Money for Nothing?

In this mini-series I claim to have no panacea, no road map of the way out of the mess we’re in; I merely suggest that if what we have doesn’t work – and for so many it clearly doesn’t – we need other ways. New ways. In short, we need to turn society off and then turn it back on again in the hope that factory settings are restored and the machine functions again. We need to disable the pointless apps hogging our processing capacity and get rid of the clutter so that we can access the important stuff.

The socialists are obsessed with pursuing every faddish minority distraction with vigour while ignoring the day-to-day realities of people who don’t need special attention or a new lexicon; they just need to be let back into participation into society. Not fashionable enough to warrant campaigns they fall off the social map and drift into debt, homelessness, drug addiction and crime and are then dealt with inadequately when they fall foul of the law.

But now it’s not just the ne’er-do-wells who are falling through society’s cracks, because many formerly self-reliant working people have been forced into penury during the lockdowns. The government has not really had much of a choice and I continue to believe – indeed, I have to believe – that they are doing ‘whatever it takes’ to protect the population from a clear and present danger. Who would want to take up the poisoned chalice of power right now?

And if this presents an opportunity to ‘build back better’, why should those words be interpreted as ‘build back worse’? Given the previous form of western governments you can be forgiven for being cynical, but think about it; what better starting point could we have, given that, in the view of a great many thinkers, society needed to be brought to its knees before it would listen? Forget about the fantasist Schwab and his futurology for fools. Who needs a great global reset when we can put on the show right here, kids!

It’s a big conversation, to be sure, and it will last for years, but right here, right now we need to consider where we start from. And I respectfully suggest that if we simply start talking over one another nothing will change. So let’s get everybody aboard the bus. First scoop up the desperate and regardless of how they got there, cover their debts, make them secure. In the grand scheme of things it would cost little to lift those burdens. Pay off the loan sharks and put the genuinely desperate back on an even keel.

Then let’s get people off the streets, fed and warm, and focus on what we need to do to bring these excluded people back into the fold. Because, the way we are now, the them and us divide has never looked so stark in my lifetime. We have allowed genuine underclasses to form and fester and let them know they are despised. I have been entirely guilty of thinking of them that way and I know it doesn’t work. We will probably need a vast army of care workers, social workers, outreach workers and the like, but we will have possibly millions of newly unemployed to draw on, and some will have hidden talents to connect.

Yes it will cost £billions, but what’s the alternative? Leaving the Covid crisis to find the denizens of the underworld have spilled out everywhere? Mass looting and violence as desperate people indulge in desperate acts? Private security installed to further separate and insulate only those who can afford it? In other words, South Africa; is that what we really want?

Despite the apparent charity, it’s not money for nothing. In return for dragging people back from the cellar up to the ground floor we need to demand they keep up their end of the bargain and perform as integral members of society. We need to go further than the mission priest exchanging a meal for an insecure attendance at a sermon. When the backsliding begins – and it inevitably will – we have to be ready to step in and prevent it. Come and re-join society and do it properly.

We’ve heard ‘all in this together’ far too many times for there to be much hope that this time it might happen. But we are all stakeholders now, and as the cynics’ cynic I harbour but faint hope it might actually work. But maybe it could, simply because of the sheer scale of the problem and the number of formerly immune who will suddenly experience a helplessness they have never felt before. If we don’t take what may be the only avenue of enlightenment open to us, who knows what alternative looms? How we pay for it isn’t the question we should be asking; that question is what are the costs of not paying for it?

The Little Reset

This is a follow-up post to Part One...

Laurence Fox has joined the ranks of uneasy demagogues touting one line or another on the lines of ‘freedom’, asserting that the government – for no verifiable reason given – is intent on removing our ‘human right’ to freedoms. That is one hell of a claim; actually it is two claims in a sense, for what is freedom? Those on the breadline, losing their businesses, houses, savings, etc, would probably trade this nebulous ‘freedom’ for some form of certainty in a heartbeat.

You can be free to starve, to be homeless, to freeze to death, or you can sign this here social contract… and be free of those concerns, as long as you play the game. Of course there are some people, often at the arse end of society, who will never opt to join the rest of the human race but they are few in number and if the will exists they can be contained, restrained and prevented from spoiling it for the rest of us; this is what the penal system is for.

But what of the rest? If society is going to work at all it has to work for [almost] everybody, but it is natural that those who need no assistance often look down on those who do. It is equally natural for those who are struggling to get by to gaze up with envy and not a little hatred for those whose apparently gilded lives give them immunity from compassion. There is the right-left paradigm in a nutshell; neither side seeing the whole picture. One narrative pits the valiant socialist freedom fighters against the greedy rich, while the other sees idle grifters forever demanding handouts from honest tax-paying.

Of course, that is way too simple, we all know it. Yet, sooner or later most of us will fall into one of those two camps and we are never so unified as a social mass as when the likes of the repugnant, be-mulleted, Philip Green appear in the news. Rapacious capitalists, riding roughshod over the peasantry are always likely to stir the blood… and when they are obnoxious human beings to boot, well, fair game.

But they’re not all like that. Andrew Carnegie https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-22246173 wrote that a man who dies rich, dies disgraced and a number of latter day philanthropists seem to have taken him to heart. Contrary to what ‘The Internet’ wants you to believe, possibly Lozza Fox amongst them, Bill Gates appears to be a major force for good in the world. Hate me for saying it but I maintain it is true. And while we’re at the naming names stage, Klaus Schwab is just a post-Hitlerian fantasist with his grandiose Great Reset, which totally ignores the evidence of centuries that nation may speak peace unto nation, but they always do it with their fingers crossed.

But maybe he has a point about the opportunity offered by the pandemic, whether you believe it is real or not, in that what better time is there than right now to consider starting over? And I mean really start over; change the paradigm; turn the clock backwards to a time when industrialists might have earned twenty times their average employees’ wages, not five hundred times, as is often the case today. Of course people should be allowed the pursuit of excellence but once your personal fortune goes beyond the wildest dreams of the majority, maybe there really is such a thing as earning too much?

I can’t be alone in simply not believing that one man is ‘worth’ so much more than everybody else, or that when you get into the $billions surely you exhaust the worthwhile options for keeping it to yourself. Trickle down economics sometimes needs to open the flood gates. And no, I’m not saying soak the rich, I’m merely suggesting we have a serious conversation about right now; how we get everybody back on their feet.

The government has borrowed a fortune to get through the year, but so has every other government. Everybody is in this. So why not borrow a little more and send it gushing straight to the bottom? Get it to the people who need it, get it to those who feel excluded and have done for a long time. Why not go further and pay off all those debts; then put the loan sharks (including some mainstream lenders) out of business. Pay off the predators, get everybody fed and housed and warm. Not forever, but for now.

How long do we have to wait?

And then, immediately, once everybody’s belly is full, let’s get around a great big table and let everybody participate in what comes next. There won’t be any free rides but right now a lot of people need a lift and I refuse to be mean enough to deny it. “Yes, but I earned what I’ve got!” some will protest. Look around you at the broken businesses and shattered lives; consider for one moment that it could be you. Our society really is broken and it really needs fixing. And if not now, when?

PS: I have made a donation to the Salvation Army appeal, here. 

(The bigger, international charities can suck my dick.)

All Change!

Nobody knows the best way to run a country and, if we are honest, even governing a small town is beyond the competence of most of us. For the developed world, a form of representative, liberal democracy has long been accepted as the least-worst system. But maybe the Covid crisis has now demonstrated the hideous flaws in allowing the hoi polloi to decide who gets a hand on the tiller of the tramp steamer of state. This last year has also shone a sickly light on free-market capitalism, given that the far too biddable decisions of millions of morons can often influence policy.

It has glibly been assumed, without much question, by advocates of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’, (which heretofore included me) that the free decisions, in their own self-interest, of the individuals of a population will ultimately regulate supply and demand far better than a centrally planned economy. And that even though inequalities arise, all boats are lifted by the rising tide of national wealth.

But it’s not fucking true, is it? Some boats, particularly the boats laden with the human detritus of our shipwrecked society, are pre-holed below the waterline, as if they have been supplied by people traffickers trying to squeeze one last trip out of a worm-ridden hulk. Popular democracy might sound like a great idea but sometimes the electorate actually does need saving from itself. There, I said it; some people’s instincts should be disregarded; some people should never be allowed to vote; and perhaps some people should never even have come into being.

But we are where we are, by whatever route we travelled and ‘here’ is a place that nobody voted for. Were the pandemic waved away tomorrow we would still be screwed. Those who have lost their livelihoods will need help and many who have retained theirs were already in too precarious a financial situation to be able to help. The wealthy, as ever, will probably suffer the least, but there will also be casualties among formerly higher rate taxpayers.

The eternal puzzle of how much should I be forced to pay from my surplus to meet your shortfall will exist regardless of whether the left or the right are in control. And in the UK it is often difficult to tell which is which, given that both sides continue to vie for popularity, rather than authority, governing not by conviction, but by opinion poll. (I wonder if an Opinion Poll Tax would help out?)

Admittedly a supposedly representative democracy is probably better than direct democracy, but only so far as the elected actually do represent the best interests of their constituents. But they don’t. People in Britain don’t really vote for representatives, they vote for a political government as a whole… and then watch, dismayed, as election promises are abandoned at what often seems like a capricious whim and the policies of the other side are adopted.

But it shouldn’t be about Labour or Conservative, left or right, it should be about right and wrong, and bringing about a world where, as far as is feasible, everybody takes part. Isn’t it time we actually had the long overdue conversation about how we tackle the real issues, the ones that actually damage people; how we let people realise their ambitions but not at the expense of others; about how we drag the underclasses kicking and screaming into society?

I don’t usually link blogs – if I’m honest it is the same three or four subjects re-hashed ad infinitum – but over the week I’m going to try and suggest a few changes we might want to consider, in order to bring about a better world, at least here, in the crucible of modern civilisation. I shall call my new system ‘socialism’ in the certain knowledge that it has never been tried, anywhere in the world. Not properly. More tomorrow… if I have the stomach for it.

Part Two...