Let me set my cards
on the table from the start, politics will never deliver my chosen
system of government, as I hope for a Star Trek style future where
currency has been abolished, and we all work together for the
betterment of mankind in a utopian egalitarian society without
borders, war or any of that kind of unpleasantness. It is pretty
obvious that this will never be delivered in my lifetime, if ever,
but I do hold out some hope that in some far flung future Jean-Luc
Picard looks back at us and shakes his head in disbelief at the way
we organise things.
With that, we
embark upon another election campaign, Britain is currently without a
government, and thus, as I had always hoped, anarchy rules, and we
are all free to follow our conscience rather than the arbitrary rules
and laws stated by the government. Although, of course we are not,
and plenty of things are still very much illegal, so stop punching
your wife in the face, and put down that spliff. It would be nice if
we could function as a society without having to make laws telling us
not to do awful, horrendous things to each other, but it is obvious
that there are just too many sociopaths hanging around for that to be
a reality, and just twats, plain, common or garden, selfish twats.
The rhetoric and
dialogue of the election campaigns are the thing that is currently
upsetting me. We are all being told that we must own our own homes to
be valuable, and that to stop the wealth creating upper echelons from
hoarding as much wealth as they can would be bad for all of us. Once
again, people are treating the laws of economics as if they were as
intractable as the laws of physics, and forgetting that currency is
an abstract concept, a useful one yes, but while you can't stop the
earth from going around the sun, or things naturally falling
downwards whilst in the grip of the earth's gravity, you could quite
easily not put up prices when demand outstrips supply if you wanted
to.
Would the whole of
western society descend into some kind of anarchic bloodbath if there
were a fight club style reset of all debts? Who would actually lose
out if, like a benevolent parent who has loaned their child the money
to cover their rent for a month with no real expectations of ever
seeing it again, all national and personal debts were cancelled, and
we all went back to zero? I would hazard a guess at pretty much
nobody in a life destroying turmoil sense of losing out. Equally, if
all the CEOs of every company out there were to suddenly have an
attack of conscience and pay all their employees an actual living
wage (the aspirational £10 an hour suggested by the Greens seems
good to me) and took it from the shareholders profits and the higher
earners salaries, rather than knee jerk price increases, would the
business actually collapse as is so often predicted? Or would
football club owners and their stars have a couple less yachts, and
might Mr Branson not have his own private island or something.
Businesses did not collapse when the minimum wage was first
introduced, despite all the protests to the contrary.
To extrapolate a
bit, I work for one of the small businesses so often quoted as likely
to go under if higher minimum wages were introduced. Full disclosure,
I do not make ten pounds an hour, though I am not terribly badly off,
and as we bring in two salaries, we are ok thanks, there are other
reasons for this which I will go into later. I suspect, that if the
CEO decided not to keep adding to his collection of very expensive
sports cars, or maybe took one less extreme fishing holiday a year,
or maybe downsized from his big country house, or travelled between
the London office and the Devon factory a bit less, maybe using
something more economical than an Audi R8 then he could probably push
up those of us who are under the tenner an hour down here to that
level without too much upward pressure on the prices we charge, or
too much of a dip into personal poverty. I could be wrong, and I
suspect he would tell me that I am (he might if he is reading this,
and if so, this is purely hypothetical, I am not lobbying here, and
you knew I was a socialist when you hired me).
Once upon a time, a
household could live on one salary, and that being a salary from a
factory or other such low paid work. The other members of the
household (be they the wife, or children who hadn't left home yet)
could go out and work as well, but the second income would be to pay
for nice things, like holidays, or new curtains or some such facile
crap. The point being, that now, with a single income, no family can
pay its rent, food, energy etc. etc. bills without claiming some
in-work benefits that are the real problem with the benefits bill
that we keep blaming on long term unemployed, disabled and
immigrants. A living wage would stop that, if a job offered you a
decent income, rather than merely forcing you to pay your own extortionate rent, while simultaneously preventing you from affording it,
even the most hapless layabout would be more inclined to take it.
Perhaps if the big CEOs had to live on what they pay their cleaners
and call centre staff for a bit, they might increase wages out of
some kind of human decency, although from what I have seen on shows
such as undercover boss, and secret millionaire, they are more likely
to make one off payments to a couple of people with impressive sob
stories than make an actual real difference in the lives of all their
employees.
It is not the
politics of envy, for most of us do not want 4 homes, a yacht and a
fleet of cars, we just want to not have to worry about paying our
bills all the time, to get to the end of the month and have a bit
left over for a rainy day, that is not envy, that is simple peace of
mind. Equality should mean levelling up, not down.
The other real,
massive underlying problem in the UK is housing, and not because we
can't all afford to buy, but because increasingly, we can't afford to
rent either. And we are told that we should all be buying, when quite
often, rent is a perfectly valid option. We have taken one of the
most basic of all human rights, the right to shelter, and commodified
it, turned it into an investment and shoved the prices up so high
that rents/mortgage payments are fast leaping over the 50% of your
income that I was told to budget for it being back when I was a
wide-eyed 18 year old skipping out into the world.
I am incredibly
lucky to own my own home (although the bank still own half of it) and
I am not going to pretend that I managed it by knuckling down,
working hard and getting on with it as so many others claim. I only
managed this feat by having the good fortune to inherit a decent sum
of money from my grandmother (it takes a special kind of sociopath to
describe losing a grandparent as good fortune) who only managed to
leave me this money by having the equally good fortune to have bought
a semi within walking distance of Guildford station back in the
1950s. She did not do this as an investment, she needed a home. I was
also lucky enough to be born into a family that paid for me to go to
a private school and get a decent education that provides an instant
leg-up into better jobs. I threw it back in their faces, and went off
to do low-paid jobs in crappy factories while pretending to be a rock
star by night, but that is the only reason that I feel I have this
unique perspective to share with you.
I see my
contemporaries, claiming that the only reason they have their
comfortable lives in nice houses and well paid jobs is that they have
worked hard. I am not doubting that they have worked hard, but so do
the people who live on the council estate where I lived before I had
the stroke of good luck that let me pay off all my not inconsiderable
debts and buy a house. We struggled to pay the rent and the bills in
that house too, hence the not inconsiderable debts. It was owned by a
housing association as affordable rented accommodation, and we
brought in two full time salaries at above the minimum wage, but that
was not enough with the pressures of bringing up two teenagers in
modern society, spiralling food and energy prices and stagnated wages. We still
struggle to pay everything now, I think everybody does, but the
difference now is that I know I could cut down on the wine bill,
maybe have a few less pets, not eat out any more etc. etc. whereas
then it was the very real dilemma of eating or heating. Most of the
comfortable middle classes who agonise over being in the 'squeezed
middle' have no idea, Jacinta can do without her riding lessons, and
Tarquin can learn piano from a book, ok?
Misunderstanding of
Tax boundaries doesn't help either, I have never made it up to the
40% band, and probably never will, but I have met people who seem to
believe that it will take 40% of everything they earn, rather than of
that over and above the threshold amount. And if you are lucky enough
to be over that threshold amount, truly, you are in a land of first
world problems if you fear a little bit of a tax rise on everything
you earn above £42, 385 a year will destroy your life.
Decent policies
such as rent control, and the mansion tax would hopefully stop the
relentless rent rise, as, if the most expensive properties incurred
an extra tax burden, then the market would make them less expensive,
thus the buy to let landlords would need less income to pay for them,
and hopefully the rents would drop accordingly (though probably not,
as I said before, there are many selfish twats). The ludicrously high
benefits payout that we hear so much about in the red-tops and the
mail are almost always made up of the amount paid out in housing to a
private landlord, who is all too often one of the very MPs who are so
quick to demonise the benefit claimants that they are gaining so much
from. A wonderfully vicious circle.
I would like our
prospective MPs to stop banging on about affordable housing to buy
(let alone the obsession with building new when there are so many
unoccupied houses already) when a huge swathe of the country do not
ever even hope to buy a home of their own, I used to be one of them,
so I know. Sensible, affordable rented homes, and not trying to hound
people out of them for having a spare room might be a start. Along
with bringing back a fair days work for a fair days pay, rather than
the culture that you should have to aspire to better yourself, and if
you don't then you deserve a salary that gives you less than you need
to live on. Forget about social mobility for once, cleaners and call centre workers, and burger flippers are
all working as well, they should be able to live on what they earn,
rather than being made to feel like they should work harder to become
managers, or entrepreneurs. We cannot all be the boss.
As to the leaders
debate, and the cult of personality going on, it struck me that
everybody says that their guy won it, and such is the nature of the
beast. We agree with those who we agree with, and everyone thinks
differently, I had been leaning towards the green party all year (and
have enthusiastically voted for them in the past) but it is a shame
that the charismatic and enigmatic Caroline Lucas has given the
leadership to the awkward and frightened seeming Natalie Bennet. I
can only hope that the more she does it, the better she gets, but I
am leaning ever back to the Labour party again. See, even I am affected by the personality game that I am so annoyed with, green policies are still the ones that resonate with me most.
Ed is pulling off
the lurch to the left that we have all been waiting for (those of us
who wanted an alternative to Thatcher/Blairism anyway) and I suspect
it is no coincidence that they have been fielding the most socialist
MPs they can find on Question Time recently. Ever since Tony Blair
tricked me (it felt like he invited me to a fantastic party, and then
it turned out that the party was in my house, and he turned up with a
load of rich mates, smashed up my stuff, drank all my booze, started
a war with the neighbours and then left me an invoice for a load of
other stuff I hadn't even seen there) I have felt abandoned by the
party of the working man. The Lib Dems promised everything I wanted
last time, and they too got a whiff of power and turned their backs
on us, hence my swing to the greens. I am still undecided in case you
are interested, but as a proud pinko-lefty-marxist type it is
unlikely that I will vote UKIP or Tory, although where I live I
suspect that will be the choice, and a tactical voter may have to
vote Tory to keep UKIP out, an extremely unpalatable option.
I was most
impressed by the policies of the SNP and Plaid Cymru, who sound like
they actually care about people. Since I am no fan of nationalism,
and no respecter of borders, I was surprised to be swayed by
separatist parties, and it was suggested that nationalists just dress
up in whatever clothes they can to appeal to the most people. I'm not
sure that's true anymore, and I might have to move to Wales or
Scotland just so that I can vote for a party whose policies I agree
with. All the warnings the Tories are giving about a possible
Labour/SNP coalition seem like good things to me, abolishing Trident
is something I have always felt to be a good thing, given the nature
of 21st century conflict, nuclear warheads seem utterly
redundant, if indeed they ever were effective at anything other than
attempted genocide, or ensuring the whole population live in constant
fear. And the SNP have been given their answer about an independent
Scotland now, so they need to concentrate on doing normal politics
instead. What were once single policy pressure parties are all starting to have
meaningful and well thought out manifestos.
It did sadden me
that the massacre in Kenya was pushed so far down the news schedule
while the pundits were excitedly dissecting the leaders debate, but
that's the media for you. I missed all bulletins on the Kenya thing,
as ironically, I was channel flicking to find it, and missed it by a
hair on all of them, that's how short it was.
The thing I must
take from all of this, is how sad it is that nobody seems to think
that the economy should be there to benefit the people, rather than
the people being there to service the economy, we are all thought of
as just units, there to ensure GDP goes up and help bring the books
back into balance. The country is not it's finances, it is the
people, whether they be those who had the good fortune to inherit
vast tracts of land and a crown, or born to a hapless, uneducated 13
year old girl on a council estate, or uprooting themselves from their
homes to build a better life in a foreign land, we need to make sure
they all have real, genuine equal chances of success, and stop
peddling this myth of a meritocracy. It is not coincidence that most
of the powerful positions in this land are held by privately educated
white men, and I say that as a privately educated white man.