Wonderful protest pic and PIL's Order Of Death

I don't know who took this great image of the recent student protests at Parliament but thanks to Charles Shaar Murray and Jon Savage for circulating it.

Meanwhile, here's a leedle sumthin' for everyone who voted for the LibDems: Public Image Limited's Order Of Death. "This is what you want, this is what you get."

Ferdinand Mount's 'Orwell on the Oligarchs' lecture: how George would have loved the Tory cuts

Well, I saw this coming a mile off. I knew that Ferdinand Mount was a novelist, Sunday Times columnist, Thatcher-era Tory grandee and former TLS editor when I heard him deliver his talk on 'Orwell and the Oligarchs' last night at the annual George Orwell Memorial Lecture hosted by Birkbeck. However, I had no idea he was also a cousin of David Cameron's Mum and a former baronet, yet I still managed to guess, about ten minutes in, on which side his fois gras was buttered.

More sophisticated than John Lloyd, whose carefully selected quotes at last week's talk on Orwell and Russia skewed Orwell into a hater of all things socialist rather than someone opposed to the Stalinist betrayal of the revolution, Ferdy knew how to get his audience on board.

He began well enough with the bleedin' obvious crowd-pleasing observation that the new oligarchs of business are having a larf with their pay. Directors are trousering hundreds of times the average pay of their own workers and Ferdy laid out how it's done with satirical aplomb.

Remuneration for boards of directors is out of control and has little to do with worth, stitched up by "mutual admiration societies" of executives and non-executives, leading to widescale looting and pillaging.

He highlighted the case of US company Household, bought by HSBC for £9 billion and which turned out to be an aggressive lender in the sub-prime market. Its inevitable fall was one of the first examples of collapse leading to the recession.

And yet ...

Building up to a full head of steam, he pleaded for self-examination, pointing out that while Marx and others in the leftist pantheon were willing to tear the mask off others, they failed to fully introspect themselves. And so Ferdy showed us how to do it, generously allowing himself the assumption that his way was the straight and narrow, pursued with enviable crystal clarity.

Thus Ferdy took us from George Orwell's critique of James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution and through to his own conclusion. Burnham, according to my Lovely Companion, made the rightward trek from Trotskyist to "ferocious right-wing-conservative". But he didn't travel far enough to the right for Ferdy, who detected a residual Trotskyism in Burnham's analysis that "capitalism was doomed". The state would take over, he warned, and rentier private capital would be smashed rather than retain any place in business. Orwell disagreed, foreseeing a trajectory towards an oligarchy where bankers and managers displaced scientists and productive talent, snatching a disproportionate share of the rewards. Power would be concentrated in fewer hands at the top and, indeed, Britain now has one of the most concentrated power elites in Europe.

And how does this destructive state of affairs manifest?

Not in the rich and powerful who make up the oligarchy: the upper classes salting away their cash in tax havens, dominating the media, and sucking out all the wealth with devil-take-the-hindmost gusto, apparently. Not in the smashing up our arts, culture and education and returning us to Victorian levels of poverty.

According to Ferdy, it is centralised government that is the Big Bad. After all that preamble, with one bound banking and business were suddenly off the hook and out of the equation, while the "thickening networks of controls" and "gigantism" were doing the damage. The Department of Education, f'rinstance, imposed its power on all aspects of education. What's more, municipal housing equates not with putting a roof over the heads of our citizens but with the loss of freedom for the tenants.

He harked back wistfully to a time of individual freedom before financial controls and regulations became oppressive. We all like to relive our glory days, and Ferdy's would have been around 1982-3 when he was a member of Margaret Thatcher's inner sanctum and heartthrob Ronald Reagan was dismantling US financial controls with the results we are still feeling today.

Ferdy wittered on about the virtues of the coalition government. Theirs is true liberalism, don'tcha know, an "apprehension of oligarchy concentrated in too few hands" aiming at a "devolved, plural, liberal" system without central government telling the little people what to do. The policy of Tory cuts, backed by the LibDems, is "the result of genuine dialogue designed to put right what's gone wrong." A "refreshing" "surfacing impulse to examine and put right the oligarchy".

Thus a banking crisis is turned into a crisis of public services. See what he did there?

It was fitting that this lecture should have been held in Senate House, the architectural inspiration for Orwell's Ministry of Truth.

Such was the tortured logic of the argument that the purpose of the lecture appeared to be to give succour to the Bullingdon bullies and legitimise the coalition government's savage policies. Do these guys sit down over dinner and work out a strategy for deceiving the public via the various media organs and propaganda outlets? Or does this stuff spring fully-formed like Minerva from heads hard-wired to work in self-serving concert? As Orwell wrote, you don't need a beaten dog when well-trained ones will do just as well.

The surreal lurch from a deserved castigation of the greed and corruption of the elite — Ferdy's peers — into an attack on our public services, and everything that made this country a pleasure, was bizarre to behold. If this is the best the right-wing intelligentsia can offer, pack them off to the dreaded Media Studies they loathe so much where perhaps they will learn to make their propagandising a teensy tad less transparent.

Birkbeck's invitation was a truly generous and charitable act, providing Mount's threadbare intellectual cast-off with home and shelter. Ferdinand Mount should be grateful that the great man himself was not in the house to offer the drily stinging rebuttal which some of us were aching to hear.

At close of play, Orwell may have been Mounted, but he certainly wasn't stuffed.

Gauche asks what sort of state is it that Labour wants?

Video: Ferdinand Mount's George Orwell Memorial Lecture, "Orwell and the Oligarchs".

Richest 1,000 could clear the deficit here

Labour woos UK Chinese in rebranding exercise

Ray Collins (Labour Party General Secretary) and Sonny Leong (Chair, Chinese For Labour)

Fancy "refreshing the Labour brand"?

The Labour training session at the weekend was a long-overdue attempt, pioneered by Chinese For Labour's chair Sonny Leong, to engage the Chinese, Britain's third-largest ethnic minority, in mainstream politics in order to find "credible" candidates for the 2011 election and haul them out of their isolation. The sad part of this innovation was the revelation that New Labour lurks like a coiled viper ready with the same old toxic policies that got us into the present mess where a right-wing coalition demolishes with no meaningful challenge what remains of the egalitarian society in which I grew up.

New Labour returns
Just when you thought it was safe to rebuild your movement ...

Richard Angell, the Deputy Director of Progress, the organ set up by arch-Blairite Derek Draper, opened proceedings by extolling the virtues of this "new Labour pressure group". Surely I must have heard that wrong? So I checked that he meant "new Labour ..." and not "New-Labour", but no, he was proud of the New Labour record that led to a fall of seats in the South from 45 to eight and ushered in the unelected ConDem Bullingdon vandals aided by Ramsay McClegg's lot. Arch-villain and New Labour architect "Lord" Peter Mandelson is, after all, supportive of key aspects of the coalition's attack on the poor.

Angell rushed in where even fools know the score, insisting that "we must know where we went wrong". But exactly what was it he identifies as going wrong? Like a pomo ad-man doomed to repeat history in ever diminishing circlets of hell, he ascribed the electorate's revulsion with Labour to not using "language they understand". We needed "the answers, not the problem ... solutions." We had to be "in the game and winning it," and "thinking the unthinkable". Be "bold, radical." "Yes we can," at the very moment the coiner of this platitudinous phrase was losing his mid-term election by a landslide.

And Angell's solution? It was crime what done us in. Even when all the figures show that crime was not the public's chief concern no matter how hard the Daily Mail tried to tell us it was so, and even though the crime rate was falling. Not the economy, not the war, not the crackdown on civil liberties, not the corruption, the sleaze, the expenses scandal, the infatuation with the rich and powerful and contempt for the poor. It was crime. Not even the causes of crime. It all fell apart when "we let the treasury deal with crime." People must learn not to commit crime ... crime ungood ... don't do it again. On Planet New Labour it is drummed into us that, "actions have consequences", which is hilarious when you consider these physicians can't even heal themselves.

How to rectify this? Fight them on the beaches? Organise in the workplace? Win the propaganda war at the hustings, in the media? Nope, we had to "go to the bars and talk to the people." I kid you not.

Platitude after platitude, cliché after cliché came thick and fast, but mostly thick, and had us reeling on the ropes. It was like banal rape — taken up the wrong'un with no chance of impregnation. The response to this utter vacuum of ideas, this tsunami of insubstance, this blizzard of buzzwords and rehashed politics while Rome is about to go up in flames, was a marked coolness from the 40 or so Chinese present. Hey, Richard, the stereotype of the Chinese being smart contains a grain of truth and if you think the ethnics are going to swallow your nonsense even with the implicit carrot that careers can be made, you are even more unsmart (to borrow his Orwellian Ministry of Truth speak) than you looked. As a seduction it was a big fat fail.

Sarah Mulley (IPPR), Mee Ling Ng, (Chinese For Labour), and Sonia Sodha (Demos)

Women wonks rool
The two women wonks, Sarah Mulley, Associate Director of the Institute For Public Policy Research (IPPR), and Sonia Sodha, Head of the Public Finance Programme at Demos, on the other hand, were far more impressive and on top of their brief.

Sarah Mulley's flawless analysis, locating the cracks in the coalition government's vicious policies, homed in on their emphasis on immigration as a problem for them. This is in meltdown as she demonstrated with forensic clarity. They've set an impossible task for themselves resulting in splits in the government and even their business supporters kicking up over the cap on the importation of skilled labour.

In their haste to number-crunch and halve net immigration from 200,000 to 100,000 per year, the government neglected to work out how they can do this in real terms. With only foreign students paying top-whack fees, families, migrants already here and the highly skilled — such as lawyers, academics, doctors, and Chinese chefs — to pick on, they will end up cutting the figures by only ten percent. Boy, will the Mail be pissed.

Unlike Ed Balls who made immigration-as-a-problem his Unique Selling Point (USP) in the recent Labour leadership contest, Mulley said that this is one area where Labour has to avoid a race to the bottom with the Tories as they can never win. Besides, "this is not as big a concern to the electorate as the economy." Balls's campaign revealed the dark night of the Labour soul and the conflict between its internationalist impulse and exaggerated doorstep anxieties. Labour should stand their progressive ground and refuse to fight this battle on Tory turf.

Mulley understands this well, and yet they don't seem able to extend this principle to other issues of fairer taxation and wealth distribution.

Sonia Sodha talked abut the spending review and how the Tories had succeeded in boosting its economic credibility.

She said that despite Blair and Brown winning the economic argument in the run-up to the 1997 election and Brown making all the correct public sector investments, as well as bailing out the banks with the support of the Tories in the wake of the crisis, the Tories had turned the narrative on its head.

The silence of the shams
Unfortunately, she made no mention of how this happened, ignoring Labour's almost total silence between June, when the cuts policy was announced, and the October Bullingdon Budget, when that narrative was taking shape, or questioned why Ed Miliband couldn't even turn up to the first (very late!) protest as he had promised. In the face of such an onslaught, babies and leadership contests are no excuse for people who purport to be leaders of our nation: if you can't walk and chew gum at the same time, you should not be doing the job.

While the Tories are cutting too hard and fast, she claimed Labour would halve the deficit in 4-5 years. Even though the crisis was not of our making, Labour still capitulates to the right-wing claim that we need a combination of cuts and tax. It's just the proportions they are quibbling about: a quick death or the death of a thousand cuts. How very feudal Chinese of them. As Harpy Marx pointed out at another showdown with the Dark Forces, we've not had our £1.3 trillion bailout back, £70 billion is lost every year in tax avoidance or evasion, and we still have funds for Trident.

Not only that, but someone scrutinising the Sunday Times rich list spotted that "the richest 1,000 people in the UK could pay off the whole of the £159 billion public deficit tomorrow, just from the profits they have made last year out of the economic crisis. The collective wealth of the country's 1,000 richest people rose 30% last year in the wake of the economic crisis. Their combined wealth rose by more than £77bn to £333.5bn, the biggest annual increase in the 22-year history of the Sunday Times rich list."

Ross McKibbin in the London Review Of Books questions the whole con-job assertion that the cuts have anything to do with the economy and says the crisis allowed the Conservatives to transform a crisis of the banks into a crisis of the welfare state:

To the historian, especially of the 1931 crisis, the whole thing is sadly familiar. There is the same paralysis on the part of the Labour Party ... and everywhere the same ramped-up rhetoric: the country is on the edge, going bankrupt, capital will flee, and it is all Labour’s fault. And this time, as in 1931, there is much that is spurious. The country is not on the verge of bankruptcy. There is no evidence that the bond market was reacting against British debt, despite the best efforts of the Conservative Party to encourage it to do so. Our fiscal position was never like that of Greece, which had cooked the books and was struggling to cope with short-term government debt, though Osborne et al insisted it was. Why was it necessary to take such drastic action at all? Our debt ratio was much higher after the Second World War and neither Attlee nor Churchill felt any obligation to do what Cameron, Clegg and Osborne have done. Even Darling’s proposed schedule of deficit reduction seems excessively prudent. A less political chancellor might simply have allowed economic recovery (i.e. increased tax returns to the Treasury), modest reductions in new spending and inflation to deal with the debt.

(LRB hat tip Gauche who writes on Labour's poor showing here.)

The reality of the Tories' "Big Society" is 78 percent spending cuts and a miserly 22 percent rise in taxes. While Sodha points out that even Norman Lamont in the 1980s split the fiscal readjustment 50/50 between cuts and taxes, she still buys into their version — the best Labour can offer is the Tory levels in the Thatcher years. I asked her how she would like the deficit divvied up and she confessed she'd like to see it at a marginally more generous proportion of 60/40. In which case, why did "Red" Ed Miliband promote economics ignoramus Alan Johnson to the Treasury when he advocates 50/50, snubbing Ed Balls and his 60/40 split?

We know that the spending review is massively regressive with the bottom ten percent of the population (minus the very top two percent) picking up the tab for the banking crisis. But who is protecting them? Not Labour. In this climate, when the majority of the electorate would like to see the rich taxed highly to alleviate the pressure on the poor by the Bullingdon bullies, Johnson is hinting that he might even axe the measly 50 percent top rate of tax. To quote Amy Winehouse, what kind of fuckery is this?

Labour is stolidly on the back foot with the media determining policy in a time of crisis.

If this was a movie, we would be in the final reel with the monster still not dead. In fact, this promises to be an umpteen-sequel franchise which won't come to an end until Jamie Lee Curtis comes in swinging a bloody great axe to put the New Labour horror out of our collective misery.

Richest 1,000 could clear the deficit here