SOCIAL LIMITS TO GROWTH

Gender Politics and New Labour's Undressing

2009-06-06T08:03:00.000-07:00

Former Europe Minister Caroline Flint appears "dressing" the front covers of most national newspapers today, as the latest lady to have stabbed the Prime Minister with her "stiletto". In her resignation letter, Ms Flint complained that Gordon used his senior female colleagues as "window dressing". Surely not, there must be some mistake !

In fact, this may well be history's verdict on the "Blair Babes" : "window dressing". For New Labour has never really embraced "Gender Politics" : "Parenting Politics", yes, and pay inequality between men and women, to a certain extent, but the power relations between the genders, no way.

Perhaps the Blair Babes - now rather more mature - have only just realised this. It should, therefore, come as no surprise to them that the woman to a have gained most from political events of the last week is no less than Mrs Ed Balls, or Yvette Cooper, as she prefers to be called : the new Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.

Sorry Girls ! - or should that be New WAGS : Women Against Gordon ?

New Labour as Social Pedagogue

2009-02-03T08:04:00.000-08:00

From Analysis: Social work - Social pedagogy: fad or the future?
Children & Young People Now 12 December 2007

"The government plans to fund pilot programmes next year that will evaluate the effectiveness of European-style social pedagogy in residential care.

But, as Sarah Cooper discovers, just deciding on a definition of social pedagogy is a job in itself..."

When I heard the term "Social Pedagogy" for the first time today - New Labour's many social policy initiatives tend to turn me off - it was a real Eureka Moment ! The term "Social Pedagogy" seems to encapsulate so much of what, for people like myself, New Labour is all about : endless hectoring on various trite social themes.

The sad truth is, of course, that social workers (of all sorts) are currently in short supply in those places where they are most needed.

An Early Deconstruction of the New Labour Project

2009-01-23T03:36:00.000-08:00

"The welfare state had been Labour's greatest achievement, then savaged and weakened under Thatcher. Its deconstruction was to be New Labour's historic mission. The two-tier society, corporate greed and the privatisation of need were inevitable corollaries. This was glossed as "modernisation". Who could possibly be against it? The linguistic operation - generating a veritable flowering of Third Way waffle, double-talk, evasions and spin - was critical to the whole venture". Stuart Hall (2003)

The above quotation is taken from an interesting article @ http://evatt.labor.net.au/news/244.html

How too much "Construction" led to "Meltdown"

2009-01-20T07:06:00.000-08:00

"'When she was nine or ten', Elena recalls, 'my parents spent their evenings writing brochures, which they said were on 'questions of Party construction'. For a long while I thought the Party built houses'"
Extract from "The Whisperers - Private Life in Stalin's Russia" By Orlando Figes

Having spent some 6 years reading Geoffrey Hosking's excellent book on "Russia and the Russians" - which I shall reflect on more fully some time - "The Whisperers" seemed an obvious continuation of my journey, if not exactly into the Russian "soul", then something similar.

I would now, however, like to quote from Hosking's account of the 1998 Russian banking crisis.

"To cover its persistent deficits the treasury issues bonds (GKOs) at attractive rates of interest, which found a ready market both at home and abroad. They kept the government afloat, and also enabled it to persuade the International Monetary Fund that it was solvent and deserved generous loans to finance its economic reform program. In August 1998, however, the elaborate balancing act came to an inglorious end. Unable to fund its soaring GKO obligations despite a large recent IMF loan, the government declared that Russia was defaulting on its debts. Overnight, most of Moscow's large banks became technically insolvent, the wealth of the "oligarchs" was sharply reduced and the new middle class lost much of its savings. Real wages fell by 40% over the next six months, the rouble declined to less than a third of its previous exchange rate, and the proportion of the population living below the official poverty line left from around 20 percent to more than 35 percent."

In the light of recent history, it should, therefore, come as no surprise that last weekend's Observer newspaper's business section should carry an article headlined : "Russians hoard cash as fear of crisis takes hold"...."after the government devalued the rouble five times in six days", nor that the cash in question should be dollars ! The article continues that in a letter published in the newspaper Vedomosti :

"Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev yesterday joined a chorus of influential Russians criticising the handling of the economic crisis. ' Resources are directed not so much at protecting the interests of the majority of citizens as at saving the assets and property of a narrow circle of influential businessmen'.....Olgarch Alexander Lebedev, who is buying the Evening Standard, was also a signatory".

Mention of the London Evening Standard, of course, brings things closer to home, and I now want to return to one of this nation's favourite topics : housing. It so happens that the same edition of The Observer quoted above, also carried a selection of articles published in The New York Times. Recalling Tom Wolfe's great novel "Bonfire of the Vanities", one of these articles is entitled : Housing Policies Stoked the Mortgage Bonfire. An extract from this follows :

"....The global financial system was teetering on the edge of collapse when President Bush and his economic team huddled in the Roosevelt Room of the White House for briefing that, in the words of one participant, 'scared the hell out of everybody'...

Eight years after arriving in Washington vowing to spread the dream of homeownership, Mr Bush is leaving office, as he himself said recently, 'faced with the prospect of a global meltdown' with roots in the housing sector he so ardently championed..."

Whilst it may indeed be largely a consequence (and a very serious one too !) of United States housing policies, it is wrong, in my view, for former President Bush to bear so much of the blame for the global financial crisis, although the United States and, countries like Britain, might well do so. For much of what has transpired has its roots not in the Bush administration, but in that of Clinton : whose affordable housing ideology , incidentally, has also been at the core New Labour policy.

So - to invert the confusion surrounding the real work of Elena's parents in The Whisperers -have the United States and British Governments also in truth been engaged in an ideological construction which has gone very badly wrong ? The irony is, of course, that most Russians still, I think, enjoy greater security of housing tenure than we in the "Old West".

Barack Obama's new chief of "Housing and Urban Development", Shaun Donovan, please taken note; and US planners please sort your own very big problems out before telling people over here what to do !

Good Days To Bury Bad News

2008-11-04T07:26:00.000-08:00

"A good day to bury bad news" was how a young New Labour advisor on transport policy described the events of 9.11.2001 in an email. Her subsequent departure from office was remarkably swift, compared to the perpetrators of later media-related blunders. However, this kind of comment very much sets the tone for political/media values during the Blair and Brown Governments. In fact, it is precisely the lack of values in the relationship between politics and the media which has been one of the most disturbing features of New Labour in office.

I was reminded of this deficit the other day when former spin doctor supremo Alistair Campbell was given air time on BBC Radio 4's cultural programme "Front Row" to promote his new novel, "All in the Mind", and describe his various nervous breakdowns and depressions. The interview co-incided with the row about Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand : a pair of overpaid mediocre twats in my opinion incidentally, but hardly worth all the fuss. Mark Lawson, the interviewer, suggested to Campbell that this row was the biggest to have hit the BBC since the media furore about the absence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and the related death of United Nations weapons inspector Dr David Kelly in 2003. Excuse me, but am I living on the same planet ! To compare the Ross/Brand nonsense with the WMD/Kelly story was rather more obscene, I would suggest, than Russell Brand's answerphone message. I can only imagine that there must be something about Alistair Campbell which causes derangement in other people.

As it happens, many other important and newsworthy items occurred whilst the politicians and the Media were gorging themselves on the on the Ross/Brand business, particularly on the economic front. But, thanks to the co-operation of busily-complaining Jo Public, whipped up by the popular press, here were more good days to bury bad news; and not least the information that the British Government knew about the problems of the Icelandic banks long before it invoked anti-terror laws - instead prudent financial regulation - against them.

1984 as a "Manual for Government"

2008-09-16T07:16:00.000-07:00

From http://www.politics.co.uk/ - Tuesday, September 16 10:55 am

Civil rights campaigner Shami Chakrabarti launched a scathing attack on Gordon Brown's record at a Lib Dem conference fringe event last night, saying he used George Orwell's book 1984 as "a manual for government".

The Liberty director warned the prime minister had failed to become the change voters expected during his honeymoon period and that he was now struggling in the polls as a result.

"Democracy is sometimes about hiring and firing governments," she told politics.co.uk.

"If you've been in power for a long time people feel like a change and sometimes you have to be the change or the change comes."I think Mr Brown got a honeymoon because people thought he might be the change. He could dump some things like ID cards, not run away with pre-charge detention, say sorry for Iraq, maybe?

"These things don't cost any money but they show a great amount of humility. You might be the change or the change comes upon you."

Ms Chakrabarti railed against the incremental increases in surveillance and unregulated use of CCTV cameras, saying the George Orwell novel 1984 was "supposed to be a warning, not a manual, for government".

"We know what we're up against: the terrible idea that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear. It does matter. Imagine a society where privacy doesn't matter: no dignity, no intimacy, no freedom of thought, no free speech."

She said Orwell's book captured the way in which language was used to subvert important values, including the 'war on terror' in particular.

"The moment you call it a 'war on terror' you're asking people to surrender their freedoms because they're living in a permanent state of emergency," she finished.

"I'm not prepared to wait for 50 years."

Student Politics, Think-Tanks & Other NerdSpeak

2008-09-08T03:43:00.000-07:00

On his recent return from a trip to Ukraine (and single-handedly sorting out the problems of The Caucasus, no doubt !), British Foreign Secretary David Miliband was keen to draw attention to the views of Ukrainian students and think tanks (and very interesting I'm sure they are too)! In doing this Mr Miliband also drew attention to the what I imagine are the cornerstones of his own worldview : student politics and think tanks. Now if New Labour were a student political party, or for that matter, a think tank, I wouldn't have a problem. It's when it involves itself in the real world, that problems start to occur.

Take those of poor Alistair Darling for instance. Only a few weeks into his new job as Chancellor of the Exchequer last year, and his first briefing on the Credit Crunch was a newspaper article in the Financial Times which he picked up whilst on holiday in Majorca. Now what are political advisers, civil servants and the like employed for but to provide this kind of information to ministers new to their jobs, I wonder ? My own impression is that many/most(?) are so stuffed full of NerdSpeak (of the kind Mr Miliband regularly communicates through) that dealing with real matters of great national and internation significance is nigh-on impossible. Discuss

The Importance of Being Worthy

2008-08-22T08:19:00.000-07:00

I'm unsure whether this post should be a postscript to my earlier one on "The Language of New Labour", or a introduction. Let's just say that there's something about the "worthiness" of The New Labour Project which brings out the Bad Arse in me ! New Tories please take note !

The Language of New Labour (or "We've been Shagged !"

2008-08-22T02:42:00.000-07:00

A while ago someone asked me what I meant by "De-constructing the New Labour Project", meanwhile looking at me gravely as if I should consider myself unworthy of such a task. Now, as it happens, many of this gentleman's favourite expressions have at their root the verb "To Shag". Incidentally, he is an extremely clever man - Mathematician, Psychologist (interested in language), Lawyer, Politician, Teacher - but likes to appeal to the popular vote and also to the passing phraseology of younger people, in particular.

Since this conversation - and, indeed, for some time before - New Labour has been in something of a self-destructive state, so being something of a "Do Minimum" person (masterly inaction and all that), I've been holding back on this blog. However, I now feel it's time to resume my "de-construction" with a short examination of the language of New Labour.

Now my educational and professional background is rather different from that my learned friend, and includes Masters Degrees in English Language and Literature, and Urban and Regional Planning, as well as formal training as a Management Consultant. I'm also a fairly proficient Animal Communicator (Horses and Cats !), and, as any human who's had a full-on face-to-face argument with me will know, have ready battalion of popular expressions to hand.
Incidentally, I'm more Jaw-Jaw, than War-War.

One of my basic problems with New Labour is in "its" deployment of language, and, in particular, the "Newspeak" (think George Orwell, 1984) which has inveigled itself into my areas of work : regeneration and planning. Indeed, on one occasion, it was suggested to me that I would need to acquire a whole "new terminology". No thanks, being deficient in foreign languages, if it comes down to being unable to communicate in my own, I think that I'll move abroad (perhaps to Russia) and learn another.

Now what "Newspeak" (and its related "Groupspeak/think") has enabled New Labour to achieve , above all else, is to to give senior politicians s and "big time" bureaucrats (whether in the public or private sectors) charged with delivering government policy an overwhelming sense of self-importance. Moreover, this overwhelming sense of self-importance has also - to give Credit where it's due - "cascaded down" (please note my mastery of McSpeak or management consultancy jargon !) to middle and lower level "operatives" ie people who do the work, or not.

Here, however, comes "The Crunch", the consumers of government policy, including public services, but also many other "goods" which do not fall under these, no longer feel that things can only get better. Indeed, many people, myself included, now feel that things could become considerably worse, and, more especially, that they will have to pay the price for the follies of, first, Tony's Cronies, and then Gordon's Gang. In short, and as onetime spin doctor supremo, Alastair Campbell, might have put it himself : "We've been shagged !".

The Empty Property Show

2008-03-11T03:54:00.000-07:00

The TV home property show has been very much "on message" for the New Labour zeitgeist. Meanwhile, gangs of executives from the likes of the Regional Developments Agencies, as well as some major urban local authorities, have headed south (literally) to international property shows of the kind held annually in Cannes.

However, many urban areas in Britain now have a glut of empty property, mainly 1 and 2 bedroom flats built for the, anticipated, swell in numbers of young professionals in well-paid work. The real growth has actually been in multi-occupancy households, many on very low incomes : the amount of low-paid work is certainly growing.

Indeed, the growing gulf between the fantasy world of so-called evidenced-based policy-makers, many of whom would deny the evidence of their own eyes if spurious statistics dictated this, and actual reality, is, I maintain, one of the key manifestations of the New Labour Project. This is precidely why its deconstruction is essential.

The Ideology of New Labour

2008-03-07T08:37:00.000-08:00

The politics of today's Britain are said to be non-ideological, but is this true ? The argument here is that there is a great deal of ideology at work in Britain's New Labour Government and an important aim is to deconstruct this by examining a number of policy areas, given below in no particular order, including :

Culture, Media & Sport
Foreign Policy Interventions
Domestic Consumption
Housing & Planning
Children & Families
Health & Disability
Role of Education
Employment & Immigration
Social Wellbeing & Cohesion

A key question in this examination is whether New Labour's policies for economic growth are socially sustainable, particularly in the medium and longer terms. There will also be a strong focus on the role of the Media, especially the BBC, and whether the gravitational pull of issues favoured by New Labour has led to under-reporting of other important matters.