Yes heaven forbid you could actually win power by appealing to centrist voters and introducing things like tax credits...
It’s like the crucial moment in Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American. The US agent stares at the blood on his shoes, unable to make the connection between the explosion he commissioned and the bodies scattered across the public square in Saigon. In leaked correspondence with the Conservative leader of Oxfordshire county council (which covers his own constituency), David Cameron expresses his horror at the cuts being made to local services. This is the point at which you realise that he has no conception of what he has done.
The letters were sent in September, but came to light only on Friday, when they were revealed by the Oxford Mail. The national media has been remarkably slow to pick the story up, given the insight it offers into the prime minister’s detachment from the consequences of his actions.
Cameron complains that he is “disappointed” by the council’s proposals “to make significant cuts to frontline services – from elderly day centres, to libraries, to museums. This is in addition to the unwelcome and counter-productive proposals to close children’s centres across the county.” Why, he asks, has Oxfordshire not focused instead on “making back-office savings”? Why hasn’t it sold off its surplus property? After all, there has been only “a slight fall in government grants in cash terms”. Couldn’t the county “generate savings in a more creative manner”?
Explaining the issue gently, as if to a slow learner, the council leader, Ian Hudspeth, points out that the council has already culled its back-office functions, slashing 40% of its most senior staff and 2,800 jobs in total, with the result that it now spends less on these roles than most other counties. He explains that he has already flogged all the property he can lay hands on, but would like to remind the prime minister that using the income from these sales to pay for the council’s running costs “is neither legal, nor sustainable in the long-term since they are one-off receipts”.
As for Cameron’s claim about government grants, Hudspeth comments: “I cannot accept your description of a drop in funding of £72m or 37% as a ‘slight fall’.”
Again and again, he exposes the figures the prime minister uses as wildly wrong. For example, Cameron claims that the cumulative cuts in the county since 2010 amount to £204m. But that is not the cumulative figure; it is the annual figure. Since 2010, the county has had to save £626m. It has done so while taking on new responsibilities, and while the population of elderly people and the numbers of children in the social care system have boomed. Now there is nothing left to cut except frontline services.
Have you ever wondered how the prime minister sleeps at night? How can he live with himself after imposing such gratuitous pain upon the people of this nation? Well now, it seems, you have your answer: he appears to be blissfully unaware of the impact of his own policies.
Cameron’s letter seems to confirm the warnings issued by the National Audit Office a year ago: that the government had only a “limited understanding” of the savings local authorities have to make. It blithely assumed that councils could make their savings through restructuring, without discovering whether or not that was true. It failed to assess their budgets as a whole, overlooking, for example, the funding of libraries and youth services, about which Cameron’s letter complains. No wonder he hasn’t the faintest idea what is going on.
It’s worth remembering that Oxfordshire, which is run by Conservatives, is among the wealthiest counties in England, with the nation’s lowest level of unemployment. In common with every aspect of austerity, the cuts have fallen hardest on those least able to weather them: local authorities in the most deprived parts of the country.
As a report commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation discovered, the cuts in some areas are so extreme that local authority provision is now being reduced to little more than social care, child protection and other core services, while the budgets for libraries, museums, galleries, sports facilities, small parks and playgrounds, children’s centres, youth clubs, after-school and holiday clubs, planning and environmental quality have already been slashed to the point at which these can barely function.
In July, the Financial Times revealed that the funding for children’s centres across England has been cut by 28% in just three years: is Cameron unaware of this? As for public protection, it is all but gone. Visits to workplaces by health and safety inspectors have fallen by 91% in four years, and have been abandoned altogether by 53 local authorities. If you want to endanger your workers, don’t mind us. You begin to see how the government’s agendas mesh.
Now, as there is nothing else left to cut, the attack turns to social care, with untold consequences for children, the elderly and people who have mental health problems.
And we are only halfway through the government’s elective, unwarranted austerity programme. The spending review this month will demand even greater cuts from budgets that have already been comprehensively flensed. How will this be possible without dismantling the basic functions of the state?
The government justifies its austerity programme on the grounds of responsibility: people must take responsibility for their own lives, rather than relying on the state; local authorities must take responsibility for their spending. But, as Cameron’s letter shows, he takes no responsibility for his own policies. Like pain, responsibility is to be applied selectively.
Graham Greene’s American agent, Alden Pyle, has an “unused face” and a “wide campus gaze”. Impervious to other people’s suffering, he can think only in abstractions, and edits reality to make it fit the theories in which he has been schooled. Nothing he encounters can change his views, as it passes through this filter before it reaches his brain. “When he saw a dead body he couldn’t even see the wounds.” Oblivious to the results of his actions, he is “impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance”. Oh, hello, Prime Minister.
The anti-democratic way Andrew Fisher and Corbynistas hurl abuse at those they disagree with
By James Bloodworth | IB Times – Tue, Nov 10, 2015
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- Andrew Fisher brouhaha.
Fisher was Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn's recently appointed – and rapidly suspended – head of policy. Less than a month after his appointment to the influential role, Fisher was suspended by Labour's National Executive for apparently supporting a rival party – Class War – at the General Election. "If you live in Croydon South, vote with dignity, vote @campaignbeard," Fisher wrote onTwitter, in violation of Labour's rule that prevents party members from supporting non-party candidates.
Really of course, Fisher's suspension is one small incident in an ongoing faction fight between the Left and the Right of the Labour Party. When Corbynistas bemoan Fisher's suspension as part of a concerted attempt to wreak vengeance on the Left, they are being completely untruthful. But then, the Left would also purge the party of "Blairite" MPs and activists if it could. All talk of "democracy" by Labour activists of every stripe is pure humbug. What really matters is ensuring their own faction comes out on top.
But Fisher's flirtation with a rival party was never the most interesting thing about this story anyway. Fisher has apologised "unreservedly" for the Class War tweet, saying he "obviously [does] not and did not support Class War in any way". Notably, however, he hasn't apologised for calling Rachel Reeves a "w****r", for calling Sarah Vine a "piece of s**t", nor for speaking about how he would like to thump James Purnell.
Forget about his alleged support for a rival party; the most interesting thing about Fisher is the abuse he seems automatically to mete out to anyone whose politics differ from his own.
As with so many Corbynistas: "Exiling a critic outside the community of the good and punishing them for their bad faith is preferred to offering reasons why they may be mistaken on a matter of principle, policy or fact," as the academic David Hirch has put it.
On economic policy at least, my own politics are not hugely dissimilar to those of the so-called "hard Left". I believe the greatest threat to well-being in Britain is economic inequality.
As far as I am concerned, class, race and gender still have a greater influence on a person's life chances than ability or hard work – probably in that order. I do not subscribe to Jeremy Corbyn's naïve cod-pacifism, but I would not hesitate to call myself a democratic socialist.
What puts me off the whole thing is the socialists – the people like Andrew Fisher and the ubiquitous activists for whom any disagreement is the political equivalent of defecating on a tombstone.
The warning signs were there during the recent leadership contest, when everyone with second thoughts about Jeremy Corbyn was informed by the Twitter Stasi that they were in fact "Tory-lite" and should "f**k off". The admonition to "go and join the Tories" became so ubiquitous as to turn into its own vaguely subversive joke, with Labour moderates playfully instructing Jeremy Corbyn to "join the Tories" every time he made a concession to pragmatism.
Far from being a "kinder, gentler politics", as advocated by the Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, the Corbynistas – and the far-Left more generally – are steeped in the politics of motive – the motive of one's opponents always and everywhere being the most sinister one imaginable.
To understand this one has to go back to Karl Marx's materialist conception of history. The prospects for communism may have turned to dust when the Berlin Wall came down, but Marx's influence on the Left – both good and bad – persists. To whittle it down to its essence, the Left carries around with it the Marxist idea that every politically conscious person is governed, whether they know it or not, by the desire to increase their own share of commodities.
For Marxists, politics is merely the expression of this desire – thus motivations which appear to cut across the economic are mere camouflage for underlying financial self-interest. The result is a paradoxical state of affairs in which left-wingers who supposedly believe humanity can be better go around viewing almost every action as rooted in bad faith.
Of course, we know that other motivations cut across purely economic considerations. To quote Bertrand Russell, who saw through communism earlier than most: "The materialist theory of history, in the last analysis, requires the assumption that every politically conscious person is governed by one single desire – the desire to increase his own share of commodities" (emphasis mine).
In reality things are a good deal more complex. Many of those who have not swallowed the Corbynite Kool-Aid are also trying to make the world a better place – their proposed solutions just happen to differ from those favoured by the far-Left. Blairites are not scum, as the Corbynistas might believe; they simply don't agree with Jeremy Corbyn on the best way to bring about a fairer Britain.
Yet for Leftists like Andrew Fisher, disagreement is considered an acceptable reason to, as Hirsh puts it, "push opponents out of the room" by showering them with abuse. This anti-democratic mentality – a mentality which seeks to delegitimize all opposition based on the view that it is motivated by bad faith - is far more worrisome that any alleged "disloyalty" on Fisher's part.
given the appalling level of service they offer at the moment then Im all for change - hopefully they can sack the useless idiots I have spoken to on the last couple of occasions.
Child and pensioner poverty greatly decreased under Blair, and that was the main target. It was fairly basic Rawlsian raising of the bottom level, rather than trying to bring the bottom and top levels closer together.
This would be hilarious if it wasn't absolutely horrible.
Indeed - one imagines that during the Eu referendum the party most likely to have the most difficulty remaining cohesive would be the conservatives... but its hard to imagine Labour being able to hold a unified front throughout and resist sniping internally...
I think he would rather line us up against a wall than woo us...
