Month: January 2021

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The great reckoning

Various loons on Facebook and Twitter a pushing yet another narrative where they promote a helplessness in the people that follow it. They call it the great reset. Essentially Covid and the climate crisis are a deliberate thing that comes from yet another inaginary cabal far away and a great many people are going to die to keep the cabal in power.

Like a lot of these narratives you can’t do anything about it. It’s related to the whole QAnon farce, where shadowy forces are taking over the world. Lunacy with a nice side-order of anti-semitism and hate directed at places where it can do no harm to the established order.

To be honest, I don’t want to talk about this any more than I already have. It’s brain-melting rubbish designed to keep you afraid and passive. You can google it if you want to go down the rabbit hole.

Instead, what do we actually have?

As I live in the UK, let’s start there:

  1. We now have the highest per-capita Covid death rate in the world, largely down to idiots trying to save christmas and not even attempting to implement a zero Covid strategy. More infections also mean more opportunities for the virus to mutate, which is a great win, for the virus. At the time of writing over 1,000 people a day are dying.
  2. A government department openly and blatantly bullied the people who work there to keep turning up for work even if they’d been told to isolate. People were also ordered to turn off the track and trace app or ignore it.
  3. Brexit restrictions mean that food is rotting before it gets delivered, but the government is trying to spin that into a story about Covid even though there weren’t any problems last year when there wasn’t any Brexit paperwork.
  4. Our crony-driven government still doesn’t have a working track and trace system, which makes even attempting zero Covid almost impossible. It has managed to channel millions to its failed private sector friends, though.
  5. Thousands of jobs in the fishing industry are probably already lost due to Brexit.
  6. The benefits system, in particular the murderous farce that is Universal Credit, pays too little, discriminates against people with larger families, and is designed to trap people in poverty. Who can forget the picture of the former minister exhulting when the former Chancellor announced even greater cuts? UC was temporarily increased to help people during the pandemic, and it has been reduced again even though the pandemic hasn’t gone away.
  7. UC is structured to give the money to the male partner in any relationship. This is because the fruit loop in charge wanted to keep families together, no count has yet been made of the number of women killed or injured because they couldn’t escape abusive partners. It also infantilises women, which is an amusing irony for a man who married money.
  8. There is evidence that 130,000 people may have had their lives shortened by inadequate benefits and benefit sanctions. This is disputed, but what is not disuputed is that it has cost lives, the argument is about how many. The department stopped collecting the figures to make it harder to work out.
  9. Our leaders continue to allow the supply of weapons to the ongoing war in the Yemen, despite being asked to stop and recently being able to vote on the policy. The humanitarian disaster is entirely man made, and our rulers’ bloody hands are all over it, including our arms-dealer queen.

These are merely a few examples of the ongoing murderous catalogue of actions and policies, from the bogus nonsense that they called austerity to the hard-faced attacks on the poor that have resulted in the deaths of thousands, both in the UK and elsewhere in the world. We are losing our jobs, having our health service privatised under our noses. We have been lied to over and over again, about everything, no-one believes a word our leaders say any more.

9/11 caused the death of around 3,000 people. The benefit “reforms” have already cost around 40 times that before we even start adding in the Covid deaths. People at the bottom of the socio-economic pile in this country are dying at an unprecedented rate, particularly if they are BAME people, who tend to be clustered in low-paying, low-status jobs where employers are particularly nasty.

The Western powers wrecked Afganistan over 9/11. So where is the outrage here? Why aren’t we going to war with these killers? Why are they still walking free, their lies unchallenged?

The killer isn’t at the gate. The killer lives in your house and eats at your table. You let them in, and let them lie to you and sing you to sleep.

The Great Reckoning

We need a great reckoning, forget the nonsense about the reset, or the racist crap about the replacement of white people with what is in fact their descendents who may have darker skin.

Every one of the dead should be counted, every politician involved in their deaths should be accountable.

Some people say that you sometimes have to make decisions that may result in resources being allocated in a way that means people will die and it’s unavoidable.

That’s true, but not in this case.

  • There are other places in the world where the UN hasn’t come into a nominally rich country to feed poor children.
  • There are other places in the world that correctly implemented track and trace and zero Covid strategies and have almost no cases now.
  • Others didn’t take the austerity pill and their economies recovered very quickly
  • There are other places where an advisory referendum is advisory
  • A large majority of the population want to see their NHS properly funded, not cut past the bone and sold
  • Other countries haven’t had the number of food banks go from a half dozen to out number the number of McDonalds in 10 years

There is no excuse for this, but at the moment our owners think they won’t face any consequences.

We need to start campaigning to disabuse them of that delusion.

The great reckoning needs to happen, or all of the nonsense about unity and healing is no more than hot air.

Footnote (March 2021) Naomi Klein has a great article on the Great Reset from the perpsective of the Davos group. A group which has itself made just about everything far worse.

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The strange cost of victory

Centrists often tweet at me saying that supporting the Corbyn project was a mistake. Blair is the only Labour leader who consistently won elections, and, of course, socialism won’t work.

Just saying stop talking bollocks doesn’t help. Everyone who knows realises that Corbyn was sabotaged and it’s hard to say what might have happened if there had been a fair election and the poor man hadn’t been continually undermined by factions in his own party. Of course, that was never going to happen and it’s not worth arguing about. The curious double think, where the sabotage is ignored and Corbyn’s Labour were always going to fail because some pundit said so, is part of the story these folks tell.

The other thing they do is harp on about Blair’s victories. But was it though? Let’s think about this some more.

All the way back in 279 BCE a king won a battle. His name was Pyrrhus. His victory was so memorable that it has become a phrase often used in English, as in Pyrrhic victory, this being victory that costs so much you have little left. This short piece will look at some of the lasting consequences of the Blair regime and question whether the winning so much lauded by some centrists was anything of the sort. After all, it is predicated on Blair being some kind of progressive, and even that is now easily recognised as debatable.

Labour was founded in part by the trade unions. They were unhappy with not having enough of a voice in the British Parliament and wanted a party they could have direct input into. This relationship was often used by Tories to pretend that Labour was beholden to the unions. The answer to this is so what? If you think about it, is it any different from being beholden to the people who think they own everything and everybody like the Tories? Who controls the trade unions, at least in theory? Their members. So in reality is there a divide with working class people as preached by our dead from the neck up media?

Thatcher defeated the miners and the other strong unions (Railways and Engineering) by using extreme violence and in part a variety of anti trade union legislation that her goverment introduced. Earlier Tory governments had tried to introduce similar legislation this and were roundly trounced in the late 70’s.

So, one of the things that Labour promised to its founders was a repeal of the legislation when it got back into power.

This never happened and has been conveniently forgotten.

The recent lack of support for the teaching unions over the attempts to force schools to open during the pandemic is more of the same. Support for trade unionists is dubious and partial at best, the middle class centrists who now run the party are terrified of people working collectively to protect themselves because they don’t understand it, it’s not sufficiently aspirational.

So, when we’re talking about winning with Blair this is the first win.

Next, let’s talk about the organisation of the NHS. Thatcher inherited a monolithic organisation that was run nationally and financed centrally. It was not something that could easily be privatised. That said, there are strategies and techniques in place that allow the break up of such monolithic organisations. These are very similar to ones used by businesses that are planning to off shore their manufacturing arm.

  • Create a management layer that splits the comissioning of the work
    from the doing of the work
  • Break large national organisation into smaller regional ones
  • Allow external companies to bid for pieces of work now they are small
    enough to be manageable.
  • Transfer the staff to the external companies so they lose their rights
    and are cheaper to employ. In the case of the NHS this is how
    companies can make money from a service that was designed to not have any kind of surplus, by attacking workers’ pay and conditions.

This is broadly what happened to the NHS. It’s why we now have a whole bunch of care commissions and service delivery groups in the NHS. It’s why there is a market in the NHS, allegedly to foster competition, but in fact to give external companies a way to take over the operations. A useful side effect of this is it’s easy to make cuts and give the reconstituted bureacratic layers less money to work with without it being too obvious. The tories also played games with VAT so on paper external companies were cheaper, because they could reclaim their tax, when the NHS itself was not able to. This effectively gave the external companies a 20% subsidy. As well as this, of course, the delivery parts of the NHS were never intended to make a profit. So if you allocate the same or less funds to a private company that is intended to make one the service will suffer. This isn’t rocket science.

The so-called NHS deficit (which means chronic underfunding in plain English) almost exactly matches the cost of the bogus internal market. This is no coincidence as extra funds weren’t allocated to pay for it.

Again, undoing the internal market, and removing these reforms were promised and never happened. Blair’s government did put a lot more money into the NHS, but they didn’t undo the privatisation preparations. All the tools and structures to destroy the service and replace it with a US style insurance system with the care being commissioned was left in place. All the Cameron government had to to was pick it up and run with it.

This is the second great win, of course.

Now let’s move on to the next great victory, which is the nonsense that is the Public Finance Initiative (PFI). Blair’s chancellor, Brown, had promised that he would stay within Tory spending targets. Putting aside the nonsense that a country with a sovereign currency could be said to have debt, it means that Brown had a slight quandary, in that Labour had promised to invest in the public sector and particularly the NHS but inherited spending plans that meant it wouldn’t be possible.

PFI, in essence, borrows money in a way that meant it wasn’t technically included in government borrowing. The funds required to, say, rebuild a school or hospital the Tories had neglected so long it was falling down, was turned into a financial contract. The hedge funds or whoever held the contract were entitled to interest several points over the base rate, and the hospitals or schools were obliged to make the payments first before doing anything else. If the payments don’t happen the people who hold the contract would end up owning the thing they had financed.

If you lived in the fantasy world where boom and bust was over, and everyone’s wages will increase forever, and so on this almost seems like a good idea. Of course, anyone with any sense could see it was stupid.

So now, in 2021, we have companies that failed to build hospitals or whatever and went bankrupt. We have new facilities that are technically fantastic but they haven’t been given the funds to employ staff and pay the debt on the buildings, which contributes to the so-called deficit. As usual, the money flowing around the capitalist system in the UK has been diverted into the pockets of those who already have plenty. We have a sovereign currency that means it can effectively just be called into existence, but instead of using that to invest it’s been put into the pockets of the wealthy, as usual.

Brown’s team, at the time, claimed they were rescuing PFI which could, one supposes, now seem very amusing. As usual there is now no sense of consequence or hubris. Brown keeps popping up in the commentariat and expects to be treated as something other than a bumbling has been. So, win number three for Blair (and Brown).

Then we come to the sore question of the 2008 crisis. It was a con driven by the banks to suck money out of the credit bubble by selling it back to themselves and loaning it out again over and over on ever more risky investments after downgrading the risk by lying about it. The boom was fundamentally built on fraud, allowed by the reregulation and massive cutting back of the regulators of the Thatcher era in the UK, and Regan and Clinton in the US, along with most of the other capital markets at the time. Laws put in place to stop rip offs and mis-selling, of setting your customers up to take losses while you hoovered up the money, were repealed or just ignored. Eventually the bubble burst.

Instead of jailing the fraudsters and protecting small investors the banks were bailed out. Their fraud and folly was turned into public debt, and, after being saved, bonuses were still paid. Think about this for a moment.

Win number four.

If you can remember back far enough there were in fact two Iraq wars. The first one drove the Iraqi forces out of Saudi Arabia and then left things hanging for many years (after abandoning people who rebelled against the regime to be murdered by it). So, the Iraqi people were punished for the crime of having a leader who was now out of favour with his former Western sponsors with sanctions. If they wanted to buy medical supplies, or indeed anything useful, with their oil revenues they were first price gouged and then various British and US officials decided whether or not the items could be deemed as having military applications and be denied.

So medical supplies, vaccines for children, cancer treatments and so on were not available to the ordinary Iraqis. A report in the British Medical Journal puts the number of children who died as a result of this policy, alone, at half a million. Labour at the time claimed to have an ethical foreign policy. These are not tears of laughter, they’re just tears.

Win number 5.

So, in summary:

  • Let’s leave anti Trade Union legislation in place
  • Let’s leave NHS provider split in place ready for Cameron
  • Let’s hog tie future generations with PFI idiocy
  • Let’s bail out banks & not prosecute fraud
  • Let’s kill half a million kids with sanctions even before we went to
    war

Win win win win win!

This feels a lot like losing looking back in 2021. We could also talk about how various flagship policies which did actually make some kind of difference to a few people were easily dismantled when Cameron came in. Not discussed here, either, is Brown selling of the UK gold reserves at a massive discount, or his changing the tax regime so that single people on fixed incomes were properly shafted. These are minor wins, obviously.

So, Tony Blair is the only Labour leader who won two elections since the war.

So what?

The boot appeared to be lifted off our necks for a few years, only to make sure it could come back down more firmly later once the ground had been prepared for more misery.

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Tales of a Brighter Future Volume 1 published

I’ve been working on Tales for a long time. The first book was started in Google Docs in June 2017 I had the last novella Zerø Day in what felt like a finished but not quite ready state for a few months and hadn’t pushed it out as a separate project onto Leanpub because I just wasn’t sure. In the end, just do it. If nobody reads it, fine. If some folks read it and get something out of it, fine. If it makes some reactionaries get all worked up, even better.

For the record:

  • The Retreat A story set in the South Atlantic on an autonomous ship that is cleaning up the plastic mess. Set about 50 years into an imagined future.
  • Better Way Set slightly earlier. Story of the collapse and how people escaped it with some mayhem added for versimilitude.
  • Zerø Day Set some time around now. How do we get armies to surrender and help rebuild the countries they’re occupying?

I spent most of new year’s eve putting them together and fighting with Leanpub’s new formatting engine. Managed to get it working but was seriously close to losing it with some of the recent changes on Leanpub about their formatting of markdown. After a lot of swearing I discovered I could go back to the original markdown engine and all was well. I’ve started writing using the vim editor, which breaks lines at line column 67. This is easier to read and look at differences than using very long wrapped line per paragraph.

Leanpub’s new wizzy engine was putting line but not paragraph breaks in and it looked awful. This will apparently become some kind of an option in future.

One of the things that surprised me when I was looking at Zero Day is how angry I am at the dangerous stupidity of our masters. I recently launched an independent project called No Mandate that has some articles and things looking at the problem of Empire Socialism and other things that are gonna kill us if we don’t get a grip on them. This is why I’ve been quiet on here for a while: I couldn’t stop myself writing this 17,000 word piece, it came to me over the course of a few days and I was waking up early with it in my head shouting at me to get it written. Then I’ve probably read it through and refined the arguments it uses a hundred times since it first came out of my editor.

Then I wanted to put it into its own site, and as it is a quite long piece also give it a page per section to make it easier to read online. This involved a fair bit of programming and chin stroking that kinda ate my creative energies for about six weeks at least. In amongst being really depressed because lockdown and the world filling up with even more avoidable suffering paralysing me a bit.

Inside Zerø Day there is a chapter called The No Mandate Manifesto that contains many similar ideas but expressed as angry rhetoric asking my fellow slaves to think about the situation they find themselves in. I don’t remember writing it. It must have been part of my drive to write 1000 words a day and I just wrote it almost on automatic. It’s not really a manifesto, it’s a call to action, a docmentation of the rage I feel when confronted with the vicious capitalist machine.

It’s quite shocking to me that I was unaware of how angry I am. On the day to day surface I don’t seem to feel the fury that’s obviously deep in my heart. Recently I have noticed that I’m far more willing to tell people who are too deluded to reach, and who are doing things like running anti-mask groups, or pandering to whatever ridiculous racist, sexist, homo or trans-phobic shite the alt-right trolls are pushing now just to fuck off. Mainly because it’s better to spend your energies on people your love can reach and let others grow until you can actually converse with them sensibly. I don’t engage to be honest, and leave the fucking off to people who try to have a go at me.

This is the hardest part. My world view is based on an intense love for this world and everything in it. Watching people deliberately hurting themselves so they can stick one on the lefties or whatever is fucking hard, and makes me even angrier that some troll has managed to damage them so much they think this is a good way to live. Humans are not stupid, whatever the cynics say, and watching people act in ways that will hurt themselves as much as anyone because of a weird hatred is deeply saddening.

I will probably use the software I developed to turn the Empire Socialism piece into a coherent website on the three novellas and put them up on a TOABF site linked from here. I want people to read stuff and argue and think about it.

The problematic thing is if I turn on comments on this site I get overloaded with spam and I just don’t have the time. I might start up a Discord server where I can converse with people without the overhead of spam. We’ll see.

If you want to read the book and are skint please get in contact. I can send you a link where you can download it for free. I don’t want any barriers in the way, but it would be nice to start getting support for this work as it takes a lot of my energies.

Oh, and

Happy New Year 🙂