mysteriously swirling spires of reinvented gothic constructions beloved of Victorians keen to demonstrate their new-found wealth.

The Russian radical, Chernyshevsky, writing in the 1860s shortly before his Siberian exile and long, slow death at the hands of the Czarists, had imagined a new Russia in a piece titled “Vera Pavlovna’s Fourth Dream”. In this, the old cities and towns had been replaced by a carefully planned grid of geometrically perfect, giant towered communities, each with thousands of inhabitants, living in social equality in self-sustaining habitats. In between would be lush pastures producing food and providing huge recreation areas. In such a utopia of plenty, all social tension and personal animosity was removed and people lived in perpetual harmony and peace.

Le Corbuiser’s vision was somewhat less egalitarian and far more brutal, although he himself claimed, perhaps echoing Faust, that his intentions were to provide better communities. He advocated wiping the slate clean by flattening existing cities and starting again. To replace them, he designed giant towered communities and advocated zoned cities – with industrial, commercial and residential areas; all carefully socially segregated. Superficially delightful parks and lakes would serve the more utilitarian purpose of keeping the classes well apart, an early example of today’s gated communities for the rich and paranoid.

Le Corbusier’s ideas were never implemented in full – but they have informed much of the thinking behind subsequent large scale housing developments in both Europe and North America, many of which have led to tragic outcomes for their inhabitants and their wider societies. And, with others, he fed the ideas that, at one stage, reached a frightening and dark zenith in Albert Speer’s designs for Hitler’s Germania, the new super-city that was to replace Berlin had the Nazis triumphed in the second world war.

Berman himself experienced this drive for supposed improvement at any costs when the public planner, Robert Moses, destroyed community after community to build freeways through New York state in the name of progress. His activities, initially supported by the public and State, gradually took on a life of their own, with a relentless momentum to develop forever, never stopping. Anyone who stood in his way found massive financial resources ranged, legally and often otherwise, against them – above all, any opposition to his proliferation of road building in particular was denigrated as being hostile to progress itself. And so, for several decades, although decidedly capitalist, Moses was able to deploy a Marxist argument, portraying himself as the harbinger of the inevitable: “There are people who like things the way they are. I can’t hold out any hope to them...Let them move to the Rockies.”

Moses somehow epitomises the spirit of much of what is modern – it  masquerades as choice and improvement for “ordinary” people, but is in fact coldly impersonal, at best patronising if not wholly exploitative, and aimed at freezing the social relations which, after the capitalist centuries, have now resettled into a new, established neoliberal order. For example, creating a freeway into the countryside was portrayed as a means of giving city dwellers easy access to the pleasantries of green spaces; but Moses designed tunnels in such a way that public buses filled with poor people could not get through them. Talking about a giant artificial beach he created, one of Moses contemporaries put it thus: “He loves the public, but not as people. The public is a great amorphous mass to him: it needs to be bathed, it needs to be aired, it needs recreation, but not for personal reasons – just to make it a better public.”

The description echoes so much of our modern world: the elitists of Murdoch’s News International who claim to “speak for the people” in their odiously populist editorials while surreptitiously promoting a politics that exploits ordinary people more and more; or Bill Gates' Microsoft Corporation, which ruthlessly copies innovators and undercuts competitors driving choice out of the IT market while claiming to be providing ever more choice to the people of the world; or the Monsanto Corporation, claiming to offer better health and food for all with their genetic engineering programmes while introducing terminator genes to crops which ruin traditional farming methods and tie peasant farmers to purchasing replacement seeds - from Monsanto.

If you oppose any of this, you are delusional, standing in the way of progress, in the way of a better life for you and everyone else. This is the curse of the Modern – and one which often cuts across political ideologies. State Communist regimes such as Stalin’s Russia with its dreadful destruction of the Aral Sea through massive, Faustian schemes of agrarian engineering, or the Cultural Revolution of Mao’s China have promoted progress as cruelly and impersonally as any Moses or Speer.

The Brutality of the Big : the German Nazi Pavilion (left) challenges the Soviet Communist Pavilion across the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower at the 1937 Paris International Exposition.

In Things To Come, the 1930s film of HG Wells book, the lead character declares at the end that there can be no rest for humanity – it must progress or die. In the name of this inevitability, individuals can, even must, be sacrificed. It is a nostrum of ideologues that this is not merely an acceptable form of progress, but even desirable. In the film Children of Men, when Clive Owen’s character, Theo, sees his friend murdered by activists, one of their apologists remarks, “I’m so sorry, but this is part of something bigger than any of us.”

The challenge then is for a new view of modern. The language of the de-collectivised world is increasingly of the individual – a personal sovereignty is manufactured through the new religion of choice. Except it is a false god, because capitalism has now reached a stage where there is less and less choice, even if you have the means to pay for making choices, so many of which are now commodified. The mitigation of capitalist excess on modern society was tempered for a few decades at least by the progressive social attitudes advocated by the socialist and labour movements that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. Particularly in Europe for around 40 years after the end of the war, a limited social democratic consensus held in most countries.

But following the rise of Thatcherism and Reaganism in the 1990s, and the collapse of the Soviet bloc (against whose communism the West had had to provide some sort of alternative mildly acceptable to the masses), capitalism has re-emerged, bloodied (especially after the repeated financial crises since 2008) but unbowed. It has coalesced around the teachings of neoliberalism, a rightwing ideology that advocates free market supremacy and "small state" government reduced to little more than oversight of policing and defence. Consequently, as American-driven international finance has adopted and imposed these values on consumers and societies around the Earth, neoliberalism has become the dominant modern ideology in country after country, and in doing so it has homogenised our world unbelievably quickly.

Stand in any street in any town and you could indeed be in Anytown. Cairo has its Starbucks, Moscow its McDonalds and the same chains provide the same pre-packaged goods in nearly every corner of the planet. More and more companies are owned by giant multinational conglomerates, all seeking to maximise profits by minimising costs through economies of ever greater scale. Even on the internet, just six addresses – Google, Youtube, Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia and Twitter – consume the majority of global hits. A mere one thousand corporations control over 90% of global business, effectively beyond the reach of any national public regulation.

Goethe and Marx predicted much of the last century and a half with a prescience that is profound. With the current long-term crisis of capitalist finance, the potential for a further paradigm shift in social and economic relations as the latter forecast is arguably more possible now than twenty years ago – but it is not inevitable that it will lead to the communitarian society Marx and Engels advocated.

The bottom line is that we do not live in a purely capitalist society. Rather, we live in a neoliberal society. Just as in the Middle Ages, the King and the Barons enlisted faith in God to retain their legitimacy over the exploited peasantry, so now the neoliberal elite, the financiers, the corporate heads and their political puppets, have enlisted the Market as their Divine Right to rule. With the supposed End of History meaning that “Free Market” economics are the only game in town, the modern public retain astonishingly high levels of trust in the economic system, even if they often distrust those at the helm. Hence, once the odd sacrificial goat, like Fred "the Shred" Goodman of RBS is stripped of his knighthood (but not his pension), even many in the Occupy Movement hold out hope for a sort of nicer capitalism run by well-meaning, honest bankers. Even now, relatively few question whether the actual problem is the system rather than the people chewed up in it (some much more willingly than others, of course).

The End of Modern?

To achieve this, the neoliberals have closed down the Modern Age as we knew it. The time of capitalism ended maybe 25 to 30 years ago, when Reagan and Thatcher and their allies around the world began to dismantle the collective social consensus in western Europe and in the even less socially conscious USA.

In defence of "market democracy" - 84 year old woman
pepper sprayed by the police in Seattle protest

While studiously maintaining and even extending the myths of "free" market competition and of the entrepreneurial economy, they have in fact manipulated access to markets to exclude competition; they have privatised huge swathes of the public sector (often with huge taxpayer subsidies as sweeteners), making obscenely profitable commodities of things such as social housing, health and education; through organisations like Blackwater, they have brought mercenaries back into vogue like some medieval throwback; they have warped the copyright and patent laws to the benefit of huge corporations; and they have rolled back the already fairly limited employment rights and health and safety protection for workers. And, to consolidate their grip, through the "emergency legislation" of the never-ending “War on Terror” the neoliberals have equipped what they see as the core or even sole legitimate function of the State – the security apparatus – with the means of controlling and neutralising any effective challenges to the new status quo.

We have come full circle from the dawn of the Modern Age. The time of Reason has been replaced by a new, unquestioning faith in the pseudo-god of the Holy Market. To be Modern is to not question, not rebel, but to accept the inevitability of so-called progress, even if it is indeed an increasingly authoritarian progress with an appalling level of human cost and suffering. Faustus triumphans est!

The challenge to the Left, to those seeking genuine, sustainable, humane progress, is to develop a new narrative that will expose and challenge this stultifying, destructive consensus. For the future of our species and our planet, we need to take back progress and create a new Future for and of Modern.

(Next - The Future of Modern: here)

Everything you say everything you do

All the things you own, all the things you knew

Everyone you love, everyone you hate

All will be erased and replaced.

Slave Britain

Arbeit Mach Frei, the Nazis proclaimed above their concentration camps. Well, in 21st century Britain we now have a government offering cheap or even completely free labour to employers using the most vulnerable people imagineable - prisoners, the unemployed, the physically disabled and the mentally ill. And the dying.

No, it is not a sick joke. Cameron and Clegg's Britain has today seen three blows to what little civilised restraint remained among Coalition policymakers.

1. The "Justice" Secretary hosted a seminar for employers on his plans to create 10,000 new jobs in British prisons where employers of all shapes and sizes can boost companies' profitability by in-sourcing their work to jails. Prisoners are exempted from the national minimum wage and have no employment rights. So, anything from call centres to finishing kitchen units will be carried out by prisoners earning less than £1 per hour.

2. Tescos in East Anglia had the audacity to advertise PERMANENT "jobs" paying out of work people - nothing! The jobs were advertised in partnership with the appropriately named "Monster" website. As part of a government workfare scheme, they will continue to get their unemployment benefit - Jobseekers' Allowance - plus unquantified "expenses" in return for working all night. If they turn down the work, their benefits will be cut. Tescos made profits of £1,900,000,000 in the six months to October 2011.

3. And now, sneaking in behind the controversial Welfare Bill, the Government has briefed a range of charities that disabled people will be forced to work for free for charities, public bodies and high street retailers on open-ended work experience placements or face losing their disability benefits. This will include people who are terminally ill with cancer, but assessed as having more than six months left. 

These provisions have been voted through the Commons with the support of nearly all Lib Dem MPs and all voting Conservatives. When disability campaigners objected to the work experience plans on the basis they penalise and exploit vulnerable people, the cold-hearted response was Ministers felt sanctions are an incentive for people to comply with their responsibility.

The terrible, inhumane thinking behind these "schemes" is bad enough. But the fact that the Government feels it has demonised  the weakest people of all in our country to such an extent that it can pursue them so vindictively and so openly and unashamedly is beyond appalling - it is positively chilling. If this is what they are like after 18 months, what about another three years of people with mindsets like theirs running our society?

Baroness Warsi - Minister without a Clue

The Conservative Party Co-Chairman and Minister without Portfolio (Clue - her titles hint at the real situation), Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, has tripped off to the Vatican to praise the well-known misogynist, Pope Benedict, and call for Europe to be more confident about Christianity. In a craven paean to The Holy Father, Britain's only Muslim Minister praises the Catholic Church for its apparent role in supporting human rights and laments the absence of any mention of Christianity in the European Union's constitution. Echoing her earlier comments that the British Government now does religion (a pointed rebuttal of officials' advice that we don't do God when Tony Blair wanted to end his declaration of war on Iraq with a Christian prayer), Warsi expresses the hope that the crucifix can be displayed in public buildings in Britain in the future.

Warsi lauds the Catholic Church as an exemplar of European culture - claiming its influence shines through our way of life and "for centuries, Christianity in Europe has been inspiring, motivating, strengthening and improving our societies."

Presumably these centuries of shining include the Catholic Church's inspiration and motivation behind
- the Crusaders' sacking Jerusalem and butchering of almost its entire population in 1099;
- the FIVE MILLION women burnt at the stake as witches by the Church, a Holocaust in itself;
- the hundreds of thousands of people exiled, tortured and killed for heresy by the Inquisition (an institution which has never been abolished by the Church);
- the Pope's ambivalence towards the Nazis in deporting Italy's Jews during the war and refusal to condemn antisemitic laws prior to the war;
- the Vatican's decades of involvement with countless bloodthirsty and corrupt Latin American military regimes through to the 1990s, as well as its cosying up to Spanish dictator Franco as he murdered thousands of socialists and communists, a tendency that continues today with Vatican approval of Belarussian dictator Lukashenko.
- the rank corruption of the Vatican Bank, including its laundering of millions of dollars of Nazi and Croat Ustashe money at the end of the war and its links to the murdered "God's banker", Roberto Calvi in 1982.
- its continuing cover up of the abuse of children in its care;
- its continuing persecution of gay and lesbian people;

Benedict himself created a storm a few years back when he deliberately misquoted a medieval Byzantine Emperor to declare the Islamic faith the Baroness professes as evil and inhuman. Presumably she won't forget to thank him for that little contribution to interfaith harmony and understanding too?

There are plenty of decent, peaceful Catholics and other Christians, but I don't want the Government of my country praising any institution with a pedigree like that headed by the Pope, especially when its leaders continue to be in total denial of much of their history and eschew their responsibilities towards their victims. Nor do I want Christianity - or any other religion - sponsored by the public buildings, officials or services that I pay taxes towards and which are meant to serve citizens of all faiths and none.

The latest census apparently shows a huge decline in the proportion of British people calling themselves Christian - and most of those who do are in fact not practising Christians as they don't attend church, read the bible or pray regularly. But, sounding like a would-be British Tea Party-goer, Warsi spits out her usual ragbag of ignorance with her customary shrill pomposity and uninformed would-be populist rhetoric.

Let's get this right - she wants to impose a religion on British citizens which she does not actually believe in or follow herself? How hypocritical, or just plain stupid, is that?

The Baroness and some episodes from the centuries of inspiration offered by the Catholic Church

"The Sun" Turns...

It was bemusing, to say the least, to behold the ire of Trevor Kavanagh, the former Political Editor (yes, there is one!) of The Sun tabloid newspaper railing against what he called heavy-handed police tactics in the latest investigation into News International's activities in acquiring stories for its gutter press. With thirty journalists under investigation for a range of possible offences involving bribery of police and other officials, as well as alleged phone hacking, Mr Kavanagh complained of families being upset by early morning police raids, and unwarranted intrusion into people's privacy.
"This witch-hunt has put us behind ex-Soviet states on press freedom!" he writes furiously in today's newspaper, blithely ignoring the significant changes in counties like Estonia in the last twenty years. He is angry that some of the legends of Fleet Street are apparently not immune from being questioned by police and are now on open-ended bail. More than slightly stating the obvious at this stage, complains that the police are investigating even although "Nobody has been charged with any offence, still less tried or convicted."
Now, of course, we have to wait and see the outcome of the investigation, but Kavanagh's complaints are disingenuous - it may have long been The Sun's take on its own targets that the conviction precedes the investigation, but thankfully, even in neoliberal Britain, there is still at least some observation of the need for an investigation before charging someone with an offence. So the absence of charges at present means nothing other than that the police are pursuing their inquiries as justice and good practice demands they should.


As far as Kavanagh's concerns about invasion of people's privacy, physician heal thyself comes to mind. The Sun, like its late and unlamented News International stablemate, The News of the World, has existed on a diet of intrusion and breaches of privacy against a host of people, famous, infamous and unknown. This is the newspaper that announced Charlotte Church's pregnancy to the world before she did - and before the 12 weeks point often crucial to safe pregnancies. This is the paper that intruded into the grief of the family of murdered football fan Mike Dye within hours of his killing with inaccurate and inappropriate insinuations that he was involved with a gang of trouble-seekers. 


As for witch-hunts, well this is the newspaper which routinely publishes wildly inaccurate, hate-filled and hate-inducing articles about disabled people, like one in January by its columnist Rod Liddle, who wrote:
"My New Year’s resolution for 2012 was to become disabled. Nothing too serious, maybe just a bit of bad luck or one of those newly invented illnesses which make you a bit peaky for decades – fibromyalgia, or M.E..There’s lots of money to be made from being disabled – your money, taxpayers’ money, as it happens."
This too is the paper that thrives on gossip about the most intimate lives of celebrities, including ones it creates so it can then knock down. It also does a good line on deaths - speculating even today with lurid headlines about singer Whitney Houston's tragic death: was she on "Jacko drugs"? Was her head underwater?


The Sun, whose huge profits subsidise Murdoch's supposedly respectable but loss-making Times newspapers, was defended just last week by its editor, Dominic Mohan at the Leveson enquiry into the Press as a force for good, which must rank as a prime contender for the biggest piss-take of the year so far. The News International stable has in fact been involved in some of the most pernicious press campaigns of recent years.
Both the News of the World and The Sun were prominent in advocating the so-called Sarah's Law, after the murdered child Sarah Payne, which would provide parents with details of convicted paedophiles living in their area. Keen to get in on the act, N.I. undertook its own name and shame campaign which, as well as indirectly encouraging vigilante law, led to the beating up of innocent people mistakenly identified as paedophiles by mobs and in one case the hounding from her home through vandalism and death threats of a paediatrician, her job title confused with the appellation for a child molester.


All this while running lurid front page stories on under-age sex, like this one on the left, one of many.
So Mr Kavanagh can moan all he likes, but, few will shed tears for his colleagues (although distress to their innocent kids and partners is another matter) as the police undertake their enquiries. Whatever the legal outcome, the employees of N.I. currently under scrutiny will do well to consider for a change what it feels like to be on the receiving end of intrusion and suspicion. And may hell mend them.

Jesus For President?

As would-be Republican party Presidential nominees fall over each other to out-Christian their rivals (never mind Nazi-Communist Obama), American TV host Bill Maher speculates on a last minute entry to the race by the Big Man Himself...

Visconti's "The Leopard" (Il Gattopardo)

(from October 2010, separate blog)

Watched Visconti's "The Leopard" currently doing the rounds in cinemas after some restoration work on this 1963 film. Starring a dubbed Burt Lancaster in an unlikely but successful casting, it traces the story of a Sicilian noble, the Prince of Salina, at the time of Italian Unification and his reluctant yielding to the turmoil sweeping around him while lamenting the enduring futility of the human condition.

"Something had to change so that everything else could remain as before," he observes laconically, a comment as applicable to now as 19th century Italy.

He feels humans will never learn the pointlessness of their greed and rapaciousness because they already believe themselves to excel in everything (though of course he speaks with some in-built advantage in this). A noteworthy scene shows the Prince commenting on how some visiting soldiers have exchanged the redshirts of Garibaldi for richly decorated blue and gold uniforms. "We are now soldiers of the Royal Army!" comes the proud reply, to the Prince's cynical if weary approval.

  

His dilettante nephew, played by Alain Delon, falls in love with the daughter (Claudia Cardinale) of a vulgar "nouveau riche" who, after supporting political change to secure his own position of influence, remarks approvingly when the army execute some rebels he had previously allied with, "This Government does things properly. Now we can take things easy."

It is indeed a meditation on social change and how elites accommodate, absorb and ultimately neutralise challenges to them. On a more individual level, it is a reflection on love ("One year of fire and passion; thirty years of ashes!") and age. Best viewed, I am certain, on the big screen - sumptuously filmed at a pace which provides a visual feast of Italian landscape, languid summer picnics and a sweeping set-piece ball filled with rich colours, swirling music and lavish costumes - it is very much worth catching on its current run.

Trailer here:

Nuclear Weapons That Can Hit London: from Israel

Who is the real threat?

ISRAEL:
- has invaded its neighbours countless times: Jordan (1951), Egypt (1956), Egypt, Syria and Jordan (1967), Lebanon (1978), Lebanon (1982- 1984), occupied Lebanon (1984-1990), Lebanon (2006) and Gaza (2009).
- has repeatedly intervened in the Palestinian areas of the West Bank and Gaza, besieging their inhabitants, bulldozing thousands of houses and constructing huge barriers and walls to hem people into large concentration camps
- carried out airstrikes on Iraq's nuclear energy reactors in 1981
- sponsored terrorist organisations - supporting Hamas to undermine the PLO
- carried out terrorist attacks, car bombing four Iranian scientists in the last few years, as well as being involved in assassinations and abductions around the world, often in collusion with the US and "friendly" Arab dictatorships
- has attacked and seized aid ships in international waters, killing several unarmed occupants - even including attacking a US warship and killing 34 American sailors.
- has developed a large arsenal of nuclear weapons - well over 200, making it the fourth or fifth largest nuclear weapons state in the world. In this, it was helped by France and Britain in the 1960s. It has never admitted to having nuclear weapons, but their existence was revealed in the 1980s by the former nuclear technician, Mordechai Vannunu, who was jailed for his troubles. Israel is believed to have developed or be developing a longe range missile - the Jerhico 3 - that will have a reach of over 5,000km, making it feasible to target and hit London; maybe even within the fabled 45 minutes Tony Blair lyingly claimed for Saddam Hussein's non-exisent WMDs.
- has repeatedly refused to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and refuses all access by the International Atomic Energy Authority to its civilian and military sites
- receives over $8 millions every day from the US in military aid.

OR

IRAN:
- has not invaded a neighbouring state (or any other country) in nearly three centuries
- has no current links to any international terrorist organisations: it did sponsor Hizbollah in Lebanon for a time, but somewhat at arms-length and bearing in mind that Hizbollah (now a peaceful, mainstream political party with support across the faith divides) was formed in response to the Israeli invasions of the Lebanon. But there is only very patchy evidence linking Iran to any other violent acts in other countries - some Iranian elements may have been involved with some Shia groups in Iraq in the middle of the last decade, but this was after the US had invaded and largely destroyed the country on their doorstep. In fact, after 9/11, Iran arrested and handed over scores of al-Qaeda suspects to the USA.
- has no nuclear weapons
- has signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and has allowed International Atomic Energy Authority officials to inspect its nuclear facilities
- receives no funding from the USA.

Any attack on Iran will be self-defeating, massively damaging in human costs, and will make a difficult situation far worse. President Obama originally promised to extend the hand of friendship to Iran, but quickly his outstretched palm clenched into a fist, his intransigence aiding rather than hindering the elements in Iran that do favour confrontation and understandably rallying Iranians to an anti-American position. Bear in mind many Iranians can still remember the toppling of Iran's first democratically elected government by the CIA and MI6 back in 1953 when it dared to nationalise the British and American owned oil industry. Premier Mossadeq was put under house arrest for life and the Shah was reinstated to become an absolute monarch employing brutal terror and repression against his people.

But above all, an attack on Iran for developing nuclear weapons it does not have by the only nuclear weapons state in the Middle East - Israel - will isolate tens of millions of Muslims and others there and around the world even further from a West that increasingly functions very openly on the basis of total self-interest and hypocrisy. The key issue here is simply wanting to ensure the continued compliance of governments across the Gulf Region with the national interests of the USA and its allies; so who is the real threat?

Disablism Update: Big Rise in Abuse of Disabled People following Government Attacks

Several national disability charities are reporting significant increases in verbal and physical abuse of disabled people following their stigmatising as scroungers by both the Government and populist media. The regular Scope survey of the experiences of disabled people has shown a rise in disabled people experiencing at least one incident of abuse from 41% of respondents to nearly two-thirds over the four months to last September alone. Anecdotal evidence since then suggests no decline in this level of hostility - rather the opposite.

This rise in hostility has been parallelled by the passage of the Welfare Bill through its first two (of three) stages in Parliament and has been accompanied by increasingly hostile press coverage. Ministers have added to the atmosphere by portraying disabled people as scroungers and muddling their own pronouncements on benefits, including Nick Clegg's assertion that he wants to get 400,000 people off of disability living allowance and back into work. However, Disability Living Allowance is not actually an out of work benefit - instead it is a payment intended to support disabled people's additional costs in participating in society. Many DLA recipients already work - without it, many may no longer be able to afford to get there and end up on the dole.

But of course, with a Prime Minister who thinks its ok to make jokes in Parliament about disability, what chance is there?

More on this here.

Booze, baccy and the Minister for Public Health

In a week when, with the passage of the Welfare Act through its second reading in the Commons stripping it of the fairly minimal amendments proposed by the Lords, it seemed that the Conservative-Lib Dem Coalition couldn't get any more offensive or vicious towards the weak and sick, the ill-titled Public Health Minister, Anne Milton MP, has decided to pile on the agony.

In a bizarre tirade against people living in the north of England, this woman, in whose hands supposedly we are meant to believe the NHS is safe, has blamed the higher than average early death toll in the north to be down to the locals supposed over-indulgence in ciggies, beer and sex. Clearly things that Ms Milton eschews for herself, her view is that if only these promiscuous, fag-and-booze swilling miscreants would mend their bad ways, then the 37,000 premature deaths in the north-east and the 5 year lower life expectancy in the area compared to the prosperous south would vanish.

In her mind, poverty, poor life chances and a disproportionately high reduction in health services to the poorer areas in our country have nothing to do with people's well-being. Dangerously, she also ignores the fact that poorer London Boroughs show similar health outcomes to the north-east. To her, it is all to do with some sort of retarded regional culture. In saying this, she goes against the findings of years of non-political, evidence-based research which shows precisely that poverty equates to bad health. This may in some cases include some bad personal choices - but if you've few chances and even less hope, and zero to negative self-esteem, perhaps the odd extra pint, (shock) one-night stand or even a nice hot pie might let you forget the misery for a few hours.

The answers don't lie in castigating and condemning people who have no way out. They do lie in supporting them and their communities to find some purpose and control over lives and economies which at the moment are in the hands of people like Ms Milton. Yet with her bigoted views of people she has not met, Ms Milton seems unlikely to do the things which, in her well-paid role, she has, along with her Conservative and Lib Dem colleagues, the power to do.

As well as tackling inequality and unemployment, the answer also lies in investing in proactive health services and in ending the scandalous power of the food manufacturing lobby, which the Coalition has permitted regular access to government ministers in order to continue to promote the sale of high-fat, high-salt and high sugar foods. And, of course, in order to make high profits from poor people.

Some people just don't know when to stop...

The Coalition might also take a look at some of the initiatives by the Scottish Government and other governments abroad to tackle the scandalous sale of low price alcohol, including the deliberate pitch to underage children of so-called alcopop drinks (which with their garish colours and labels masquerade as the next "adult" step up from kiddies fizzy drinks). There seems little chance of this, however, as the Government has stacked the alcohol advisory body with representatives of the alcohol companies.

All these remedies lie in the hands of Ms Milton and her Con Dem colleagues, including the Deputy Prime Minister, who, demonstrating the Coalition's concern for self-restraint, claims to have slept with "no more" than thirty women. But we will ourselves expire if we hold our breaths waiting for them to adopt any of the real solutions when they can of course spend their time understanding even less and condemning even more.

For more on health and poverty try the Socialist Health Association link here

Disablism, Con Dems and Lib Dems: No More Excuses

From The Morning Star newspaper

As I write, the Con Dem Government is comprehensively voting down in the House of Commons various amendments passed a couple of weeks ago in the House of Lords which would have partially mollified some of the harshest aspects of the new Welfare Act. These amendments included extending from one to two years the period of time people previously on Incapacity Benefit would keep the new Employment Support Allowance before it becomes means-tested (at which point, if the disabled person's partner earns more than £7,500 p.a., they get nothing). This amendment has been removed today even although the Government acknowledges that at  least 94% of those on the new ESA Work group will not find employment within twelve months.

The Lords' amendments also included exemptions from loss of benefit for cancer sufferers and widening eligibility criteria for young people. However, the Coaliton MPs have swept these aside and, a few minutes ago, they voted to cut disability living allowance (to be renamed personal independence payments) to disabled children.

Concerned that the Lords might reimpose their amendments when the Bill goes back there for its next reading, the Government has invoked the Parliament Act and declared the legislation to be a financial measure. Now, to be sure, the Act will involve spending money; but on this basis, virtually all legislation would be classified as financial. The Parliament Act was introduced a century ago to ensure that the Lords could not block indefinitely a Budget passed by the Commons - so it is stretching the spirit of the law far beyond breaking point to try this sort of ruse. But, there again, as the Government has already written to many disabled people informing them of the changes to their benefits from April, when the necessary legislation has not yet been passed by Parliament, perhaps they are in a bit of a hurry.

Never has the assault on the literally most vulnerable people in our society been so full on, so evident and so utterly vicious. The whole Act is petty and narrow-minded in its conception and unyielding and bigoted in its execution. This Government, led by a Prime Minister who has had to apologise for making so-called jokes about disabled people, is the most unashamedly wicked in modern history. Not even Thatcher pushed through such mean-spirited legislation.

"Proof the Tories know nothing about real life!" I noticed someone blog today.

Well, yes, many people do think we have a Tory Government. It has certainly out-Toried every previous one by a long shot. But never, ever let us forget that this is not a majority Conservative Government. It is a Conservative-Lib Dem Coalition. And today, these measures have been passed only with the vital support of Lib Dem MPs. Oh yes, a handful of them rebelled, and plenty of them doubtless wrung their hands and muttered about the deficit. But they still put their hands up to support this pernicious assault on some of the poorest and sickest people in Britain. They are not passive bystanders helplessly witnessing some unfolding tragedy; rather, they are active participants in a crime against society.

Yes, they whine and shake their heads apologetically alongside people like Nadine Dorries MP who declare people not to be disabled if they are able to text or twitter; alongside people like Philip Davies MP, who thinks people with mental health problems should be exempted from being paid the national minimum wage, and alongside Tories who echo and support the words of Cllr Luke MacKenzie of Basildon who thinks "unwashed" disabled people should move to North Korea.

I am married to a disabled person who got her letter informing her of her ATOS assessment for future eligibility last week. She had been expecting it for some months but needless to say, the prospect of an employee of a French IT company deciding whether or not she is disabled enough after a forty minute interview (if it lasts that long) is not an appealing prospect. And in the climate of hostility engendered by the Government, with its peddling of myths about scroungers and the workshy, she has, like many others (including police statistics) tracked a rising degree of overt hostility from complete strangers in recent months. This is fuelled by the lies repeated over and over again by Con Dem MPs, who often muddle things like Incapacity Benefit and Disability Living Allowance - I choked with bemusement and anger listening to Nick Clegg talking about the need to get people off DLA and back to work last year: DLA is not an out-of-work benefits, but rather paid in recognition of the higher costs faced by disabled people in participating in society. Frequently, DLA is the vital aid that ensures many disabled people CONTINUE to work. Without it, tens of thousands now in work will end up on the dole.

To be fair, the Lib Dem federal conference voted substantially against most of what the Government is doing. Many Lib Dems are far more than slightly uncomfortable about the changes. But Lib Dem members can't have it both ways - their MPs and Peers have, with a handful of honourable exceptions, consistently voted for this legislation. Their leader and parliamentarians have ignored their demands and concerns. So if ordinary members really disagree with this most disgraceful piece of legislation, targeting vulnerable people and using dubious parliamentary methods to rush it through it time, the only true course left to them is to leave their party. If they genuinely hold to any shred of socially progressive belief in the welfare state or a vaguely humane society, they will walk away from a party which is now simply one of the twin engines of a vehicle driving forward on full-throttle the most extreme rightwing project in British history. There can be no more excuses.

If they don't leave, if they stay in collusion with the rank disablists who run our government, then as the saying goes, by their friends shall you know them.

UPDATE: New survey by Scope shows massive increase in abuse of disabled people following Government and media stigmatising of benefits claimants. More here.

A Joke No More...

Housing - the Benefit of Mutuals

Hidden as a footnote in the BBC business news today is the report from the mutual Building Societies Association that in 2011, approved lending in this not-for-profit sector rose by a substantial 15% overall, with a massive 49% increase in mortgage lending. At the same time, the corporate banking sector saw a small decline in overall lending in spite of the increasingly desperate efforts of the Con Dem Government to get the "Masters of the Universe" as the financial PLC sector used to refer to themselves to lend cash to get the economy out of the doldrums.

Mutuals have long been advocated by many in the socialist and green movements as a key part of the solution to a free market economy based on speculation and accumulation. Formed out of mutual aid friendly societies as long as the late 18th century, British building societies have always worked on the basis of sufficiency - never lending more than came in and limiting what members could take at any one time; and, critically, not seeking profits for any purpose other than reinvesting in the business. There are no shareholders, no owners and no money taken out.

The result was that by the late 1980s, the sector was large and healthy, and at that stage still relatively diverse in spite of a trend of mergers. But the Thatcherite era saw an infusion of new possibilities for financial mutuals first of all to diversify their services and then to "go public" - become publicly listed companies making profits for shareholders. In other words, to become banks. Key to this was the 1986 Building Societies Act, as Thatcherite a piece of legislation as you could possibly find, which paved the way for the cash-grab of the bankers.

I briefly worked for the Bradford-based National & Provincial Building Society in its last days as a mutual. As its Board tilted towards de-mutualisation, scores of high paid executives were imported from the banking sector in a veritable frenzy of backslapping bonus-sharing as they strove to find ways to become a bank. In just three years, the number of Directors increased from six to over 60. Many staff in what had been a major local employer and a means of fostering modest home ownership and savings became uncomfortable about the sponsorship of a culture of greed and pie-in-the-sky notions that, in future, N&P as it became, might sell anything at all - "even hamburgers!" one over-excited director declared.

The vanishing mutual: N&P's Bradford city centre branch, long since empty..

As it was, a couple of years after I left, the first big housing recession kicked in and their plans came to nothing. Instead of sailing their way into corporate supremacy, the financial wizards had to settle for being swallowed up first by Abby National PLC before in turn vanishing into the giant Santander PLC. The headquarters, a large building in Bradford city centre that appeared to have been architecturally inspired by lego windows, was symbolically dynamited as hordes of locals looked on, uncertain how to react other than run up the hill when the dust clouds billowed out much further than anticipated.

The intervening decade and a half up to 2008 saw the bankers egotistical bubble inflate and stretch horrendously. Old shibboleths that limited lending went by the wayside. Anything could be borrowed and repaid. Buy-to-let mortgages, where people could borrow to purchase property to rent out, were introduced after decades of being illegal - causing massive inflation in the first-time buyers sector and pricing many younger people out of the housing market for good. Mortgage limits, once pegged at 80% of house value, rose to 120% and beyond as the poison of overlending reached everywhere.

The banks have failed and failed comprehensively. Nearly four years on from the crash of 2008, most remain in hoc to the Government, which in turn is punishing ordinary people through higher taxes and reduced services, grinding the whole economy to a halt. The housing market is flatter than flat, with unscrupulous private landlords the sole beneficiaries. In spite of repeated demands from the government, small businesses especially complain that it is nigh impossible to get loans for vital investment in their businesses. Stagnation results, with unemployment and low wages driving the consequent cycle ever down.

In all, with offers of a few hundred pounds in shares to members, ten building societies took the crooked path from mutuals to plcs. Read the list now, and they have virtually all vanished or, in the case of Bradford & Bingley and the pisspoor Northern Rock, were nationalised after collapsing only for their profitable sections to be sold off to the private sector once more.

The Green New Deal, proposed just before the last election by a range of green economists and politicians, including GPEW leader Caroline Lucas, argued for the hastily nationalised banks to be broken up and re-mutualised rather than sold off. In this way, the link with the need to make profits would be broken and they could focus again on building communities and local businesses and co-operatives.

But the Government is not listening. The profitable bits of RBS are being sold off to Santander, all of which will go firmly back into the private banking sector, in spite of all the signs that it has not learnt its lessons from the avaricious mess it has got itself and all the rest of us into. 

But of course, the building societies don't make donations to the Conservative Party - perhaps the one investment that does still count these days.  

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO STOP BANKING WITH BANKS, LINK TO THE NEW MUTUALS CAMPAIGN TO VOTE WITH YOUR CASH - MOVEYOURMONEY.ORG.UK

Minding Your Ns and Qs on WMDs - IRAN, not Iraq! Doh!

Well, it's an easy mistake to make...

From Facebook - "Labour: Taking Back Our Party" group


CHECK OUT - THE FIFTY AMERICAN MILITARY BASES SURROUNDING IRAN @ THE ECOSOCIALIST- click HERE

BUSH: "This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. And having said that, all options are on the table."
OBAMA: "“No options off the table means I’m considering all options (on Iran).”

WHY THE LONG FACE?

Public Say No to Porker Capitalism

Everything has its price - capitalism eats itself!

The last week has seen executive pay high in the headlines in Britain again as we saw first the damp squib of the Con Dem government's supposed assault on overpaid corporate bosses followed by the same Government's decision to allow a bonus of nearly £1 million to be paid to Stephen Hester, the head of struggling state-owned bank, RBS. With both their report and Hester's pay, they resorted to their faux calls for responsible capitalism and for him to "do the decent thing" and hand the money back. Needless to say, there is no sign of either on the horizon.

Repeatedly, all three main parties have taken part in a mindnumbing dance of twisting and turning on executive pay. They all condemn the huge disparities in pay awards - nearly 50% increases for directors and senior managers in the FTSE 100 this last year in spite of the same bosses insistence on pay restraint among "ordinary" employees. They rail against the soaring ratios of 500:1 and higher in the top to bottom pay in some companies - a far cry from the 10 to 1 ratio seen as the "acceptable face of capitalism" back in the 1950s, not that that face showed itself quite as often as some apologists of reformist capitalism like to fondly remember.

And yet when it comes to action, they all baulk at anything effective. The furthest the Government has gone has been to propose an exceedingly modest increase in shareholder control over executive pay; but nothing on punitive taxation of bonuses; nothing on giving workers a say on the remuneration boards of big companies; nothing on squeezing down the immoral and outrageous inequalities in pay in spite of the spiralling social misery and potential disorder this is creating. In spite of their failure to pay fair or even any tax and their track record of business failure and short-sighted greed, these people, the politicians argue, are too valuable to risk them leaving Britain.

Fortunately, the public do not agree.

An opinion poll published by ICM today shows that only 7% of the public believe any executive should be paid more than £1 million. Just 1% - one per cent - of the 2,003 people surveyed agreed that the very top executives currently earning £4 million per year are worth it. Two thirds want to see workers on remuneration committees - an option ruled out last week by Business Secretary Vince Cable on the bizarre grounds that where companies have employees working overseas, it would be too difficult for them to elect representatives to sit on these bodies. Risible to say the least.

So in spite of the clear antipathy of the public to the eye watering inequalities in pay, none of the main parties offer any political action to tackle these effectively. Meanwhile, of the parties "bubbling under" in national opinion polls, only the Green Party commits itself to taking mandatory action on pay.

Three years back, I was involved in a Green Left proposal to the Green Party of England & Wales conference to set a maximum pay rate as well as the current minimum wage rate. At that time, we suggested £150,000 p.a. - roughly ten times the living wage rate. The proposal received significant support but fell short of being passed. The following year, however, the Greens adopted a policy that commits them to statutory measures to enforce a ratio of ten to one between the highest and lowest wages within any company or organisation; and the party is committed to higher tax rates for higher earners, with an emphatic endorsement of progressive taxation.

So for progressives, there is a genuine option for action on pay inequality. And as "The Spirit Level" report by Wilkinson and Pickett showed, a more equal society is one where there is much less crime, better health, stronger communities and higher levels of happiness. It also paves the way to a more sustainable fostering and use of resources at a time when many of the most basic are under increasing pressure. So everyone would benefit.

Meantime, under the Old Grey Parties, Britain remains firmly set on a course towards social disintegration. Austerity and authoritarianism are the watchwords of our gradually more and more embattled elite as it seeks to suppress rather than resolve the despair of the squeezed majority. Like the ancient Spartiate nobility in its decline, terrified by the growing resentment of its helot underclass, British capitalism is teetering over the abyss between chaotic collapse and social fascism.

Another news item today, on the BBC website, highlights that in Papua New Guinea, the price of a bride is four pigs. Checking the current price of adult saddleback pigs in Britain, the monthly pay of someone on the national minimum wage is worth less than two pigs - and of course that falls to zero when compared to the cost of the greedy porkers sitting in the boardrooms of "broken Britain."

Trickle down economics - from The ConDem Effect