I give up - does anyone read this blog?

If so, just add a comment to this entry saying 'Yes'. No details required (unless you'd like to volunteer them). I'd dearly like to know.

25/7/2010 - Well, in the 30 days since I posed this question, it turns out that there have been 174 views of this page. I guess you're all too shy to speak up! But it would be nice to know - it's quite dispiriting to write and not be read. Blogging is a bit like standing on a high cliff on a foggy night and shoutin ginto the darkness - does anyone hear anything?

National budgets and global economies

George Osborne delivers his first budget and insists that it is fair. I’m not sure what he means by this, but it is hard to see how it can be. Regardless of what Mr Osborne wants, he simply lacks the political levers needed to control the economy or to decide who bears the burden of the recovery. Of the three key controls, he has access to (and by no means full control over) just one: the UK public sector, including the livelihoods of millions who not only did not cause this recession but also are the main victims.

As for the other two areas - the private sector and the global economy - what can he say? But, being a mainstream politician who therefore cannot confess that the social system he works in is profoundly dysfunctional, he has no power over the UK private sector, especially the banks. I know from my one personal experience that the banks are doing very well at the moment, thank you, and despite a piffling bank tax, will do even better in future. But George cannot do anything about them, because they are his mates in the City – not exactly the Tories’ targets of choice - and because faith in the beneficence of untrammeled markets and big business is in the very the bedrock of Tory thought. Indeed, I suspect that most Tories cannot imagine what taking the City to task would even mean (and I doubt that many Labour or Liberal politicians would do any better).

But even that is a relatively small problem. The real reason why the private sector is free from political action is not that it is sacrosanct but that it invulnerable. Capital will simply go somewhere else. The reason it is free to do this is not that this is some sort of natural phenomenon – the mysterious workings of the market – but because we lack a political system with the span of control, the competence and the willingness to take action on a global scale. There are no true global or inter-governmental political institutions, and such economic institutions as do exist at that level – the WTO, IMF, etc. – have effective power only over the weak (and therefore, like the poor in this country, the very people who require support, not budget cuts), and remain committed to the market ideology that got us into this mess in the first place.

At the moment this gap can be filled only when the politicians of all the major economies can agree on a common policy. But that is extremely unlikely, because the very mobility of capital that allows banks and others to flout local economic controls also creates a bidding war between struggling national economies that forces national politicians to make their own economies as attractive as possible to global capital.

Tough luck, George. But you can do something about it. You can start to admit that the global economy requires direction, not only to escape from the present recession but also avoid future problems with the environment, with global development, and so on. Secondly, you can agree that that direction must be active - not just ‘market forces’ and more than regulation but positive organisation (or at least active alignment) of its basic forces with the world’s basic needs. And finally, you can start to campaign for the truly global political system, without which any aspirations to a coherent economic system are completely forlorn.

You won’t, of course, and neither will your Liberal or Labour counterparts. Because you are, after all, a mainstream politician for whom the present system is so all-encompassing that you cannot even imagine what it is. Asking you to grasp the nature of global society is like asking a fish to point at the sea it is swimming in – obviously everywhere, but so pervasive that it cannot be conceived by any run-of-the-mill fish like you. So we all limp along, with little hope for anything but the weasel words of a well-intentioned bloke who is unable to solve the problem he is confronted with, but too immodest to concede that there is nothing he can - or will - do.

Margaret Thatcher – a re-evaluation

Driving home this morning I catch Woman’s Hour, the excellent Radio 4 programme, where they are conducting a balloon debate. The question is, ‘Who has done the most to put women on the political map in the UK?’, and the four individuals in the balloon are Mary Wollstonecraft (author in 1792 of the Vindication of the Rights of Women), Emmeline Pankhurst (the great heroine of suffragette activism), Barbara Castle (who gave British women the Equal Pay Act and ensured that the contraceptive pill would be readily available for all – perhaps the two most important changes to women’s position in a century), and finally Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s only woman prime minister.

By an overwhelming majority and to the audience’s obvious delight, Margret Thatcher is the first to be tossed out. And I think, a good thing too – it is just a pity we did not have such simple, practical solutions to her presence when she was PM. She had the unique knack of correctly identifying every important political problem the country faced, and then choosing a solution that actually made things worse. Her period in office began with her quickly becoming the most unpopular PM in British history, and ended with the British middle classes rioting in the streets of London about her wretched poll tax. By the time she was finally ejected from office (by her own party), I could no longer listen to her voice without feeling something between enraged and physically sick. Had it not been for the Falklands War, she would have been out on her ear in one of the shortest premierships ever recorded.

I must admit that the Falklands was the one subject on which I actually agreed with Thatcher. Only the worst charlatan or the greatest fool could imagine that handing over 1400 innocent people to the truly vicious Argentine military dictatorship could possibly be justified by either an 18th-century treaty with Spain or the desire to harm her government by any means possible.

Nowadays, however, I find myself increasingly agreeing with another of her ideas – and in this case, perhaps as central an idea to Thatcherism as there ever was. Am I undergoing a conversion?

The idea in question is Thatcher’s notorious dictum that there is no such thing as society. Or, more fully:

there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. [Interview 23 September 1987]

At the time I had quite grand ideas about the reality of society, and regarded Thatcher as simply another Tory fool with absolutely no understanding about how society really works – definitely a candidate for a GCSE Sociology course.

Now I am less confident. And again I have Margaret Thatcher (and her associates) to thank for this. For there really is very little left of society - now that, for three decades, the other great social force Thatcher was willing to acknowledge – the market – has had its way. What really is left of society? So well done Margaret, I’m finally persuaded: there is no such thing as society. There’s just the desert you and your kind left behind. Thanks.

Are Boomers to blame?

An interesting article over at the Burning Platform site - a nicely expressed summary of the widespread sense in the USA that our current crisis is caused by Boomer fecklessness, corporate greed and other cultural and psychological failings. This is the comment I posted:

Nice article but still just a footnote to the culture-wars debate. No real analysis of capitalism as an economic system, so not likely to get to the real nub of the matter. Just as your car is ultimately driven by its underlying engineering and your driving style only affects what it is capable of in relatively small ways, so the basic rules of a capitalist system are clear and simple and all this anger about corporate greed and reckless Boomers is secondary. So are complaints about CEOs offshoring America’s jobs: if you don’t get the basic fact that globalisation is the natural expression of capitalism and completely indifferent to American interests then you are just going to be reduced to another branch of the Tea Party any day now. A capitalist economy pursues the maximum possible ROI – and that is necessarily greater than any sustainable return from the real economy. So this structural requirement for ever-increasing profit will soon cease to be met by any conceivable real economy, especially in peace-time, and the unreal economy, where imaginary values can be made to look real just long enough to cash the cheques, will start to take over. But even the financial sector is only the pure form of capitalism: _all_ sectors of a capitalist economy – including the real economy – will eventually be forced to resort to the same tricks – short-termism, unsustainable debt, insane risks, creative accounting, illusory economics, perpetual motion machines, ridiculous leverage, subsidies to the biggest and richest companies, the constant destruction of (and forced demand for more) goods and services to fight imaginary security threats, and finally just plain dishonesty. Where else are the profits in a mature, free and open economy going to come from? Well, you could try being less mature, free and open, but I don’t think that’s a policy direction any of the subscribers to this site would like much – being cheap labour and having a security-obsessed state isn’t much of a future. None of which has anything to do with Boomers or greed or other cultural or psychological explanations. They are the symptoms – along with environmental devastation, the looting of developing countries, the appalling levels of poverty within America itself, the absurd dishonesty of so much of the media and government, and much else. But they are not the disease.

Not, I suspect, very congenial to most of the readers on that site, nor likely to be responded to, but what the hell.

Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson - a brief review

Well, I've been reading Marilynne Robinson's universally acclaimed Gilead, and at page 83 I've given up.

I cannot imagine what inspires critics to such paeans. If you believe that piety and quietism are the pre-eminent virtues, then perhaps it has something to recommend it, but I just found it a dull collection of inconsequential thoughts by a very ordinary person whose reminiscences do nothing whatsoever for me. Here the boldness and adventure of the great trek's to the American West collapse into the parochialism and thoughtless faith to which the physical harshness and the cultural smallness of the colonialist’s existence is inevitably prey.

Nothing is allowed to disturb its fearful religiosity. The son returning from Germany, armed with Feuerbach's brilliant, profound and sensitive atheism, is cast out. Every possibility of criticism or change, every attempt to hold their beliefs up to scrutiny, is rejected, and the resulting rigidity – which the author presents as timeless simplicity – creates a society inhabited by individuals (like the book’s protagonist) who are no doubt gentle and humane on the surface, but who, when threatened with anything they do not know, are likely to either be crushed (a tragedy for them) or turn their back (a tragedy for peace and democracy in 1914 and 1939) or lash out in the name of their vengeful Lord (a tragedy for the society about them, or at least for anyone who is not like them).

If I were looking for a simple explanation for why America scares me, this would be it.

Deepwater Horizon

An interesting (and more than a little unnerving) contribution to the current debate on the Deepwater Horizon spillage at http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article19923.html from Dr Stephen A Rinehart - advocating the use of nuclear weapons to plug the hole, raising the prospect of the Gulf of Mexico rapidly degenerating into a carcinogenic benzene pool, and concluding that 'this is a “National Emergency” on the scale of a nuclear weapon attack'. The author's conclusion:

Bottom Line: We are looking at the worse environmental disaster in human
history and it continues to grow and the US Government has failed totally in
responding to this epic crisis because of BP and Big Oil political clout and
money.