18th February 2015

Bishops and Benefits.

Analysis and prescription.

I had a small, bit part, in Faith in the City., it was largely a walk on role rather than a speaking part.

I was asked by the Bishop of the Diocese where I worked to write the Diocesan Submission to the Commission established by Robert Runcie.

The essence of my report came from a comment, actually made later and directly to the Commission by an officer of the Local Authority, the North East has three problems, Poverty, Poverty, Poverty.

My second involvement was to make all the arrangements for the Commission's visit to the North East.

The commissioners heard again and again about too much week at the end of the money, shame at not being able to afford to house, feed or clothe families adequately and not attending Church because people had no money for the collection.

When the report was published there was a follow up conference in Newcastle and I made a slide presentation of inner city and outer estate poverty with a voice over that I scripted.

After it was shown the Chairman commented that the problem here is that anyone can be good at analysis but what is needed is a prescription that helps to change things for the better.

The analysis offered by Faith in the City was sharp and clear but the failure of the document was that the prescription offered was to put it crudely more welfare which raises the inevitable question can you solve the problem of welfare dependency by prescribing more welfare?

Clearly at one level if you simply don't have enough money to house, feed and clothe your family then more money will help but if there are deeper underlying structural problems within the economy both nationally and locally more money is not the entire answer.

Now the Bishop's have written a Pastoral Letter which follows hard on the heels of the Archbishop's book Rock and Sand.

So is this meddling in politics?

Is it partisan?

Is it interfering with the political process which is the purview of politicians and no-one else?

Both documents manage to combine a degree of wisdom with a sense of looking for justice for the poorest in society.

The notion that those with the broadest shoulders should share a greater part of the burden of austerity should seem to most sensible people to be a reasonable idea. It is certainly not a Marxist view, if anything it is a compassionate view and one that arises out of the Christian ideal of 'the common good'.

Rather than condemning the con-dems in fact the Bishop's seem to be calling for the ideal of 'the big society' to be reclaimed and re-worked.

Whilst the right of centre press have described the pastoral letter as Tory bashing in fact the bishop's analysis is pretty consistent with that of the Tory Party and their prescription is pretty anodyne with the possible exception of a mild slap on the wrist for for describing people on welfare as undeserving.

What I would have liked to see coming from the Bishop's was a much sharper analysis leading to a more compelling prescription.

The analysis has to describe the failure of capitalism itself to contribute to, promote or even imagine the ideal of the common good.

Clearly if capitalism is the chosen mechanism for generating and sharing wealth in global society and the analysis points to its failure, after all even Ed Miliband is just asking for a kinder capitalism,  then the Tory MP's who described the letter as a left wing manifesto or (even) factually wrong might have been right!

Standing alongside the Bishop's letter however are two other commentaries, one demonstrating the failure of austerity (see Simon Wren-Lewis in the London Review of Books) and the other a speech reported in the Guardian given by the Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis given in Zagreb in 2013.

In the speech Varoufakis describes neoliberalism as toxic propaganda against which we need to be immunised.

Describing himself as an 'erratic Marxist' he shares an insight from Marx:

That 'wealth is privately produced and then appropriated by the state through taxation' is of course the underlying neo-con belief that underpins both Cameron and Osborne's political agenda promising to take people out of tax as much and as far as possible, when money is commodified as it is in their world view then that money is yours if you are one of the hard working strivers.

But Marx has demonstrated that this view is false, precisely the opposite applies, 'wealth is collectively produced' by workers in offices and factories and then 'privately appropriated' by means of production and property rights.

So if the Bishop's had wanted, they might have challenged the underlying proposition of capitalism which increasingly in Europe, America and Japan is failing to produce a 'common good' by simply storing more and more wealth into its own barns leaving less and less to be enjoyed by the wider community and shared either through work or, as work increasingly becomes an inadequate distribution channel, through the idea of a basic income to be enjoyed by all.

11th February 2015

The Big Society continues to be the underlying theme of this blog.

Sitting in a cafe in Genoa enjoying a Caffe Corretto, reading the weekend papers and watching the passing traffic both pedestrian and motorised it was easy to reflect on what a big society could mean not only for me but for all.

A truly big society would be too big for small minded nationalism.

It would be a society in which wealth was shared more equitably, where people could shop and eat and drink and heat their homes and travel without resorting to begging, borrowing or stealing to stretch already stretched budgets.

It would be society where culture was enjoyed, where health care was available when needed and where prevention was always preferred to cure.

A society where children could play and learn without fear, where people would share and learn about other people their cultures and faiths.

A truly big society would be a society where respect for others was so deeply ingrained that it would be possible for all to sit at a pavement table and sip their coffee in peace.

But now the idea of bigness is having to be rethought in the light of an avalanche of small minded policies.

And the idea of society similarly is having to be rethought as the ties holding the nations that comprise the United Kingdom are weakened and the Con-Dems chase other parties in a race to the right.

Of course the Lib Dems are now trying to establish a separation between their current manifesto policies and the policies they have supported and pursued for the past five years, a strategy which won't wash, at least with this commentator!

The review of the past five years is a list of broken promises, austerity, rewards for the already rich taken directly from the pockets of the poorest as the welfare budget has been systematically reduced under the guise of making work pay?

As though zero hours contracts, low wages, part time jobs and benefit sanctions represent encouragement?

But the chorus of nay sayers in business and the right wing media continues to drown out the voice of those demanding justice.

Will the Labour parties policies actually result in what we are told they will?

All the evidence suggests that an unequal society is an inefficient society, an unfair society and a society that can no longer be called 'big' because it loses any sense of the large and spiritual ideas that hold communities together.

At the heart of the call for Scottish Independence lie the values of justice and fairness which should bind societies together, but which now can be seen to be so divisive south of the border.

In the promised big society we might have expected a certain sense of brother's/sister's keeperliness to hold people to together in common cause but as the inequality that has been consciously introduced has infected society so many of the indicators of disaffection's have increased.

As Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have illustrated in the book The Spirit Level: almost every indicator from life expectancy to mental illness, violence to illiteracy is affected by how equal or unequal a society is.

As the con-dems have pursued their policy of austerity we have experienced an increasing gap between those with and those without.

Yet again and again we have been shown that in such a society all become losers both rich and poor alike.

The difference of course is that some will move their money (in bricks of cash?), their residence and their contribution to live offshore or on their private island only appearing once a year at Davos to flaunt their wealth.

In Europe there are encouraging signs that austerity is being challenged and rejected, in Greece and in Spain, the response to increased job insecurity for many, the stress of managing each day on reduced domestic budgets against a background of increasing prices, youth unemployment and increasingly stretched public services is to use the ballot box as a referendum calling for change.

Of course as the EEC has enlarged the centre has increased its power and influence, its no surprise that Germany and France are leading the mission to achieve a peaceful settlement in the Ukraine, leaving Britain as an increasingly peripheral nation on the sidelines.

But our marginalisation is not simply geographical we are choosing to become a smaller, less influential society, with Brexit in the background why would the centre choose to continue to treat with Britain, and if we do Brexit after a referendum, where will that leave the Scottish Parliament?

Far from ushering in, promoting or enabling a Big Society, it seems that the Con-Dems under David Cameron have succeeded in creating a much smaller society, one in which Britain's influence has declined, one in which our place in the world is less than it used to be.

But unless we wake up and smell the coffee the terrifying prospect of another five years of austerity lies ahead.