greedy fuckers

The government are taking more out of our hard earned and already pitiful wages than at any time since the height of Tory belligerence in 1991, says a story in the Sunday Telegraph.

The proportion of household income taken in tax rose from 34pc to 34.6pc in the first quarter of this year – the highest level since Spring 1991.

Calculations by Capital Economics, based on figures from the Office of National Statistics, show that if you earn about £23,800 the taxman now takes £8,222 a year direct taxes.

And what are they doing with our money?

We have two stupid, profligate overseas adventures in the Arab world that are costing us dear in people, money and international goodwill.

The technology and infrastructure of surveillance has been extended nationally to an unprecendented and truly Orwellian degree.

Politicians themselves squirm in sleaze and corruption scandals while the rest of us struggle to continue our wretched, exploited and numb lives.

No matter what party is in power all this will continue. Elections offer no choice. No wonder no one votes.

Filed under: politics , money, politics, tax

freedom to loaf

This weblog malarkey requires a lot of discipline, and I’m not really the disciplined type. It isn’t easy finding things to write about all the time. Still less easy is actually finding the stubborn will to avoid mates and the pub and actually sit down at a keyboard. Even then there are still the lurid possibilities of internet porn still to explore. I shall struggle on. I must. Literary fame awaits me one day – or maybe I’ll be mayor of London…

A lot has happened since I last graced y’all with my erudite analysis. I now have a job, and so I feel the excrutiating pain of exploitation all the more keenly. Though every cloud has a silver lining: I soon hope to resume my daily newspaper fix, which will hopefully put paid to my writer’s block.

But the work thing is a real fucker. Although towards the end I felt slightly as though I was grinding to a halt, I really did enjoy my three month sabbatical from wage slavery. Thanks to a deal struck with my former employer I was not short of cash, and didn’t even have to claim Job Seeker’s Allowance. I was able to while away my days watching Jeremy Kyle, reading interesting things, and day dreaming ideas for articles, books, businesses and other projects. But money, like all good things, is only finite, and, unless you have enough to make it work for you, it soon comes to an end. When you’re stuck the wrong side of the class divide, the only perpetual certainty is work.

Must it be this way? One good thing I read during my umm, let’s call it ’study leave’, was Alexander Berkman’s ABC of Anarchism. I picked up this slim volume from the 56a Infoshop, an intermittently open anarchist bookshop near my house in South London. It cost just £5, but the pleasure I got from reading it was, as if I paid by Mastercard, priceless.

Berkman was an active anarchist theorist and agitator of the early 20th Century, and involved in Labour disputes across the industrialised world, from Boomtime USA to Weimar Germany. He eschews the staid, scholarly and latinized language of most radical writers to present his ideas in a way that is clear, vivid and engaging. His paragraphs are short and sweet. His language is plain but succinct. Anyone who’s had a chance to read George Orwell’s wicked rant Politics and the English Language will know exactly what I’m on about here.

Although I have long and loudly professed my anarchism, I shamefully hadn’t actually bothered to read any anarchist theory for almost a decade before I read Berkman’s ABC. I think I had probably forgotten what anarchism was, apart from a vague sense that it somehow chimed with my own deeply held feelings about radical freedom.

According to Berkman the basic idea is that we should be able to live our lives free from ‘compulsion of any kind’. Government, Berkman claims, is just organised violence. “The law orders you to do this or not to do that, and if you fail to obey, it will compel you by force.” The authority of the government is based on its monopoly of the legitimate use of force. This threat of violence is the glue that keeps us stuck in place in the social order. It guarantees the vast wealth of the economic elites, even though they have more than they could use in their lifetimes. It ensures that your creditors can hold you to account for whatever you owe, however poor you might be. Given this, the most obvious step in the advance of human society is the abolition of the state.

That’s just a caricature, and Berkman does admirable work in countering many of the frequent objections to anarchism. ‘Doesn’t anarchy just mean chaos?’ No, by advocating a society free from coercion anarchy is really a doctrine of radical pacifism. ‘Don’t anarchists throw bombs?’ Well yes, sometimes, but everybody throws bombs from time to time, even conservatives (think of the Taliban).

‘What about crime?’ Now here’s a knotty problem, and one which I have had difficulty unravelling, at least to the satisfaction of my girlfriend, who always brings it up when I’m trying to tell her about how we need to abolish the state. The solution is complicated. Of course, the abolition of the state – and, by extension, of the state backed legal system – would make a nonsense of the very notion of crime in the sense of ’something illegal’. In a society without property stealing is a non sequitur.

In a society based on pacifism the only deviance is violence, and I guess, even in a society without rules, there must be some kind of way of dealing with violent people. I have spent a lot of time wondering about this but I have not thought of a satisfactory answer. In a society without compulsion now can people be brought to account for their actions?

This makes me think that there is a contradiction at the hear of anarchism. It purports to be an ideology of freedom, a dream of a society with no rules. But actually there are rules, insofar as one person can never use any personal ability to exploit or compel another, which makes me think that to work an anarchist society must have at least one very strictly enforced rule.

Oh what a can of worms! It’s still got to be better than 40 hour a week wage slavery…

Here’s is a lovely anarchist riot porn slide show to watch

Filed under: politics , anarchy, politics, violence, work

reclassification, criminalisation and discrimination

My mum gave me a good laugh yesterday afternoon. She rose from her slumbers just after midday, as is her habit, and was just in time to catch Home Secretary Jacqui Smith in parliament announcing the Gordon Brown’s latest plan to make the country a Better Place: the reclassification of cannabis to class B.

“Fucking fat cow,” she exclaimed. “Fucking fat, fat fucking cow,” she continued. “I’m tired of being ruled by fat people. Look at them, all fat and comfortable. What’s their problem? Fucking fat cow.”

This kind of language is unusual for my mother, who is usually among the best and most properly spoken people I know. On this occasion however, notwithstanding her morning grumpiness, her violent hyperbole seemed entirely justified.

Not only are the government clearly over-nourished, but by their reclassification of cannabis they have clearly signalled that they intend to use the full discretionary powers of parliamentary mandate to make sure that no one in the country has any fun whatsoever. No wonder they are polling the worst electoral results in 50 odd years.

This is just the latest move in a trend which I indentified in an earlier blog post: the move towards puritan politics. First they banned smoking indoors, next they blocked supercasinos, now they are increasing penalties for weed smokers. What next? A ban on kissing on the grounds that it leads to unnecesary and risky exchange of saliva?

What’s worse is that the government ignored their own advisors on this move, for the first time in parliamentary history. Even the Home Office’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs recommended that reclassification would make no difference to the level of cannabis use in the UK, and that there is no scientific evidence to support a tightening of legislation. Indeed, the advisory council’s top scientist, Prof David Nutt, dismissed the move as “naive”. In the end they voted twenty to three against reclassification, which seems pretty definitive

This recommendation came in the face of recent media hysteria over links between cannabis, especially the supposedly super-strong ’skunk’ variety, and psychosis in young people. The right wing press, for reasons best known to themselves, have championed this campaign, with lurid tales of teenagers brutally murdering their own families while under the influence of the ‘evil weed’. Commentators have sought to imply links between the emergence of stronger varieties of dope with the spate of teenage violence affecting our urban communities. Overall, they have used the kind of hyperbole more appropriate for crack cocaine to vilify cannabis and cannabis users.

In fact, as most news reports have been eager to point out, cannabis use among young people has actually decreased since it was made a class C drug. And the evidence for a link to psychosis is, as the ACMD’s decision shows, sparse. Which makes one wonder what the government’s real reason is for reclassification. My mum reckons it’s because they actually want more people smoking weed, ostensibly to stop them rising up in some kind of spontaneous revolutionary movement. Perhaps, she argued, increasing the legal penalties will make it seem more illegal, and so more appealing to rebellious young people. I have a different theory.

There is a very convincing school of thought that argues that the original reason for drugs prohibition in the USA was more to do with the control of certain groups of people, rather than public health. At the beginning of the 20th century the USA was experiencing a massive wave of immigration. Economic migrants from all over the world began pouring in to the sea ports of the US looking for the American Dream. This made the White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) majority nervous: they envisaged their country being stolen away from them, as they had in turn stolen it from the native american peoples. In response they passed laws which allowed them to use the legal and penal machinery of the state to target these new immigrant groups. Opium was made illegal to criminalise Chinese immigrants who came to build the railroads. Alcohol was prohibited to criminalise Catholic Italians and Irish immigrants. Cannabis was made illegal to target Mexican farm labourers.

So who are the goverment trying to criminalise this time? Well, the foremost answer is young people. This government is afraid of youth, they don’t understand it, they didn’t inhale and if they did they probably got scared and didn’t like it. But more than that, they are also criminalising whole sections of the Afro-Caribbean community who have strong cultural connections to cannabis use – sections of the community whose culture incidentally lends rather a lot to English popular youth culture.

A recent announcement by the Police backs up this theory. As reported in the Guardian recently, police chiefs claim that, even with the reclassification of cannabis, they do not intend to depart from their current strategy of confiscation and warnings for possession of small quantities, except where they see fit to impose harsher penalties. This hands the power to criminalise over to the police. Always a bad idea.

Filed under: drugs, politics , discrimination, dope, jacqui smith, police, politics, weed

Britain – shit place to be poor

Think tank Reform have published a condemnatory report showing up UK society as the most unequal and least least socially mobile of all Western developed nations.

[Live here? You're unlikely to escape...]

According to the report, despite the successes of the UK economy over the last 30 years, we have merely gone from being the ’sick man’ to the ‘divided society’ of Europe. Not very catchy, but then they are academics.

The report certainly makes depressing reading: inequality is up; child poverty is up; and severe poverty is up. At the same time income growth has accelerated for the richest 10%. The share of total income for these top 10% is apparently now at comparable levels to the 1940s, which rather mocks the idea of progress to a fairer society.

Life chances, they say, are increasingly determined by background rather than aptitude, citing studies that argue that kids from wealthy backgrounds consistently outperform kids from poorer backgrounds. This is a result of an unfair two-tier education system, which means the children of the richest get the best start in life.

I was 16 at the millennium, and the report says surprisingly little about my generation. However, it has always been clear to me that British society is deeply divided. Here in London the inequalities are stark, as anarchic town planning puts leafy suburban idylls right next to the kinds of places where you put your ipod away and hope your phone doesn’t ring. Class divisions extend right down to choice on public transport: poor people ride the bus while rich people ride the obscenely expensive Tube.

One of the biggest lies ever propagated by this Labour government was that “we’re all middle class now.” In reality we’ve all been ground into various rough gradations of proletariat, in the most Marxist sense of the word. British society is at its most divided for 60 years, and inflation continues to push up prices faster than employers are willing to raise wages, making life even harder for the poorest. This has resulted in record profits for corporations, while the average person is struggling to make ends meet.

Thatcher’s dismantling of the post war economic consensus, continued by succeeding Conservative and Labour governments, sent the UK economy into overdrive; but it also took away a significant safety net for the most disadvantaged. Privatisation destroyed key industries that had provided lower class employment as the lifting of exchange controls turned London into a Mecca for finance. The British economy lost its manufacturing base in favour of financial services, which gave greater rewards to fewer workers. The government happily trotted out GDP and growth statistics citing them as evidence of a wildly successful economy, when really it just meant that the rich were getting rich beyond their wildest dreams.

Few of the economic gains of the various booms since the 1980s have trickled down to the population at large in the UK, even with the supposedly more redistributive Labour party at the helm. Indeed, since gaining power in 1997, this Labour administration has done much to dismantle the mechanisms for social mobility, like introducing top up fees and abolishing assisted places to public schools. At the same time, educational standards in state run education have dropped as a result of thoughtless centralisation, a culture of league tables and an obsession with assessment by examination. No matter how much money they pump into the system, it seems to become more dysfunctional with each passing year.

And that money has to come from somewhere. According to Treasury estimates the tax burden is set to rise from 34.9% of GDP in 2003-4 to 37.5% in 2011-12. But these increases in public revenue will not come from taxing our rich multinational companies and non-domiciled residents. Instead, as the recent furore over the abolition of the 10p tax rate has shown, Labour have continually increased the tax burden on the poorest sections of society, while giving away massive tax breaks to the richest, for whom the UK is an effective tax-haven.

What’s clear is that this massive scale exploitation of UK society is likely to continue as long as people remain convinced that it doesn’t affect them. This is the true lie behind the claim that we are all middle class. Your average Joe thinks that because he’s got a crippling mortgage for some 1 bedroom hovel in Hackney and he wears a suit for work that he is somehow middle class. Nothing could be further from the truth.

We are all working class now.

Spot the difference

Filed under: politics , Labour, news, politics, poverty, UK