economistadentata Economista. Gin fancier. Not Writing a Book.

I’m currently re-reading Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels in sequence, partly as a useless but heartfelt tribute to someone who, sadly, we are about to lose, and partly to make sure there’s nothing too much for my 13 year old (who has just discovered Banks) to encounter in their pages.

The third in the sequence is ‘Use of Weapons’ - the most often recommended starting point for newcomers to the Culture (which also features my favourite drone Skaffen-Amtiskaw). Amongst, well, its genius, is this….

“That’s the way they prefer to work: offering life, you see, instead of dealing death. You might call them soft, because they’re very reluctant to kill, and they might agree with you, but they’re soft the way the ocean is soft, and, well; ask any sea captain how harmless and puny the ocean can be.”

english2english:

Right, then. Prince Harry’s visit to the USA is as good a time as any to point out that the mutual curiosity shared between British and American cultures is as intense as ever. It’s also a good time to launch this Tumblr. 

When Winston Churchill coined the phrase “special relationship” to describe the connection between the two nations in 1946, he was describing two countries whose commitments to similar ideals – for better or worse – have historically meant a keen interest in each other. “Special”, sometimes, doesn’t even begin to cover it.

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Critics of Niall Ferguson will often offer the caveat, ‘Ah, but ‘The Pity of War’ - that’s a good piece of proper academic work’.

This morning there was a bit of a hoo-ha on Twitter and elsewhere about Niall Ferguson’s comments at a conference, in which it was alleged he linked John Maynard Keynes’ sexuality with Keynes’ economic theories and policy recommendations (eg here: http://www.streettalklive.com/daily-x-change/1688-niall-ferguson-the-great-degeneration.html). 

He has since offered a fulsome apology, here:  http://www.niallferguson.com/blog/an-unqualified-apology

However.

The remarks which Ferguson called ‘off-the-cuff’ in his apology are echoed, to say the least, in ‘The Pity of War’.

I’ve cited one instance in a previous post (apologies for self-linking but my typing really is appallingly slow)

http://economistadentata.tumblr.com/post/49613464765/from-niall-fergusons-the-pity-of-war-paperback

Another instance of Ferguson’s linking Keynes’ views (this time of the war) to his sexuality is on p. 327:

‘Though his work at the Treasury gratified his sense of self-importance, the war itself made Keynes deeply unhappy. Even his sex life went into decline, perhaps because the boys he liked to pick up in London all joined up.’

The inference seems clear: Keynes was made unhappy by the war, not because he feared for his remaining friends (several close friends died during the war, Rupert Brooke being the most well-known), or because he thought it was being badly conducted, but because it restricted his access to boys.

It should be noted that Keynes, along with several other members of the Bloomsbury group applied for conscientious objector status, which Ferguson dismisses thus:

‘…-nearly all the Bloomsbury men were conscientious objectors (although only Shove was a true pacifist).’

On this evidence, either Professor Ferguson’s recent remarks were not as nearly as off-the-cuff as he would have us believe, or he truly does think that Keynes (and others) views on the First World War, its conduct, and the reparations which followed were influenced by his sexuality, rather than his economic views. I would politely suggest that a further clarification seems to be called for.

p400

There is, however, no question that a series of meetings with one of the German representatives at Versailles added an emotional dimension to Keynes’ position. Carl Melchior was Max Warburg’s right-hand man (……..) It may be that Keynes’ subsequent declaration that he ‘got to love’ Melchior during the armistice negotiations at Trier and Spa obliquely alluded to a sexual attraction. As we have seen, Keynes was an active homosexual at this time. However, it seems more likely that Keynes was simply captivated by the sound of his own pessimism…..

So Ferguson has previous on this…..

From Robert Skidelsky’s one volume biography of John Maynard Keynes, pages 403-4:

It was Keynes’ links with the theatre that brought Cambridge into Lydia’s orbit. Lydia was thirty-five in 1927. She had steered clear of any further ballet engagements in order to have a child. The letters she and Maynard exchanged give only vague hints of what happened. There is some suggestion that she miscarried in May 1927, Keynes assuring her that ‘we shall have in the end what we so much long for’….Then apparently she became pregnant again. On Monday 10th October 1927, Keynes wrote: ‘Dearest Lydochka, Well, I have had the telegram - the sad deed is done and my dear little bun has had its throat cut. No more to be said until I see it [you?], except a tender touch where the sweet bun was.’

Niall Ferguson is an oaf.

I said I wouldn’t. I promised myself I wouldn’t. Blogging about Thatcher this week if you’re a lefty is like re-inserting a clot into one’s vein post-triple bypass. But. Margaret Thatcher being cast as a lion in the struggle against apartheid? It just won’t wash.

To listen to some people with either short memories or a factual deficit, apartheid was essentially social racial discrimination writ large. This would be bad enough, of course;  in reality it was worse, far worse, because rather than merely enabling discrimination to occur unaddressed, in actively legislating for discrimination it made racial discrimination mandatory. Its sins were of commission, not omission.

And those sins were many. For a government to oppress 92% of of a country’s population takes work, and successive National Party governments went to theirs with a will. Aside from the laws enforcing racial segregation (their names will give you the gist: the Group Areas Act, the Mixed Marriages Act), a comprehensive list of the tools used to combat dissent included (but was not limited to): Censorship of literature, music, and naturally the press, state violence, banning orders against individuals (which were so stringent they left some parents unable to attend their own children’s birthday parties), political assassinations both in South Africa and abroad, the arming of paramilitary groups, the outlawing of unions and the use of the police and the army to break up strikes (which were illegal, naturally), conscription for white males between the ages 18-21 with effectively no right of conscientious objection, indefinite detention without arrest or trial, wire taps….The list goes on and on and on. And all in pursuit of keeping political power in the hands of a privileged minority.

You would think, wouldn’t you, that a grocer’s daughter who had made it to Prime Minister in the face of undeniable obstacles would have some sympathy with those systematically denied access to the means to ‘improve themselves’ (as she would probably put it)?. And to be strenuously fair, she did speak out against apartheid, repeatedly and on the record. But apartheid, as the ANC and its allies knew all too well, was never going to be ended by rhetoric alone. Deeds not words were what were called for, and time and again Thatcher steadfastly refused to act either by implementing sanctions or by retracting her description of the ANC as a terrorist organisation - a description repeatedly deployed by the apartheid state as justification for its repression of any dissent. So..why? Why would someone who proclaimed her enthusiasm for liberal individualism, for get-up-and-go, for democracy, for freedom stand by and do nothing in the face of a system denying all those things to the majority of its people not as a incidental consequence, but as its raison d’etre?

I would argue that the reasons lay not in any one person’s credo, but in the contemporary global political context in which whose credos found expression.

A point that has been largely ignored this week with regard to Thatcher’s engagement with the apartheid state is the strategic importance of South Africa during the Cold War. Sub-Saharan Africa was one of the theatres in which the geopolitics of the Cold War were played out by proxy in the civil wars between Western client states and the (broadly socialist) resistance movements. These struggles, of course, arguably represented a continuation of colonialism by other means -a point neatly underlined by Mrs Thatcher’s insistence that she knew better than the internal resistance what would bring about apartheid’s demise, and the most appropriate means to pursue that end.

Once the Cold War was over (and only a fool would deny Thatcher’s key role in that conflict, whatever your view of her ideological rectitude), then the ‘glue’ that had held South Africa in an alliance with Western interests simply melted away. It is at this point, perhaps, that a debate could be had about the indirect role she therefore played in ending apartheid - but it’s a debate far more intricate than the ‘No more apartheid because Thatcher’ spiel emitting from some commentators. Apartheid’s end was due to far more complex forces than the actions of any one individual.

Which bring me, of course, to Nelson Rolihlala Madiba Mandela, often held up as the exemplar of the difference one person can make, the light that one conscience can shine into dark corners, and the redemption one man’s forgiveness can offer, which overblown rhetorical bollocks (I’m looking at you, Bono), throws into sharp relief the difference between Thatcher’s cult of the individual & the collective moral force exerted by many, if only by way of contrast.  Mandela himself has not only always acknowledged the moral complexities thrown up by an armed struggle in pursuit of freedom, but also that that struggle was a collective endeavour. When, at Thatcher’s urging, the apartheid state offered him his freedom after over twenty years in prison on condition he renounced the use of force, he refused, saying he was a disciplined member of the ANC, it was not for anyone individual to decide the course of the fight for his country’s freedom, and making the point that outside of a fully democratic state, a contract between a state and its prisoner made purely on the state’s terms has no moral legitimacy.

Both Mandela and Thatcher are often held up as being somehow more, somehow better, than mere politicians by both their supporters and their detractors. The tributes paid to Thatcher this week have harped on this point again and again. However, the contrast between the reality of the Thatcher engagement with apartheid state and the version we’re now being given undermines that claim to its destruction:  politics, whether domestic or global, is driven by the will and actions of many forces, not just those of individual men and women. But as I’m sure the late Lady herself would point out, probably tersely: I would say that. I’m a lefty.

A frequent accusation thrown at Iain Duncan Smith is that he has a ‘Victorian attitude towards the poor’.

If only.

One of the problems with throwing the epithet ‘Victorian’ around, is that like the terms ‘God’ or ‘reasonable’ it tends to reflect the beliefs of the person using it, rather than any objective set of social phenomena.  In fact, the Victorian attitude to poverty underwent a profound shift, ending as one I would characterise as significantly more progressive than that of our current government.

The initial Victorian responses to the new phenomenon of mass-scale urban poverty were simply cruel. The New Poor Laws, the early workhouses with their stated intention of making life there so hellish that people would do anything to avoid seeking help…I could go on, but you get the drift.

But as Victoria’s reign progressed, these cruelties by commission and ommission were exposed. And increasingly rejected: for example, by the late 1840’s although workhouses still existed, they were at least subject to regulation and inspection which ameliorated conditions.

Running alongside were the improvements in working conditions (Factories Acts), the extension of the Franchise (for men; as usual women had to wait), the Education Acts, the great reforming surveys into the conditions of the poor by, for example, Charles Booth, and later Seerbohm Rowntree, and ongoing improvements in medical care.

In short, whilst things were still  desperately grim, there was at least a desire to try to improve the lives of the poor: for their sake, as well as for the good of all.

Here comes the caveat: yes, I know this desire to ‘improve’ was patronising. Yes, I know poverty was still an unspeakably awful existence and that massive social injustices still existed. The point I am trying to make, however, is about the direction of travel: from bad to better, if not perfect.

So. Let me now turn my basilisk stare to the current….*sighs* administration.

A significant feature they do have in common with successive Victorian governments, is the utter absence of a modern democratic mandate. I remain stunned by the insouciance with which the country’s ‘Meh’ has been transmuted into an effective landslide, simply by the swaggering entitlement of the Cabinet and ‘The Quad’ (Cameron, Osborne, Clegg and Alexander) in particular. In 1997 Labour stuck to Tory spending plans for two years; this lot had an ‘Emergency Budget’ within eight weeks.

Much is made, principally by him, of IDS’ time in Easterhouse, and his apparent Damascene conversion there; it is interesting to note Bob Holman has since characterised IDS policies in office as a volte-face (http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/jun/19/thanks-iain-duncan-smith-poor-must-cry), motivated by purely political considerations.

When the Churches, and charitable organisations (many of whom were newly founded in the nineteenth century) exposed the reality of lives lived in poverty, they would at least be heard. Nowadays the CoE is likely to be denounced as being ‘socialists at prayer’, and charities as ‘vested interests’ (unlike, I presume, the Institute of Directors). Any criticism of current and proposed cuts affecting both the working and non-working poor is not given any sort of hearing, but dismissed with a sneer.

‘Self-help’. ‘Freeing’ people from the welfare state. Fine words provide neither butter nor parsnips. The brutal truth of current welfare policy is to not encourage people to work for their own benefit, but for that of corporate interests (which oddly align rather closely with those of the government’s millionaires and their chums) . Forcibly, and without pay if necessary. Quite a contrast from the Victorian move from forced work in the workhouse to a more humane system of poor relief.

All this against a wilful manipulation of the truth of lives lived in poverty, the egregiously mendacious deployment of outlier cases as though they were the norm, the rejection of objective data, the removal of the means of redress, the lying and smearing of opponents, undertaken by what were once the great offices of State who in the Victorian period and at their considerable best, acted with a constant awareness of the awesome responsibility their position conferred.

The Victorians were not perfect, far from it, but they would have looked first in horror, then in rage at what this bunch of spivs are doing in the name of those old Victorian values of self-reliance and self-help, to their party, their people and their country. IDS, a Victorian? Not even close.

“My lord,’ he says. “You have said what you have to say. Now listen to me. You are a man whose money is almost spent. I am a man who knows how you have spent it. You are a man who has borrowed all over Europe. I am a man who knows all your creditors. One word from me, and your debts will be called in.’

“Oh and what can they do?” Percy asks. “Bankers have no armies.”

“Neither have you armies, my lord, if your coffers are empty. Look at me now. Understand this….The King will take your title away, and your land, and your castles and give them to someone who will do the job you cannot.’

“He will not. He respects all ancient titles. All ancient rights.”

“Then let’s say I will.” Let’s say I will rip your life apart. Me and my banker friends.

How can he explain it to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from his border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined….Not from castle walls but from counting houses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus….by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and the shot.

Thomas Cromwell tells Harry Percy how their world works.

How our world works.

Polly Toynbee has written elsewhere about the cruelties this April will bring to the most vulnerable, ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/28/benefit-cuts-monday-defines-government ), but this is specifically about the changes I’ve seen as a volunteer.

The vulnerable people I see are: homeless or precariously housed (sofa-surfing/squatting/about to lose their tenancy); most have alcohol or drug addictions; many have Mental Health issues; many have a dual diagnosis, or we suspect that they may; the vast majority have poor levels of literacy, numeracy and computer literacy; some have criminal records.

They are all human as you and I are human. As David Cameron, George Osborne, and Iain Duncan Smith are human.

When I began volunteering in 2004, the charity was an addition to the welfare state. We directed clients to (free!) courses in literacy and numeracy, helped with CVs, or practical skills such as woodwork. Or simply sat and talked to people who were lonely, afraid, lost.

We helped people with benefit forms, but more often than not, they were assisted by the JobCentre+ staff. There were sanctions cases, of course (people without alarm clocks or phones have a tendency to poor time-keeping), but more often than not they could sort it out, and get the result for themselves. It didn’t need endless phone calls, endless arguments followed up by letters: clients could visit the decision-makers in person, just around the corner. Who were also human. And humane.

Since 2012, clients can be effectively fined £50 for mistakes on their benefit forms (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukdsi/2012/9780111524244/pdfs/ukdsiem_9780111524244_en.pdf the term used by the DWP is ‘negligently giving incorrect information’). Given our clients’ literacy levels this means we receive more requests to fill in these forms. But sooner or later, I will make a mistake. I won’t face the sanction. My client will. But he can appeal, right?

Legal aid is being cut from £22 million to £3 million. So people will not have access to legal assistance in their battle against the state (side note: you’d think those of a libertarian bent would love legal aid, enabling as it does the little guy to go up against the state with expert help. Oddly, not, it seems.) - they will have to go it alone, sorry, take responsibility for their own defence/court case/appeal. Meanwhile, one presumes the DWP will still have recourse to the finest barristers in the land. Paid for by the same taxpayers, who if claiming housing benefit, are regularly denounced as scroungers by the Secretary of State from his bully pulpit.

The changes the government are proposing are based on a lie. Their stated aim is a desire to replace the welfare state with the ‘Big Society’, encouraging people to take responsibility for their own lives, drawing us all together in a civic union free of the heavy hand of the state. Sounds great, doesn’t it? But the reality is quite other.

Our clients, and volunteers like me, are being asked to assume the responsibilities of the welfare state without, crucially, having any actual power. I can phone up, and argue, and recite regulations, I can ask a  friendly lawyer for advice, but the actual power to change a decision still lies with the DWP. And what makes it insupportable is that we are no longer arguing the case for the improvement of people’s lives through access to skills: we are having to argue for their right to obtain the very necessities of life. On top of which, the time this takes up reduces the time we have for the ‘softer’ aspects of volunteering, the talking and the listening.

Power without responsibility is the prerogative of the harlot, the saying goes. Whilst I hesitate to attribute moral motives of quite such dubious origin to Her Majesty’s Secretary of State, his proposals do rather make me wonder if we are all to be set quite so free, what purpose does his office have - unless of course it is to instruct us all on how responsibility without power is all the vulnerable (or ‘undeserving’ to use his terminology) and their supporters can expect.