25th March 2015

I guess that it is little more than a commonplace to note in passing that generally the Labour Party is for public ownership and the Tory Party prefers to privatise stuff.

So with Railways as with the NHS, with Water and Gas and other Utilities and Technology and the Post Office all, under this Tory led, co-alition Government shifted from the public to the private sector.

The East Coast Railway, a victim of its own success after the failures of the previous private sector franchisee and having been run successfully as a public company, the company has gone back into private ownership.

Little enough is said about the costs of privatisation, the public funds invested to allow BT to compete with Sky in bidding wars to show premiership football on TV.

And why not allow Mr Branson his  very own life size railway set to play with, I don't imagine that his private Island has one, so hey!

It's OK come and play with ours, why don't you?

But hidden in the pages of the Newspapers last week there was a story about another privatisation.

After five years of austerity, during which the national debt has barely shrunk at all, the Con-Dems appear to have come up with a cracking new plan.

Privatise the debt.

So, instead of each and everyone of us taking the strain of the cost of maintaining a fairer society in which rich and poor share the burden proportionately the latest wheeze is for each of us to carry our own debt as best we can.

This at least it seems to me, thinking aloud as I often do with only the indoor critic to notice my muttering, is the plan for the years after the election to come.

Apparently according to my Newspaper, the average UK household is likely to be £10, 000 in debt by the end of 2016, not including their Mortgage, if indeed they are lucky enough, or not, to have one.

I'm not entirely sure that there is a coherent logic to this thinking and whether I am comparing like with like or whether I am comparing Pears with Oranges?

But if the National Debt costs everyone of us in interest payments and is held by the Chancellor to be a bad thing is it a better thing for private debt to be costing each of those in debt over £2500 a year in interest payments?

I suppose if you happen to be one of the lucky few who are not in debt then, well .......!

But if debt is the method by which we have each managed to survive the last five years of austerity.

And if we have exchanged inflation for deflation during the process.

And if it is at all true that we have halved the deficit as Mr Cameron likes to claim.

Or indeed that the plan is working as Mr Osborne claims.

Why is it that household debt, excluding mortgages, over the period has risen by 10%?

And why also is it that much of that borrowing appears to be, not for luxury high price-tag items, but that people are increasingly depending on credit, both credit cards, personal and pay day loans, to afford essential items.

Or are borrowing simply to make ends meet?

The inevitable bump in the road ahead will be felt, and felt pretty dramatically, when interest rates start to rise.

If loans are affordable with interest rates at 0.5% will they remain affordable when rates increase?

Privatising the public debt is the logical conclusion of privatising everything else but the corollary of this strategy is the growing evidence (published by The Bank of England) that whilst people borrow to spend, thereby providing some support to consumption within the UK and helping GDP.

The increase in private debt has contributed to the depth of the downturn in the economy and a much slower return to growth.

5th March 2015

The election is now only a couple of months away.

After five years of austerity it feels that the 2015 election is critical for the future becoming of our society.

I have always been committed to fairness, peace, justice, multi-culturalism, rock and roll and motorcycling.

Of course the austerity we have been forced to pursue was only ever a sham austerity.

Anyone relying on social support for their survival will in all likelihood have had their benefits reduced whilst bankers will have retained their bonuses.

The disabled have had DLA replaced with PIP.

Whilst the Bar Bills at Westminster have kept up with inflation.

Those in receipt of housing benefit will have lost some of their benefit if they were adjudged to have a spare room.

Whilst houses in London have been extended downwards not for spare rooms but for essential Gyms and Swimming Pools.

People faced with impossible choices will have been sanctioned.

Whilst Hedge Fund Managers will have been promoted.

And throughout the past five years strivers have been contrasted with shirkers although how those struggling to manage to maintain family life on a reducing budget whilst balancing increasing costs for food, energy and transport can be thought of being anything other than strivers is beyond me.

The idea of Universal Credit has been planned, developed and rolled out (sic) on the assumption that all have access to the Internet that monthly payments can be managed in order to last until the month has ended before the money has run out.

Last week we received a letter telling the indoor critic and myself that our household had been chosen at random to take part in a study being managed on behalf of the DWP.

The study was into Family Resources.

For agreeing to take part  in the study we received a book of stamps!

Apparently the results from this survey 'allows the DWP plan for the future and monitor the impact of policy changes in the United Kingdom'.

Oh Yeah?

The leaflet that was enclosed with the letter and the book of stamps included a pie chart.

Apparently the last survey? found that:

74% of UK household income was in the form of Earning and Investments.

14% of UK household income was in the form of pensions.

9% of UK household income was in the form of Benefits and Tax Credits.

3% was described 'as other'!

Bank Robbery?

Maybe! Although whether that was banks robbing us or us robbing banks is not clear.

My first reaction was to not participate in the survey. The conspiracy theorist in me was highly suspicious of the fact that the survey was being conducted on behalf of the DWP, but having spoken to another person who had participated in the survey and found the experience interesting I began to soften my attitude.

So much so that when the knock came, i.e. the researcher just turned up at the door without first 'phoning to check that we were home or that it was a convenient time, my initial hostility had changed from a 'No' to a 'Maybe'.

Keeping him on the doorstep seemed discourteous, so the two of us, the indoor critic and myself aka 'The Household' sat at the dining table with the researcher and his battered lap top.

He didn't know our names, he still doesn't, but he knows where we live.

The information we were asked for and which we gave was so general as to be of no use to anyone, apparently because we are retired, the survey is less interrogative, but how Mr Duncan Smith and his team could make any kind of use of the knowledge that our income is from our pensions and that we don't have a mortgage, other than adding us to the 14%, I don't know.

I am told by another friend that the DWP need to find the 'tipping point' for the moral majority because they need to demonstrate that we are in the middle of an economic recovery and that the cuts need to slow down not increase further.

It was after receiving that message that I opened my paper to read that the Chancellor is planning a giveaway budget.

First they guaranteed the pensioners income, then they raised tax allowances, then they restored tax credits and then they sat back and hoped that they'd done enough to win the election.

So far I have received, apart from emails from the Labour Party, one election leaflet from UKIP.

There is a strong link between UKIP's unfunded promises and the promises made by the Conservatives to win our votes.

Protecting jobs, increasing prosperity, repairing the economy and reducing the debts we leave to our grandchildren.

The headlines are user friendly but the devil as always is in the detail.

Just read the small print and don't get taken in by a free book of stamps even if you need one to cast your postal vote.

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.

29th January 2015

Debt is a complicated concept.

An overdraft is debt.

A credit card debt is either a balance or the card can be 'maxed out' but the key word is still credit.

If I do a favour for a neighbour it could be a simple act of kindness or it could put them in my debt.

When the banks spent all the money that was characterised as a financial crisis.

But it appears that bankers to one side, it plunged us all into debt and ushered in a prolonged period of austerity.

In the UK the practise of sanctioning people who are in receipt of welfare benefits (other than the elderly who of course are the largest single group of welfare beneficiaries) is in practise the failure to pay the money that individuals have been guaranteed to maintain themselves and their families and makes the state indebted to those individuals it fails to pay.

No amount of harrumphing from the front benches changes that.

As it has it in the Book Leviticus: 'if your brother becomes poor, and cannot maintain himself .... you shall maintain him'.

The Greek people have elected a new Government charged with ending austerity and renegotiating debt.

In Britain austerity continues to hold us to ransom.

There is it seems TINA no alternative. But of course there is an alternative and it will be interesting to watch how Syriza in Greece negotiates with the EU and Angela Merkel to find an alternative.

Meanwhile the wealth of the richest 1% ratchets yet higher leaving the 99% to rely on credit to reach the next payday.

On TV last  night a commentator stated that debts should always be paid but in reality the forgiveness of debt is possible and in some cases necessary.

There is evidence that in the earliest societies debt was seen as a bad thing and its relief by the state a social good.

In The Old Testament in the book of Leviticus debt was forgiven on a fifty year cycle where each fiftieth year was declared to be a year of Jubilee announced by 'the loud trumpet' each fiftieth year was to be 'hallowed' and all the inhabitants of the land will enjoy liberty.

This was a vision in which all returned to their families and their property.

This vision of Jubilee would be welcomed through out the world today in Palestine, in Syria, in Africa were it to be declared.

But just as there seems to be confusion over the true meaning of the word jubilee there is no real evidence that Jubilee was declared.

Just as in the UK the con-dems realise that their five year parliament is about to end so at some point in the past, human nature being what it is those who held the credit notes and mortgage deeds began to plan for the coming jubilee, it would they possibly argued be irresponsible to return a mans' 'patrimony' it might cause 'chaos', it would certainly mean that we might not pass go and indeed might go straight to jail.

Christians tend to start with the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples in which the word trespass in the common usage of the prayer, is in the Bible rendered as Debt.

Forgive us our debts as we forgive others theirs.

Stated like this it seems to me that it sounds like a simple and relatively incontrovertible position.

As has been argued by the anthropologist David Graeber in his book, Debt: The First 5000 Years, debt has changed and been changed by the people and societies who have used it.

In his book Graeber compares and contrasts two forms of Debt, the first he identifies as imprecise, informal, community-building and this he describes the natural indebtedness that arises in human economies where people lend and borrow, repay and fail to repay but retain natural obligations between each other.

The second form of debt is monetised debt the outcomes of which are deeply negative often as Grabber observes resulting in impoverishment and violence.

The accumulation of wealth in the bank accounts of the few in practise puts them in societies debt to have so much money that you cannot spend even the interest on your capital is an obscenity but it is an obscenity that is not only not recognised but is denied.

Capitalism, unlike Marxist and Islamic economics, consistently confuses price with value. This is what is meant by monetising debt.

A recent large purchase made using an 'interest free offer' has resulted in my receiving weekly letters from the lender offering more and more 'credit' in the form of bank loans and 'credit' cards.

Recently as a seventy year old pensioner I was offered a £10,000 loan for 10 years!

There's optimism?

Borrowing money to pay off debts is in the simplest sense of the word usury.

Whilst it is clear that neither of the main political parties in the UK will ever consider the possibility it will be fascinating to see whether Syriza can achieve a Jubilee in relation to its continued membership of the eurozone.

Meanwhile the rest of us must keep up the payments ........

22nd January 2015

In the early 1970's I recall driving out as a family, the indoor critic, myself and our one year old daughter.

I was low on fuel and so I called into the first filling station that we came across.

The price of a gallon of petrol, on which our Citroen Dyane would run for some sixty miles, was around 35 pence.

I remember being shocked at the price.

I filled the tank with petrol, the cost was under £2 00, and when I returned to the car I announced, 'That's it, when petrol gets to 50 pence a gallon I am selling the car and giving up driving'.

Of course I didn't, I couldn't, I needed the car for my work as a Curate in the Church of England, I had a young family our second daughter was born and my life and work style was built around the flexibility of the family car.

It was also in the winter of 1974, January through to March, that we endured three day weeks, with routine power cuts. 

I managed to fix up an old car headlamp from the local scrapyard attached to a car battery which meant that with oil fired heating and temporary lighting we were still warm and we could see to read.

We couldn't however cook on our electric cooker and had to use a camping stove.

With the cost of crude oil and gas rising and with the increased militancy of the Miners Union it must have become clear to someone that action was needed.

And action was taken by the Conservative Government under Margaret Thatcher.

Our energy dependency was exported and the advent of first Gas and then Oil in the North Sea was used to first undermine and then close down our coal industry.

The receipts from the North Sea were then used to underwrite the economy creating a false sense of national well being and ensuring that the balance of payments balanced on a day to day, month to month, year to year, hand to mouth basis.

Meanwhile in Norway .......

Or as the SNP might have it, 'we was robbed'.

Now, as if some great Machiavellian hand is at work in the affairs of the British State Oil prices are falling, the North Sea Oil Fields are not producing because it is not economic to do so, and on the supermarket forecourt prices are being reduced and the rate of reduction is almost 2 pence a week and occasionally 2 pence a day.

The price is still over 50 pence a gallon, even £1 11 99 is close enough to £6 00 a gallon making people feel much better off than when it was nearer £8 00 a gallon but it is still impacting on family budgets.

And of course the Chancellor is smiling, our plan he says, is working, except that of course there is no plan at all, but he senses that people will feel sufficient easing of the financial constraint imposed by austerity to give him and his colleagues another five years and perhaps this time without being hampered by con-demnation.

As Oxfam has reminded us whilst the 1% gather at Davos that the 1% have now garnered into their barns as much of the wealth as the other 99%.

Croesus must be looking down from the Pantheon and worrying that soon he will not be the very definition of Wealth.

The Managing Director of the IMF is worried that Marx might yet be proved to be right and that Capitalism is harbouring the seeds of its own destruction and Picketty and the authors of The Spirit Level stand back and watch ..... and wait for their warnings to be heard, reprinted and republished.

This is no way to run our affairs as a nation in the year of our Lord 2015.

As the Archbishop commented recently, quoting William Temple a former Archbishop of both York and Canterbury, “The art of government in fact, is the art of so ordering life that self-interest prompts what justice demands.”

There is a consistent theme that emerges whenever thoughtful people reflect on inequality which is that more equal societies are happier, more at ease with themselves, more  productive and ultimately richer and more successful than unequal societies.

Tragically it remains a lesson that Conservative Governments consistently fail to learn.

In 1972/73 my Stipend was £900 and my housing was provided and petrol was 35 pence a Gallon, forty three years and a couple of O's later and little has changed, there is still more month than money when pay day comes round and I'm still considering giving up Motoring perhaps when petrol reaches £50 a gallon?

16th January 2015

Last night we went to see The Broonzies.

A great live hoax of a band with members drawn from amongst musicians well known in the NE.

In creating The Broonzy family of which all five performers are 'cousins' the musicians have begun to weave a web of possibilities.

Inventing a faux family is not especially wicked, its not illegal, its not morally wrong its just a group of friends who are musicians creating for themselves a creative persona, after all, most Bands play under a made up name and having made up the name sometimes they begin to embody some of the essential characteristics of their invention.

When The Broonzies returned to the stage for their encore it seemed entirely appropriate to end the evening with This Could Be The Last Time by another band with a made up name, The Rolling Stones, who have certainly lived up to their chosen name by gathering no moss, they kept their hair and plenty of money, but no moss.

Some years ago I flew from Luton on a Monarch flight to Gibraltar.

On board was the TV presenter Robert Kilroy-Silk.

I was tempted to pop in to the loo and write Kilroy was here on the wall but good manners prevented me.

Mr Kilroy-Silk was briefly a member of UKIP but left after nine months calling the party 'a joke'.

If it is a joke it is neither as funny or gentle or persuasive as the family history concocted for and by The Broonzies, although the Broonzy family, like UKIP and Mr Kilroy-Silk,  apparently split apart after a disagreement which left a rancour that lasted for some years and which has now been put aside and is not referred to.

Now apparently, according to Ofcom, UKIP is a 'major party' and qualifies to feature in televised debates whilst The Green Party isn't and doesn't and now the PM is refusing to take part in the debates if there is no Green Party representation..

It is a strange decision. The Green Party it seems to me has a long and respected history, founded in the 1970's it went through various personas becoming The Green Party in 1990 when it separated into separate parties in England, Scotland and Wales, Caroline Lucas a Green Party MP sits in the commons.

UKIP was founded in 1993, now it has two MP's, both former Conservatives, it has a number of members in the Upper House and is the single largest English party in the Europe Union.

Both the Labour Party and the Lib Dems are challenging David Cameron and he is being accused of using the Greens as a smokescreen because he has no desire to debate with the UKIP Leader Nigel Farage and they might be right.

But they are also wrong because, apart from Russell Brand it seems, no-one can win a debate with Nigel!

But Mr Cameron is also right because the UK is not in the business of electing Presidents, it elects parties whose leader attends HM The Queen and is then invited to form a Government.

Mr Clegg managed to wriggle his way into the debates last time and possibly affected the outcome of the election negatively, resulting in five years of a coalition for which people did not vote.

With Mr Farage, the privately educated ex Banker, posing as a man of the people, articulating the populist rejection of politics and politicians the risk of the debate ever actually addressing the issues that really matter, whether it is the NHS or the economy, is extremely high.

The gentle humour of an invented family forming a band made for an enjoyable evening of music played by talented musicians, but if Mr Kilroy-Silk is right about UKIP being 'a joke' the risk is that if these debates are aired it is the public who may find themselves the 'butt' of a joke that is in very poor taste.