Merchant Bankers, the lot of ‘em

Every seasoned television journalist knows that TV is good with people, personalities and emotion and bad with complex ideas, facts and figures.  It’s why TV news reports hang big topics on individual cases; TV can’t make us care about 100,000 disabled people losing their benefits in the abstract but it can make us care about one disabled person struggling to get by, trying hard to get a job, being shafted by the system.  And by making us care about the one there’s a chance it’ll get us to care about the many.

Pity then Stephen Hester, boss of RBS, trying to turn a publicly owned bank back into something that private investors will want to take off our hands (albeit at a giveaway price if George Osborne has anything to do with it).

Hester has become the unwilling poster boy for everything that’s wrong with our increasingly divided society.  Bob Diamond, Barclays’ Group Chief Executive last year got a far bigger bonus (£6.5 million) than the one that Hester has just turned down.  But that’s not the point is it; Barclays is doing fairly well and is private, RBS is struggling and publicly owned.  Hester is our man, Diamond belongs to the market.

So why pity Stephen Hester?  Hester is the victim of the fact that the three big parties can’t address the real issues, the big issues.  That would require too fundamental a critique of what has gone bad with our society.  Hester has become the target over a narrow issue that the Tories, LibDems and Labour feel they can address without getting into really uncomfortable territory.

So, at the risk of being a pariah on Bright Green, I’m going to start with a defence of Stephen Hester.  Hester was brought into RBS to sort out its problems because he had a track record with Credit Suisse, Abbey National and, briefly, with a newly nationalised Northern Rock.  His task was to salvage an RBS which, briefly in early 2009 was the world’s largest company by asset value (£1.9 Trillion) with liabilities of £1.8 Trillion – and we; you, I and every other British tax payer, we own 84% of those assets and, by extension, we are underwriting 84% of those vast liabilities.

Clearly we don’t want a numpty sorting out RBS.  The trouble is that people with the skills needed to avert a disaster big enough to warrant a poem from the late William McGonagall are sought all over the world and they’re sought by very, very rich institutions.  Anyone capable of getting RBS back on track could take their CV anywhere are get a very large pay packet.  Hester’s problem is that RBS’s shares have fallen over the last year, the bank has shed 11,000 jobs and that, notwithstanding the fact that he may have prevented the situation being far worse, a bonus for a result like that looks, in political terms, very bad.  Above all though Hester has become a public servant running the kind of enterprise that no state would have chosen to run, let alone create – a high octane, aggressively acquisitive financial institution that mixed dull retail banking with highly speculative investment operations.  As a public servant he finds himself judged not next to his peers in banking but next to nurses and dinner ladies and cabinet ministers.  The criticism levelled at his bonus by the three big parties is founded on his being a public servant and the poor headline indicators of the bank’s performance.

So Stephen Hester gets it in the neck, faces calls for a Commons debate about little old him, and waves goodbye to almost a million pounds in share options.

The reason I feel sorry for Stephen Hester is that the real issue is not one man’s bonus but a system that consistently rewards ‘top people’ with sums of money that are beyond the imagination of most of those who work for a salary, if they’re lucky enough to get one.

So how has that happened?  Banks like to say that they need to attract the best and the brightest.  It’s long struck me as funny that when we reach for a profession that acts as a metaphor for intelligent we come up with terms like ‘rocket scientist’, ‘brain surgeon’, ‘boffin’, ‘quantum mechanic’.  We don’t say ‘merchant banker’.  If we say ‘merchant banker’ without meaning it literally we’re likely to be using it as rhyming slang as a substitute for something a little more offensive.

I happen to know an astrophysicist.  He’s very clever and paid very badly.  I know a few doctors.  They’re paid a lot better but they’re not paid anything like as well as people in banking many of whom have studied far less hard and do far less good.

Banks don’t have any sort of monopoly on talent.  Plenty of bright people do more useful things with their lives.  Banks do enjoy the greatest proximity to absolutely mindblowingly large streams of virtual cash.  The crumbs that fall from the tables of banking giants are, by mortal standards, huge.  As a result they suck in quite a lot of talent much of which is interested, above all, in those huge crumbs.  So remuneration in banking reflects more the availability of cash with which to reward people (and those people’s ability to make cash), rather than intrinsic worth.

None of this you’ll hear from LabDemCons.  Nor will you hear any fundamental criticism of the way banks operate, of the effect that banking remuneration has to divert useful people away from more socially useful professions, of what it does to a society when tens of thousands of people are propelled into a stratospheric earning bracket creating a vast pay divide (with all the social ills that follow in its wake) and distorting asset prices (such as housing) in a way that positively impoverishes those outside that world.

So let’s have a sensible debate about banks.  Banks can be very useful.  They handle money – money being a clever invention that saves people having to stick a cow in their pocket when they want to buy an iPod and saves Apple having to parlay a cow with a software developer who has time to offer but only a balcony on which to graze a cow…

OK, I’m being flippant, but financial institutions can act as flexible links to ease fluctuations in demand, spot and invest in new trends, facilitate trade between nation states, allow people to save the proceeds of a lifetime’s work against old age and sickness and so forth.  In Germany banks traditionally forged long-term relationships with companies, in which they’d invested, installing a representative on the board to offer advice and provide oversight; it was hands on banking focused on encouraging the production of real and useful stuff that people need and want.  Banks can have a useful, though often rather dull, role in society.

The trouble began when banking started to get rather exciting.  The biggest practical issues to have arisen in the Anglo Saxon world in recent decades have been the increased ability of banks to create cash on their balance sheets and to (supposedly) offload risk, and their tendency to engage in making profit through speculation rather than investment.

Since big bang in 1986 UK banks have typically reduced their capital against their liabilities (what is generally termed increasing their leverage).  With the extra dosh they’ve ‘invented’ they’ve been able to bring US style consumer credit to the UK and Europe (allowing consumers to run up more debts doesn’t of itself lead to more houses being built but it does create more cash to chase the available stock of houses pushing up prices while increasing their exposure to defaults).  They’ve magick’d up financial instruments (of which CDOs were merely the most infamous) that are essentially ways of disguising how bad the quality of debt they’ve been trading amongst themselves is, removing the risk from the lender but not transferring meaningful oversight of that debt to its new owner.

On an international level markets have gone beyond their traditional role of helping to determine true value to a state where they can create crises in order to profit from them.  One could make a cogent argument that what we’re seeing at the moment is disaster capitalism writ large – with markets demanding that states downsize and hold a fire sale of assets (which can be bought cheaply by those able to raise cash) and that governments are unable to take sensible Keynesian measures, such as investing in capital projects that upgrade infrastructure and make an economy more competitive, for fear that they’ll be held to ransom.

The banks aren’t alone responsible for their being too much cash sloshing around and with the asset price and localised wage inflation that’s gone with it.  Technology has also allowed people to become more productive.  Rather than result in a more generalised increase in living standards it’s benefitted those who are in a position to pitch their skills into the biggest and most lucrative markets.  Globalisation works to push up remuneration for those at the top and push it down for everyone else.

Likewise international corporations are able to shop around in a beggar my neighbour search for the lowest tax rates.  Of course any suggestion that global capital needs global regulation provokes cries of ‘new world order’ from the libertarian right, a political movement funded by, of course, big corporations (c.f. the Tea Party and the Koch brothers).

A single article isn’t the place to discuss the answers to such big problems.  One article doesn’t even allow room to set out all the problems.  However it should illustrate that Stephen Hester isn’t the problem.  He’s a symptom.

The reason the flock throws one of its number to the wolves is to keep the wolves distracted.  We can’t take down the rich one at a time (we’ll we could but we’d be about it for ever).  It’s even morally highly questionable whether we should as a society turn on one person – rich though he may be, Hester is but a single human being.  Following the mob won’t lead us to the new Jerusalem.

No, we should refuse to allow our focus to be drawn from the biggest issues of an increasingly divided society and a world where the nation state is being outmanoeuvred by transnational corporations to the detriment of the many and the benefit of a very few.  We shouldn’t be happy about Hester’s bonus but nor should we make him a scapegoat.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo – Review

Warning contains spoilers

 

Steig Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy raised the bar for crime writers the world over.  Part thriller, part noir and highly political, it gave us two enduring characters who stepped away from the page and became almost three dimensional.

The first is Larsson’s alter ego Michael Blomkvist.  Larsson was a left-wing activist, journalist, the editor of an investigative periodical Expo, a Swedish counterpart to Searchlight and an expert on far-right groups.  Blomkvist is co-founder of an investigative periodical, Millennium, that takes on the rich and the powerful and as a result regularly finds itself in trouble.

The second is the extraordinary Lisbeth Salander, one of the most captivating fictional creations in modern literature.  Victim of a violently abusive father, she’s thrown into state care after she sets fire to him for beating her mother and leaving her with brain damage.  Sexually, physically and pharmacologically abused through her incarceration she remains a ward of the state though she’s in her twenties, and making a living as an investigator through her ability to hack into computers.  As the novels unfold we come to know someone who is deeply scarred, vulnerable and yet possessed of an awesome facility for self preservation.  Salander becomes a modern avenging angel.

Not only did Larsson produce great characters and a truly gripping plot (I read the third volume in a little over 24 hours, stopping only to sleep), but Swedish friends attest to its being beautifully written (though I suspect the translation has rendered it rather more work-a-day).  So it’s a series that despite its popularity one would hope a film maker would approach with a degree of respect.

As a result I went to see the English language version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo wondering just how big a hash director David Fincher would make of it.  I couldn’t see Daniel Craig as Blomkvist.  Blomkvist may find himself in the role of action man from time to time but he’s an idealistic softy at heart.  Craig doesn’t make a convincing journalist.  Journalists spend days chained to their computers.  They eat doughnuts and drink coffee.  They don’t have abs.  OK a few have abs but very few journalists are very good journalists and have abs.  There isn’t time.

Rooney Mara on the other hand was a surprise.  I could believe that her Lisbeth Salander had been systematically maltreated.  She managed to capture quite convincingly a combination of low self esteem, fragility and rage.

However my biggest issue was with the directing.  The settings, the cinematography, the degree of fidelity to the original story were all commendable.  I’ll set aside the fact that the film opened with a striking but meaningless pop-video-like CGI sequence set to a godawful cover of Led Zeppelin’s sublime Immigrant Song.

What really bothered me were the sex scenes.  I know that the ubiquity of porn has changed the way sex is shown on screen.  Directors parade more flesh – female flesh of course, no penises – and Rooney Mara’s flesh was put on a float and paraded down Main Street.

That’s widely accepted these days if the sex shown is supposedly between two consenting adults.  But in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo the sex involves someone who has been profoundly traumatised throughout her adolescence and young adulthood.

In the book when Salander slips into Blomkvist’s bed and the two make love it’s an act of considerable trust on her part, while Blomkvist, who one is led to believe is romantically rather cavalier, seems unaware of just how vulnerable Salander is making herself to him and how big a deal that is.  Needless to say Fincher passes on the subtext in favour of straight sex, with the result that it loses much of its emotional power.

If that scene is a missed opportunity then the scene where Salander is manacled to a bed, raped and sodomised by her legal guardian is just plain shameful.

Portraying rape on screen places a huge responsibility on the film-maker.  To eroticise rape is essentially to condone it.  Not only does it ignore the fact that rape is nothing to do with sex and everything to do with power, it also validates the act.

Film-makers who want to show rape for what it is show us faces not bodies.  They allow us to look into the eyes of the victim and see their suffering, their powerlessness and to identify with the emotional impact that sexual violence has on them.

Fincher shows us Mara largely naked, chained face down to a bed.  We never look into her eyes.  We only see her face in profile.  We see her writhing around.

After the attack, when she limps away, we see her from behind, Rooney shuffling so as to underscore the physical impact of anal rape – but again we don’t see her eyes as she processes what has happened to her.  The act is objectified.  We watch.  We aren’t helped to empathise.

Frankly having sat through what seemed to me the eroticisation of the forced and violent sodomy of a much abused woman I felt not a little soiled and complicit for having watched it.

I’m quite surprised that more fuss hasn’t been made about the scene.  It’s all the more shocking because Larsson’s own position seemed pretty clear to me.  The depiction of the rape scene in the book was of an act of violence, not sex.  The incident was about power and domination and we were never allowed to forget what Salander was going through.

Indeed the Swedish title of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is “Män Som Hatar Kvinnor”: “Men Who Hate Women.”  At the start of each section of the book is a page blank save for a fact about violence against women in Sweden.

I hope it’s not pushing the point too far to suggest that Larsson was a feminist writer, or at least hoped that was what he was.  (Nick Cohen in the Observer disagrees though as he bases his argument on remarks quoted without proper context it’s hard to know if he has a case).

I can’t help but feel that Fincher’s movie was a betrayal of the book’s core values and that we’ve somehow contrived to overlook the fact that he’s turned an explicit protest against violence against women into a spectacle which we’re expected to secretly enjoy.

If there’s one thing above all about big money entertainment that saddens me it’s its apparent determination to pander to the worst in us rather than to appeal to the best.

 

Pissing On The Flag

Another day, another scandal involving United States servicemen.  This time its four marines pissing on the corpses of Taliban fighters they’ve killed.  Each time this happens we’re asked to treat it as an isolated case.  What we’re expected to believe is that when US troops misbehave it’s captured on camera and everyone knows about it.  When the cameras aren’t rolling they’re the honourable warriors Americans believe them to be.

Counterintuitive doesn’t begin to describe it.  In the wake of Abu Ghraib, the Iraq Helicopter Video, all those instances of collateral damage, the attack on a Pakistani border post and too many others, we’re expected to believe that these represent terrible exceptions, exceptions that just happen to be caught on video.

A far more credible explanation is that there is a far deeper problem, one stemming from an increasingly inhumane culture that, in the wake of September 11^th, has gripped American forces.  The US military has become brutal and, dare one say it, fascist in the proper sense of the word – that it wields the power to punish and execute and sees itself as the final arbiter.

In the wake of the Vietnam War the US military drafted a ‘Soldier’s Creed’.   You can see the degree of emphasis put on protection, creditable behaviour and the importance of not disgracing one’s uniform.

 

I am an American Soldier.

I am a member of the United States Army – a protector of the greatest nation on earth.

Because I am proud of the uniform I wear, I will always act in ways creditable to the military service and the nation it is sworn to guard.

I am proud of my own organization. I will do all I can to make it the finest unit in the Army.

I will be loyal to those under whom I serve. I will do my full part to carry out orders and instructions given to me or my unit.

As a soldier, I realize that I am a member of a time-honored profession—that I am doing my share to keep alive the principles of freedom for which my country stands.

No matter what the situation I am in, I will never do anything, for pleasure, profit, or personal safety, which will disgrace my uniform, my unit, or my country.

I will use every means I have, even beyond the line of duty, to restrain my Army comrades from actions disgraceful to themselves and to the uniform.

I am proud of my country and its flag.

I will try to make the people of this nation proud of the service I represent, for I am an American Soldier.

 

In 2003, at the height of the war on terror a section of the US military responsible for the Warrior Ethos rewrote the Soldier’s Creed thus:

 

I am an American Soldier.

I am a Warrior and a member of a team.

I serve the people of the United States, and live the Army Values.

I will always place the mission first.

I will never accept defeat.

I will never quit.

I will never leave a fallen comrade.

I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough, trained and proficient in my warrior tasks and drills.

I always maintain my arms, my equipment and myself.

I am an expert and I am a professional.

I stand ready to deploy, engage, and destroy, the enemies of the United States of America in close combat.

I am a guardian of freedom and the American way of life.

I am an American Soldier.

 

All those references to protection and honour and avoiding disgrace have been stripped out.  It’s as though the task of writing the code has been handed to the teams responsible for Gears of War or Call of Duty.  There’s no ethos there just a cartoonish and brutal rant.  The actions of US troops pissing on their dead enemies fly in the face of the original Soldier’s Creed but they’re wholly consistent with the current version.

If the US military wants to defeat its enemies rather than see its soldiers acting as recruiting sergeants for new ones it needs to recognise that it is in the throes of an ethical and cultural crisis.  If it wants to take a step back towards a US military that projects American values, values that might have been recognised as American by the four men whose faces look out from Mount Rushmore, they could do worse than scrapping the current Soldier’s Creed and replacing it with the original.

Lawrence Verdict; Fingers Crossed, Tightly

Doreen Lawrence said that today’s verdict is no cause for celebration.  It certainly isn’t.  At best it represents a belated attempt by our criminal justice system to right the dismal wrong that was the original investigation into her son, Stephen Lawrence’s murder.

At worst, and I hesitate to say this, I fear there’s latitude for a miscarriage of justice.  Don’t get me wrong – I really hope they’ve got the right guys.   If they have then a lengthy spell inside will underline the message that, even if it takes a while, justice will catch up with racist thugs.

My misgivings are more down to two factors.  Firstly the conviction rests heavily on forensic evidence.  Although forensic evidence appears to offer empirical proof, a more reliable alternative to the memory and eyesight of human witnesses, it too is capable of being abused, compromised and misrepresented by lawyers and by ‘expert witnesses’.

Above all though I am mindful of the wider context of this trial.  Just like the trial of the Birmingham Six and of the Guildford Four there’s been huge pressure for a conviction.  That pressure is many fold; from a public that was, rightly, disgusted by the way the entire Lawrence case had been handled hitherto; from a political class that wants to convince people, not least our fellow citizens, neighbours and friends from the black community, that the system serves them as much as it serves anyone; from the campaigning media (not least the Daily Mail); from the police, who have had their fill of the flak this case has brought them and who want to be seem to be capable of doing their jobs.

The point is this –so many stood to lose much face had this trial resulted in a not guilty verdict.  That’s not an environment in which we can feel absolutely, one hundred percent certain that justice has been properly done.

I’ll say it again – I really, really hope they got the right guys.  I see no reason to believe they didn’t.  I certainly don’t want to get some particularly vile people off the hook.  However I am also reminded, worryingly, of situations where someone got banged up because someone had to get banged up.  God help us all if that ever turns out to have been the case.

Sometime a Great Contrarian

The fact that we saw Christopher Hitchens’s death approaching with a crushing inevitability makes it no less sad its day has arrived.

Hitchens was an aberration; a popular public intellectual from a country that abhors intellectuals who moved to another Anglo Saxon country that abhors intellectuals.  And yet he thrived.

The man known to his friends as Hitch couldn’t stand cosy consensus.  He subjected every shibboleth to ruthless dissection.  No argument was ever settled in Hitchens’s mind, every debate was in flux and warranted review, no flummery was ever tolerated.  “That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence,” is just one of many great Hitchens lines.

Many of us in the green movement will disagree with positions that he took.  He supported Margaret Thatcher over the Falklands War.  Many ‘progressives’ would find that a hard place to be, yet I cannot see how we can disagree with his point that a free democratic nation has no choice but too defend its citizens against subjugation by a brutal military dictatorship.

Likewise he supported the invasion of Iraq reasoning that a tyrant like Saddam could not be tolerated.  Indeed, though the West didn’t merely tolerate Saddam but encouraged him when it suited, just as it forged a rapprochement with Gaddafi when the possibility of doing business arose.

These are difficult issues for the left.  Hitchens asked the right questions though he often supplied no answers or the wrong ones.  But is there a right answer to dictators other than to remove them each and every one?  And if we cannot do that in such a way that causes less suffering than leaving them be are we not then corralled into a position where we’re making less than principled choices about which we depose and which we live with?

But he also supplied good answers.  To understand Hitchens it helps to understand the great figures of the Enlightenment that he was so drawn to; Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine.  He realised that America’s true power lay not in its military might but in the ideals that it embodied.  “In America, your internationalism can and should be your patriotism,” he wrote.  Sometimes he could have been harder on contemporary America for having left many of its founding principles so far behind.  Sometimes he simply put the boot in.  “How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape,” he despaired.

Many saw his journey away from the left and apparently towards the right as a betrayal.  I think his own assessment of it is rather fairer.

“There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking.”

Hitchens was a radical in the tradition of Lilburne, Wilkes, Paine, Jefferson and Cobbett.  They were all men of affairs, of business yet valued liberty, justice and had a profound sense of the equality that our shared humanity implies.

Hitchens poured his writing into that river of thought.  He never stopped challenging not just others beliefs but his own.  As he put it: “Time spent arguing is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.”

I suspect his reputation will only grow with the passing of years.

The Distant Thunder of Water Cannon

Over the last couple of years the conversations I’ve had with friends in the city have been defined by their unremitting gloom.

Just this week a neighbour who works as a market analyst pointed to a recent paper by a senior economist at a major bank that suggests Europe may not get itself back on a firm financial footing until 2020.  If the author is right then we will have been through an on and off recession lasting 12 years.

Where the living standards of the 99% who have to work for a living will be at the end of it is anyone’s guess but for almost all they will be lower than in 2001.

That’s bad, yet my neighbour fears worse.  She sees the possibility of complete social meltdown.

Of the many ‘lessons’ supposedly drawn from the summer’s riots the most demonstrable is surely this; that with the advent of new technology the police no longer have the organisational advantage they once enjoyed.

In August things came very close to a tipping point where the police had to surrender the streets to the rioters.  In some cases, arguably, that tipping point was momentarily passed.

The police rely not just on their immediate physical response, their ability to put officers, vehicles and riot equipment on the ground at flashpoints, but also on the sense that even if crimes are committed unhindered now the law will inexorably close in on those responsible.

Yet if future disorder does spiral out of control and if public anger is such that a larger and larger minority sides with rioters, not just passively but actively participates, then the realisation will dawn that the police simply won’t be able to track down most of those who have taken part.  The more widespread the rioting the more would-be rioters will feel they have impunity, the more that those on the fringes will put aside their fear of retribution and join in.

And that, I suspect, is what the government really fears.  Faced with a surge of anger at the way our economy has been pillaged by the super rich and financial institutions the authorities pull their one club from their golf bag and use it to threaten or beat anyone who gets off their posterior to protest.  Ignore comments that the British are not supposed to protest sitting or lying down, the establishment doesn’t like protest full stop unless it’s sufficiently polite that they can afford to ignore it.

They seem unable to distinguish between protest that expresses legitimate feelings of injustice, something that should prompt the government to act to address those grievances, and civil disorder in the making.

The phrase that I keep reaching for is ‘in denial’, for through the disaster that is the current crash the 1% and the politicians that support them seem to be expanding the maximum effort to preserve the status quo and doing the minimum required to appease the rest sufficient to forestall further rioting.

The same pattern can be seen time and again.  Those insulated by wealth and power from the reality experienced by everyone else never grasp the seriousness of the situation until it is too late.

Just as with Mubarak and Gaddafi, so too in their own way the mighty of the City of London and the cabinet.  Rather than seize the initiative and do sufficient to properly address the despair of the many, rather than ensure that the pain is borne proportionally by those best placed to weather it, they will do the minimum; forever reactive, forever on the back foot, never in control.

This is a time to demonstrate the hard way that we’re all in this together.  But what we will surely see, time and again, is that we are not.  Rather than listen to dissent they will suppress it.  Rather than help the poor they will keep them down.

So when (I fear it will not be if) they resort to water cannon and rubber bullets we will have reached a point of no return.  They will have created a wound in our society, a divide between an ever larger number of us and an ever smaller number of them, that will not be healed with warm words.  The consequences cannot be fathomed but we should be afraid.

Very few of us have anything to gain from more riots.  They will play into the hands of the far right and the authoritarian left.

The government needs to wake up to the fact that change is inevitable and manage that change.  Doing nothing will simply hand the opportunity to do something to some very ugly people.

Time To Change The Game

Growing up, did you ever play Monopoly or Risk?  Did you ever get to a point where you simply picked up the board, chucked the pieces in the air and told everyone ‘this is a stupid game’?

I did and I feel I’ve reached the same point now with the much bigger game that we’ve been suckered into; mindless materialism. Suckered because it’s a game that creates 99 losers for every winner and for 150 years the traditional left has been playing along, simply trying to ensure that more people win.

The time has come to stop playing an unwinnable game and play a different one entirely.

Looking back 150 years to an age when working people had been driven off the land and into the cities, when live expectancy was short, when malnutrition and slum housing were rife, when education was accessible only the a minority, when social security was almost non existent and universal healthcare yet undreamed of; that early socialists saw the problem in almost purely material terms is understandable.  Confronted with such deprivation the only decent response was to feed, clothe, house, educate and cure.  There are many parts of the world where that still holds true.

But the left has moved beyond trying to meet people’s needs in order to ensure that everyone can live with dignity.  The traditional left has bought into materialism – the mindless pursuit of consumer crap – and in doing so, it has condemned millions to misery.  Misery because the material hierarchy for which they’ve signed up condemns most of them to be losers, and it’s the conscious or unconscious knowledge of this that leaves so many people in modern Western societies feeling dissatisfied, adrift and depressed.

Leftist materialism found its purest voice in New Labour.  New Labour worshipped the rich.  Blair and Mandelson embodied that final capitulation.  They didn’t just feel intensely relaxed about others getting filthy rich, they felt really very chilled out at the prospect of getting filthy rich themselves.

I’ve often wondered what the attraction is.  Of course most of us can understand why people lust after the first million or so; a nice house, a decent car, big TV, all that stuff – not having to worry about paying the bills.  But the second million?  Or the tenth?  Even the one thousandth million?

Looked at in purely quality of life terms the relationship between wealth and wellbeing rises steeply from zero but reaches a point pretty fast where it more or less flat-lines.  A BMW gets you from A to B in relative comfort (I prefer the train, so long as I can sit down and not get charged a fortune), but 5 luxury cars don’t get you there any faster or more comfortably.  The difference in wellbeing between having four homes rather than three is miniscule next to having one home rather than none.  A wardrobe full of the latest Versace dresses and no friends is a poor substitute for a chest of drawers full of hand-me-downs and a dozen people you can turn to when you’re feeling low.

A recent survey concluded that the Mexican telecoms magnate Carlos Slim is the richest man in history because his income equals that combined of more of his fellow countrymen than even legendary rich figures such as Crassus- in Slim’s case his wealth equals that of 440,000 average Mexicans.

Yet Slim doesn’t have 440,000 homes.  He doesn’t have 440,000 cars or even 440,000 fried eggs for breakfast.  The same is true of Warren Buffett, a shrewd investor but an unassuming man whose modest lifestyle belies his vast wealth.  Redistribute their capital and you don’t free up additional resources to be redistributed.  You only pump more money into the system and change the price of goods.  Take away Slim or Buffett’s fortunes and spread around their cash and you redistribute power, not least buying power, but you don’t create more stuff.

Because here’s the thing.  Past a certain point money has nothing to do with standard of living and material comfort; past a certain point it’s about status and then it’s about power.

We are, on a very important level, still the children of our animal selves – with our need to survive, reproduce and to have a place within the group.  It’s just that these days all that evolutionary programming is at work in the city rather than on the savannah.

Status and power are intimately tied up with survival and finding the best possible mate.  Our need to be valued and to be with others that are valued is as hardwired into our brains as is the need to eat, sleep and go to the toilet.

But here’s another thing – value doesn’t have to be measured in financial terms.  There are plenty of circumstances where people have won status, respect and even a more desirable mate not through being rich but through giving more – through being indispensible to the group.  When your people are starving being the person who knows how to grow food gives you a value that being able to hand out gold coins does not.

The trouble is that the left has capitulated and plays a game where value is measured in purely material terms.  As the Archbishop of York John Sentamu said the other day; “it is hard to imagine a more powerful way of telling someone that they are of little value than to pay them one-third of 1% of your salary.”  Yet even if we manage to reduce income disparities – which we most certainly should – in a world where value is ascribed in purely monetary terms, nurses, carers, teachers and so many others are never going to be paid enough to reflect their real value to us.  We have to change the game.

Just think; if we refuse to run on the materialist hamster wheel, if we refuse to coo and ooh and aah over someone’s new car, bigger house, shiny handmade kitchen and designer clothes, those things start to lose their value.

If the natural reaction to someone with five cars was ‘what a wombat’ (apologies to wombats everywhere btw) rather than ‘wow, like your cars’ the incentive to own five rapidly diminishes.  Of course if you’re reading this you’re probably the kind of person that would tell the owner of five cars that they’re a wombat (you’re so polite – I’d expected more anglo-saxon).  If we can persuade all the other people who have been conned into playing this sucker game to do the same then we’re onto something.

It’s tough.  It’s tough to tell people, especially ones you like, that you think the rubbish they buy is just that.  After all when someone has bought loads of stuff to bolster their self esteem it’s pretty crushing to be told it’s just so much tat.  Perhaps better to tell them you like them for themselves but that their tat gets in the way.

So just imagine what it would be like if we were valued for what we gave rather than what we took, not so much for financial giving as the giving of time, concern, support and love.  Imagine the sort of race that would produce to be top dog – and there would be a race because we’re programmed to want to be valued, however that value is handed out.

I’m talking about a system which creates lots of winners because that sort of value generates more value – we become valued because we give of ourselves and those we give to feel valued because they receive our love, time, concern and attention.  It’s a virtuous circle and the resources involved are infinite not scarce.  It’s a recipe for a happy, sustainable society.

It won’t be easy.  Not only have millions invested a lot of their hopes and dreams in stuff but some very big and powerful companies have invested millions (upon millions upon millions) in creating an addiction to things, anything that can be sold to them.

But we can make a start.  Let’s stop complimenting people on the stuff they’ve bought and start complimenting people on the good things they do – or just for being a good person.  A pebble rolled down a hill…

So much for financial status addiction, but as for what money buys you when you already have status – power – the answer there is hardly new.  We want democracy.  We want power to rest with the people and we want those we elect to govern on our behalf to do just that – to govern for the 100%, not just the 99% and certainly not just for the 1%.  Where corporations and the super-rich have accrued power for themselves, we want it back.  They can have their share, like the rest of us; a ballot paper, a pencil and if they want to use it – a voice.  But they don’t get to use their money to buy a megaphone to drown out the voices of the 99%.

But whatever we do we should remember this; human nature is what it is – it may not be quite a constant but it evolves at the speed at which continents drift – very slowly.  We mustn’t aspire to perfect people.  As Christopher Hitchens noted; “It is only those who hope to transform human beings who end up by burning them, like the waste product of a failed experiment.”  Mao and Hitler and Pol Pot all hoped to transform people and ended up slaughtering them.

Rather we should aim to improve society so that it brings out the best in people rather than the worst.  We’ve found that while greed may be a powerful force for growth, it’s also a poisonous, polluting force that corrupts those it touches and crushes those that stand in its way.  If we want a society driven by more wholesome urges; the desire to help, to care, to nurture, to discover, to create, to beautify, to understand – then we must reserve our respect and reverence for those who embody such values.

So let’s focus on needs and let’s focus on deeds and let’s stop measuring our worth by the stuff we own – as someone I once loved said to me; you don’t own your possessions, they own you.

A Despatch from OccupyLSX

I’ve wanted to drop in on the OccupyLSX camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral ever since it was set up and on Tuesday I finally got there.

I wandered down with Rupert Read who’d persuaded me to join him at a Progressive Alliance meeting that morning at TUC headquarters.

The Occupy camp had been high on the agenda with two active members of the camp, Tess Carota and Jonathan (? sorry didn’t get your surname) there to speak about it.

Both were eloquent and personable but neither pretended to have any answers to the numerous questions fired at them.  Chief amongst these were how long the camp should remain and how it could draw in the 99% it claims to represent into the process they’ve started.

What Jonathan and Tess did explain was that they see Occupy as part of, perhaps a catalyst for, a conversation – a conversation that our society has to have.

I walked down Holborn to St Paul’s with Tess.  She’s from Philadelphia, the meeting place of the revolutionary Continental Congress, the city where Tom Paine penned Common Sense, where Washington, Adams, Jefferson and their contemporaries declared independence and drew up the Constitution of the United States.

If the Progressive Alliance was a modern congress, the Occupy camp was Valley Forge.  The tents are our pickets and trenches.

I met up with Rupert who was giving a (very good) talk at the University tent on The Spirit Level.  The whole scene reminded me of the free festival circuit of the 1980s.  On display were the fruits of endeavour and creativity and free thinking – posters, discussions, food, music… Rupert and I joined in a guerrilla singing session and belted out ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ and ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’.  He’s got a good voice.  The police looking on were clearly non-plussed.

What I found most affecting however was the presence of quite a number of people who I presumed were either homeless or marginal.   Tess mentioned on the way down that some can, occasionally, be problematic and that people in this highly-democratic space didn’t feel they had the right to ‘police’ them.

I don’t entirely agree.  Any society has the right to agree certain boundaries to protect the safety and dignity of all.  The key thing is that rules be non discriminatory and applied evenly.

However what I saw were people who’d had no place finding a place and making an effort to contribute.  It spoke volumes to me.  However much we’re encouraged to crave stuff what we really crave is purpose and belonging.  We’re social creatures and we’re happiest in society.  I’m sure Occupy is far from perfect.  I know some of those there find the process of reaching consensus difficult.  However the experiment they’re carrying out matters.  It may turn out just as it turned out for The Diggers on St George’s Hill but whatever happens it serves to remind us that there are other, possibly better, ways of working and being and I doubt anyone who has been a part of it will ever forget it.

Justice Peeks

There’s a reason that the figure of Justice is traditionally represented as blind.  A fundamental principle of justice is that it applies equally to all who are subject to it and, though historically the crown has been partially exempt, that in theory means everyone else – rich or poor, grand or humble, old and young, man and woman.

There’s also a reason why the separation of powers was built into the constitution of the United States.  It was recognised that for justice to function it had to be free of political influence so it could hold the other arms of the state, the legislature and the executive, to account.

Having lived in and reported from a country where the judiciary was utterly compromised to the extent that it was simply believed to do the bidding of the government (and little I ever saw contradicted that) I know what a cancerous effect that has on a society.

It’s about more than justice.  It’s about social cohesion.  Take away from someone the belief that society (in the shape of the state) will act on their behalf to right wrongs done them and their sense of belonging withers.  Even in the Middle Ages feudal lords were bound to provide justice and protection as their side of a bargain that gave them status, money and free labour.

Yet in Britain we face a growing culture of impunity that gives the impression that certain groups or sections of society do not face proper justice while others feel its full force.

Like many people I was near apoplectic watching the scenes of destruction from around London during the August riots.  For many of the rioters it appeared to be little more than a guerrilla shopping expedition and I felt scant sympathy for them even if the statistics out today suggest that they are more accurately described “poorer, younger and of lower educational achievement than average” rather than as well organised criminals, gang members or middle class idiots having a little fun living dangerously.

Though the resulting sentencing has been somewhat uneven, many of those linked to the rioting have had some pretty substantial prison terms imposed on them, not least the two men who were each jailed for four years  for using Facebook to incite people to riot.

The tough approach might be easier to justify if we saw the law taking an equally tough line with other groups who seem to fare better under the criminal justice system.

A number stand out; bankers, business leaders and the police for instance.  According to the group Inquest juries at coroners inquests have returned 12 verdicts of unlawful killing related to deaths in custody (of which there have been about 300) since 1990.  There have been no prosecutions.  None, nada, zero.

There have been 45 people killed by police firearms officers since 1993.  No police officer has been convicted of any offence in relation to any of these incidents despite there being grave doubts over some of them.

The initial lack of action over the death of Ian Tomlinson was symptomatic, not exceptional as were the denials and disinformation following the killings of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell and Mark Duggan in Tottenham.

Most people recognise that the police have a tough job and wish them well in doing it – me included (and I’m not paying lip service to the sentiment when I say it).  That’s why they approve of legislation that gives the police additional protection, making it, for instance, a more serious offence to assault a police officer than an average member of the public in the street.  But the flipside of that is that we need to hold officers to account in accordance with the professional standards we expect of them.  The perception is that this isn’t happening.

Likewise there have been no prosecutions over the actions of financial institutions whose recklessness resulted in our needing to pump £80Bn into them to keep them afloat.  If someone had driven a car as recklessly as bankers ran their institutions they would have come before the law.

It’s not a case of ‘somebody must pay’.  It’s that we know that bankers pushed the rules to the limit and possibly broke them.  We know that they repackaged high-risk debt as AAA securities in a way that may have been fraudulent.  Given the enormity of the crisis they brought about the criminal justice system seems to have applied different standards.  There’s been no proper criminal investigation.  Bankers get the benefit of the doubt.  Stupid people on Facebook get four years.

Then there are corporations.  For years it was almost impossible to hold the people at the top of a company to account for that corporation’s actions.  The death of Simon Jones at Shoreham Docks was a case in point.  The company paid a fine.  No individual or group of individuals was held to account.  Bad people have been allowed to hide behind their business’s legal personality and escape prosecution.  That is wrong.

It should not be about revenge, it should be about justice.  There is the sense abroad that justice may turn a blind eye when it comes to the establishment but that it peeks out from under its blindfold at everyone else.

That runs the serious risk of undermining faith in the judicial process.  If people think the system is unfair they won’t participate.  I know some on the right think that criminal justice isn’t about participation.  I think they’re naïve. There are swathes of the country where the police are already unwelcome.  The lack of cooperation from those communities makes the police’s task far harder.  As a result some crimes go unsolved while others require far more resources in order that they be brought to court.

We already have elements of a ‘them and us’ justice system.  If it continues on its present trajectory eventually we won’t be able to call it a justice system at all.

 

St Paul’s – for the 1% or the 99%?

I’m not an unalloyed fan of the man who gave his name to St Paul’s Cathedral.  Saul of Tarsus was an uncomfortable and divisive figure in early Christianity.  Many of his pronouncements, which reflect his conservative rabbinical background, leave many of us equally uncomfortable today.

Paul had issues with women, gays and men with long hair.  If he’d found himself caught up in the Occupy crowd beside the great London church that bears his name he’d probably chew their ears off.

However that’s as nothing to the roasting he’d have in store for the denizens of the City; the men and women of the City of London Corporation, the trustees of St Pauls and the tens of thousands of highly paid men and women whose relentless pursuit of money strains at the leash of legality and, despite protestations to the contrary, whose employers are not permitted by law to pay heed to the constraints of morality if it curtails their profits.

Arguably Paul’s great contribution to Christian theology was his discourse of righteousness.  In framing his argument Paul pulled together many of the radical threads of Jesus teaching.

It’s best summed up in Matthew 22 36-40 “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ ³⁸ This is the first and greatest commandment. ³⁹ And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ ⁴⁰ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

One of the reasons Paul readily seized on this is that it was already well established in Jewish theology.  Paul had studied under Gamaliel, the grandson on Hillel the Elder who had framed the commandment thus: “What is hateful to thee, do not unto thy fellow man: this is the whole Law; the rest is mere commentary” (Shabbat 31a).

But Paul developed the theme.  The aim of the righteous was to maintain a right relationship with God and with one’s fellow people.  Anything that acted as an obstacle to this relationship was an obstacle to salvation.

So though he’s often misquoted as saying that ‘money is the root of all evil’ what Paul actually says is that ‘the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.’  When the love of money supersedes the love of one’s fellow man it is morally and spiritually corrupting because that love of money prevents one from doing the right thing.

It’s in this light that we should read the parable of the Good Samaritan or the remark about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

And so back to St. Paul’s in London.  It has ‘sadly’ announced that it will be closing due to health and safety concerns arising from the #OccupyLSX protest.  It smacks of moral blackmail.

The Dean of St Paul’s, Graeme Knowles, explained that it was “simply not possible to fulfil our day to day obligations to worshippers, visitors and pilgrims in current circumstances”.  The implicit message is clear – these dreadful protesters are preventing good people from worshipping.

Aside from the fact that the credibility of this assertion is in doubt, as the Rt. Revd. Knowles would be the first to point out, God is everywhere, not least in the dozens of underused churches that dot the city of London, within a few hundred yards of St Pauls.  Indeed given how few people actually live in the Square Mile, the City of London probably has more churches per head of population than anywhere else on earth.

The Rt. Revd. Knowles should remember that St Paul’s is not just a place of worship, it is a symbol.  It was a symbol of London’s resilience and defiance during the Blitz.  He and his fellow Canons need to decide whether during the worst economic crisis in 80 years it’s a symbol of the 99% or of the 1%, of the poor, the needy and the dispossessed or of the city’s rich men and women stuck trying to squeeze through their own eyes of needles.

You can see the cathedral’s dilemma.  As its website reads ‘We are extremely proud of the close partnerships we have forged and continue to nurture with our corporate neighbours.’  Those corporate neighbours give millions of pounds a year to the cathedral and they want the protestors to go.

The City of London Corporation has called on the protesters to leave.  Well there’s a surprise – it’s the corporate interests that the CLC represents, and that enjoy such close links with St Paul’s, that the protesters are there to protest about.  It’s like Margaret Thatcher telling the striking miners ‘move along now, you’ve had your fun’.  Preposterous.

In truth it shouldn’t be a difficult choice.  All the Canons need to do is to listen to their hearts and consider the words of the man whose name their cathedral bears, and then they’d surely have no trouble in making the right – indeed the righteous decision.