It must be hard for George Osborne to hide his hatred and disgust for the woman who sacked him: Theresa May. Or else he just does not try to disguise it at all.
Since taking the plum job of editing the London Evening Standard, a job he does on a part-time basis for a full-time salary, the paper has hardly missed a chance to lay into his former colleague, and at the same time to attack the Brexit process she is trying to negotiate..
Today’s headline in the business section of the Evening Standard is no exception.
Before the June 2017 referendum Osborne and his Treasury lackeys were making dire predictions for the economy if the result was Leave. And sure enough the British working class gave this class warrior the hearing he wanted. They listened. And they decided, if George Osborne wants us to stay then we had better vote Leave. And they did.
The economy did not collapse. The end of the world was not nigh. Life went on.
Every snippet of the economic news now has to be spun by Osborne in the most negative way possible. Let me quote the article word for word:
“The Chartered Institute for Procurement & Supply’s latest health-check on the sector [manufacturing] was short on New Year cheer after a surprise downturn for UK industry in December. Its activity index – where a score over 50 indicates growth – dropped to 56.3 from November’s six-year high of 58.2.”
According to our curmudgeonly journal, failing to maintain what they admit was a 6-year high is a ’loss of momentum’.
Suck it up, George. Admit you got it wrong. You were prepared to lie, exaggerate and cajole to get the result you wanted, and the working class still gave you a bloody nose. Do the honourable thing. Tuck your tail between your legs and go hide in a corner.
The BoE (Bank of England) decision to increase interest rates to 0.5% was a vote of confidence in Brexit. That was what the headlines should have been in the capitalist press.
When the rate was reduced in August 2016 we were told it was because of the vote to leave the European Union. The decision to leave would have calamitous consequences for the UK economy. Armageddon had been predicted, the sky was about to fall in on us. The BoE had to take steps to protect us. So the interest rate was reduced from 0.5% to 0.25%.
The world carried on. The sky stayed in the sky. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were NOT sighted.
Mark Carney, the governor of the BoE, might argue that his minuscule change in interest rates was what saved us from collapse. Even if we give him credit for controlling a tsunami of destruction with a minimal interest rate change, he would have to admit that his dire predictions for the referendum result were not borne out by the facts.
So yesterday the BoE decided to return to the rate of interest that had existed before the referendum.
All the media who swallowed the hype about the effect of a Leave vote, and who have attributed every bit if negative news to “Brexit” would surely now concede that this reversal in BoE policy was a recognition that the rate drop fifteen months ago was no longer needed. And that must mean the economy was getting better. Or, at the very least, it was not getting worse.
But no. The interest rate increase has been reported as if it were a drastic measure needed to deal with another catastrophe. Inflation is too high. Unemployment is too full. Whatever rationalisation they give us, they are adamant that leaving the EU is a bad thing.
Meanwhile the British working class look at the reporting and see, yet again, the press have their own agenda. They are not reporting facts. They are not describing events. They are interpreting them, with all the pro-capitalist, pro-establishment bias we have come to expect of them.
When a tragedy like the Grenfell Tower fire happens, people instinctively know why. We can pore over the detail. We can set up public enquiries. We can dissect the fire regulations, and the relationship between the government, the local authority and the KCTMO (an NGO set up to allow the council to keep the day-to-day management of the housing stock at arm’s length).
But we know the reason.
And you do not have to be a revolutionary to say it out loud. A headline in one of today’s newspapers sums it up in the words of Sadiq Kahn, the Labour Mayor of London. The headline reads:
COMMUNITY’S ANGER IS ROOTED IN ‘COUNCIL AND GOVERNMENT NEGLECT’
The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (to give it it’s full bombastic title) has long been a bastion of right-wing Tory thinking. The Council has been a breeding ground for ambitious Tories trying to climb their way up the slippery pole to parliament. Career politicians sucking their way towards a cosy ministerial post with its in-office perks and its cosy non-contributory pension would do well to start here.
The types who run this council do not think they have to pander to the hoi-polloi who live in the tower blocks at the northern edge of their borough. Upgrading and improving their living conditions and prioritising their safety is not at the top of their agendas. RBKC and their close neighbours, Westminster City Council have, for many years, vied with each other to charge the lowest possible council tax. For years these two Tory boroughs, together with their Tory colleagues south of the river in Wandsworth, enthusiastically cut and slashed their own budgets. Before cuts had been rebranded as ‘austerity’ these pioneers of slashing budgets and picking statistics that ‘prove’ services are getting better while the resources to deliver them are being cut, were doing their work. Burrowing under the foundations of the support mechanism that protect the weakest and most vulnerable.
A cynic might think that they were trying to impress their political masters at the head of the Tory Party. Look at me! See how efficient a council can be, when it is run by Tories. Efficiency, in this context, meaning cheap.
The anger felt by residents and their supporters in the locality has been fuelled by a sense, over many years, that this council was not for me. It was for the posh Tories with their multi-million-pound houses and their weekend homes in the country.
There are estate agents you go to in RBKC when you are looking for a flat to rent, where a resident of `Grenfell Tower could not get through the front door. The agencies that deal with the “top” end of the market have high street offices more spacious than the flat allocated to a family of six. The agencies that deal with people most like the residents of Grenfell Tower are far less salubrious.
The difference in social status is palpable and obvious as you traverse the borough.
We do not need a public enquiry to know why sprinkler systems were not retro-fitted to tower blocks after the Camberwell fire in 1979. We know why. It was too expensive. It was too inconvenient. It was too difficult.
Theresa May tries to kick the problem into the long grass with her judge-led public enquiry. We do not need a judge to tell us the truth. If we are going to have an enquiry, it should be carried out by the FBU (Fire Brigades Union). The union that represents the workers at the sharp end of the catastrophe are the best people to make these judgements. They know that if and when it all goes wrong, it is their members whose lives will also be put at risk dealing with the fire.
Let the FBU be the judge. Every day they walk into shops and office blocks, and if they see a significant fire hazard they close it down. They have no truck with the ‘economics’ argument. Economics should play no part in decisions about life and death.
I doubt even of the LFEPA (the organisation for which they work) have the strength to withstand the political pressure that will be put on whoever runs the enquiry. So give it to the FBU. If we are going to get answers that we believe, the enquiry cannot be carried out by a judge.
The working class victims, their relatives and friends, deserve an enquiry overseen by their peers. The workers of the FBU are the only people I would trust to speak the truth, point the finger of blame in the right direction, and tell us what needs to be done to prevent this happening again.
They don’t care if you know they are doing it. It works. So they just keep on doing it
The Tories are using the mantra ‘strong and stable’ to describe themselves at every opportunity. Even though interviewers have picked up on the ploy, they continue regradless. They believe that if they describe themselves as ‘strong and stable’, or say repeatedly that their leader is ‘strong and stable’ it will be an effective campaigning technique.
And there is some truth in that. Even if they are challenged on the mantra, they win. Half the interview will then be taken up discussing whether Theresa May is strong and stable or not. They have put their little propaganda ear-worm into our heads.
I hate the idea of being brainwashed. And brainwashing is what this is. So I have come up with a counter-strategy. Simple.
Every time I hear the phrase ‘strong and stable’ I say out loud ‘weak and wobbly’. Even if I am watching a TV programme on my own, I say it out loud. I know the effect of the spoken word is greater than the effect of internal thoughts. I say it out loud when I am in company, too. If I am sitting next to you during a news broadcast, or we are watching Question Time together, you will hear me say ‘weak and wobbly’ out loud as many times as the Tory propagandist repeats the mantra.
If nothing else, it emphasises how deliberately repetitive the use of the phrase has become during the election campaign.
If you want to counteract the propaganda machine, and keep the election debate rational rather than psychologically manipulative, use my phrase. Be my guest. Say it out loud wherever you hear the Tory mantra.
The announcement that George Osborne is to take over as editor of The London Evening Standard is just another example of corruption in high places.
What experience does the ex-Chancellor have of editing a large circulation newspaper? Zilch.
The salary he will earn has not been disclosed, but it is unlikely to be a major factor in his decision to go for the job. He has been sidelined since David Cameron quit as PM following his EU referendum humiliation. And that must hurt. He was unceremoniously kicked out as soon as Theresa May formed her first Cabinet.
Conservatism’s golden boy (in his own estimation) deserves a front row seat in current politics. He should not be sitting on the back benches, representing his constituents and supporting the government. No, he has more important things to do. Like making sure nobody forgets what an important person he is. And if he can use his position at the forefront of London’s only free daily evening paper to promote his own political career, what is the harm in that?
Why, you might ask, would the owners of the paper recruit such an inexperienced man? The Standard’s owner, Lebedev is a multi-millionaire. A Russian oligarch with a conviction for hooliganism (for punching another guest during a TV programme) he owns the Independent newspaper, as well as an interest in the anti-Putin publication Novaya Gazeta.
Traditionally, ex-Chancellors and ex-Prime Ministers can expect a warm and generous welcome from the banking sector after leaving office. Perhaps the bankers do not want to get on the wrong side of the woman who sacked Osborne, Theresa May. Not to worry. Lebedev is a banker too. Time to set up a nice little sinecure for Osborne, the loyal servant of finance capital for so many years.
As a thank you for spending his entire time as Chancellor attacking the poor, reducing welfare spending, cutting the wages of millions of NHS, central and local government employees, a job as editor of a newspaper might seem a paltry reward. But George does not need a lot of money to get by. He already earns a generous MP’s salary, plus hundreds of thousands of pounds for speaking to rich people (speaking engagements earned him hundreds of thousands of pounds last year). And only last week it was revealed that he earns £650,000 per year working one day a week for BlackRock, the world’s biggest fund manager.
If it is not the money that drew slippery George to journalism. It is probably the opportunity to stick it to the woman who sacked him.
When a former finance minister in an African country gets a plum job just after leaving office, the word ‘corruption’ is bound to be in the headlines. But when George Osborne takes a salary of £650,000 a year for working less than one day a week, the press are more circumspect.
The only reason George Osborne’s salary is in the public domain is because he is still a sitting MP. So he has to declare all his additional sources of income on the register of MP’s interests. Other former Chancellors retire from political office to enjoy their payback from their capitalist masters discretely. Not so Mr Osborne. He is so arrogant and greedy he wants to hang on to his £75,000 a year MP’s salary too.
Does anyone in public life spring to his defence? The silence is deafening.
Osborne claims he will work 48 days a year for BlackRock, the world’s biggest fund manager. Work is a euphemism for what he will be doing for BlackRock. The fund oversees over £4 trillion of investments, and has a vested interest in knowing what governments are planning to do. But why pay so much money to a has-been? Perhaps they want to send out a signal to his successor, Philip Hammond. Play nicely, Philip, and you will be rewarded in the afterlife – meaning life afterholding high political office. And the message is also going out to finance ministers and political leaders across the capitalist world.
When the press jumps on every hint of self-enrichment by political leaders abroad, the British ruling class do precisely the same. In most cases they are subtle. The process of cashing in once you have spent years in public office serving your capitalist rulers is less obvious in the west. But it is no different in essence. There are no poor ex-Prime Ministers, and no poor ex-Chancellors. They are well rewarded for their service. And they know which side their bread is buttered on even before they take on high office.
The UK’s permanent representative to the EU (let’s call him ambassador, for short) resigned and sent a long email to all his staff. Not the usual ‘thanks for all your hard work’ and ‘I will miss you’ for Sir Ivan Rogers. No, he had a lot to say for himself. About 1400 words.
For all the fuss that has been made about his resignation email, it is an innoccuous document. I read it, and yes, the guy is verbose. If my boss sent me an email that long I doubt very much that I would read it to the end. Even less likely if I knew he was leaving anyway.
But the usual suspects have jumped in front of the cameras to analyse and dissect every nuance and phrase. And whoever has an opinion about what the email ‘really’ means, or the ‘real’ significance of his resignation, has an axe to grind.
Pro-Remain campaigners look for criticisms, implied or imagined, of Theresa May’s premiership. If he tells his staff to challenge muddled thinking, then that must mean he is saying the government is muddled.
For Leave campaigners he is a pro-Europe bureaucrat who has left in a huff because he disagrees with the whole project.
Balderdash. Read the email yourself. It says neither of those things. Unless you want it to say them.
What amuses me the most is the people who trumpet the impartiality of the British civil service. Impartial? Don’t make me laugh. The top knobs in the civil service have their own agendas to push. And Ivan Rogers is no different.
The news must have been very slow for this bland and over-long email to get so much attention from the media.
If I was the leader of the Labour Party I would not ask Diane Abbott to go on TV programmes to represent my party.
She appeared on The Andrew Marr Show, today. to be interviewed by Nick Robinson. One of his first questions was straightforward. Are you in favour of Brexit or are you in favour of stopping it?
A straightforward question, but a convoluted answer. Like all politicians who oppose leaving the EU she starts of by paying lip service the decision of the majority in the referendum. “We are in favour of respecting the votes of the 17 million people who voted for Brexit.” Like all mealy-mouthed pro-European politicians, the deference to the referendum vote is asserted first, followed immediately by a statement which is just a disguised way of saying they are NOT going to respect the majority decision. Abbott’s version of the twist is to say, ‘We are also in favour …. of getting the best possible negotiated deal’. Not exactly a clear statement of policy.
So Nick Robinson decided to put the question to her even more directly. He asked her if the Labour Party would block Brexit in parliament if the government does not approach the negotiations in a way approved of by the Labour Party. Her answer? “We are not going to block it in a trivial way. But there are really important issues for the British economy.” So reassuring to hear thet Labour are not going to block leaving the EU “in a trivial way”. So we can presume they will block it, but in a non-trivial way.
She did not like the word “block”. “Block makes it sound as though we are being wilful.” But she went on to say we will make the case for what is right for the British economy. In other words, we will block it.
The plan of Nick Clegg, Ed Miliband and other Remain campaigners is clear. They want what they call a soft Brexit. What it means is NOT leaving the EU. Stay in the single market, accept the free movement of capital and labour, pay whatever the EU demands. In fact, stay in the EU in all but name.
So there you have it. Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet have climbed on the anti-Leave bandwagon. They are going to respect the decision of the electorate – by trying to overturn it.
The Labour Party under Corbyn is fully committed to running a capitalist economy in the interests of capitalism. Hopefully they can get a few concessions out of the ruling class, so they can try and sell their shameless pandering to Capital as socialism. But they are adamant that British capitalism retain its membership of the capitalist club that is the EU. And they are not going to let a little thing like democracy stand in their way.
It is laughable for Nick Clegg to call himself a Liberal “Democrat”. His contempt for democracy was on public display when he appeared on The Andrew Marr Show, earlier today.
Clegg had turned up to justify his part in trying to prevent the UK leaving the EU. After the obligatory platitudes (of course he respects the decision of the electorate in the EU referendum) he follows it up with the biggest “but” he can contrive, so he can convince himself he is not trying to overturn the decision.
But overturning that decision is precisiely his intention.
What is his argument? He thinks we mandated the government to leave the EU, but we did not tell the government which type of “Leave” we meant. Well, I have news for you, Clegg. We knew exactly what we were voting for. It was written on the ballot paper. It asked us if we wanted to Remain or Leave the EU. And we voted to Leave.
Which part of Leave do you not understand? With your public school and European University education, you certainly understood the issues during the campaign. You and your cronies argued repeatedly that leaving the EU and entering an arrangement like Norway or Switzerland was untenable. It was the same as being a member, except that you had no democratic participation in the EU’s decision making process. You told us again and again, Norway is not an option. Switzerland is not an option.
We knew that. We heard you. Give yourself the credit for elucidating the options much more clearly than your Leave Campaign opponents. But even if they lied through their teeth, as you love to repeat endlessly, the vote was about the electorate listening to BOTH SIDES and deciding. So if you think they lied, you know the truth was put before the electorate – by YOU.
His real objective was clear when Andrew Marr asked him if losing a vote in parliament would delay the triggering of Article 50.His reply: “Yes, and by the way that would be a very good thing”.
Later in the interview he was even more explicit – asked if this move for a parliamentary vote was just a tactic to overturn the referendum decision, he said “It is not a tactic. It is an attempt to ensure that, as the government pursues its mandate of pulling us out of the European Union they do so in a workable way, a legal way, and crucially in a way that does not throw the single market baby out with the EU bath water.”
The baby Clegg is trying to save is EU membership. If he cannot have the whole thing, then he will accept a truncated baby, which is better than nothing for him.
After losing the vote, after teling us all that the Norway option or the Switzerland options were just a rehash of EU membership, but with less good points, he has the effrontery to suggest in this interview that Norway is a model we could follow.
Don’t be such a cringing snake, Clegg. At least your replacement as leader of the Liberal Democrats is open about his intent to get the decision overturned.
As a so-called “democrat” try accepting a democratic decision you don’t like for once.
Luckily for us we poor, stupid, ignorant, misled voters have a saviour in Clegg and his Remain colleague MP’s. We made the wrong decision. Now let’s leave it up to a body that overwhelmingly opposed our decision to decide what we ‘really’ wanted.
We should not be surprised at this convoluted attempt to paint an anti-democratic manoeuvre as true representative democracy. Remember, this is the man who gave a written pledge to oppose rises in student fees, and then did a complete volte face as soon as he was presented with a chance to get a place in government, a ministerial salary and a commensurate pension.
The true nature of the socilaism espoused by Jeremy Corbyn and his Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, were revealed at the Labour Party conference today.
Despite all the left rhetoric, McDonnell made a speech on economic policy which made it clear they plan to run capitalism for the capitalist class. In his own words, McDonnell wants to be an “interventionist” government. That is to say he thinks the role of a Labour government is to intervene in the so-called free market in order to make it run more smoothly. His vision of the future is based on the rosy prospect of an ever-improving world capitalist system. He hopes he can protect and improve the lives of ordinary working people by running that economy more efficiently than the neo-liberals who have been at the helm recently.
Unfortunately for McDonnell, the prospects for “happy capitalism” are dire. On the same day the capitalist press were reporting on his speech and the less-than-hostile response of the CBI and other business and finance representatives, two other majior stories were appearing in the financial pages.
First, there has been a substantial decline in the share value of Deutsche Bank. Share values are less than 50% of their market price a year ago, and have not been this low for over twenty years. They were not even this low following the financial crisis of 2008. And the reason for the decline is that the bank is seen as at risk of failure, as it has recently failed banking ‘stress tests’ in Europe and the USA. This position was exacerbated by a recent record fine imposed by US regulators. But at the heart of the crisis is a belief that this bank might fail, and that the German government will not come to its rescue.
Deutsche Bank is far from the only bank at risk, it is just the one that the financial press focus on this week. Many others are in a similar position. For all the talk of banking reform, the financial sector is balanced precariously on a knife edge.
The second big financial story hints at what might tip the tottering banks over the edge.
Ken Rogoff used to be the chief economist at the IMF. Now at Harvard, he warns that the Chinese economy could be headed for a ‘hard landing’. It is estimated that the Chinese economy may have up to $25 trillion in debt. This has in part been due to huge borrowing to fund construction projects intended to boost growth in the economy. But the Bank of International Setlements (BIS) estimates that China now has 30 times as much debt as its total annual GDP. The BIS considers a government with a ratio of debt to GDP which is greater than 10:1 to be in trouble.
To quote the editorial in today’s City AM newspaper:
“So the spectre of a Great Chinese Crash hovers over the global economy. If the debt bubble bursts the UK will not be immune. British banks have $530 billion worth of lending and business in China, including Hong Kong.”
So, Mr McDonnell, what steps are you taking to prepare for the looming crisis? Taking over infrastructure such as railways and other de-nationalised industries will not be enough. When Capital has got itself into this intractable crisis, the role of socialists is not to try and fix it for their capitalist masters. The role of socialists must be to help the working class take control of the essential industries that the capitalist financial crisis threatens, and to put the production of essential goods and services under workers’ control.
Too radical for you, John? Of course it is. The time for left talking is over. We need to prepare to take real power. That will require a genuine workers’ party, committed 100% to the end of capitalism and the establishment of a socialist economy.
