EcoLogics

EcoLogics breaks a self-imposed hibernation to comment on the disastrous outcome of Copenhagen:

Let’s be very clear: the future that awaits us in the era of the Chinese empire that is fast replacing its American counterpart is grim—very grim. Even if one is critical of the systematic Sinophobia that characterises U.S. and European media representations of most matters Chinese, it seems very clear that the following decades will make the authoritarianism, and the culture of corruption associated with Anglo-American neoliberalism seem meek and mild by comparison to what is coming. Chinese rulers have been, and will in all probability continue to be absolutely ruthless. They are also corrupt.

That said, the current effort on the part of British and U.S. spinmeisters to blame China (‘and a few other countries in Latin America’) for the abject failure of the Copenhagen talks is as foolish as trying to say that New Labour’s Ed Miliband played a key role in ’saving’ some kind of agreement. Both versions are not only disingenuous, but extraordinarily convenient to the cause of the selfsame neoliberal forces that Miliband represents, and which have worked so hard to scupper any truly meaningful agreement. If you want to get a sense of what really is the outcome of the deal, and how it was achieved, have a read of Joss Garman’s ‘Copenhagen: Historic Failure that will Live in Infamy‘.

EcoLogics’ one proviso is that Garman is wrong—or is playing politics—when his article singles out Ed Miliband for praise. The following excerpt from the Guardian pretty much sums up the attitude and true stance of New Labour, behind all of its quasi-green grandstanding:

Last night Miliband was being credited with helping to rescue the summit from disaster. He had been preparing to go to bed at 4am, after the main accord had been agreed, only to be called by officials and warned that several countries were threatening to veto its signature. Miliband returned to the conference centre in time to hear Sudanese delegate Lumumba Di-Aping comparing the proposed agreement to the Holocaust. He said the deal “asked Africa to sign a suicide pact, an incineration pact, in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries”. A furious Miliband intervened and dismissed Di-Aping’s claims as “disgusting”.

Just what is ‘disgusting’? The fact that Lumumba Di-Aping spoke the truth? Or that he spoke the truth ‘out of turn’, and in so doing broke the spell of lies that had already begun to be spun by Britain, the United States, and the small group of signatories of the Judas-like betrayal of Kyoto? We have here the true measure of the cynicism, and hypocrisy of New Labour.

And so we come full circle. Last night, in a speech delivered as part of the Scott Society’s Hugo Young Lectures (yet more evidence of the Guardian’s swerve to the right?), Cameron finally came out and showed his true colours, his truly blue face: what we need, he said, is less government, and more ‘social entrepreneurs’, i.e. replacing the tattered remains of the welfare state with a neo-Victorian form of philanthropy.

I will return to this suggestion below. First, a very brief history of David ‘Janus’ Cameron’s progressivism. The Janus in question is not the god of transitions, symbolised in Roman mythology by way of gates and doorways. Instead, the appellation refers to the modern interpretation of the myth, which is to say someone who puts on a mask that is appropriate to whatever context s/he wishes to manipulate.

When the media limelight has been shining on him, Cameron has been a paragon of conservative moderation, almost to the point of a centre ‘left’ liberalism. Cameron has, in this sense, worked very hard to persuade us that he is a TeePee Tory, i.e. a Tory Progressive intent on transforming the Conservative Party from the defender of class-bound privilege into something akin to a ‘broad tent’ party, what this blog describes ironically as the PPP: the People’s Progressive Party. It has often been noted that Cameron has stolen Blair’s clothing, and so he has, in the sense that it was Blair who came up with the idea of taking the ‘old’ Labour Party quite far to the political right while protesting loudly about the need for more social justice. But whereas Blair and the rest of the New Labour nomenklatura really did force Labour to swing to the right, Cameron has only paid lip service to liberalism, engaging in backroom deals which, if anything, will push Britain in the direction of a greater authoritarianism than even Blair or Brown have managed.

A case in point, Cameron’s stance on homophobia. In early July, Cameron made headlines when he announced that he was officially ashamed of the Tories’ infamous Section 28, a part of a Local Government Act passed by the Tories in 1988, which stated that a local authority ‘shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality’ or ‘promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’.

But just two months earlier, the Westminister commentariat chose to look the other way when, during an unseasonably warm weekend at the very end of May, Cameron flew out to Poland on a semi-secret mission. Having ditched his party’s old alliance on the European scene with the centre-right parties of Merkel and Sarkosy, Cameron went to Poland to seal a new pact with a rag-tag of ultra-nationalist parties, known as the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR). The deal was apparently a payment in kind, agreed in the last Tory leadership contest, during which Cameron bought the votes of the farther-right in the party by promising to axe the alliance with ‘federalist’ centre-right European parties.

The result of this deal with the Tory devils is that Cameron now leads an agglomeration of right, and far-right groups, some of which are explicitly homophobic: take for example the Kaczyński twins, the leaders of the hard-right Polish Law and Justice Party. One of the twins, Lech, is the current president of Poland. The other, Jaroslaw, was the prime minister until the current PM, Donald Tusk, defeated him in the 2007 general elections. Amongst other authoritarian policies, the Law and Justice Party advocates strengthening restrictions on abortion, which is already illegal in Poland except in extraordinary circumstances. They also oppose same-sex marriages or any other form of legal recognition of homosexual couples. Jarosław Kaczyński has been quoted as saying that homosexuals should not be teachers, but that homosexuals ‘would not be persecuted’. He has, however, also stated that “The affirmation of homosexuality will lead to the downfall of civilization. We can’t agree to it”.

Another member of the same party, Michal Kaminski, is now the formal leader of the ECR. For those who haven’t heard about him, Kaminiski was recently denounced for his neo-Nazi past by the not exactly progressive David Miliband. As if this were not bad enough, the ECR group also includes Latvia’s ‘For Fatherland and Freedom Party’, which helps to organise the annual celebrations in that country of the veterans of the Latvian Waffen SS. So in addition to homophobics, Cameron appears to have allied himself with Nazi sympathizers.

The contradiction between Cameron’s perorations about Section 28, and his alliance with the mentioned parties cannot be spin-doctored away. No truly progressive or liberal politician would ever countenance establishing an alliance with the likes of the Polish Law and Justice Party, let alone the Latvian Fatherland and Freedom Party. We have to conclude that the real Cameron—i.e. the social formation that he really represents—is anything but progressive. On the contrary, his claims to liberalism are no more (and no less) than PR fodder for all those who don’t follow politics closely, and who may be conned into thinking that Cameron is what he has worked very hard to make himself appear to be. Of course, any politician must always be something of a chamaeleon, but in this lizard’s case, it is the iridophores—the layer of cells that reflect blue incident light—that predominate.

Alas, until last night, conservatives with a capital or small ‘c’ might well have dismissed this critique as the figment of a left-wing imagination. But during the speech given in the Hugo Young Lecture, Cameron began to lose the face that he has managed to show the mainstream media, and which the media have so happily agreed to show to their audiences. As he turned to look at the people who attended the Hugo Young Lecture, Cameron’s audience will have seen the monstrous visage not so much of Margaret Thatcher, but of a youthful, 21st century British equivalent of Ronald Reagan, the true modern father of Tory slash ‘n burn policies—the same policies that have made the United States what it is today. Cameron spoke of paradox in his speech, but the real paradox is that, just when the United States is waking up to the terrible legacy of Reaganite neoliberalism, England, Wales and Northern Ireland are about to re-elect a party that not only was the chief accomplice of Reaganism between 1980 and 1997, but is now set to take this complicity even further to the right.

Cameron’s big idea is that, instead of ‘big government’, we need ‘big society’. (How does a politician change the size of a society!?) ‘The era of big government’, he said in the speech, ‘has run its course. Poverty and inequality have got worse, despite Labour’s massive expansion of the state. We need new answers now, and they will only come from a bigger society, not bigger government.’ At the heart of his proposal is the idea of using ‘social entrepreneurs’.

In case you don’t know what this term means, it’s the buzz word for people who have made careers out of engaging in philanthropic activities that blur the line between charity, and business. Cameron singled out one such entrepreneur in his speech: Debbie Scott, the head of Tomorrow’s People. If you visit their website, you will find the philosophy of social entrepreneurship clearly stated from the very beginning: ‘We help break the cycle of unemployment so that people can take positive control of their lives and build a brighter future’–and in the same breath, ‘We also save employers time and money by finding them the right people for the right jobs.’

Ah, so that’s what it’s about—how clever! Social entrepreneurs make their careers by taking over the roles traditionally accorded to the welfare state, and turning them into charitable or so-called ‘social’ enterprises. Put simply, there’s money to be made from poverty.

To the right-wing New Labourites that Cameron is out to seduce, this may sound like a good idea. But it is only good if you fail to consider two problems. First, unlike state entities, such charities are under no obligation to provide universal coverage for their services. They help whomever they choose to help. They are no different, in this sense, from traditional philanthropies of the kind that were the only palliative during the Victorian era. From this perspective, Cameron is inviting us to return to a Victorian form of social justice, where the disadvantaged are helped only if someone takes pity.

The second problem is that, despite Cameron’s efforts to portray New Labour as the party of big government, what he is proposing is exactly what New Labout itself has been doing for the better part of 12 years. Far from simply expanding the state, New Labour has been pouring money into corporate welfarism. It has outsourced more and more state roles to darling donors such as Capita and the failed Carter & Carter, companies which might well describe themselves as being run by ‘social entrepreneurs’. Sandy Leitch’s Review of Skills was coached precisely in the terms of social entrepreneurship, and it its most recent proposals, New Labour is saying that it will even pay private hospitals to get treatment for patients—perhaps even private doctors might now be called social entrepreneurs!

So no, New Labour has not so much expanded the state, as used more and more state money to fill the coffers of private organisations run by social parasites that long ago figured out that there was lots of money to be made by criticising the welfare state, and then fulfilling some of its vital functions for profit—or at least, for personal career or political gain.

The one thing that has slightly—ever so slightly—mitigated New Labour’s hell-for-leather push to privatise has been the fact that the party still depends on the unions for votes, and crucially, for money. In this, the blog’s penultimate post, EcoLogics asks readers thinking of voting for Cameron’s ‘TeePee’ Conservatives: what will mitigate the policies of the party of privilege, and indeed, the party which has seen fit to join up with the likes of Michal Kaminski?

Update 30 November 2009

See ‘Britain faces return to Victorian levels of poverty‘ in The Independent

Updated 24 November 2009 (scroll the bottom of the post to see latest updates)

If you read this article in the Independent, you might come away feeling relieved that the great tide of authoritarianism that has characterised New Labour’s years in power is starting to ebb. Under the headline “Ministers cancel ‘Big Brother’ database”, the paper says that ‘Plans to store information about every phone call, email and internet visit in the United Kingdom have in effect been abandoned by the Government’, and that the decision to postpone further legislation could be ‘to kill off the plans for years.’

If, however, you read the Telegraph (which you really shouldn’t), a rather different picture emerges. Under the headline “State to ’spy’ on every phone call, email and web search’, that paper suggests that

All telecoms companies and internet service providers will be required by law to keep a record of every customer’s personal communications, showing who they have contacted, when and where, as well as the websites they have visited.[...] Despite widespread opposition to the increasing amount of surveillance in Britain, 653 public bodies will be given access to the information, including police, local councils, the Financial Services Authority, the ambulance service, fire authorities and even prison governors.[...] They will not require the permission of a judge or a magistrate to obtain the information, but simply the authorisation of a senior police officer or the equivalent of a deputy head of department at a local authority.

Which version of events is the correct one? EcoLogics suspects that both papers are right. New Labour probably has decided to shelve plans for a single database, reluctantly realising that it’s a vote looser. Senior New Labour politicians must be having quiet talks with Entrust and other digital security corporations, explaining that they’re very sorry but it isn’t feasible to deliver the promised contracts, at least not yet. At the same time, the politicians will be explaining to Britain’s increasingly deliberative security services that the single database isn’t that great a loss because the information will be there, awaiting to be used, in the databases of private corporations like BT or Virgin. Now isn’t that reassuring?

Even as the two papers make headlines on this subject, if you read the BBC news, you will find out that good ‘ole Jack Straw has got his way with New Labour plans to replace public enquiries with secret inquests. The conclusion has to be that, if anything, that tide of New Labour authoritarianism is in full flow.

By the way, the ‘Part II’ in the title of this post is a reference to the earlier The New Labour Modus Operandi.

Update 24 November 2009: The news media are devoting headlines to the fact that a former police officer has denounced the police for deliberately arresting people in order to obtain their DNA, a policy which is not only illegal, but has had the effect of increasing the proportion of DNA samples taken from ethnic minorities, relative to their actual numbers in civil society. For an account of this practice, which would confirm the existence of a New Labour-Police conspiracy to introduce a universal DNA sample by the back door, see this Reuters account.

A short note to say that the news that Peter Mandelson is planning to slash spending on training for young people should come as a surprise to no one. New Labour’s educational policy—which is to say, its ‘skills’ policy, for education has long since become a bad word in New Labour circles—is premised on a species of consequentialism that is particularly susceptible to the wayward fluctuations of neoliberal politics.

Before the banking crisis, companies such as Carter & Carter successfully lobbied New Labour politicians for state ‘donations’ in the form of corporate welfare payments, and money flowed from the state into the bulging coffers of the burgeoning private FE/HE sector. But now that vast sums of state money have disappeared down the sinkholes of banks such as Lloyds and RBS, the claim will increasingly be that there is no money to be had for anything else—not even for projects that were once the darlings of New Labour’s ‘train to gain’ variety of clientelism. (Expeditionary wars such as those of Afghanistan or Iraq will continue to be excluded from the accounting because they make money for the merchants of death, and, like the Trident nuclear subs, have the cover of the sacred for British politicians who still cannot let go of a ‘glorious’ past).

EcoLogics wonders: what will happen in this brave new world of alleged scarcity to stalwart defenders of the New Lab skills faith such as Howard Newby? Will they now be busy stroking the Conservatives, in the hope of securing the continuation of the political conditions required for an on-going spirit of creation in higher and further education?

Whatever the case, the upshot is that a badly misguided, if not corrupt policy will be replaced by a return to good ‘ole Thatcherite slash—and—burnism. And like the Tory grandees who were ousted from power in 1997, Peter Mandelson, Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and the rest of the New Labour nomenklatura will be voted out, but will also retire to corporate adviserships, the writing of ‘memoirs’, and perhaps the odd bit of TV presenting for the BBC or ITV, à la Michael Portillo.

The future is bright, isn’t it? But it certainly isn’t orange.

In the wake of the news about Alan Johnson’s decision to promote xenophobia in the UK, EcoLogics suggests that the neo-Nazis have much to learn from the New Labour politicians. The trick, Nick, is to appeal to ‘common sense’, and to an apparent ‘common ground’, one that makes ‘us’ the normal, the victims, and ‘them’ the abnormal, the perpetrators: say, as Jack Straw did, that you find it difficult to talk to women who are wearing a veil; or say, like Johnson has just done, that ‘There are communities which have been disproportionately affected by immigration, where people have legitimate concerns about the strain that the growth in the local population has placed on jobs and services’.

And New Labour claims to be outraged over the rise of the BNP? As noted by this blog in earlier posts, the rise of neo-Nazi politics in the UK is clearly linked to the racism and xenophobia of New Labour itself.

This blogger’s first reaction to the news that Mandelson is banging on again about ’student consumers’ and university courses that need to provide ‘economic benefits’  was to stifle a yawn almost as big as Mandelson’s ego. Vision? What vision?

But then this sequence of ideas crossed my bloggerly mind:

1) Mandelson, like the rest of the British neocons before him (and that is what Mandelson is, a neoconservative), is saying that education is a matter of consumption. Ergo, education is a commodity like any other, and can and should be given a price.

2) If education can be commodified, then so can anything else—including, of course, politics. Politics, and by implication politicians like Mandelson, can and should be given a price.

3) So what is Peter’s price? And how should we calculate his exchange value: by way of what lecturers and students would be willing to pay for him, or what Russian (and not just Russian) oligarchs have been willing, or will be willing to pay for his invaluable services?

The possibilities for corruption, if you really stick to New Labour’s partitura, are endless. Indeed, the simple argument presented above explains why neoliberalism is inherently corrupt: its economic fundamentalism means that it gives everything a price, and in so doing, puts everything, everyone, up for sale.

You can always tell when Rupert Murdoch, or one of his proxies, needs to undermine a view that runs against his/their right-wing ideology. It’s what this blogger describes as rottweiler journalism. For a good example, see the headline below:

Murdoch doesn't like David Nutt

Note how the picture is not only at the top of the article, but actually implies, by way of the caption, that the photo is of Nutt himself, ergo Nutt is a drug user. It doesn’t get less subtle than that, does it? For an analysis of similar tricks over at the Guardian, see The Guardian and Peter Mandelson.

Post published originally on 1 November 2009; updated 12 December 2009: It’ll take more than formaldehyde, Tony; final update on 18 December 2009: is Tony Blair, effectively, a ‘non-dom’ like Zac Goldsmith?

Here’s a mathematical equation with which to characterise Tony Blair: T=Po/M+P

If the Daily Mail isn’t lying through its teeth—which it may well be doing—then news about Tony Blair provide us with the best evidence yet that Blair’s nothing but an apparatchik for big business.

According to the Daily Mail,

Tony Blair has been in talks with Tesco about helping them open supermarkets in the Middle East – allegedly in return for up to £1m. It is believed the discussions between the supermarket chain and the former PM ended after the two sides failed to agree terms.

Two thoughts on this. First, how naive of us to think that Tony Blair only got himself named as a peace envoy in order to pretend that he still mattered. We always knew that it was a bit rich for the man to pretend he was a peacemaker after he got Britain into two wars, and after it became clear that his power owed much to his shadowy relation with the Labour Friends of Israel lobby group. But to be honest, this blogger’s corruption radar never even contemplated the possibility that Blair might find a Middle East angle for the money side of his greed. It was bad enough that he was anything but a neutral figure in Palestinian-Israeli negotiations; to seek to make a fast million bucks on the back of his dubious role as peacemaker is truly emetic.

The second thought is that anyone who has done their homework will know that if indeed the Daily Mail isn’t lying, then the news not only confirm, but add proverbial insult to the injury of a pattern that began to emerge almost as soon as Tony Blair got into power. That pattern can be expressed by way of a simple mathematical equation:

Let T=Tony

Let P=Politics

Let M=Money

Let Po=Power

Here’s the equation:   T=Po/M+P. Put in less abstract terms, Tony is power divided by a combination of politics and money.

We first saw the curve of this equation during the Ecclestone Affair, when Blair welcomed to 10 Downing Street two characters who have since been revealed to have, shall we say, a Fascist sense of fun. We saw it again during the Iraq War, or what might be renamed the Cheney-Haliburton Conflict, when Tony not only bent right over for Cheney-Bush but then cashed in by taking a role as an ‘advisor’ with J P Morgan, part of the bankfia that did rather well from the Iraq war and whose bonus culture is still ripping off people across the world. And even now that Tony’s gone, the UK is still paying dearly for Tony’s cash–for–honours scandal. Witness, for example, Capita’s on-going role as the giant of government outsourcing of public sector IT.

So no, knowing what we know about Tony Blair’s and indeed New Labour’s corruption, it should not be surprising at all to confirm that Blair has indeed used his office in Jerusalem to drum up new business opportunities for himself in the Middle East. You can almost imagine him on the phone: Tescos! BAE! Capita! Join the Crusade!

No wonder that, shortly after it was announced that he would be making millions off his relation with the bankfia, Tony said that

Nowadays, the intersection between politics and the economy in different parts of the world, including the emerging markets, is very strong.

‘Emerging markets’, and ‘intersection’, indeed.

Update 2 December 2009: Bounty for Blair

Well done  The Guardian for publishing an exposé, and in effect setting up a bounty for Tony Blair—or rather, for the ‘capture’ of his potentially corrupt financial dealings. See The Mystery of Tony Blair’s Finances

Update 12 December 2009: It’ll take more than formaldehyde, Tony

You may have missed this choice morsel of news: Tony Blair was reportedly paid a cool £90.000 for giving a speech about formaldehyde in honour of the opening of a new plant in Azerbaijan. According to the Guardian, this is what he told the great and the good gathered for the event: “To be honest, until I looked at the list of what formaldehyde does, I had no idea of how many parts of my life were governed by the existence of this thing. When I go back home, I will tell my nine-year-old boy: ‘Stop all other studies and concentrate on formaldehyde and you will be fine!’”

This weekend we hear that Tony is once again trying to spin his way out of the fiasco—many would say the war crimes—that he helped to create in Iraq. He is, evidently, feeling the pressure of the Chilcot Enquiry. It occurs to this blogger that Blair’s new-found expertise in formaldehyde might come in handy: the chemical has at least three applications which seem particularly appropriate for Tony’s task at hand:

1) As an embalming fluid: if only formaldehyde could be used to embalm Tony’s image, as it stood just after the 1997 elections.

2) As a disinfectant. According to Wikipedia, ‘An aqueous solution of formaldehyde can be useful as a disinfectant as it kills most bacteria and fungi (including their spores)….Formaldehyde solutions are applied topically in medicine to dry the skin, such as in the treatment of warts.’ What a wart in your career that decision to go to war in Iraq has become, eh Tony?

3) As a process C-41 (color negative film) stabilizer in the final wash step. Maybe Tony, just maybe, the Chilcot Enquiry will serve precisely this function: as a kind of final wash step which will allow you to settle down a little more comfortably to the business of raking in millions via the deals you made with banks and other businesses.

Updated 18 December 2009: Speaking of those millions…is Tony Blair, effectively, a ‘non-dom’ like Zac Goldsmith?

From the Guardian:

“A little-known loophole in UK company law is being used by Tony Blair to keep his finances secret, the Guardian can disclose. Blair would normally have to publish company accounts detailing the millions flowing into his various commercial ventures since he stepped down from office in 2007. But he has set up a complicated artificial structure which avoids the normal rule. In effect, he is getting the benefits of running a British company without the drawbacks of unwelcome publicity.”"When Blair refused to give any information, the Guardian ran a worldwide online competition as an experiment in crowd-sourcing, to find the best explanation for his schemes. The winner was crusading accountant Richard Murphy, of Tax Research UK. He identified the small print of the Partnership (Accounts) Regulations 2008 as the key to the mystery. ‘Memo to Peter Mandelson: this really is an abuse you should stop very soon,’ he says. Murphy adds: ‘What is it that Tony is so keen to hide that he’ll go to this length and this cost to do so?’ While the law requires Blair to publish limited accounts for parts of the Windrush entities, the finances of the master-partnership remain a secret. More than £6m can be seen to have cascaded down from the partnership into other companies. But details of the full revenues remain hidden. Murphy claims this gives Blair all the advantages of an offshore “secrecy jurisdiction” while allowing him to state, correctly, that he remains a regular, onshore, British taxpayer.”

In some of this blog’s very first posts (see A Social Ecology of the Buccal Swab, or McNulty’s Genie), EcoLogics described the role that former Minister for Policing Tony McNulty played in sneaking in New Labour’s de facto universal DNA database policy. In ‘A Social Ecology of the Buccal Swab; or, When Gattaca came to the UK’, EcoLogics compared the near-future science fiction film Gattaca with the reality of the UK’s then-present political culture:

Gattaca’s future, imagined in our own past, is arguably New Labour’s present. In March [2007], its Home Office produced a document with a magnificently unthreatening title (‘Modernising Police Powers: Review of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) 1984’). The document nonetheless paves the way for what might well be described as the Gattacaization of the UK. The document has been put on the internet by statewatch.org(1), and arguably provides a good example of New Labour’s political stealth technologies, a modus operandi that this blog describes in some detail in The New Labour Modus Operandi. One of the ‘suggested areas for consideration’ in Chapter 3 concerns ‘Biometric information and identification procedures’. This section raises the prospect of universal DNA ‘sampling’, to be applied even for what it describes as ‘so-called minor offences’. However, it does so rather elliptically:

‘3.33 The absence of the ability to take fingerprints etc in relation to all offences may be considered to undermine the value and purpose of having the ability to confirm or disprove identification and, importantly, to make checks on a searchable database aimed at detecting existing and future offending and protecting the public. There have been notable successes particularly through the use of the DNA database in bringing offenders to justice.

3.34 Is there scope to populate identification databases and remove unnecessary operational constraints on the extent to which police are able to use fingerprints etc. to prevent, detect and investigate crime?’(2)

That little ‘etc.’ may well be the most loaded etc. in the history of UK policing legislation. A number of commentators have noted how the proposed policy erodes civil liberties to the point that it may well complete the UK’s transformation into what the London Editor of Vanity Fair has reluctantly described as a ‘Police State’.

[...]

Who is behind this proposal? It is, undoubtedly, a part of the New Labour lurch to the right that began as soon as Tony Blair took office, but which looks set to continue under Gordon Brown. EcoLogics is nonetheless interested to note that there is one person who has presented, signed, and fronted photographically the document, but who has so far avoided the media spotlight. That person is Tony McNulty, the UK’s Minister of State for Security, Counter-Terrorism, Crime and Policing, and whose pictures on the Policing document and in the official government website make him look eerily like a character in Gattaca.According to the ‘TheyWorkForYou.com’ website, McNulty has voted ‘very strongly against a transparent parliament’,‘very strongly for introducing ID cards’, ‘very strongly for introducing Foundation [quasi-privatized] hospitals’, ‘very strongly for introducing student top-up fees’[arguably the beginning of the privatization of higher education in the UK], ‘very strongly for Labour’s anti-terrorism laws’, ‘very strongly for the Iraq war’ and ‘very strongly for replacing Trident’[and so for a £20 billion nuclear sub replacement]. If TheyWorkForYou.com is to be believed, McNulty is, from the New Labour point of view, a very safe pair of hands.

Returning to [Henry] Porter’s suggestion that there should be a warning in neon across every town centre, perhaps that warning should come with a name, and should also be placed above the STHF’s (‘short term holding facilities’) that McNulty wants to put into shopping malls, and which will be one of the sites where our DNA samples are to be taken. That name could be ‘the Gattaca Law’, or perhaps, the ‘McNulty Act’.

Today we read that Mr McNulty himself has now admitted publicly to having committed an act that ought to land a cotton swab in his cheek (for the purpose of a DNA sample of the kind he was intent on making everyone else take), and the rest of his body in a long term holding facility, that is to say, in jail. McNulty is one of the many MPs who helped himself to state money when he thought no one was watching. He did so to the tune of more than £13000 in expenses which he claimed against his parents’ home.

Will McNulty actually get his cheek swabbed? Will he actually get taken to a long term holding facility? Of course not. We can only take comfort from the thought that the House of Commons may well prove to be a short-term ‘holding facility’ for this and other corrupt New Labour politicians. If voters know what’s good for them, this man will be out of Westminister by May 2010.

Yesterday Charles Haddon-Cave QC published a damning report about the causes of the Nimrod XV230 disaster. The report is as critical of the New Labour government as it is of the Ministry of Defense and of New Labour’s private partners in corporate manslaughter—one particularly prominent partner being the eponymous BAE. For once, we find a review that has the guts to tell it like it is: what killed the RAF airmen is a combination of managerialism, the outsourcing and privatisation that come with corporate welfarism, and of course, political expediency. This is, arguably, also what is undermining the broader culture in a variety of social spheres–a case in point, New Labour’s assault on higher education.

The following are two excerpts that give a taste of the review:

“1. The MOD suffered a sustained period of deep organisational trauma between 1998 and 2006 due to the imposition of unending cuts and change, which led to a dilution of its safety and airworthiness regime and culture and distraction from airworthiness as the top priority.

1998 Strategic Defence Review
2. This organisational trauma stemmed from the 1998 Strategic Defence Review which unleashed a veritable ‘tsunami’ of cuts and change within the MOD which was to last for years.

3. Financial pressures (in the shape of ‘cuts’, ‘savings’, ‘efficiencies’, ‘strategic targets’, ‘reduction in output costs’, ‘leaning’, etc.) drove a cascade of multifarious organisational changes (called variously ‘change’, ‘initiatives’, ‘change initiatives’, ‘transformation’, ‘re-energising’, etc.) which led to a dilution of the airworthiness regime and culture within the MOD and distraction from safety and airworthiness issues. There was a shift in culture and priorities in the MOD towards ‘business’ and financial targets, at the expense of functional values such as safety and airworthiness. The Defence Logistics Organisation, in particular, came under huge pressure. Its primary focus became delivering ‘change’ and the ‘change programme’ and achieving the ‘Strategic Goal’ of a 20% reduction in output costs in five years and other financial savings.”

[...]

“7. The Strategic Defence Review intensified three organisational themes during the period 2000-2006:
7.1 First, a shift from organisation along purely ‘functional’ to project-oriented lines.
7.2 Second, the ‘rolling up’ of organisations to create larger and larger structures as a result of
(a) the drive to create more tri-service ‘purple’ organisations, and (b) a move to ‘whole-life’
management of equipment.
7.3 Third, the ‘outsourcing’ to industry of increasingly more of the functions traditionally carried.”(1)

An epigraph to Chapter 13, the one that details the ‘organisational causes’ of the accident, is worth quoting, as it reveals in a few short sentences what managerialism is all about:

“We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.”

The item is attributed to one ‘Gaius Petronius Arbiter, 210 BC’, but as noted by Haddon-Cave, it is also attributed to Charlton Ogburn Jr. (1911-1998), an American author and free-lance writer who was formerly an officer in U.S. military intelligence. EcoLogics suspects that the latter is the more accurate attribution.

Two questions before ending this post:

1) Is this the kind of inquest that Jack Straw wants to make secret?

2) What New Labour politician(s), and what BAE executive(s), will be taken to court on corporate manslaughter charges?

References

1. http://www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/hc0809/hc10/1025/1025.asp