The Rates of Power

Three Rates for the Wall Street-boys under the sky,

Seven for the Bund-lords in their halls of stone,

Nine for Bear Stearns traders doomed to die,

One for the Lord Mayor on his dark throne

In the Land of Mammon where the Usurers lie.

One Rate to rule them all, One Rate to find them,

One Rate to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

In the Land of Mammon where the Usurers lie.

Austerity in Europe: The End of the Affair?

‘We must stay the course of reform and avoid any loss of momentum, which could undermine the turnaround in confidence that is underway, delaying the needed upswing in growth and job creation.’ [My emphasis]

In so many words Olli Rehn–European Commissioner for Economic & Monetary Affairs and the Euro–proved that the reigning cult of self-flagellation is alive and well in Europe.

I don’t wish to knock Mr. Rehn alone for the increasing disconnect between official statements and the facts on the ground. Some, such as the Bundesbank’s Jens Weidmann and the ECB’s ex-president Jean-Claude Trichet, deserve to go down in history as arch-villains in a story resplendent with smug witch doctors and other petty peddlers of bunkum. Trichet’s particular brand of delusions holds that the plan–a double-whammy of austerity & competitiveness ‘reforms’–will work any day now, that the confidence fairy is real. Mr. Weidmann’s odious stance is that a multi-year record of misery (of which more below) won’t just work, but that it is morally right to pursue on its own terms. (A Spectre is Haunting Europe–Moral Hazard.) The self-denial of all, ‘the denial of life and of all human needs,’ might result in the impoverishment of all, but as Marx realised in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, it is easy to dress misery in ethical clothes.

What makes Mr. Rehn’s interventions rather more galling, however, is his insistence that the plan not only will work and is morally correct to pursue, but rather that it is, somehow, already working.

For a moment, financial markets found cause to believe him. On 26 July 2012, the new president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, promised the bank would do ‘everything it takes’ to save the euro. A week later, on 2 August, the ECB announced the creation of Outright Monetary Transactions–direct central bank interventions on secondary-markets to pacify distressed markets, provided recipient countries accepted strict conditionality under EU diktat. Spanish & Italian bond yields–the implied price at which governments can borrow on the open market–duly tumbled in response, as the markets dared to hope Europe might exit the crisis intact.

By Europe, of course, one means the financial markets themselves. For the peoples of Europe, however, the last six months have seen the continual evolution of a social catastrophe.

***

The Eurozone economy has been contracting since the last quarter of 2011–5 consecutive quarters (15 months) of recession–despite heroic efforts from Europe’s ‘locomotive’, Germany.

Real GDP Growth in 10 Largest West European Economies since the Great Recession

If this spectacular failure were at least mitigated by the promise of better economic performance in the near-future, then perhaps Mr. Rehn’s enthusiasm for disaster economics might make sense. But as Markit’s latest Purchasing Managers Index for the Eurozone makes plain, such optimism is misplaced–unless, of course, your only concern is the continued rude health of the German economy. For the rest, the double-dip recession goes on without end.

Markit Eurozone Output PMI, March 2013 Release

Whilst German and Irish PMIs signal expansion of activity in the first quarter, Spain, Italy and (dismayingly) France continue to contract:

Worryingly, the divergence between Germany and France so far this year is the widest in the 15-year survey history. Germany is on course to see the strongest quarterly growth since the spring of 2011, but France is contracting at the fastest rate for four years.
The deteriorating picture in the periphery is also a concern. Rates of decline picked up in Italy and Spain, with further weakness likely in Italy especially in coming months due to the uncertainty caused by the elections.

Much has been made of the totemic strength of the German economy–representing over a quarter of the Eurozone’s nominal output. German GDP is almost 9% higher than it was at the deepest point in its recession 4 years ago, but that mighty rebound came hot on the heels of one of the deepest recessions in the G7; its output is still but 1.4% higher than it was a full five years ago. The continued relative strength of her job market is commendable, but even that shouldn’t be overemphasised. Too much of that job growth comes from low-paid and/or precarious employment, as is becoming increasingly clear in Germany itself.

The continued weakness of France, Italy and Spain suggests that not even mighty Germany–but a relative strong swimmer in a sea of dashed recoveries–will be strong enough to pull all sinking boats. Germany’s strength continues to be outweighed by contraction in the monetary union’s next three largest economies, representing half the Eurozone’s GDP.

Policy-makers are struggling mightily to convert Europe into a Bizarro Greater Germany–a continent where Hartz-style reforms and perpetual austerity are complemented by technocratic control of fiscal policy. But to do so requires enormous political will–at the institutional, electoral and street level. And recent events suggest Europe’s élites might be losing grip of the situation.

***

The Financial Times recently reported on tensions in the Netherlands as the government there attempts to enact yet more austerity:

A €4bn package of additional austerity measures aimed at enabling the Netherlands to hit EU deficit targets in 2014 has set up a bitter clash with trade unions, after the largest labour federation attacked the cuts as “stupid and ill-advised” and the government pleaded for negotiations…Following this weekend’s mass demonstrations in Portugal and the results of Italy’s elections, the impasse in the Netherlands reflects the tensions over austerity measures that are testing the limits of European governments.

The latter points to growing concern across the continent that the social fabric of the hardest hit states is fraying. It should not be so difficult to understand how the deteriorating economic fortunes of millions–e.g. youth unemployment rates at (Spain & Greece) or approaching (Italy & Portugal) half the population, increasing poverty, growing income inequality, etc.–translates into a new Irish diaspora, or protests & violence on the streets. As David Begg, General Secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, has argued:

European integration has proceeded on the basis of a ‘Permissive Consensus’. European citizens thought it was a good thing, or at least did no harm. I doubt that view is still current. From what I hear in the circles in which I move, today’s labour movement is disaffected from the European project,” he said. “What will happen when people eventually realise that they are trapped in a spiral of deflation and debt. We may reach the tipping point.”

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, this is not what European & governing national officials see. They argue austerity is working because, well, surely it must be. But of course, this is an élite admirably tolerant of its own failures.

Austerity and GDP growth 2011-2012 (Click for Source)

It doesn’t matter that austerity’s knock-on effects on growth–implicitly admitted to by the IMF–are exacerbating the crisis, or that by policy-makers’ own foolish metrics (an obsession with debt-to-GDP ratios) the situation is hardly getting better for distressed sovereigns.

Austerity and increases in debt-to-GDP ratios (Click for Source)

Meanwhile, unemployment is already at depression levels & climbing in Portugal, Spain and (worst of all) Greece, while Irish unemployment is mercifully stuck there. (Unemployment has hovered around 15% in Ireland for more than 3 years; this presumably is what José Manuel Barroso, European Commission president, meant when he claimed the Irish economy was ‘turning the corner.’) Italy’s unemployment rate has decoupled from the core EU states and is taking off into the stratosphere, in the midst of political chaos. Unemployment continues to inch up in Austria, Sweden, Netherlands, France; remains stable around levels of mass unemployment in Belgium and Denmark; and is falling below its pre-crisis peak in only one European country: Germany.

Unemployment and Percent-Point Change since Peak

The repercussions of continued stagnation and high (and in many countries, growing) unemployment can be seen in capitals across the continent. In Athens, the radical left party SYRIZA has replaced PASOK as the primary party of political opposition, as demonstrated at both of last year’s elections and recent polls putting it neck-and-neck with the governing conservatives. This is in the context of far-right thuggery, ongoing protests and violent street clashes. In Italy, the political earthquake unleashed by the rise of a populist anti-establishment party as the largest political faction in the new Chamber of Deputies means the third-largest Eurozone country is now without government, shouldering a massive debt, and with gross domestic product at year 2000 levels (and falling.) Portugal and Spain have seen increasingly epic protests against austerity, the government and injustice more broadly–with the latter even contending with an emboldened separatist movement in Catalonia.

Even the largest European states are suffering under the strain of austerity. Britain’s ruling Conservative Party is being outflanked to its right by the anti-EU, nationalist & anti-immigrant UK Independence Party, while its coalition partner, the Liberal Democrats, have been struggling to remain the third force in British politics. There is little growth and real wages are falling, while gently declining unemployment signals a productivity reversal–storing economic problems for the future. Meanwhile, the French government’s policy u-turns (such as on the proposed 75% marginal income tax rate) in the context of rising unemployment has seen the president’s approval ratings tumble precipitously in less than a year in power.

The window of opportunity to avoid a truly radical backlash is closing. As history professor Mark Mazower puts it:

The response from Brussels and the creditor north to all this has been robotically unimaginative – to insist that the debtors, like the little fish in Finding Nemo, must just keep on going. And so they may – for a while…A moment of truth is surely approaching…Those preaching austerity probably do not see themselves as contributing to a crisis of democracy, but they are. The Italian elections should remind eurozone leaders to pay attention to their voters. Economic fixes have failed to staunch a political crisis that has the capacity to harm not only EU integration, but the legitimacy of the continent’s democratic order itself.

Only a few voices at the top (e.g. László Andor, François Hollande?) seem alert to the possibility they might have unleashed a process they might soon not be able to control. Many more, perhaps the majority, have finally succumbed to fear–the fear of straying from a determined path. Fearful, finally, of the unknown. And some–like Olli Rehn and Jens Weidmann–seem blissfully unaware that with each auto-da-fé they bring Europe closer to rupture.

History is unforgiving. Either Europe breaks austerity soon, or austerity will break Europe.

Labour’s ‘One Nation’ Dead-End

The British Labour Party is approaching a natural, if in any case farcical point in its 30-year turn to the right. Impelled towards the liberal-left on largely symbolic social matters in a vain effort to stake a claim to progressivism, the party remains hemmed to its right on matters economic. These narrowed ideological bounds continue to find spirited defence in the dimwitted mainstream media, and largely go unchallenged, either by ineffective unions or the members of the parliamentary party.

In the 15 years after the global recession of the 1990s–a period marked by an unprecedented, unsustainable credit-fuelled boom in the OECD, and in particular in Britain–the collective delusions of the pensée unique at least made temporary, fitful sense. These ideological blinders persist even now, in the fifth year of an apparently intractable economic crisis, the longest depression in perhaps a century.

NIESR estimates of monthly GDP since the start of the recession

Both the Leader of the Opposition and his Shadow Chancellor have argued that Labour would have to make ‘tough economic choices’–that’s public sector/welfare cuts to you and me–in order to capture and harness political power in 2015. Austerity is condemned and co-opted in the same breath. Labour still believes in the mirage of market confidence, that dimming lodestar of neoliberalism. The accumulated confusion of a 40-year counter-revolution hasn’t been swept away despite the greatest economic crisis in the capitalist core in over 80 years.

Labour’s increasingly regressive pronouncements in relation to welfare follow over two years of spending cuts gleefully pursued by the Coalition Government. Failing to deliver a credible alternative to these self-defeating policies, Labour’s pantomime internal battles follow the same script they have for decades. The discontent at the lack of direction in the party (or outright capitulation to the right) usually bubbles underneath the surface among party activists until, in a fit of gall, Labour’s union ‘paymasters’ launch blistering attacks on the party they created. The parliamentary party, in turn, take these criticisms in stride before pushing forward towards ever closer union with the Conservative party. The past is prologue.

The UK is therefore set to be governed for most of the rest of this decade by a tripartite consensus, that austerity is ‘necessary’ in the teeth of a stagnant economy which will remain below its pre-crisis economic peak (measured by GDP on a per capita basis) until 2018. This dismal lost decade makes Japan’s crisis in the 1990s look enviable by comparison.

It is in this context that we must understand a document which may come to define Ed Miliband’s stewardship of the party: One Nation Labour – Debating the Future. A desultory attempt at analysis of the party’s future prospects and direction, the pamphlet is part of a wider Policy Review spearheaded by three ominous-sounding committees of the shadow cabinet: One Nation Economy, One Nation Society and One Nation Politics. Yes, a shudder is in order.

The pamphlet is the brainchild of Jon ‘Labour luminary’ Cruddas, whose introduction lays the groundwork for the dead intellectual marshes to come. Witness his fourth principle of a One Nation politics:

‘…it is a politics of being together. The traditional phrases were solidarity and fraternity but neither work well for the changes in our country. Solidarity calls upon an underlying shared identity which no longer has the same broad reach in our post industrial, plural and diverse society. Fraternity in contrast does emphasise a diversity amongst equals but it is a sentiment that excludes the political relationship between men and women and between women. The politics of togetherness is a way of talking about the ‘we’ while holding to the uniqueness of each individual. It emphasises how our individual freedom is secured by the equality of constraint we share. ‘

You’re not alone in thinking that entire paragraph is either muddled or presumptuous, or is perhaps just filler. It’s most likely all of these things. Is this the sort of brilliant yarn David Skelton praised when he called Cruddas ‘one of the most interesting thinkers in British politics today’?

Most of the rest of the pamphlet reads like the crudest stab at the basest instincts of Home Counties England. Examples abound. Tristram Hunt’s opening salvo is a dreary recap and defence of Disraeli’s One Nation conservative tradition. You’d be excused for mistaking this for an Andrew Tyrie apologia in the Spectator. About half-way through the pamphlet we find Phillip Blond (yes, that one) talking about a ‘capitalism that benefits all’–a pathetic incoherence. (Put flippantly: are we to believe social ‘mobility’ only has one direction; that it did even at the height of the post-war boom?)

Darker musings lurk behind every corner. Mary Creagh’s contribution appeals to the UKIP voter in all of us (‘A green and pleasant land’) while John Denham’s piece, ‘The progressive national state’, talks about a ‘patriotic economy’ (huh?) in which a ‘progressive patriotic welfare state must reflect contribution and earned entitlement.’ (That’s the end of the post-war welfare state as we know it, then, couched in the most ridiculous, nationalist bluster.)

We come to our stride with Lord Maurice Glasman’s truly bizarre twist to the proceedings. Before seemingly dividing the economy into ‘the workforce, along with [the public sector's?] funders and users’ he indulges himself in an exceptional piece of liberal apologetics (the rich needn’t fear us, we just want ‘recognition’ from you!) which deserves to be quoted at length:

With the emergence of One Nation however, the organising concept has been established. It commits Labour to a politics of the Common Good. In all areas of policy, estranged and divided parts of our Nation: capital and labour, north and south, immigrants and locals, men and women, secular and religious need to be brought together in order to generate greater value. It is different from what went before because no one interest dominates civic, political or economic life but all of these require people to come together and make things better.

Labour was founded in order to demand recognition by those who worked, as part of one nation. There was no wish to dominate but to remind the rich and the powerful that workers were part of the nation, that they had interests and considered themselves a necessary part of the common good. That argument needs to be made again, for one of the things that is different about the One Nation position is its recognition of labour as a source of value, the Labour theory of value…

If you find vague echoes of Benito Mussolini’s ‘The Doctrine of Fascism’ in this eerily insistent babble of undefined or appropriated terminology and infantile platitudes, you’re certainly not alone.

***

So what is going on here? Perry Anderson once famously described Labourism (‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, New Left Review I/23, January-February 1964) as that ‘most stolid and mundane of political movements.’ Much of what he had to say in that withering attack against Britain’s national culture–about its conservatism, its institutional inertia–finds discomforting echoes in Cruddas’ pamphlet. Its analysis is shoddy when not incomplete; its message, ‘radical and conservative,’ bereft of any proposals resembling root-and-branch reform of the British state. (With, if one gives Anderson’s heavily criticised analysis the benefit of the doubt, profoundly arresting effects on the UK’s economic development.)

No indeed; this pamphlet is one of the clearest indications ever of the Labour Party’s increasing inability, or desire to do much at all that might seem radical in a leftist direction. On the contrary, it anchors the party on the conservative right–an odd whiff of Little England imagery here, a touch of the National Common Patriotic Will there. Coherence is an absent friend; for better or worse, Cameron’s smash and grab of the public sector makes a heck of a lot more sense than the atavistic nonsense caked on large swathes of this manifesto.

Instead of proposing a way out of crisis and terminal (sometimes gentle, sometimes not) relative decline, this pamphlet reads like a final, vulgar capitulation to the inevitable. This is no promise of an elegant or dignified decline, mind; quite the opposite. Grasping at totems, cloaked in the shabbiest, dodgiest cultural rags: Is this all that’s left of Britain’s ‘democratic socialist’ party?

Post-Script 2012: A Personal Statement on Precarity

When I finally board my flight from London to Los Angeles later this month, I’ll have completed a decade-long journey of sorts. I’ve spent the better part of the last 10 years ensconced in Europe, after a 3-4-year long stint in New England, routine trips back to California, and a brief sojourn in South America. University and employment structured the vast majority of my experiences in this time–with a difficult intermission 5 years ago–and they have shaped my worldview, personality and predilections accordingly.

This latest move, with its logistical nightmares, isn’t a new experience, then. It’s part and parcel of my story the last 10 years–the constant moving around; the transportation of my possessions and person, in boxes and bags and planes, across a few thousand miles. In some ways, it’ll be one more roll of an all-too familiar pair of dice. It’s been an admittedly charmed and privileged decade–not always easy (hardly so, in fact) but almost always exciting. Privilege, of course–or at least a certain kind of privilege–comes with its own drawbacks. For a kid who’s not had everything in life, but one blessed by random chance and hard-working parents, I’ve not had so much to complain about. I’ve ‘lived’ more than most, and feel I’ve genuinely learned from these experiences. That progress of sorts creates in turn a series of expectations–that things, even if they don’t always get better, might at least turn that bit more interesting; perhaps new opportunities will present themselves, maybe even in a new language or environment.

Yet, where my past has good memories to commend it–the future, never realisable, I anticipate mostly with a mix of dread and indifference–my present is defined by a singular banality–a cæsura in the progress of my life. 2012 has been a torrid year. A few hefty personal & social snags dominated the first half of the year; the second half has seen the final, precipitious decline in my material conditions. I have been rendered unemployed. I am an immigrant whose presence in the United Kingdom is, in one swift stroke, no longer tenable. I am financially in as parlous a position as one could be–with eye-watering debts–and there’s little prospect of that changing any time soon. As a consequence, I’ve eaten less well than I should have, my health has been so-so, my sleep patterns are ungovernable, and my confidence (emotional, intellectual, social, sexual) has taken a monumental battering.

The latter half of this year has been one long and dreary attempt to keep ‘the basics’–a roof over my head, food on the table, a mild set of amusements to sustain my moods–trickling in. Some of you (though I don’t know who, really) might be amazed to know just how financially exacting London is, even for the most savvy saver. I was never much of the latter, and since 2011 I have found it well-nigh impossible to save anyway: I’ve been paying off my (second) degree, among other things, since the spring of last year. I would have been sorted out on this front by this July, had the news of my present unemployment (and the concomitant need to save for the transition between having and not-having a wage) not intervened.

Life is full of cruel jokes. Had I not lost my job, I would have (ironically) been in the position to change career paths, as I’d long planned, this autumn–and done so from a position of strength. The best laid plans have a funny way of becoming unstuck.

For a variety of reasons family have not been able to step-in to help me to anywhere near the degree of assistance I’ve required to keep the show on the road. I’m returning to Los Angeles precisely because I don’t have the money, job, or legal status to live the life I’ve lived here, in London, for the past 6 years. For an educated, not-so-dim, decently-travelled and sometimes optimistic man–one rather fond of this cantelevering, grimy, exhausting, exciting city I call home–this Present is neither edifying nor illuminating. It just is, grimly.

***

Awareness of one’s precarious condition is subjective, even if the conditions shaping that precarity are objective. In a few concrete ways, my present travails are very much tied to the global events of the last 4 years. I’m still paying for my degree here in the UK thanks in large part to the Great Financial Crisis. I was unable, thanks to the global credit crunch, to secure anything like the student loan money I needed to pay off both my living expenses and my degree during my third and final year at uni. I was initially rejected for funding even my second-year, in the immediate aftermath of Lehman Brothers, at the beginning of the Autumn 2008. I was able to secure most (though not all) of what I needed then, though in the follow-up crisis a year later I failed to get even half of that amount. The credit crunch wasn’t an abstract event for me.

I spent three rewarding years (July 2009 onward) working for a start-up company. Less rewarding was my (American) employer’s attempt to swim against the tide of recession, austerity and a tenuous economic environment, as it attempted to expand its client base in the UK. Last year, the company was bought-out by a large fund–and I received my first scare employment-wise, as the parent-company decided swingeing cuts were necessary. My job and skills were spared then. I planned an exit strategy tied to paying off my degree and searching for a new career path. I accelerated the payment timetable for my degree to allow me to save-up cash–the centrepiece of this plan. If timing is everything, I’ve been well and truly played.

I first moved to London (not my first time living in the UK; I lived in Edinburgh in 2004-2005) at the height of the economic boom. Immigration of ‘economically-desirous’ migrants was still encouraged officially, though the issue was slowly worming its way into the public consciousness, thanks to the tireless efforts of the tabloid press. As the Great Recession got underway, the mood quickly changed. One telling example, which I’ve told a few times since: my sister (also studying at the time) and I endured the spectacle of an English plumber complaining about foreigners stealing British jobs. (Thanks, Gordon Brown.) When I noted that he was speaking to two immigrants, he responded that we were ‘different.’ Presumably, he meant that because we were Americans. He probably assumed, correctly, that we were students–perhaps not that I was employed.

Since the formation of the Coalition Government in 2010 the hardened public atmosphere with respect to immigration has found expression in government policy. Despite living here for more than five years, I’m not eligible for indefinite leave to remain. I’ve had a slew of job offers in the last few months, two of which fell by the wayside under frustrating circumstances, the rest quickly being withdrawn when they realised I needed a new visa. I never applied for a post-study work visa (I wasn’t eligible initially, thanks to that degree fiasco mentioned earlier) and as of last year I couldn’t apply for one anyway–it was abolished by the present government. Short of me finding a job offering sponsorship, in the context of government efforts to reduce net migration, switching into a new visa category was never going to be easy.

In a very real sense, my options have been steadily closed-off by the sort-of policies or events routinely reported in the news, but which many of us often (understandably) consider exogenous to our day-to-day life. Sometimes, however, one’s life instantiates the bulletins on the 10 o’clock news, or the special panels on Newsnight, or the heated topic of debate on Question Time. Yours is then a differently-precarious condition: your life finds resonance in those stories usually experienced at arms-length, at the reader’s disinterested remove from the human stories under-girding the printed word. The awareness that you are not alone in your endeavour–I have a few North American friends here who’ve either just clung on or finally succumbed to the inevitable on the immigration front, for example–is hardly reassuring.

I’ve always been somewhat moody, swinging between stormy emotions, but I’ve usually been redeemed by an odd sort-of optimism–or perhaps, a positive fatalism. As bad as things are, they can always get worse; life sucks for large stretches, after all, so just get over it and move on. Yet, depression, even mild depression, has a way of undoing or overturning our most positive and motivating instincts. Sure, maybe depression is, in the end, but a consequence of a chemical imbalance in the brain. Those, its proximate causes. But I don’t find it coincidental that my current, mild, if obstinate depression has paralleled a very real social low. To put it crassly, the outside world has intervened all too brutally in my daily life.

***
Depression manifests itself with its own peculiar, sequential flare.

During the day, the unceasing banal demands of life drag me out of bed (late), to scrounge around half-heartedly for food, not immediately motivated to shower and gret dressed and get out the door. I eventually recall things are shit, and embark on an increasingly cack-handed journey towards new employment (…and, in a telling example of the determinative power of the wage-labour relationship in a modern capitalist society, a new sense of purpose in life.) Even if I could fall back on state benefits of any sort, here or in the United States, I don’t know how I or anyone could ever consider and/or portray such a state of affairs as anything but grim and thwarting. You continue through the motions, hands tied behind your back, because you must–proceed to Go, forget the $200–but there’s little satisfaction in the inexorable; my present horizon, so to speak.

By night, the subdued, tightly-compressed despair unwinds in a jittery, if intellectually numbing, sleep-depriving stasis. It’s the psychological mirror of a cocktail of opiates and uppers. Insomnia–that most faithful if least forgiving of mistresses–keeps me glued to the web, the television, anything other than my pillow. This rambling blog post is a consequence of such sleep delayed. Fortunately, I don’t need to drink or smoke to wallow or forget; I have other playthings to push me along–not exactly backward, unquestionably not decisively forward. To borrow liberally from Cyril Connolly’s description of postwar British austerity, ‘Here the ego is at half-pressure…’ That description usually fits the bill, until, where by chance at the weekend I find myself just a bit inebriated, the floodgates become injudiciously loosened. Then I experience release fully, in all its spluttering, blubbering, pathetic lack of glory. Behind the four walls of my room, I ‘allow’ dignity to implode into indignity; joy, into sadness; and most importantly, for perhaps the first time in my adult life, a degree of pride to dissolve into shame.

Life, of course, goes on. I’m fortunate enough to have a home to return to, a family to have me back. I have this lingering conviction (though only lingering, hardly irrepressible) that things should get better. I also know that I am luckier than many in the West, far more so than most in the developing world. This is barely comforting–how can one be comforted by the greater indignities, to any degree, suffered by others?

This evening–now, at the cusp of a move I’m shattered to have to undertake, in circumstances now entirely out of my control–that ‘comfort’ is less impressive still. It’s as though I’ve been spat back out by Life, shot back to where I started as a teenager.

Tonight, this morning, I feel I’ve wasted the last 10 years of my life.

The SNP: Hogging the Spotlight

Question Time took place in Glasgow this week, and for the second time this year I find myself blogging about—you got it—Scottish independence. I promise not to make this a habit, dear reader. And my apologies for this quick and dirty post.

The Scottish National Party (SNP) have secured an historic agreement with the UK government to stage a referendum in two years’ time. The agreement insulates the vote from judicial scrutiny and is largely on the SNP’s terms. Separatists in Catalonia and Flanders could only dream of such a swift path to independence.

Yet, the party has been on the back foot a bit recently as it struggles to articulate a coherent argument for independence. I have previously argued that the exact contours of a post-independence Scotland need not be spelt out in detail at this stage; I stick to that view. However, the next two years offer pro-independence groups a shot to discuss what sort of country they want Scotland to be come 2016. Here, the SNP are stumbling.

The Yes camp must start by doing its homework, tackling flimsy, yet scary-sounding myths. One zombie myth concerns Scotland’s purported inability ‘to pay its way’ in the world—a stupid suggestion the Yes campaign must tackle head on. In its crudest form, one would think Scotland lacked an existing tax base, which is of course ludicrous. Per capita GDP is very much that of a wealthy European country, allowing Scotland a comfortable welfare system comparable to that of its neighbours. And, for all the scaremongering, North Sea Oil should provide enough revenue for at least a decade to cushion the transition to independence. Short of Scotland conceding a ‘per capita’ share of oil to the rump UK, for which there would be little precedent in international law, Scotland should be able to fund itself as readily as any small European state.

Independence Is NOT Just an SNP Issue

What went unmentioned in my last post, but which I am exercised enough tonight to mention is the danger in the perception that the SNP is the only pro-independence game in town. Socialist Unity today posted an article on the challenges facing the pro-independence camp—directly challenging those on the left to articulate a socialist vision for the country to replace the faux-progressive policies of the SNP. The article does a good job dissecting many of the SNP’s current flagship initiatives:

The policy of no tuition fees for students entering higher education is being funded by the introduction of swingeing cuts to the funding of FE colleges, a traditional route onto university for students from low income backgrounds…[on] the cancellation of PFI and PPP contracts, the introduction of the Scottish Future Trust in 2008 to replace it amounts to the same thing – namely the leveraging of private finance to invest in infrastructure projects, NHS included…child poverty in Scotland has gone up under the SNP (it is now 1 in 4), and one of the first things the nationalists did upon taking office was cut Labour’s scheme of free central heating for the elderly…When it comes to international issues one of the main arguments in support of the…SNP support the war in Afghanistan, supported the NATO intervention in Libya, and the leadership’s U-turn over NATO membership means that it envisions Scotland providing men and materiel to future NATO missions around the world…On the economy…the [SNP intend to reduce] corporation tax to 15 percent, thus entering Scottish workers in a race to the bottom for jobs.

This is progressivism with neoliberal characteristics. If there is an actual socialist or ‘progressive’ policy platform distinct from the SNP’s, I have yet to read it. That’s a problem. The Yes camp will be in trouble if it cannot be distinguished from the record in office of the present SNP government, especially on key institutional issues, of which more below. For now, I think there are two key steps they can take to begin to separate the two.

First, the SNP must defer to and amplify the voice of other pro-independence groups, whatever their political affiliation. This cannot be seen as an SNP issue alone—that will condemn the vote to a referendum on the government of the day. The SNP is no Congress (India) or ANC (South Africa)–it does not have the credibility on its own to promise, fight for, or even nurture a desire for independence. Second, they should propose a transparent process through which to frame the social, economic and political institutions of an independent Scotland. They should categorically state that, whatever the party’s views, all issues are still on the table. That process should begin to take shape now—and it should be accessible to all, from pro-union groups to the general public.

Independence Is a Bold Move—Act Like It

Scotland’s pro-independence movement will go nowhere if it is not bold in its convictions and confident in its boldness. Independence is a big deal—the Yes camp should not act as though little will change. At the very least, they must embrace the possibility of change and make it into a campaign principle. They need to challenge the shibboleths of unionism if they are to persuade and excite undecided voters. They must promise a Scottish currency controlled by Scottish institutions. They should not close down the debate on whether an independent Scotland would be a republic or monarchy. They must ask themselves what sort of ties to maintain with the rest of the UK, how much to emulate the Irish experience.

As I have previously argued, Scotland’s international position will be much clearer after independence than presently assumed. I still think it likely the UK government will settle Scotland’s status as a successor state in international law for very practical reasons, e.g. the proportional assumption of sovereign debt. What this means for Scottish membership of the EU is very much open to debate. In my opinion, the treaties are rather flexible on the matter (largely out of silence on the particulars) but the law will bend only as far as the politicians allow it to, and the politics of membership will admittedly be dicey at the heads-of-state level. There might even be a need to appeal to the European Court of Justice.

The difficulties of separation should be spelt out clearly. The independence camp—nationalist and progressive—have got to accept that promising more of the same will simply result in a decisive no vote. I fear a lopsided outcome against independence might set back the currently inexorable trend towards greater devolution. The Yes camp have got to go for broke, and if they want to make a real run for it they have to stop campaigning on a defensive, conservative platform.

Because you cannot deliver change by changing nothing.

Black History Month, Slavery and British Historical Memory

Black History Month is a relatively novel addition to the British calendar. The first celebrations took place in London in 1987, a good 60 years after its first iteration in the United States. That separation in time is matched by understandable cultural particularities: racism in the UK is different in style and tone to its American equivalent; its contours are specific to Britain. Yet, given this ‘method’ of commemoration is clearly an American import, it begs the question—in what ways and to what degree does the UK’s Black History Month differ to that of the United States? What is the role and nature of historical memory in the respective countries’ celebrations?

I had these questions in mind whilst reading Miranda Kaufmann’s article, ‘Slavery Shouldn’t Distort the story of black people in Britain,’ (17 October 2012) in The Guardian. Kaufmann contends that the history of black Britons is incomplete and misunderstood. Her background in the history of African people in Renaissance Britain commends her as she recounts the lives of particular black people in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. She disproves the generally held assumption that blacks in Britain were slaves during this period—and makes the helpful, if woefully ignored observation that black people have lived on these islands for a long time. Her contribution to the collective memory here is admirable.

These strengths aside, I found certain elements in the piece inchoate when not problematic. We are told that it is ‘dangerous’ for erroneous assumptions about the status of blacks in pre-20^th century Britain to go unchallenged, but we are not told exactly how or why this is so. Is it because these assumptions underpin nativist idylls of a pre-1950s Britain; a land unspoilt, mercifully devoid of darker faces? If so, how exactly would an intimate knowledge of this history overcome an irrational antipathy to black people—to say nothing of white privilege and institutionalised racism? Kaufmann admits the numbers involved are infinitesimal. Would the average EDL or BNP supporter (and/or racist middle class white Englishman) change his or her attitudes if they knew ‘hundreds of black people [were] present in these isles during’ the Tudor and Stuart periods, a period spanning over 200 years?

I am further perturbed by her co-option of ideologically tricky language, inadvertent though that might be. Witness her modern, liberal concern with integration–itself a far from neutral term: ‘Africans were far more integrated into the English community than we might expect.’ (My emphasis.) There’s no attempt (admittedly due to space constraints) to engage with the tricky question of ‘Englishness’ (the Africans ‘developed…intimate relationships with English people’) especially with reference to the children of mixed parentage. Finally, her use of the word ‘contribution’ feels ripped from the pages of modern newspaper debates on ‘deserving’ immigrants.

These are not minor quibbles. Kaufmann is by now talking about racism, slavery and memory, though in no meaningfully direct sense. Hers is a muffled tone: not once does she use the word racism in an article plainly discussing it. She spends a good amount of space discussing the historical evolution of slavery in English law (of interest mostly to legal historians) and is generally correct to note that there were no positive laws allowing slavery in England; but at the risk of sounding flippant—so what? At best, this demonstrates the hypocrisy at the heart of the British Empire—a system underpinned de jure by one (hazy) set of rules for the metropole, and another, more barbaric set for the periphery. (To her credit, Kaufmann does not contend otherwise.)

Consequently, it is difficult to swallow Kaufmann’s closing paragraph:

The lives of the free black men and women living in this country 500 years ago tell a far more positive story than is usually told…We must not allow the spectre of the transatlantic slave trade to warp our view of black British history.

The enslavement of black people by whites was staggering in scope and terrifying in deed. It validates Hegel’s passing remark, that history ‘is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages…’ To emphasise the decisive role of slavery in British history is not to invalidate or neglect those who did not live their whole lives directly under its shadow. On the contrary, it is to appreciate their lives in a historical (and systemic) context. That context—of empire, and slavery, and racism—must be constantly acknowledged if Black History Month is to be anything but an anodyne reminder of British diversity.

A full account of black British history must encompass so much more than the narrow (if fascinating and shamefully ignored) experiences of free black men in England. This is not a warped or distorted version of history: American slavery, after all, was also a British institution, and it deserves a central role in British history. Is it really a ‘far more positive story’ to note that the lives of an objectively small number of black people in England were pleasant relative to the degrading experience of millions of black people across the Atlantic? No—the history of slavery in the colonies is British, black and white. If these vignettes of contentment are to have any meaning it must be as part of a larger narrative of oppression. Kaufmann’s article, despite its merits, misses a good opportunity to weave the former into the latter.

By all means, let’s remember the long history of black people living in Britain. Let’s not, however, forget that most of that history is inextricably linked to a brutal system of oppression for millions. We over-emphasise the happiness of a few in an age defined by the immiseration of the many to our detriment.

The Aurora Shooting & America: A Response [Open Salon cross-post]

[This was originally posted on my Open Salon blog. I decided to move it here for future reference.]

I’ve often found it counterproductive to wade into discussions about acts of mass violence, such as the events in Aurora, Colorado, because, frankly (to use a clichéd, if horribly appropriate turn of phrase) I’ve seen this film before. As The Onion acidly noted, in an article titled, ‘Sadly, Nation Knows Exactly How Colorado Shooting’s Aftermath Will Play Out’:

Nothing really surprises me when it comes to this kind of thing anymore. And that makes me feel terrible…Oh, and here’s another thing I hate I know…In exactly two weeks this will all be over and it will be like it never happened.

Quite.

Still, I found myself compelled to respond to a post by Jan Wilberg, with the telling title, ‘Let the Blaming Begin.’ Now, I don’t mean to pick on her–I think there are very good-hearted reasons for people to respond the way that she has; and I reckon she’s very far from alone in those sentiments. I felt compelled to respond for the simple reason that I find such explanations incredibly short-sighted: to pass this over as a singular instance of depravity–maybe even as the result of a terrible upbringing–whilst refusing to engage the possibility of a systemic explanation, is one of those frustrating American habits that has me reaching for the keyboard. Such an attempt at balance and sobriety ends up all-to-often looking like a myopic (and, yes, contrived) exercise in disengaging with uncomfortable truths.

So, I had to respond. Please forgive any mistakes or awkward constructions, etc., in the following, as this was posted as a comment under the relevant article:

************************

‘It’s so hard to accept that terrible, inexplicable things just happen.’

I couldn’t disagree more, Jan. I think you’re approaching the matter from a good place–from a desire not to pretend to know the causes of something we might not, yet, understand. But everything does have a cause–or, as with these sort of events, a multiplicity of causes that reach a final, devastating conclusion.

According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, the United States recorded 12,996 murders in 2010. The comparable figure in England & Wales was 550. Of those 12,996 murders in the US, a full 67.5%–a full 8,775 victims–were attributed to firearms. The comparable figure in England & Wales last year: 39. You can find similar disparities between the US and other developed states, e.g. 194 gun-related death in Germany, 200 in Canada. And this proportion of gun-related homicides to the total number of homicides is pretty static over at least the last 7 years.

Surely this discrepancy would stand out as incredible if one were blind to the joke that is the US legal structure built around gun ownership. In this *particular* mass shooting, the perp had 6000 rounds of ammunition. He had purchased all of his weapons in the last 60 days. But there was no effective system to warn anyone–and/or no-one connected any dots.

Were this incident just a blip on the radar, we wouldn’t really be talking about guns. The debate about the recent anti-Semitic shootings in Toulouse, for example, concentrated surprisingly little on the number of guns on the street–because, frankly, there are incomparably fewer guns (and, therefore, incomparably fewer gun crimes) in France.

And of course, this ISN’T a blip on the radar—no matter how the media treats these sort of events. Just look at the following report from the Brady Campaign: [Mass shootings report.]

Three things need to be pointed out here. Firstly, that this report had *JUST* been updated up to 17 July 2012, i.e. in the past 7 days, when another mass shooting left 17 people injured at a bar in a college town. Secondly, and more importantly, that this report runs to 62 full pages, a damning indictment of anyone claiming these crimes are singular or unique in America; they aren’t. Finally, the report only covers mass shootings since 2005–and is based on those which received news coverage, i.e. it is (in its words) ‘not comprehensive.’ 62 pages of mass shootings in 7 years–about 8-9 pages per year–without counting the terrible events on Friday.

So no, this sort of event doesn’t seem ‘inexplicable’ to me, even if the particulars of the case seem to render it unique. The United States’ abysmal history of gun crime seems to me to stem from a particularly odious convergence of a hyper-violent culture and an overly-armed civilian population.

America can pretend to be shocked all it wants here: the appeals for a de-politicised discussion notwithstanding, the tragedy of such events won’t change the fact that the United States’ relationships to gun[s] is more akin to that of developing, and often failed states, than to that of its partners in rich democracies to its north, and across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.