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| Photo: Syaibatul Hamdi [link] |
It’s a strange feeling at the moment, being stuck in lockdown during the coronavirus. I’ve been meaning to write about what has happened in the last sixth months for a while now, but this seems like a timely period to so. The streets of London feel eerily empty, particularly at night, with the shots of Central London I’ve seen from a friend resembling something out of 28 Days Later (ubiquitously soundtracked by Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s suitably apocalyptic ‘East Hastings’).
As the world heads inexorably towards recession, with no end in sight for lockdown in many countries, the fragile nature of the global economy has become more and more exposed. The Great Recession (the term often used for the 2007-9 Financial Crisis) exposed neo-liberalism’s failures, but was supposedly rectified pretty quickly: in the UK, the tax payers rescued the banks, so that financial speculators could carry on as before. Ordinary people weren’t asked if we wanted to bail out the failing banks, of course; the Government knew that it had no choice, because the banks were too big to fail, and so went ahead regardless. Despite huge job losses, people went back to work, and then socialised. We were all told to feel better that things were back to normal, despite the fact that we knew that the financial crash had led to the near collapse of the financial system as we knew it. Few lessons were learnt in terms of any meaningful financial regulation that could prevent another financial crash from happening again – but that would’ve meant the Government challenging a deregulated financial sector that has become the main driver of the nation’s economy. Meanwhile, hedge fund speculators made money from the economic chaos and austerity, as they always do – including Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father, as I’ve pointed out in a previous post – and the economy carried on being based around assets such as an overheated housing market. So while plenty of people got laid off, rents, especially in London, didn’t go down.
Things feel very different now, though. The Great Recession was able to recover because things beyond the essentials were open. Beyond the Bank of England’s quantitative easing and the buying of essential goods, people were able to pump money into the economy from doing stuff rather than being housebound, whether entertainment or shopping or a thousand other social activities. In contrast, no amount of liquidity can stopgap the fact that this time people are physically not allowed out to their place of work (admittedly electronic communication has mitigated this somewhat). Once again, the ordinary taxpayer in the UK will be the one to pay to bailout large companies, including Richard Branson’s Virgin, without being asked if we want to, while small businesses are likely to be the ones really feeling the heat, despite Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s best intentions – and, of course, if some of them go to the wall, they will be rich pickings once again for the hedge funds and various disaster capitalists who take advantage of economic chaos.
The failings of the capitalist system when faced with the Coronavirus couldn’t have come at a worse time for the UK, because of another big shock to the system: Brexit. Yet it’s been fascinating to watch the tabloid’s handling of both.
I’ve already discussed how the tabloids and much of the mainstream media has been deliberately relentless in their anti-EU propaganda, for a variety of reasons. That was ever more obvious in the run-up to the snap General Election (GE) in December 2019, but added to that was another element: that the mainstream media, hand-in-hand with the Government, were clearly terrified of the prospect of Corbyn in No.10. Corbyn didn’t play the media game that the Eton-educated Boris Johnson, who was famously part of the Bullingdon Club, knew so consummately. The newspapers didn’t have privileged access to him in the way that they did with other politicians. His radical manifesto of change included defunding private schools, from which many top-tier politicians come from, together with threats to stop corporate tax breaks, stamp out wage inequality, put energy and water in public ownership, and challenge the dominance of overseas tax avoidance. It was the latter ambition, especially, that put him in perpetual opposition to the City and a global economic system entrenched in money made in tax havens, as Financial Times journalist Nicholas Shaxon’s engrossing book Treasure Islands reveals – not to mention the tax-avoiding owners of the tabloids. Not only were Corbyn’s plans anathema to Tory values and right-wing ideology; it also represented a threat to the interests of the system generally. Together with a serious radical socialist program, it was obvious that the establishment and the wealthy elite had to do whatever it took to demonise Corbyn as much as they could – and the way to do that was through the bulk of the mainstream media.
So despite Corbyn coming from a long tradition of English radicalism going back to the Levellers and the Diggers, the tabloids neutered the threat of a Corbyn administration in power by appealing to the lowest common denominator instinct of the British public: by casting him as a heretic, a ‘traitor’ who ‘despises this great country’, a ‘danger’ to ‘our way of life’, ‘unpatriotic’, ‘Jezbollah’, and ‘an IRA sympathiser’ (the truth is more complex). He was depicted deliberately as somehow ‘anti-British’, a 'collaborator' with 'the enemy' (for the tabloids to exist, there always is 'an enemy' to conveniently rail against).
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| Declaration by the Diggers, depicting themselves as "true Levellers", in 1649; public domain |
Deliberately targeting the older population of the country, it was impressed upon us that it was he who would lead ‘Labour’s £11,000 hit to your pension’. Meanwhile, the Brexit Party, in virtual alliance with the Government, focused on issues such as World War II and fishing, which they knew had a certain flashpoint in the psyche of some Brits, seizing disingenuously on war clichés and grievances in the fisheries industry when, again, in the case of the latter the truth remains much more complex, rather than simply being boiled down to slogans such as ‘Our Waters, Our Fish’ – not to mention the fact that Nigel Farage, as a member of the European Parliament Fisheries Committee, only attended one out of 42 meetings.
At the same time as this, we now know that the Tory Government had secret connections with the Russian Government, at the very same time that the media was vilifying Corbyn as a ‘Communist spy’. And it wasn’t just the Government: the links between Farage and the Brexit Party and the Russian Government are well-known too – and involve large amounts of money. Time and time again, there have been proven connections between all of them, with Farage and The Brexit Party voting against EU resolutions to stop Russian election meddling – while lecturing the rest of the country on patriotism. The vilification not only ensured another five years of the Tories in power, then, but also served as a convenient distraction that covered up links between No.10, Farage/The Brexit Party, Vote Leave (run by Matthew Elliott), and the Kremlin, and shadowy free market figures in the US such as Steve Bannon. And it also served as a convenient distraction to the various, mind-bendingly vast Byzantine strands that orbit around pro-Brexit activity in 55 Tufton Street in London, from the Taxpayer’s Alliance, Leave.EU, numerous right-wing think tanks, various climate change deniers, to obscure Canadian web analytical companies and involvement with the US and Russian Governments. Just some of these strands are explored in the image below:
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| Graphic creator: unknown. If this is your work, please get in touch and I will credit you |
The Sun has had form on this, of course. They castigated the previous Labour leader, Ed Milliband, depicting his deceased father as “The man who hated Britain – what did Milliband Snr. really believe in? The answer should disturb everyone who loves this country”. Desperately searching for any way to smear Milliband Jr., they picked a random photo of him eating food. For those who can remember further back, they meted out similar ‘punishment’ to Neil Kinnock in 1992. This insidious thought process and faux appeal to patriotism has reappeared and again in the newspaper, and last December’s GE, with Corbyn the victim, was no different. As ever, appearance rather than the underlying reality was all. Yet the disturbing thing was that this time it wasn’t just confined to the tabloids. The Telegraph was just as bad, sycophantically demanding that “It’s time critics saw Boris for the Churchillian figure he is”. But less predictably, it also featured more subtly in the BBC’s coverage. When Johnson bumbled his way shambolically through a Remembrance Sunday service at the Cenotaph in Whitehall in 2019, including laying the wreath upside down, the BBC used footage instead of Johnson laying the wreath in a much smarter demeanour in 2016, then later dubiously claimed that it was an ‘error’. During that same Remembrance Sunday back in 2016, two newspapers claimed that Corbyn “broke into a dance” on the way to the Cenotaph, which we now know was a lie. Another ‘error’ by the BBC, meanwhile, was when the BBC edited out the incredulous laughter from the audience on Question Time in reaction to Johnson being asked a question about how important it is for people in power to tell the truth. Then, a day before the GE, Laura Kuenssberg reported that the postal votes were already “looking pretty grim for Labour in a lot of parts of the country”.
The insidious culminated effect on this was a character assassination that slowly chipped away at the public’s belief that Corbyn and Labour were sufficiently ‘patriotic’ and could offer a credible alternative path, while Johnson appeared unassailably the leader, his flaws airbrushed out. And the BBC, at least ostensibly, appeared to be complicit in this.
Labour themselves didn’t help, either. Shambolic infighting and factionalism, perennial technological problems at a crucial time, and an inept handling of the anti-Semitism crisis all contributed to a disastrous election campaign. As leader of this, Corbyn remained a flawed character. Nonetheless, he was always unfairly destined to lose, despite determined campaigning by Labour volunteers in torrential, rain-soaked December weather. The establishment ‘won’, with the line sold that Johnson ‘will get Brexit done’, pushed by disingenuous journalists who knew few well that this is only the beginning of negotiations between the UK and the EU, in which the EU will have the upper hand due to its size and clout – something that they simply cannot concede, because then the whole premise of their anti-EU scapegoating, in which the UK has the upper hand, falls like a pack of dominos. Instead, the tabloids have pulled the wool over the public’s eyes, and continue to do so, including condoning the increasingly deranged, quasi-Stalinist behaviour by the unelected Dominic Cummings even as he has turned against them – along with the independence of the judiciary; The Confederation of British Industry (CBI); civil servants; Cabinet members who wouldn’t agree with his demands to have their advisers fired and replaced by individuals hand-picked by 10 Downing Street; and anyone else who he perceives to be standing in his way – while still castigating “unelected Brussels elites”.
In case you’re wondering, these aren’t just my opinions. They’re also of a senior journalist.
It’s striking to see now, as the coronavirus takes hold, that the mainstream media still cannot bring themselves to offer anything critical, bringing to mind the GE. This is because they are still pushing the lie, foisted upon them by their tax-dodging owners, that only the Conservative party can be trusted with the economy. So instead the line has been pushed that only Johnson can get us out of this, with The Telegraph claiming that “Far from requiring delay, coronavirus strengthens our hand in post-Brexit talks”, while the fact that the UK could have joined the EU procurement scheme to secure ventilators and other coronavirus equipment to treat people affected by the virus, but chose not to - because the word Europe has become so toxic in the Conservative party - has been wilfully brushed aside. Indeed, the mainstream media have wilfully ignored just how dangerously reliant the UK could be on the EU if things get tough over medicine during the pandemic, particularly if an intransigent USA President intervenes. In a move that brings to mind Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, which focuses on ‘disaster capitalism’, the chaos taking place over the coronavirus could pave the way for the Tory Government to push through one its cherished aims, thwarted only because of repeated public opprobrium – to move towards an American-style healthcare system, away from a National Health Service (NHS) that the Conservatives opposed right from its forming in 1948 under a Labour administration. Pharmaceutical companies, some of whom could view the coronavirus pandemic as a unique business opportunity, know this well. This is touched on heavily in the podcast below by Global Justice Now (produced just before the coronavirus, so there’s no mention of it, but still chillingly relevant):
If there’s one conclusion that the last six months have taught us, it’s that the mainstream media for the most part cannot be trusted. With notable exceptions for some of the coverage by The Guardian (including particularly Carol Cadwalladr’s investigative work), Financial Times and the Mirror, the mainstream media savaged Corbyn while offering Johnson the easiest of rides, including still conveniently burying the withheld Government’s report on what exactly was going on between the British and Russian Governments. Going back to The Sun, in a classic case of audience manipulation, the newspaper has now put up logos saying 'I Love The NHS’, and encouraged its readers to applaud NHS staff during the pandemic crisis, while conveniently failing to mention that they themselves advocated sacking junior doctors on pay strike in 2016, who were angered at the Tories’ continual underfunding of the NHS:
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| If you took this photo, please let me know and I'll credit you |
It also ignores the fact that the Tory party, who The Sun have consistently supported, have been consistently opposed to the NHS, as mentioned already, for a number of reasons (chief among them that the NHS is not a profit-making body). It’s no secret that many Tory politicians have advocated moving towards an American-style healthcare system. This is common for a paper which has consistently gaslighted its public, including classing dissenters over the Iraq war in the early 2000s as ‘traitors’ (despite the fact that the war took place under a Labour leadership) – now conveniently forgotten as public opinion has retrospectively shifted to against the invasion.
It’s clear that society cannot go on after this crisis in the way that it could after The Great Recession just over ten years ago. Going ‘back to normal’ won’t paper over the cracks that have been exposed in our laissez-faire financial system, nor the increasing strain that climate change and dwindling peak oil reserves will place on the system. Despite what the naysayers have pronounced, there is an alternative. The coronavirus is just the start when taking into account the impacts that will take place as a result of climate change (more on this in a previous blog post) over the next ten years. Instead, this opportunity should be seized to embrace a new way of thinking.
First, a major boycott campaign against the tabloids needs to be taken, in which the disinformation and smoke and mirrors pedalled within the publications are highlighted. Instead, people should be pointed to independent sources such as Open Democracy, Byline Times, Full Fact, The London Economic and Novara Media.
Secondly, when the UK emerges from this crisis, the economy needs to be boldly and fundamentally re-orientated, so that power is taken away from deregulated finance and an alternative to the current financial system is prioritised. We need to embrace structural change via the Green New Deal (GND) – an ambitious new financial and political architecture that prioritises investments in decarbonisation techniques; a just transition for workers away from dependence on carbon and addiction to fossil fuels, as well as other greenhouse gas emitters; and attempts to embrace degrowth. All of these are huge fields in themselves, but the latter includes the notion that we should aim for a ‘steady-state’ economy, with a generally stable, moderately fluctuating population and per capita consumption.
There have been a number of versions of the GND in several countries; in this blog post, I’m going to focus on the UK one. In terms of day-to practice, the GND advocates alternative energy moves to prioritise the retrofitting of every building as much as possible, so as to cut back emissions and improve efficiency; for the UK’s electricity grid to be sourced from renewable energy, including wind, solar, hydro and geothermal electricity; and for a general move to energy efficiency.
Ann Pettifor’s book, The Case for The Green New Deal, offers some good suggestions on how this would work. As one of the original members of the Green New Deal UK Group, and Director of the organisation Policy Research in Macroeconomics (PRIME), she points out that “mobile agents [i.e. on behalf of private market forces] have very little interest in supporting states that need to wean economies away from dependence on fossil fuels and from the all-powerful corporations that dig up, distribute and make money from those fuels”.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Instead, Pettifor calls for the establishment of an international reserve currency, objectively independent of the sovereign power of any single, imperial state, as Keynes proposed at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference. Keynes was defeated, largely because of US opposition. The US Government insisted that their dollar be established as the world’s reserve currency instead – and got their wish. So it has been ever since, to the point where this status quo – where the US enjoys an inherent international advantage due to the dollar being the world’s default reserve currency, with the Federal Reserve acting as a global lender of last resort - was strengthened, rather than weakened, by the 2008 crisis. More, not less, power flowed into Wall Street as a result of that crisis, because of the money made through insurance as a result of the US making trillions of dollars available to European and Asian banks who were reeling from the crisis. Combined with this, the EU faced its own structural problems within the Eurozone. Pettifor points out what would have happened if the money the US lent, on favourable terms, was an independent reserve currency instead: “The ‘insurance’ is valuable at times of crisis, but it could just as easily have been provided by an independent, international central bank working with, and answerable to, all nations, not just the most powerful”.
The result of this dominance of the US dollar has been that poor countries, unable to pay for essentials such as oil and gas in their own currencies, have been forced to use the dollar, making them subordinate to it. Meanwhile, deregulation in the latter part of the 20th century of the international financial system, particularly in the US and the UK, has meant that, in the words of Alan Greenspan, the world is once again governed by markets.
In addition to the above, Pettifor advocates the establishment of an international ‘clearing union’ for the settlement of credit and debts between nations, so that the burden of transformation is shared equitably. She advocates central bank intervention to manage cross-border capital flows, so that tax evasion can be combatted, with demands that offshore capital be brought back onshore. And she recommends that for carbon taxes to be effective, they need to be targeted at the biggest emitters.
This also chimes with the work of another member of the Green New Deal UK Group member, Andrew Simms, a research associate with the Centre for Global Political Economy at the University of Sussex and Fellow at the New Economics Foundation (nef – the acronym is always in lower-case, for some reason). Simms points out in his book Cancel The Apocalypse that “much more could be done to tackle the £100 billion-plus lost to the public purse in tax that has been avoided, evaded or simply not paid. A general tax-avoidance provision targeting the abuse of tax allowances could raise £10 billion a year if only half successful.” Simms also advocates green bonds, incentives on green savings, and a global Financial Transactions Tax that “applied at a rate of 0.05 per cent could raise more than £400 billion a year, several times the global aid budget. It could underpin a Green New Deal in the Global South, playing a significant role in enabling the majority world to adapt to climate change as well as ‘breaking the carbon chains of fossil fuel dependence’”. The EU had actually proposed a Financial Transactions Tax of its own (EU FTT), but faced opposition from the City (in fairness, some other member-states opposed the tax too). Simm’s backing of such a tax follows on from his work on ecological debt, which looks at the accumulated debt that wealthier countries owe from the plunder of much poorer countries, including resource exploitation. An example among many of this is the mining of cobalt, the chemical element that features in your smartphone, in the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo, located in central Africa. Other examples of ecological debt include the degradation of natural habitats, and occupation of environmental space for waste discharge. In all these case, developing countries have taken the brunt.
More broadly, the GND in the UK has a set of principles, similar to its cousin in the US proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that need to be abided by in order for it to succeed. These include the aforementioned steady-state economy principle, which in itself includes nine ecological boundaries, and the notion of a ‘Plimsoll line’ that is both economic and ecological in the way that it caps the economy at a sustainable level, much of which I’ve covered at least to some extent in this blog post. That ‘Plimsoll line’ has already been demarcated by scientists, in line with cuts that rich countries have to make in terms of temperature rises.
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| Photo of Plimsoll line on boat by Markus Brinkmann (link) |
The nine ecological boundaries outlined are:
- Ozone depletion
- Biodiversity loss and extinctions
- Chemical pollution and the release of novel entities
- Climate change
- Ocean acidification
- Freshwater consumption and the global hydrological cycle
- Land system change
- Nitrogen and phosphorus flows to the biosphere and oceans
- Atmospheric aerosol loading.
On top of all that, though, the GND UK is revolutionary in another way. Tying in with the work mentioned above on degrowth, it dares to suggest that ‘national happiness’ is not necessarily tied to ever-increasing Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In fact, more neoliberal societies and excessive materialism have if anything made us more neurotic, anxious, atomised and unhappy, and have exacerbated this through inequality, which in turn has led to social problems – the London Riots in 2011 being a prime example. While the question of what constitutes subjective life satisfaction is a deeply complicated one with a lot of variables – that intangible something that makes some people happy and some people not - various attempts at an ‘Index of Wellbeing’ have been made, including by the World Health Organisation, the UN’s Human Development Index and the Happy Planet Index. The work of Simms, too, does offer some clues, including with nef’s Centre for Well Being. This has included co-authoring a report called The Great Transition, which looked at the impacts on GDP in the UK of what would happen if the UK adopted the methods of the GND, leading to a national reduction in carbon emissions. He, along with colleagues, found that while growth would decrease somewhat, slightly reducing national incomes, egalitarianism would increase, leading to a corresponding drop in social costs that would make up for the drop in national income from a smaller GDP.
No country on the planet is perfect, but the Scandinavian/Nordic nations (along with certain other countries in Northern Europe and elsewhere, such as Japan and New Zealand) have grasped at least to some degree the value of a more equal society, particularly in terms of fostering an overall happiness, as Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have focused on in The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone. “When income differences are bigger”, they point out, “social distances are bigger and social stratification more important”. Their conclusions are undeniable: sharing more equally leads to an overall better standard of well-being for everyone. This inevitably means moving away from an economic model in which “the high levels of inequality in our societies reflect the concentrations of power in our economic institutions”.
A new, fairer system could be ours if we want it – and when a country becomes more equal, it raises the well-being of everyone. However, for the GND to work in the UK, as Pettifor points out, it needs to have the public’s confidence, and that of financial backers who can finance the decarbonisation. The opposition from private interests, including particularly tax havens, and those who stash their money away in them, would be huge, particularly with initiatives (if they ever were to take place) such as the aforementioned Financial Transaction Tax – and the opposition would almost certainly include the aforementioned network of think-tanks and other organisations that revolve around 55 Tufton Street. The City, too, would raise objections, due to the fact that, as Simms puts it, “the commercial companies that trade in fossil fuels tend to be concentrated in a small handful of stock exchanges, and the City of London is a major one”. Never underestimate, too, the effects of NMBYism in the UK. For those who don’t know what that means, it stands for ‘Not In My Back Garden’, and is tied up with a certain kind of Daily Mail reader (you can Google the rest).
And yet, at just 17, Greta Thunberg has shown that protesting against the current system can capture the world’s imagination and be successful, as have the (admittedly flawed) activities of Extinction Rebellion. So, too, can progressive initiatives such as London’s Congestion Charge (and its newer cousin, Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ)), which faced opprobrium from many quarters at the time, yet has eventually become the new norm here in the capital. Similarly, Simms points to the bold steps that other cities - for example Freiburg in Germany, Ghent in Belgium, and Portland in the USA - have taken, so that polluting cars have been sidelined in favour of initiatives such as the increasing presence of public transport and cycling. The Plimsoll Line, mentioned earlier, is yet another example. The public mentality can change, if initiatives are done properly. It can be done. In addition, the ordinary taxpayer holds more sway over global financial markets than they think. As Pettifor puts it: “We must grasp that power. Only then can we begin to demand ‘terms and conditions’ for taxpayer-backed subsidies and guarantees – and use that power to regulate and subordinate the globalised financial sector to the interests of society as a whole”. Here’s Pettifor talking some more about how the GND in the UK can be financed, followed by a video by nef on their own approach to its funding, including borrowing, taxing the wealthiest, and the phasing out of subsidies for fossil fuels:
However, in the UK, the GND is unlikely to work as long as the tabloids and right-wing organisations have such a vice-like grip on the public’s imagination. Which goes back to my first point about what needs to happen when we re-emerge from the pandemic, whenever that is: the tabloids cannot be allowed to go on normal, in which any kind of positive progress in society is obstructed with lies and untruths, and get away with it. New, robust laws need to be put into place to hold them to account and counter their disinformation.
Finally, in case you’re wondering if a lot of this stuff sounds eerily familiar – that’s because it is. Much of it is in the present manifestos of the Labour Party and the Greens, the only two parties that people should seriously consider voting in the next GE for the sake of our future. Yes, that’s the manifestos that the tabloids told you were ‘unaffordable’ – and yet now the Tories are unavoidably forced to pump millions and millions of pounds into the economy because of the coronavirus pandemic, in order to shore up the economy in a crisis, recalling what followed the crash ten years ago. This illustrates that the money always has been there – it’s simply the willpower that’s been lacking. An alternative to the status quo is possible – if only we are prepared to put our minds to it.
