The capabilities of contemporary society are immeasurably greater than ever before - which means the scope of society's domination over the individual is immeasurably greater than ever before.
MARCUSE
Saturday, November 07, 2009
WHY IT IS WRONG TO POSTPONE INDUSTRIAL ACTION
From Left Turn:
Royal Mail always make promises to negotiate with the union, like they did in the deal they agreed in 2007, and then they ignore them and impose 'executive action'. They lie. By agreeing to postpone industrial action until next year, the union are throwing away all the momentum built up through the sacrifices postal workers have made up to now, especially those involved in local disputes in London and elsewhere, as well as throwing away the best chance of making strike action effective by doing it at the busiest time of the year.
"The assault on post workers is a sign of things to come." You wouldn't know it from reading the papers or watching the news, but the postal strike has brought industrial action back into common currency. The strikes planned for tomorrow and Monday may have been called off, but it seems likely that this is a postponement rather than a cancellation.
DV noted the other evening how odd it is that the only vaguely mainstream media outlet which is covering the postal workers' side of the story is the London Review of Books. A BBC News report this week depicted the dispute as if it was between two equally culpable sides, with the Unions inevitably coming out as the more loggerheaded of the two. There is very little inquisition into what the Royal Mail's management mean by "modernisation," nor any challenge to its claim that the number of letters and packages they handle each day is down (a conclusion they have reached largely by fiddling the figures).
In September, "Roy Mayall" debunked the "figures are down" myth:
People don’t send so many letters any more, it’s true. But, then again, the average person never did send all that many letters. They sent Christmas cards and birthday cards and postcards. They still do. And bills and bank statements and official letters from the council or the Inland Revenue still arrive by post; plus there’s all the new traffic generated by the internet: books and CDs from Amazon, packages from eBay, DVDs and games from LoveFilm, clothes and gifts and other items purchased at any one of the countless online stores which clutter the internet, bought at any time of the day or night, on a whim, with a credit card.
According to Royal Mail figures published in May, mail volume declined by 5.5 per cent over the preceding 12 months, and is predicted to fall by a further 10 per cent this year ‘due to the recession and the continuing growth of electronic communications such as email’. Every postman knows these figures are false. If the figures are down, how come I can’t get my round done in under four hours any more? How come I can work up to five hours at a stretch without time for a sit-down or a tea break? How come my knees nearly give way with the weight I have to carry? How come something snapped in my back as I was climbing out of the shower, so that I fell to the floor and had to take a week off work?
Royal Mail has become unprofitable because much of its activities have already been privatised. TNT, for example, have a lucrative contract with BT, where they collect BT's mail, deliver it to Royal Mail's offices, where it is sorted and then delivered by Royal Mail staff. For Royal Mail, who do most of the work, this is not a profitable contract. In other words, "if ‘figures are down’ that doesn’t mean that volume is down."
Royal Mail has responded with redundancies, a flurry of initiatives to get employees to take on more and more office and delivery work for the same pay, and a carving-up of jobs so that part-time and casual (non-unionised) staff gradually replace full-time workers. Those who don't comply with the management's directives become the victims of bullying:
“They started me on the new walk earlier this year. When I realised that it could not be done in the time allotted, I followed procedure and rang my manager to explain. I said that there was too much mail and that the route made no sense. But they didn’t want explanations. They’re just like some of the teachers I had at school – they’re just bullies. When I got back to my office the top manager shouted, ‘I want him in the office. Now!’.”
A letter in this fortnight's LRB describes the Royal Mail's new walks. They have reduced the number of delivery walks, but made them much longer. Christmas means that the bulk of mail delivered on a particular walk increases, which means staff face the double-whammy of a mailbag so heavy it becomes unsafe to carry, and a walk which is so long that they cannot complete their round until 7 or 8 o'clock in the evening. Royal Mail has stopped paying overtime, so whatever hours a postie is forced to work to complete his excessive round, s/he will only get paid a basic salary.
The LRB correspondent suggests that Royal Mail is being wilfully hostile towards its staff because it wants to replace them with casual (non-unionised) workers. It has certainly (and probably illegally) embraced the idea of a scab workforce. Neither Labour nor Tories have any time for a public Royal Mail - even though experience shows that privatisation causes unprofitability and redundancies, it remains the plan for the Royal Mail. A Tory Councillor in Ipswich has even drafted the staff of his firm "Experience Connect" to join anti-strike protests.
Maybe I'm being naive, but you would have thought the Mirror would have covered the dispute in a bit more detail. The Guardian have published a number of pretty mealy-mouthed pieces. For anybody who places a grain of faith in the idea of justice, taking sides in this dispute is a no-brainer. Yet the Socialist Worker and the LRB are alone in supporting the postal workers.
The strikes are off for now - but where does this leave us? As Seamus Milne wrote last month,
The test will come in the next few days: do Royal Mail managers, and the ministers behind them, want a deal to give a more progressive future for a popular public service – or a self-defeating, confected confrontation with one of the strongest workforces in the public sector? We'll know soon enough.
The imprint of the experimental rotating loop, Orford Ness
August 5. Found the man Traven. A strange derelict figure, hiding in a bunker in the deserted interior of the island. He is suffering from severe exposure and malnutrition, but is unaware of this or, for that matter, of any other events in the world around in. He maintains that he came to the island to carry out some scientific project - unstated - but I suspect that he understands his real motives and the unique role of the island... In some way its landscape seems to be involved with certain unconscious notions of time, and in particular with those that may be a repressed premonition of our own deaths. The attractions and dangers of such an architecture, as the past has shown, need no stressing.
August 6. He has the eyes of the possessed. I would guess that he is neither the first, nor the last, to visit the island.
In an interview with an architecture magazine in 1997, J.G. Ballard recalled his attachment to airports and airfields during his time as a medical student at King’s College:
I would flee all that fossilised Gothic self-immersion and ride a borrowed motorcycle to the American airbases at Mildenhall and Lakenheath, happy to stare through the wire at the lines of silver bombers and transport planes. Airports then were places where America arrived to greet us, where the world of tomorrow touched down in Europe.
Ballard was not alone in being seduced by the glamour of the American military complex. A new and modish item of swimwear had recently been named after the Pacific island group where more than 20 tests of atomic bombs were carried out between 1946 and 1958. The fall-out from one such test – the detonation of a bomb 1,200 times more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – poisons inhabitants of the atoll to this day.
It was the imposition of the future (the USA) onto the past (historic sites along the coast of a Britain in the depths of austerity) that fuelled this seduction. The prime site in England for the testing of atomic weapons (as well as earlier experiments into radar and bomb trajectories) was Orford Ness, a long shingle spit etched by centuries of longshore drift.
Watched over by the keep of a castle built by Henry the Second, Orford Ness is made up of fossils of the near-past: the foundations of a prisoner of war camp; a tower for measuring the projectiles and explosions of bombs; reinforced huts used to test detonators for nuclear missiles; the monument to a failed Cold War mission to detect long-range aircraft and missiles; shrapnel and unexploded ordnance.
Here lay what Ballard calls “the contents of a special kind of forensic inquisition,” where detritus and ruins, connected only by shingle trails and disused railway lines, can be deciphered and decoded. What is revealed is a hidden reality of life today, a reality which we mistake for the past, since we are told it no longer exists. But the way we perceive the world today is still defined by the structure – ideological, technological and cultural – of the Cold War.
Exhibit A: Donald Rumsfeld, 1976
By the mid-1970s, the American intelligence community had concluded that the Soviet Union’s strategic weapons programmes were broadly defensive in nature, and adhered to the SALT 1 agreements of 1974. This era of detente did not suit a group of influential neoconservatives led by Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, who persuaded President Gerald Ford that the CIA had underestimated the aims and potential of Soviet military policy. This clique named themselves Team B, and they claimed that the Soviets were secretly building up a “missiles gap,” and that an overly casual US administration was allowing them to do so.
Adam Curtis’s suggestion that everything Team B claimed was a fiction is now accepted by virtually everybody outside of the Team. Anne Hessing Cahn, an intelligence officer during the Carter and Reagan Administrations, has said that “if you go through most of Team B's specific allegations about weapons systems, and you just examine them one by one, they were all wrong.” Their predictions that the Soviet Union had the capability and the intention to produce 500 bombers by 1984 proved to be awesomely wild of the mark; their estimates of Soviet GDP were similarly exaggerated; George Bush, who was then the Director of the CIA, admitted that Team B instigated “a process that lends itself to manipulation.”
How were Team B allowed to fabricate intelligence information, and how were they subsequently so successful in setting Ronald Reagan’s defence agenda during the 1980s? Rumsfeld’s simulation of a threat that never existed is entirely in keeping with the general progress of the Cold War, a war which never happened (except via sub-contracted assaults outside of the US and USSR). Rumsfeld’s press statement does not respond to any Soviet threat, but instead creates one. It is implausible to conceive that Team B really believed that the CIA was being careless; rather, their frustration at the thawing of enemy danger compelled them to make a fictional case for a Soviet military boom, in order that the fiction became fact. As Baudrillard states,
Just as wealth is no longer measured by the ostentation of wealth but by the secret circulation of speculative capital, so war is not measured by being waged but by its speculative unfolding in an abstract, electronic and informational space, the same space in which capital moves.
Baudrillard’s comparison between war and capital is pertinent, for the military technologies of the Cold War coincided with the development of other tools, used in advertising and popular culture, which took images and turned them into propaganda which transformed human beings into consumers. In the introduction to the French edition of Crash, Ballard wrote that “thermonuclear weapons systems and soft drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudoevents, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century – sex and paranoia.” This constant stream of images, whether of the Bikini Atoll or the bikini model, returns to us to an age of Idealism, an era of paranoia and superstition. As we shall see, Orford Ness reveals the fossils and fictions of a hyperrealism which continues to shape our lives.
Exhibit B: Cobra Mist
Earlier this summer, DV and I walked from Thorpeness to Aldeburgh, where we ate our sandwiches on the beach, and then continued south past the Martello tower at Slaughden to see how far we could go. Before very long, we came upon one of many lines of demarcation in this area: a metal gate holding a notice warning of unexploded ordnance. We must go no further; and this was the nearest we got to Orford Ness from the north.
In the distance, five kilometres away, stand the masts of the BBC World Service’s transmitters. They surround a huge, grey opaque structure which used to house a long-range aircraft detection system, once codenamed System 441A, but more commonly known as Cobra Mist. Cobra Mist was designed to use radar technology to detect and track Soviet aircraft, missiles and satellite vehicles.
In the 1960s, when the US Air Force was looking for sites near to the Soviet Union to build a detection system, the Turkish authorities refused them permission. The British government agreed for a system to be built on Lantern Marshes near Orford Ness, ideal for its remote position and inherent security. The Cobra Mist complex, designed by the Royal College of Architects, was completed in 1971, and after a period of local tests, long-range tracking was due to begin in July 1972. But almost immediately, scientists noticed a strange tapping noise which interfered with its detection capabilities. No explanation was ever found for the noise, and an Anglo-American Scientific Assessment Committee recommended its closure in June 1973. Up to $150 million had been spent on a system which was never used.
Some ufologists believe that Cobra Mist was a cover for the production of weapons which could manipulate a victim’s senses, making them believe they had heard or seen something that never existed. It is implied that the UFO sighting at Rendlesham Forest was the product of low-level electromagnetic pulses being transmitted from Orford. English Heretic suggests that the interfering tapping noise – the “cosmic tinnitus” of Cobra Mist – was also the synaesthetic effect of psychotronic weaponry:
A curious feature of UFO encounters is the accompanying sonic phenomena, often described as being like the humming of bees. The horror writer H.P. Lovecraft suggested that the ululations of certain insects heralded the proximity of the Great Old Ones. This raises an interesting question. Could it be that the project was closed down because, rather than failing in its purpose, it had actually succeeded in its real aim – that of achieving rapport with ancient alien forces?
Exhibit C: radar masts
We could only see Cobra Mist from a distance. The imposition of barriers which separate permitted places from prohibited places is what gives Orford Ness its unique claustrophobia. The Ness can only be reached by ferry or trespassing, and what lie beyond these limits are empty spaces, drained beaches of the sort that are found in the short stories of Ballard or the paintings of Dali.
We visited the Ness last month, taking a short ferry ride from Orford Quay to the jetty on the edge of the spit. On landing, we walked through sticky, pestilent air on a path beside a First World War prisoner of war camp, whose inmates were cut down by a flu pandemic and buried in Orford churchyard. The scorched earth resembled human skin infected by impetigo, and there was a light drone in the air, though we couldn’t be sure if this was caused by dragonflies or the alien forces contacted via Cobra Mist (Brian Eno’s track “Lantern Marsh,” from On Land, buzzes with insectoid interference).
We passed the receiver and transmitter buildings used by Robert Watson Watt and his team of female workers to develop radar. Between these stand the bases of two steel transmitter masts, a ruined sick quarters (where only a cracked ceramic lavatory bowl remains) and a smashed-up Nissen Hut, used to test the aerodynamics of primitive atomic weapons and re-entry vehicles.
We read notices and surveyed maps inside an information point, but could not escape the truth that much of the Ness’s activities were secret, and remain so. The development of radar points up two themes of Suffolk: the coastal bombardment it confronts (both military and biological), and the edgy fictions and folklores created by the land and what man has chosen to build on it. We see it at Felixstowe, at Shingle Street, at Cobra Mist, at Blythburgh, at Rendlesham, and it is never more acute than near the radar testing sites at Orford and Bawdsey, where Watt and his team were later transferred. For many years, Suffolk transport workers claimed that their buses, which stopped at Orford or Bawdsey and refused to go any further, were subject to the “death ray”.
Exhibit D: Pagodas
Emily Richardson's (magnificent) film, Cobra Mist
We walked over the bridge that crosses Stony Ditch and connects King’s Marshes with the shingle-covered testing-range of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment. Here one is put in the position of the Norse hero Hadingus (or so claims English Heretic), who crossed a bridge over a river filled with ordnance and saw noble lords engaged in war-games on a glittering plain. The shingle stretch of Orford Ness (which certainly does glitter) is deeply reminiscent of J.G. Ballard’s short story “The Terminal Beach,” and the sci-fi cadences of its towers and observation points conjure up a world of human and object forms which we have yet to assume. The path across this cosmological space takes the visitor from one ominous junction to another.
The Bomb Ballistics Building was “the nerve centre of the new experimental bombing range” and was used to anticipate the trajectories of atomic weapons.
The Orford Ness Lighthouse – the most likely source of the light which RAF Woodbridge men confused as UFO beams – was blacked out during the two World Wars, and is now sinking inexorably into the sea.
The Black Beacon housed an experimental ‘rotating loop’ navigation beacon, or missile guiding system.
Suffolk, still a predominantly rural economy, has never felt the full impact of industrialisation. The RAF bases, nuclear power stations and military testing complexes which are dotted between the Deben and the Blyth represent the imposition of the Twentieth Century onto the landscape. Nevertheless, they have transformed the coastline – always a brutal, unforgiving terrain – into a place of nightmares and paranoia. Here is Milton’s and Blake’s vision of hell writ large, albeit in a somewhat different form from the factories of Manchester or the vast smelting plants of Shropshire.
As with the Brutalism of the cities, the raw concrete fortresses at RAF Woodbridge and Orford Ness were explicitly informed by the prospects or realities of war in the middle of the last century. At Orford, 600 local people, who had grown up on the land, were sent to the Ness to work at testing nuclear weapons and bomb ballistics inside rough, obdurate buildings which spoke to both a primitivism and a futurism.
Reading Owen Hatherley’s thrilling Militant Modernism, it is useful to be reminded that industrialisation was the road taken by the English after the failure of the Republic and the dismissal of the Diggers’ and Levellers’ demands for rural communism. The years of the Civil War can be seen as a somewhat late conclusion to the Middle Ages – an age before pre-Modern England emerged. The witch-trials of the 1640s (see Michael Reeves’s 1968 film Witchfinder General, whose nihilistic ending takes place in Orford Castle) require a separate post, but the violent punishments meted out to women whose repressed desires returned to haunt them remind us that secrecy, obsession and brutality loomed over Suffolk long before the Twentieth Century.
“Leaving the tower, the visitor is now on that desolate path envisioned by Allen Holub; on the way to the nightmare denouement of Orford Ness.” We are now at Laboratory 1, in which AWRE researchers carried out tests on Britain’s first atomic bomb, Blue Danube. Extreme temperatures and ‘g’ forces were thrust at the bomb to test its time-delay fuses, and its light aluminium roof was designed to blow off in the event of an explosion. Nearby are the most famous test labs, their obscene pagoda roofs visible from miles around. The Pagodas had heavy reinforced concrete roofs to absorb a vertical blast and any objects thrown out by an explosion. The first major test on an atomic weapon on Orford Ness took place in Laboratory 1 on August Bank Holiday 1956.
Here, amongst the tight passageways, crushed concrete and dank puddles of Laboratory 1, lies the graveyard of the Twentieth Century. Here lies the Trinity Site, Bikini Atoll, Eniwetok, Guam – all places where we might ponder the junctures of speed, aggression, violence and desire. Here are the bones which may anticipate our future...
After climbing the concrete incline, he reached the top of the embankment. The flat, endless terrain stretched away on all sides ... Here, in this terminal hut, he began to piece together some sort of existence. Inside the hut he found a set of psychological tests. Although he had no means of checking them, his answers seemed to establish an identity. He went off to forage, and came back to the hut with some documents and a coke bottle.
- J.G. Ballard, "The assassination weapon" from The Atrocity Exhibition
Contra to those who believe its burgeoning interest in free trade and (pseudo-) democratic spaces signifies a loosening of political control, the Chinese government is clamping down on people's movements (and that includes their eye movements) for the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic:
Given the long insurgency of China’s market economy, it may seem surprising that Beijing’s architecture has only recently caught up with the rest of the world’s impudent postmodernism. Until very recently, the great monuments to the world’s fastest growing economy were Zhang Bo’s Great Hall of the People on the western edge of Tiananmen Square, and Zhang Kaiji’s museums of the Revolution and of Chinese History on the eastern side.
In his book The Edifice Complex, Deyan Sudjic suggests that two new buildings have replaced these pompously Stalinist hulks: Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV Tower and Herzog and de Meuron’s Bird’s Nest. He also provides a sardonic narrative describing how they came to be built.
The commission for Koolhaas’s 234 metre Moebius strip, built on an earthquake faultline, arose largely through good fortune. When Beijing’s city planners launched a competition to design a new headquarters for Chinese state television, they quickly realised that they did not have sufficient expertise to know what they were looking for. They invited the architect and landscaper Charles Jencks to join them. “I am here for architecture independent of any other consideration,” Jencks explained, cautious of being caught up in a fait accompli. Jencks is a good friend of Koolhaas, who in turn decided to submit a radical proposal comprising two towers of 70 floors each, leaning into each other and supported by horizontal bands at the top and bottom.
Jencks, belying his apolitical stance, set about lobbying the great and the good of Beijing in favour of Koolhaas’s design. “It is a Chinese moon gate,” he explained, “a framed hole, or the heavy shape made in bronze and jade thousands of years ago in China as a symbol of exchange.” Yet at the same time (covering the postmodernist and authoritarian bases), “it’s a pop image, it can be seen as suggesting the Arc de Triomphe, or the Grande Arche.”
Koolhaas’s design was eventually accepted, but Chinese conservatives and Western academics like Ian Buruma shared a certain scepticism: “What should one make of famous architects competing to build a new HQ for Central China Television? CCTV is the voice of the party, the centre of state propaganda, the organ which tells a billion people what to think. It’s hard to imagine a cool European architect in the 1970s building a television station for Pinochet.”
Sudjic suggests that the source of Koolhaas’s motives may be found in his esteem for Le Corbusier, in particular his wooing of Mussolini and the Vichy Government in the 1930s and 40s. “What attracts me about China is that there is still a state,” says Koolhaas, which is all very well, except that the Chinese state’s function – achieved by continuing the Maoist ban of Trade Unions and locking up those who stand in its way – is to validate the most extreme form of late capitalism in the world.
Presumably Koolhaas wouldn’t see it like that. He will appreciate the lack of planning regulations that an autocracy affords. China is a playground for architects with a missionary zeal, even though they may emerge from the process ultimately powerless. Sudjic compares Koolhaas with Yung Ho Chang and his father, Ziang Kaiji, the man who designed the museums on Tiananmen Square, and subsequently lived out the Cultural Revolution as a caretaker. “Both father and son have confronted the essential dilemma of architecture. Their work has brought them into an intimate relationship with power, but they have remained powerless in the hands of those who wield it.”
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Due north of Tiananmen Square, through the Forbidden City, along the axis that gives Beijing its backbone, stands the Olympic Park, a theme-park built on the bulldozed ground of a former residential area. “Stung by criticisms of its murky approach to the allocation of construction contracts,” writes Sudjic, “Beijing’s municipal government has been proclaiming its determination to pursue design excellence and maintain a fairer tendering process. That is why the competition to design the Olympic Stadium had an unwieldy, thirteen-strong jury.” The jury included Rem Koolhaas.
The successful design was, of course, Herzog and de Meuron’s Bird’s Nest, its exterior taking the form of a concrete mesh, its interior defined as much by the gaps between the threads, as by the threads themselves. “There is a certain symmetry in the presence of both Rem Koolhaas and Jacques Herzog in Beijing at the same time, working on such significant projects,” says Sudjic. “They like to see themselves as the Picasso and Braque of contemporary architecture, towering over their peers in the same way that the cubists once monopolised painting, ‘roped together like mountaineers for the final onslaught on the summit,’ as Braque put it.”
Herzog is much the superior architect – witness his transformation of Bankside Power Station, and his Schaulager art store in Basel – and the stadium is considerably more edifying than Koolhaas’s opportunistic and megalomanical CCTV headquarters. And yet, as I wrote at the beginning of the year, the vision for the Bird’s Nest (“the architecture is the crowd,” said Herzog at the time, “the proportions are intended to shift the spectators and the track and field events into the foreground”) has been thwarted by its redundancy. It was designed for the greatest spectacle in the global capitalist calendar and, for all its futuristic high-technology, its time has passed.
*
As a postscript to this, here is another story from Sudjic’s book which demonstrates the obscene ironies that only Olympic building can produce:
“Both Koolhaas and Herzog have made more headway in Beijing than Albert Speer, the son of Hitler’s architect, who invested considerable energy in lobbying the city’s authorities to take up his plan for a fifteen-mile-long north-south axis for the city, with the Olympic Stadium at one end and a huge new railway station at the other linked by a series of tree-lined freeways. Speer is an urbane, spry man approaching seventy. If it wasn’t for his name, he would be the personification of postwar Germany, the worthy Bonn-based republic of serious newspapers and liberal politics, where ecology and competently managed car factories are taken for granted. I meet him in his sun-filled Frankfurt office with its blond wood floor and its atrium full of primary-coloured art. Speer would rather be in Beijing, but in the spring of 2003, the SARS epidemic has made him cautious about travelling there. He is, however, still busy in Germany, where he worked on Leipzig’s unsuccessful bid for the 2012 Olympics, surrealistically in partnership with Peter Eisenman, the architect of Berlin’s Holocaust memorial, itself built on the site of his father’s studio, where Hitler and the elder Speer spent hour upon hour with the model of Germania.”
"It's hard to listen to that joy - in terms of sheer feeling, British pop has rarely come near There's a Place since - without feeling deeply depressed afterwards, and when you buy the Beatles in 2009 you're effectively buying that memory, a means of distraction from all the machinations of power around you. At the time of the last great Beatles repromotion, there were hopes - however vainglorious - that pop might again lead a movement towards greater equality of opportunity. Now we can see that for the myth it was, and that - combined with the simple passing of time - must be the main reason there has been that much less fuss this time. Every promise is discredited."
Great news - CLR James is the face of the Brixton £10 note! Two CLR James's has got to be better than one Adam Smith, no?
Aside from the inclusion of James and Olive Morris, and the welcome hoohah expressed by the media towards Brixton, I'm not quite sure I see the point of it other than to encourage localism. But even then, how will it work? You can spend your Brixton pounds at several local shops, but what do the shops then do with them? Could the Chinese supermarket on Electric Avenue use its B£s to buy frozen dumplings from the supplier? Presumably not. Could staff be paid in B£s? I suspect they'd rather stick to sterling, however devalued.
Like the man at Brixton Wholefoods (and many of the sceptical stallholders in the market, I suspect), it feels to me like a marketing ruse which will benefit the more upmarket shops more than the nailbars and butchers. Still, if it's a gimmick that persuades more people to visit Brixton Market, that must surely be a good thing.
*
DV and I went to Brixton windmill this weekend. An enthusiastic chap with the voice of James Goldsmith told us that there used to be seven windmills in Lambeth, but when the height of buildings grew in the mid-nineteenth century, most burned down or were demolished. Brixton Windmill stopped milling flour in 1935, and is now open to the public only a couple of times a year. There are some rather wonderful, Savage Messiah-esque drawings of the mill here.
How short are the memories of politicians and their class. There is now consensus among the leadership of the three main parties that the cause of the recession is the scale of public debt, and that the only way out of it is to cut public expenditure. Nick Clegg, in a rather laughable attempt to out-muscle Brown or Cameron, has even boasted those cuts must be “savage”.
The concentric bubbles which actually caused the recession, the excesses of the free market, the complete lack of regulation in the financial sector, the yawning inequalities that fuelled the credit boom, the need to bail the banks out with public money – all these have been forgotten. So has the lesson of the early 80s – that cutting back salaries and making working people redundant is no way to flee a recession.
Gordon Brown’s speech to the TUC yesterday, littered with the c-word, has gone largely unchallenged by politicians, journalists and Trade Union leaders. Even the joint-leader of Unite has argued (using a tortuous football metaphor - "in off the bar in the last minute of the game ... we are now in extra time – we can beat the Tories" - uh-huuuuh...) that Brown’s speech lays clear ground between the two parties.
But what exactly is the moral or economic rationale for making workers and recipients of public services pay for a crisis which is the result of capitalist excesses? Why does nobody challenge the orthodoxy that our economic exit strategy lies in perpetuating inequality?
*
Last week, the Left Economics Advisory Panel (LEAP) published research which points out that, for all the talk of low inflation (or even deflation), costs of living have risen for the poor in Britain and fallen for the rich.
Although official measures of inflation (the CPI and RPI) for February 2009 were between 0% and 3.2%, the 2009 Inflation Report suggests a more objective yardstick which they call “Essential Inflation.” This measures the prices of “essential goods that households cannot avoid purchasing” – i.e. shelter (rental and mortgage payments, Council Tax, home insurance), heating (electricity and gas), clothing, transport, communications, food and drink, and water.
Taking Britain as a whole, Essential Inflation was -0.82% in February 2009. But broken down according to income, Essential Inflation was -3.21% for the richest 10% of households and 1.92% for the poorest. Viewed another way, the poorest 10% spend 67p of every £1 they earn on the essential items outlined above; the richest 10% spend only 29p of every £1 they earn on essentials. And, of course, the rich earn a lot more £s.
The LEAP report analyses how this works in practice by focusing on housing costs. The inflation rate for Council Tax was 3.6% in February – although this applies to everyone in permanent housing, it costs the poorest half of the population 4.1% of their income, and the richest half only 2.5%. The rate for rent – which affects poorer people disproportionately – was 2.9%. And yet the cost of mortgage payments – which applies to wealthier homeowners – fell by 39.9%. This example clearly supports LEAP’s contention that “inflation is a class issue.”
Since the cost of living has increased by nearly 2% for the poorest 10% (and by 2.38% for the next decile) but decreased by more than 3% for the richest 10%, the report concludes that,
It is important to understand that a pay freeze is a real terms cut of nearly 2% in living standards for the poor, but a real terms increase for the richest. Unions are therefore correct to argue that low paid workers should not be treated the same in pay negotiations as senior management grades ... It also means that unions representing the lowest paid workers should be calling for pay increases of at least 2% just to maintain living standards.
It is a measure of how fearful people are about having a job at all, that 89% of local government UNISON members voted to accept a general 1% pay increase, and an increase of 1.25% for the lowest paid (in reality a 0.75% pay cut). Meanwhile, the Government has recommended that the National Minimum Wage should be raised by 1.1%.
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On the other side of the spectrum, the benefits of lower living expenses for the rich have been coupled with massive hikes in pay. Executives of FTSE 100 index companies have enjoyed a 10% increase in their salaries, even as their companies lost nearly a third of their value and their workers were faced with pay freezes or made redundant. The Guardian’s report on executive pay shows that “nearly a quarter of FTSE chief executives received total 2008 pay packages in excess of £5m, and 22 directors now have basic salaries of more than £1m.” Staff at Man – a hedge fund group – earned an average of £198k each last year – an increase of 100% since 2004. Although shareholders may challenge boardroom pay, there remain no legal ceilings on how much the wealthiest in society may earn, even if their salaries are at the cost of their employees’ jobs or earnings.
Vince Cable has responded to this survey aggressively: “[it] shows that breathtaking cynicism involved in a lot of executive pay deals, which are unrelated to either personal or corporate performance and involve people who are very well off helping themselves to larger salaries when private sector wages in many companies are being cut.”
Yet his party has proposed nothing specific about keeping a check on executive pay or making Britain’s economy fairer. They have joined the chorus of belt-tightening, pay-freezing and pension-stripping for people who work in the public sector and those who depend on it.
We don’t know exactly which services will be cut most, though we can guess by a process of elimination. Not defence, where £130bn savings could be made by scrapping Trident. Not crime and immigration, both Tory comfort zones. And while the Tories would like to take the axe to health and education, we know from history that the market-based policies which they will ramp up will actually increase the burden on the taxpayer.
So the people who will ultimately bail out the wealthy are public sector workers, pensioners, people on benefits, tenants and people who don’t travel to work by helicopter – 'twas ever thus. These are the very people who, in a setback to the late nineteenth century, have nobody in Parliament who will act on their behalf. In an age of late capitalism, parliamentary democracy is worthless.
It is clear what is needed: political participation from the bottom up. But this was only ever likely to be successful during a period of Labour Government, for this should have been the period when those abandoned by Labour sought an alternative to it - and indeed, the recent simmerings of industrial action have been encouraging.
When David Cameron forms a government, he will instantly become unpopular (as it is, he is hardly a savoury proposition to most people). Workers will recall how much they hate the Tories, and how much the Tories hate them. Will they turn to the Labour Party, or what’s left of it? It seems unlikely. But as more and more people find themselves unemployed or out-of-pocket – as people find that they have nothing to lose but etc etc – something will have to give.
