Since the global financial crisis of 2008 a number of countries in the OECD have articulated the desire to catalyse economic growth while also simultaneously ‘re-balancing’ their economies. This ambition for ‘balance’ frequently aims to both tackle the problem of trade deficits through greater export orientation and in producing a greater amount of goods compared to services than is the case at present. In a previous article I briefly examined how in the US state-financed investment in Chrysler represented one path to such re-balancing through increased investment in fixed capital and higher levels of automation. This article will instead focus on a different approach that has instead been adopted by the UK government which can perhaps be understood under the rubric of ‘Plan A’. Such an approach instead focuses on the reduction of variable capital - the cost of labour - and views the repression of wages as the most important thing in attracting investment and stimulating increased levels of growth and job creation.

A new Director General is being appointed to take over the leadership of the single most important cultural and current affairs institution in Britain, the BBC. It is a publicly funded institution, hugely valued and believed in, pushing hard into new technology with a massively respected presence on the web, from news to iPlayer.

It is also, arguably a last bastion of old Britain where public services were run with mandarin values by people who felt they knew best - and occasionally did even if, as often as not, they didn't.

How would it be, if the Government asked if you wanted radioactive waste buried below your town, you said NO! And then they did it anyway? That is the dilemma facing communities around Sellafield in Cumbria north-west England, aka the Lake District, home of romantic poets, most famous tourist region of the UK and aspirant site for World Heritage status. This disposal site for radioactive waste is proposed to be a national facility, and will be a project similar in size to the Channel Tunnel.

The enormous structural changes facing both Britain’s mainstream media and its universities are placing considerable strain on a third tradition: the age-old antagonism between the two sets of institutions.

Tabloid journalism has historically had a pivotal role in generating the burlesque image of the academy as a safe haven for those unwilling, unfit or too ungrateful to work in society.

‘Totally Tom', the comedy duo behind the viral
satire on life at Bristol University, ‘High Renaissance Man’

But in the wake of the spectacle of last year’s student protests, this caricature is seeing a significant shift: the flimsy and foppish is increasingly subservient to a more hysterical vision of the bandana-clad black bloc activist, gyrating - fire-extinguisher in hand - to the ominous rhythms of hard dubstep. Alexander Boot’s recent Daily Mail attack on the LSE demonstrates a particularly paranoid manifestation of the political anxiety behind the stereotype, making the hyperbolic conflation between its MA in ‘contemporary urbanism’ and a nightmarishly totalitarian political project apparently being brewed in its course-work…

All over Europe, the post-war ‘catch-all’ political parties of left and right are in decline, losing vote share to new parties and other rising forces across the political spectrum. Centre-Right parties are struggling to contain surges of anti-immigrant, Eurosceptic and sometimes avowedly racist populism.  Centre-Left parties have leeched votes to environmentalists, socialists and radical liberals.  Regional and civic nationalist parties drain support from both.

It is very odd for any politician to deny a moral purpose, and especially so for a Liberal Democrat to do so, since they make piety the cornerstone of their politics,  but that is exactly what Business Secretary Vince Cable did in a revealing interview with Jeremy Paxman on the BBC's Newsnight last week. They were discussing Cable’s role in seeking to moderate the ridiculously high rewards for business and finance bosses – and Paxman suggested that Cable had a “moral” interest in restraining such rewards.  Thrice he put it to Cable that he took a moral view; thrice, Cable denied any such thing

I believe that Paxman was right, and that Cable very likely does take a moral view.  But like Peter, after the death of Jesus, the time is not right for him to admit it.  

‘Modernisation’ is one of the defining words of our time, along with ‘legacy’ and ‘journey’. It is a word used by Tony Blair, David Cameron and Alex Salmond.

It is an in-word for those who feel they shape and define the age, change and the world. It has had an interesting trajectory: it was once bright, shiny, confident, swaggering with confidence, impatient with opposition, and believing the future was theirs for shaping.

Then it became associated with Tony Blair and New Labour. Modernisation was about ‘the project’ and ‘the narrative’; it was against ‘old Labour’, dinosaurs, vested interests, and ‘the forces of conservatism’.

The two-storey wooden hut in which Francis Wheen worked and wrote when he was at home was burnt to the ground on 13 April, taking with it all his packed library, manuscripts and correspondence. Francis is the Deputy Editor of Private Eye and the author of an amazing range of books. He is a chronicler of our time, with books on Britain in The Sixties, and the seventies in Strange Days Indeed, and, above all, How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World, a forensic exposé of the founding moment of our now disintegrating epoch: 1979 and the joint counter-revolutions of Margaret Thatcher and Ayatolla Khomeini. He is a biographer of distinction: Tom Driberg, Who was Dr Charlotte Bach, and the prize winning Karl Marx, the latter followed by a remarkable conceptual biography of Das Kapital. We can also chuck in an early survey of Television and collected journalism, Hoo-Hahs and Passing Frenzies and a book of cats. But he and his family are fine and his partner Julia wrote this reflection. Rise again Francis!  (Anthony Barnett).

The morning after, with
the cable repair in progress

The morning after the night before did not bring quiet sorrow. An employee from the National Grid called early. They had been searching for a break in a main power cable. Somewhere, 10,000 volts was pouring into the ground. Their search had led them to our house.

Whose story will be told in the 'Isle of Wonders' fable? 

As London struts its stuff for the Olympics and calls to the world to attend its show, what kind of account of who we are, who we were and who we want to be will it celebrate? Danny Boyle’s dramatisation for the opening ceremony is planned as a spectacular remake of Britain’s ‘island story’, drawing its inspiration and strap-line from Caliban’s famous speech in The Tempest, in which he urges his companions:

Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises

Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.

Boyle’s ‘Isle of Wonders’ seeks to conjure up a vision of Britain as just such an enchanted island, a latter day Illyria, where the descendants of Caliban energetically disport themselves, demonstrating a ‘can-do’ attitude that enables them to defy gravity, become authors of their own lives, and above all ‘live the dream’. And not a Prospero in sight to spoil their fun.

Whilst the final figures are not yet known, the turnout at Scotland’s recent local government elections is set to disappoint. Prior to polling, senior figures from mainstream parties feared that nationwide turnout could fall below 40%. As though confirming their fears, turnout at Glasgow was an historic low of just 32.42%. With such poor voting figures, it is questionable what sort of a mandate any ‘winning’ party has.

Certain sections of the media and political classes will inevitably argue in a variety of ways that the 'epidemic' of political apathy is a disease whose symptoms - ignorance, complacency or disdain for the personalities of politicians - are largely self-inflicted. According to their upcoming diagnosis, this epidemic could easily be cured if only the public would just "get involved and invigorate democracy."

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Even by the expensive standards of major defence projects, Britain's commitment to maintaining both a nuclear-weapons capability and a global naval reach over the next decades represents a substantial burden. A decision announced on 10 May 2012 illustrates the enduring problems in pursuing the second of these ambitions - and reveals anew the flaws in the ambitions themselves.

Tacked on at the end of the very first paragraph of yesterday’s Queen’s Speech was a government promise to "limit state inspection of businesses.” 

Innocuous as it sounds, this phrase contains a promise that profoundly threatens the health and wellbeing of all of us. And yet it passed by virtually unreported, under the radar of all of the major news bulletins.  
 


We have come to expect – and take for granted - the guarantee that our workplaces, our environment and safety of our food comply to a minimum standard of protection.  And yet, this is not how business representatives or the government see it.  Since the election of the Coalition, we have been subjected to a constant barrage of mythology about those protections being a “burden” on business. Recall that Cameron’s New Years priorities for 2012 were the Olympics, the Queen’s Jubilee, and to “kill off the health and safety culture for good” - to rid British business of an “albatross” that was “costing them billions of pounds a year”.  

The most remarkable aspect of the May 3rd elections has gone almost without comment. Despite the overwhelming result in the AV referendum, The 'single transferable vote' was used without significant controversy or complaint in Scotland, a sequence of Mayors were elected using the supplementary vote – and there was even a clutch of referendums on introducing more elected Mayors with the supplementary vote.

Everyone in Britain knows about the News of the World phone hacking scandal, and most people know that at its heart is a collection of documents and computer files assembled by the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire. Buried by police in 2007, these records have been laboriously dragged to the surface by journalists and lawyers, and they have revealed outrageous illegal behaviour. The Mulcaire files, in other words, have done untold damage to Rupert Murdoch’s organisation.

British-Danish security firm G4S has been severely criticized for its operations in the occupied Palestinian territories and in prisons and detention centers in Israel, including those housing children and “administrative detainees” held without charge or trial.

On 17 April Palestinian organizations called for action against G4S for its role in Israeli prisons where Palestinian political prisoners from the occupied territories are held in contravention of international law.

The Business & Human Rights Resource Centre in London published Michael Deas’s report on the call and invited G4S to respond. G4S submitted an update with old statements that does not address the criticism of the provision of services to prisons in Israel. Meanwhile, about 2,000 Palestinian prisoners bellow out their ill-treatment in a mass hunger strike.

Who Profits - a research project of the Coalition of Women for Peace – has provided the information on G4S activities in Israel for the rejoinder below, including its extensive G4S report of March 2011.

One of the persisting ideas that even now continues to unify all three major parties in the UK is the desire to 'rebalance' the economy. Such a view ignores increasingly mechanised production processes and a correlative decrease in both the volume and intensity of labour required within production. These conditions lead to the paradox of the modern global economy - ever greater production and ever fewer jobs. An age of unprecedented surplus and goods in circulation, matched by the increasing inability of ever-larger populations to consume such surplus. This is the heart of the 'secular' crisis and, whether there is state-led intervention or not, it is a crisis that remains without answer.

Anthony Barnett has written a powerful and compelling indictment of the relationship between the Tory leadership and the Murdoch empire.  He is surely right to say that David Cameron was deeply foolish to take on Andy Coulson as his key press adviser, at the apparent behest of George Osborne, and reckless in then retaining him in a crucial government position after the election.

Last week the Guardian reported the extraordinary story that KBR (Kellogg, Brown & Root), the Texas-based former subsidiary of the Halliburton corporation (of which former US Vice President Dick Cheney was the CEO), is part of a consortium that has made it through to the final shortlist for a £1.5bn contract to “run key policing services in the West Midlands and Surrey.”

KBR, which was sold by Halliburton in 2007, was involved in building the Bush administration’s reviled “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, and “was still part of Halliburton when it won a large share of Pentagon contracts to build and manage US military bases in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.”

It has been a dramatic few months in Scottish politics, which have revealed something about our nation and its public life. We have a problem with how we do politics, public conversation and understand power. There is an inability, or more accurately, unwillingness across large swathes of Scottish society, from our political classes and institutional forces - even among many of the radical and alternative voices - to confront some of the difficult issues we have to.

This pattern has been evident for decades, but it has become more and more clear with the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and election of SNP Government, first as a minority in 2007, then as a majority in 2011. This is because each of these events upped the stakes about the rhetoric and expectations of change and has illuminated more dramatically the silences, omissions and collusions across Scottish public life.