New British Caste System
Posted on September 8, 2007
Filed Under Welcome To Great Britain, Politics, News | Leave a Comment
For anyone who can remember the British Labour Party before Tony Blair and his chums turned it into New Labour, there may be a vague impression that it used to stand for social inclusion and a ‘levelling of the playing field’, so that the rich were not allowed to ride roughshod over the poor with impunity.
Obviously, it metamorphosed into a slick marketing machine, the purpose of which was to steal from the poor to give to the rich, but in a way that the poor did not immediately feel that they had just been beaten up and robbed.
The theory went that if you kept repeating catchphrases often enough, people really would imagine that their lives had got better. If you fiddled the figures enough, people could pretend that they were not paying more and more of their earnings to a government which was helping them less and less.
Until, that is, some chaps at Sheffield University started making some maps. That is, maps of the real world lived in by real people, rather than the terra incognita and fantasy land inhabited by politicians.
What it has found is that social mobility, which had been moving fluidly and rapidly for some sixty years, has now ground to a halt under the ten year reign of New Labour. If you are rich, you will find it almost impossible to find your fortunes in jeopardy, however dimwitted and profligate you may be. If you are poor, that will be your inescapable lot, even if you are a parsimonious genius.
Society has achieved the status of an immobile monolith under Tony Blair and his pal Gordon Brown. The rich are free to gad about and gallivant, the poor are manacled serfs whose only purpose is to pander to the whims of their innumerable political and corporate masters, the supplicants and beggars beyong the closed portals of plenty, the gated communities of unbridled avarice.
The Guardian quotes from the authors of the report:
Bethan Thomas, a researcher at the department of geography at the University of Sheffield and co-author of the study, said it showed clearly that disadvantage at birth tended to follow through each stage of life. “Every step of the way, your chances are much more constrained. This is not to be deterministic; obviously there are people from disadvantaged areas who do make that leap and people from the most advantaged who can’t be bothered, but those cases are much less common.”
While the continuing effect of a disadvantaged background might not surprise, the extent of disadvantage, particularly among children and young adults, was striking, Dr Thomas added. “We have had 10 years of the Labour government and they keep saying things are improving, and maybe they are - but there seems to be little evidence that we can see.”
[…]
Daniel Dorling, co-author of the atlas, said: “Most people think they are average when asked. In most things, most are not. Most say they are normal, but our atlas shows that what is normal changes rapidly as you travel across the social topography of human identity in Britain - from the fertile crescent of advantage, where to succeed is to do nothing out of the ordinary, to the peaks of despair, where to just get by is extraordinary.”
There is an enormous problem here and the rich need to understand that they are sitting on an elegant pressure cooker or powder keg. One day, the poor are going to take things back and when they do, they are going to know exactly where to look.
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Never Too Rich
Posted on September 2, 2007
Filed Under Business, Politics, News | Leave a Comment
“You can never be too rich or too thin” said Wallis Simpson, for whom a king abdicated, so there might be some truth in it.
However, there might also be something in the idea that as the financial divide between rich and poor grows into a gulf which can never be closed, those who are on the receiving end of the excessively good fortune might actually be sowing the seeds of their own demise.
There seems to be a correlation between how wide the perceived gap of financial circumstances between rich and poor becomes and the way the rich are perceived by the poor. This perception seems to have reached the stage where the poor are less simply jaded by the parade of wealth by the rich and more angry.
When the poor realise that the promise of being rich is just a lie put about to keep them working hard and the reality is that the rich are forever riding on their backs, there will be trouble.
The Guardian:
These are two more examples of the way, as capitalism changes, the super-rich are able to accelerate the rate at which wealth trickles upwards, from those who have less to those who already have more. It’s not just the very poor who suffer as the wealth gap grows, the vast majority of middle income earners are being fleeced by the super-rich. And government is deeply complicit in the process. First, it neglects the manufacturing sector (which employs more lower-paid people) and creates conditions in which the financial services sector (which employs fewer, better-paid people) can thrive. Then it allows those who rise to the top to set their own terms and conditions of employment.
As Howard Glennerster wrote here on Friday, a few decades ago “it was considered indecent and unwise to reward yourself as a boss with extravagant incomes and lifestyle”. Back then values and a sense of society counted for something. Today power, along with the wealth that begets it, has become concentrated in the hands of a small minority for whom the possibility of a more inclusive or egalitarian society is anathema.
Followed by a comment from ‘questionnaire’:
Yes, Bobdoney, that’s how the whole system works, by stimulating envy and converting it to ‘aspiration’, which is the euphemistic term for envy turned into self-orientated economic activity.
The historically and culturally illiterate number-crunching economists, accountants and financiers who run the advanced capitalist economy have no idea where the whole rotten thing is heading. When a plutocracy emerges to live off the compound interest generated by anxious, debt-ridden, over-worked proles producing consuming cheap goods and violent pornography - today’s ‘bread and circuses’ - the moral values and social relations that constitute the system’s cultural infrastructure break down, and life becomes irredeemably corrupt, decadent, nihilistic and violent.
The problem we face today is that the current economic system, with its global financial institutions awash with cash, is unlikely to crash, and thus it will keep on growing for decades despite the cultural degeneration occurring around it. We are facing a system that has outlived its usefulness yet cannot die a natural death as systems did in the past. The system is now ‘undead’.
We are looking at a form of barbarism that we have not yet seen, and a possible fascist response by the middle-classes as they are squeezed economically and threatened by the cultural decay they sense to be seeping in from both the top and the bottom to threaten their fragile values and meanings.
How strange that when only the very rich keep getting richer, everyone feels the poorer for it. Peter Mandelson hit the policy of New Labour on the head, declaring it: “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”. Of course, Tony Blair and Cherie Booth never made any attempt to disguise the fact that money was their guiding principle.
Gordon Brown is supposed to want to govern with the aid of a “moral compass”. Will it just steer him straight to the bank or shall we wait to see him grapple with mammon?
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Brazil, Britain, Anywhere, Everywhere
Posted on August 31, 2007
Filed Under Business, Politics | Leave a Comment
Hurrah! Capitalism has taken over the entire world. There is no other show on earth. You are the winner!
Many years ago when visiting Australia (where they have massive roadside signs proclaiming “Next McDonald’s 1250 km”) a friend said that the best thing about McDonald’s was that wherever in the world you ate one, it was exactly the same. Thousands of people in all corners of the planet could be having exactly the same taste experience at exactly the same time.
The problem with this global monoculture is that we are now persuaded to believe that sameness is good, whereas it has been diversity which has propelled human development.
To have a global market, you need global brands and you need a world which thinks the same about everything. To be different, to have a mind of your own, to be a particular individual is actually anti-capitalist.
It is less the police state which will guarantee conformity and more the global one trick pony of capitalism, which may well ensure its dominance through the police state, but it will do so equally happily through your democratically elected government.
The Guardian on Brazil:
At Daslu, a mega-luxury designer store in Sao Paulo billed as Latin America’s most glamorous ’shopping experience,’ customers arrive by helicopter and are ferried in golf carts across marble floors to spare their Jimmy Choo heels. Slim, tanned dasluzetes attend to the sartorial needs of senators’ daughters while uniformed maids, bussed in from the favelas, hover with cafezinhos (espressos) and scoop up discarded garments.
Daslu’s decadence is unnerving. Like the cocaine problem. It’s when you happen to sit on a bus next to a boy with a bag of cocaine whose armed bodyguard, an off-duty policewoman, sits two rows behind, that you begin to see how dangerous Brazil really is. Or when the police arrive in response to a burglary at your home and suggest you buy a bullet from them, which you can fire and they’ll take full responsibility for, the next time you’re in trouble. A bargain at 1,000 reals (£250).
The problem with law and order, or rather the lack of it, is most apparent at night, when packs of feral children roam the streets and drivers know better than to stop at red lights. The problem is poverty as a daily reality, a flood of guns, alienated youth.
What is unfortunate is to be invited to celebrate these inequities, again, the great paradox of Brazil, a soap opera of impunity and greed. God forbid the social hierarchy should ever change. Upward mobility? On taking office in 2002, President Luiz Inacio da Silva was quoted as saying he was ‘fighting to bring the poor of Brazil out of economic apartheid’. The social groups who voted him in demanded a fairer and more egalitarian Brazil. But Lula doesn’t want to jeopardise economic growth. His plans for development are [in] line with the needs of big business.
The problem with this superficial, artificial culture is when you think of its exemplars, its paradigms, perhaps in terms of the immaculately dressed and coiffed wives, girlfriends and boyfriends of the plutocracy.
They look appealing in a disturbingly packaged and processed kind of way, like supermarket food which is enticing on the box, disappointing in reality and, like the McDonald’s utterly Unhappy Meal you waited 1250 km to eat, tastes of anything, of nothing.
When there is something other than nothing going on in the minds of these people, it is only ever one thing: money.
So, is that really what you want to be like? Is it?
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