"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
Friday, 23 January 2009
Tuesday, 20 January 2009
How too much "Construction" led to "Meltdown"
"'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 !
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 !
Tuesday, 4 November 2008
Good Days To Bury Bad News
"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.
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.
Tuesday, 16 September 2008
1984 as a "Manual for Government"
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."
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."
Monday, 8 September 2008
Student Politics, Think-Tanks & Other NerdSpeak
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
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
Friday, 22 August 2008
The Importance of Being Worthy
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 !"
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 !".
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 !".
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