Human kindness is overflowing in 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH"

. . . and I think it's going to rain today

This painting titled Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward is by the Liverpool born artist Luke Fildes.

Fildes exhibited ‘Applicants for admission to a casual ward’ (Collection Royal Holloway College) at the Royal Academy in 1874, accompanying it in the catalogue with Charles Dickens’ description of a scene outside the Whitechapel Workhouse in 1855:

‘Dumb, wet, silent horrors! Sphinxes set up against that dead wall, and none likely to be at the pains of solving them until the general overthrow.’

The composition of the painting was based on Fildes’ famous ‘Houseless and Hungry’ drawing published in the first issue of The Graphic in 1869, which led to his being commissioned by Dickens to illustrate Edwin Drood.

In 1860, at the age of 17, Fildes became a student at the Warrington School of Art. Fildes moved to the South Kensington Art School where he met Hubert von Herkomer and Frank Holl. All three men became influenced by the work of Frederick Walker, the leader of the social realist movement in Britain. Fildes was the grandson of the political activist Mary Fildes, president of the Manchester Female Reform Society in 1819, and played a leading role at the mass rally at Manchester in that year which ended in the Peterloo massacre. 

Fildes shared his grandmother's concern for the poor and in 1869 joined the staff of The Graphic newspaper, an illustrated weekly began and edited by the social reformer, William Luson Thomas. Fildes shared Thomas' belief in the power of visual images to change public opinion on subjects such as poverty and injustice. Thomas hoped that the images in The Graphic would result in individual acts of charity and collective social action.

Fildes' illustrations were in the black-and-white style popular in France and Germany during the era. He worked in a social realist style, compatible with the editorial direction of The Graphic, and focused on images depicting the destitute of London. The Graphic published an illustration completed by Fildes the day after Charles Dickens' death, showing Dickens' empty chair in his study; this illustration was widely reprinted worldwide, and inspired Vincent van Gogh's painting The Yellow Chair.

In today's print edition of the Guardian, Wednesday 28 October 2020, on page 4 of the Guardian Journal, Steve Bell quotes Luke Fildes painting of the poor and destitute of late nineteenth century London's East End, waiting outside the workhouse, desperate for relief.

One of the posters on the wall in Steve Bell's version of the Fildes painting declares that:

£63 million already for targeted paup snacks  

This refers to money allocated by the UK government to local councils about 13 weeks ago. Government ministers have explained that their refusal to fund a voucher scheme for children in the free school meals scheme, over the half term holiday period, is because local councils were given this money three months ago for purposes such as this. What the government ministers did not explain, whether they knew or not, is that the government had stipulated that this money be spent by the end of a 12 week time frame. So, all things being equal (except they are structurally NOT equal in a capitalist economic system), this money should have already been spent. So there is nothing for children in the scheme for this half term holiday. 

Stay hungry - Control your kids - Save money

So, says the other poster, a version of the governments advice in the campaign to mitigate the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Steve Bell's cartoon makes the point that the UK government, and many of the Conservative party MP's, in rejecting the Labour proposal to extend the free meals scheme over the holiday period, have exposed themselves as "Dickensian" in their attitude. Dickensian in the sense that the term Dickensian is used to describe something that is reminiscent of Charles Dickens' chosen settings for his writings, such as poor social conditions or comically repulsive characters. The lack of human kindness shown to those struggling in the present circumstance of a health crisis amidst grotesque inequality in British society, is reminiscent of Dickensian characters like Scrooge, as portrayed here by Alistair Sim in the 1951 film Scrooge.

If they would rather die they'd better do it . . . 

. . . and decrease the surplus population!

If the British public can now see that there is a want of feeling amongst those currently holding political power and influence, that is shocking enough. But what is also becoming increasingly exposed is the UK government's agenda, as critiqued by George Monbiot earlier this month in his Opinion piece, published in the Guardian, two weeks ago (Wed 14 Oct 2020). He writes under the headline and subheading:

The Conservatives are shrinking the state – to make room for money and privilege

Boris Johnson’s talk of restoring sovereignty is a lie. He is handing democratic power to economic elites, not the people

George Monbiot writes:

The question that divides left from right should no longer be “how big is the state?”, but “to whom should its powers be devolved?”. In his conference speech last week, Boris Johnson recited the standard Tory mantra: “The state must stand back and let the private sector get on with it.” But what he will never do is stand back and let the people get on with it.

The Conservative promise to shrink the state was always a con. But it has seldom been as big a lie as it is today. Johnson grabs powers back from parliament with both fists, invoking Henry VIII clauses to prevent MPs from voting on crucial legislation, stitching up trade deals without parliamentary scrutiny, shutting down remote participation, so that MPs who are shielding at home can neither speak nor vote, and shutting down parliament altogether, when it suits him.

He seeks to seize powers from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland: the internal market bill appears to enable Westminster to take back control of devolved policies. He imposes the will of central government on local authorities, refusing to listen to mayors and councils while dropping new coronavirus measures on their cities. He claws back powers from the people, curtailing our ability to shape planning decisions; shutting down legal challenges to government policy; using the Coronavirus Act and the covert human intelligence sources bill to grant the police inordinate power over our lives.

His promises to restore sovereignty are lies. While using the language of liberation, he denies power to both people and parliament. He promised to curtail the state, but under his government, the state is bursting back into our lives, breaking down our doors, expanding its powers while reducing ours.

Instead, he gives power away to a thing he calls “the market”, which is a euphemism for the power of private money. This power is concentrated in a small number of hands. When Johnson talks of standing back and letting the private sector get on with it, he means that democratic power is being surrendered to oligarchs.

Under the Conservatives, the state shrinks only in one direction: to make room for money and privilege. It grants lucrative private contracts to favoured companies without advertisement or competitive tendering. It gifts crucial arms of the NHS to failed consultants and service companies. It replaces competent, professional civil servants with incompetent corporate executives.

We need a state that is strong in some respects. We need a robust economic safety net, excellent public services and powerful public protections. But much of what the state imposes are decisions we could better make ourselves. No Conservative government has shown any interest in devolving genuine power to the people, by enabling, for example, a constitutional convention, participatory budgeting, community development, the democratisation of the planning system or any other meaningful role in decision-making during the five years between elections.

The Labour party’s interest in these questions is scarcely more advanced. The 2019 manifesto talked of “urgent steps to refresh our democracy”. It called for a constitutional convention and the decentralisation of power. But these policies were scarcely more than notional: they lacked sustained support from senior figures and were scarcely heard by voters. During his bid to become Labour leader, Keir Starmer announced that “we need to end the monopoly of power in Westminster”. He called for “a new constitutional settlement: a large-scale devolution of power and resources”. Since then we’ve heard nothing.

When challenged on its policy vacuum, Labour argues that “the next general election is likely to be four years away … There’s plenty of time to do that work.” But you can’t wait until the manifesto is published to announce a meaningful restoration of power to the people, and expect it to be understood and embraced. The argument needs to be built – and Labour local authorities, by developing powerful examples of participatory politics, need to show how Starmer’s promised new settlement could work. Instead there’s a sense that the parliamentary Labour party still sees its best means of enacting change as seizing a highly centralised system, and using this system’s inordinate powers to its own advantage.

For many years, Labour relied on trade unions for its grassroots dynamism and legitimacy. But while the unions should remain an important force, they can no longer be the primary forum for participatory politics. Even at the height of industrialisation, when vast numbers laboured together in factories and mines, movements based in the workplace could only represent part of the population. Today, when solid jobs have been replaced by dispersed and temporary employment, and many people work from home, the focus of our lives has shifted back to our neighbourhoods. It is here that we should build the new centres of resistance and revival.

Starmer has so far shown little interest in reigniting the movements that almost propelled Labour to power in 2017. But even if Labour wins an election, without a strong grassroots mobilisation it will struggle to change our sclerotised political system. Any radical political project requires a political community, and this needs to be built across years, not months.

The popular desire to take back control is genuine. But it has been cynically co-opted by the government, which has instead passed power from elected bodies to economic elites. The principal task of those who challenge oligarchic politics in any nation is to offer genuine control to the people, relinquishing centralised power and rewilding politics. Yes, the state should stand back. It should stand back for the people, not for the money.

The Tracks of Our Tiers

Martin Rowson's take on the Dido Harding led fiasco of the NHS Test and Trace £12 billion failure, except it's NOT the NHS, it's a fake, a front for big outsourcing firms like Serco and Deloitte, run by the chums of Boris et al. 

Human kindness is overflowing . . .

'Blown away' 

So, the heading for this story goes, on page 5 of the print edition of the Guardian, Saturday 24 October 2020, above the headline: 

Campaign flooded with offers of help from public 

Alexandra Topping and Patrick Butler cover this story for the Guardian published on the Guardian webpages (Fri 23 Oct 2020) in the thread link to Food Poverty. They write:

Marcus Rashford may have seen his attempt to get the government to provide meals for the poorest children defeated in the Commons this week, but the footballer has harnessed a far greater force than parliament in his battle to defeat food poverty – the kindness of strangers.

As news spread that a Labour motion to provide 1.4 million disadvantaged children in England with £15 a week in food vouchers during holidays until Easter 2021 was voted down by the government on Wednesday night, dozens of hard-hit restaurants, bars and cafes contacted Rashford with offers of help.

The Manchester United and England striker’s campaign to end child food poverty calls for an extension of free school meals to 1.4 million more UK children, an increase in the value of Healthy Start fresh fruit and vegetable vouchers for pregnant women on low incomes, and an expansion of charity-led holiday hunger schemes.

By 10.30pm on Thursday, Rashford stated his intention: “Blown away by news of local businesses stepping up to fill the voucher scheme deficit during the October half term. Selflessness, kindness, togetherness, this is the England I know,” he tweeted. “Add #ENDCHILDFOODPOVERTY to your tweets so I can track them. I will share as many as I can.”

He then began a steady stream of posts, mostly screengrabs from local sites on Facebook, marked simply with where the help could be found. The offers came from everywhere, including Wigan and Watford, St Helens and Middlesbrough, Hull, Falmouth, Liverpool and Lincoln.

Posting his last tweet just before midnight, the footballer started up again at 7.49am. As one observer put it: “Marcus Rashford appears to have set up an alternative government.”

The owners of El Bar de Tapas in Stevenage wrote that the government’s decision not to fund meals was “truly heartbreaking”, adding: “We can do nothing to change that decision, so instead we need to help! We work in an industry that is being decimated by this virus, but cannot use that as an excuse.” Customers applauded the move, offering to donate to costs. “What an amazing thing to offer,” wrote local Rohan Gordon. “Community spirit is alive.”

Even companies with no background in hospitality pledged support, Summer House Interiors in Shrewsbury wrote, offering to make a lunch bag for children in receipt of free school meals, adding: “We’re not sure how successful this will be or how busy it may get so please bear with us – we’re just trying to do our bit for our community.”

The owner of Berry’s tea room in Cumbria offered packed lunches, saying as a single parent of three, they understood what it was like to need help: “You can private message me in confidence and just pop in and collect it. Please don’t feel ashamed.”

Marcus Rashford at FareShare, Greater Manchester, with his mother Melanie Rashford. The charity network is naming a new warehouse in her honour. 

In north Liverpool, The Panda Cab offered free lifts to any family needing to get to a food bank, Manjaros in Middlesbrough promised to discreetly drop off food packages, while the Rhubarb Shed cafe in Sheffield offered sandwiches, cupcakes and hot chocolate after seeing another company in Rotherham do the same. “Although this token may be small, we hope it brings a smile to some children’s faces during this dark time,” wrote the owners.

The tidal wave of kindness continued in Leeds, where Muntaz offered free chicken or vegetable biryanis to children between the ages of four and 16, writing: “This is NOT about politics. This is about doing our part to help [...] Good only begets good. We have to help each other during these very difficult times.”

Councils including Redbridge and Southwark also said they would step into the breach. The Redbridge councillor Khayer Chowdhury wrote: “If the government will not feed hungry children, this London borough will.”

Responding to the tweets, which continued on Friday, the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, tweeted: “If you need reminding that our country is far better and more generous than this government, have a look at @MarcusRashford’s Twitter feed this morning. #ENDCHILDFOODPOVERTY”

So, for me, I'll take that all day long as long as we start to see improvements going forward for the people that are in need of it. Now, (that's) what's important to me . . .

. . . so I don't mind the criticism

The shameful and low level of criticism meted out to Marcus Rashford and those supporting his campaign has created a public backlash that seems to have surprised some of those Conservative MP's who have supported the government's defeat of the Labour motion in parliament last week. But  these responses expose their woeful ignorance of what life is like for families struggling to survive on low paid jobs or so-called "benefits". 

Conservative MP for Mansfield, Ben Bradley, linked vouchers given to low-income families to ‘crack dens’ and ‘brothels’.  Amy Walker reporting for the Guardian (Sat 24 Oct 2020) writes:

Pressure is mounting on Ben Bradley to apologise for a Twitter tirade in which the Conservative MP was accused of linking free school meals with “crack dens” and “brothels”.

Bradley, who this week voted against extending free school meals for deprived children during the holidays until Easter 2021, said the since-deleted post had been taken out of context.

In it, he wrote: “At one school in Mansfield 75% of kids have a social worker, 25% of parents are illiterate. Their estate is the centre of the area’s crime.

“One kid lives in a crack den, another in a brothel. These are the kids that most need our help, extending FSM doesn’t reach these kids.”

Bradley then replied to a tweet in which another user said “£20 cash direct to a crack den and brothel really sounds like way forward with this one”, writing: “That’s what FSM vouchers in the summer effectively did …”

The local response in Mansfield: 

Organisers at food banks and child poverty groups dealing with surges in demand say MP is;

'misinformed'

Amy Walker reports further on the local situation in Mansfield (Sat 24 Oct 2020): 

Labour MPs have called on Bradley, who later said the tweet had been “totally taken out of context”, to apologise.

At Sherwood Forest Foodbank, in Mansfield Woodhouse, demand for food parcels is “up to double” what it had been before the national lockdown in March, according to its client coordinator Jo Hays. She worries that when the government’s furlough scheme ends on 1 November, it could triple.

“We see people on the frontline who are coming to us and they’re not from a crack den or any of that. The majority of people we see is as a result of the government lockdown,” she said.

Hays, who said the pressure the food bank was under was “the worst we’ve seen” with families making up most new claimants, criticised Bradley’s stance as “misinformed”.

“It’s: ‘if you want to do better you’ve got to look after yourself’, but there’s no jobs and people are losing the ones they had,” she said. The MP’s apparent “vilifying of people in Mansfield on benefits” was “disgusting”.

On Wednesday, a satellite branch of the food bank will open at St Peter and St Paul’s church in Mansfield. The Sherwood Forest branch will have to stock both sites at a time when supplies are diminishing as the general public begins to feel the financial impact of the coronavirus crisis.

“We have got money in the bank, but that’s not going to last long if we don’t get any donations. The stock we’ve got would last about a month and a half or two months,” said Hays.

On Friday, Bradley invited Manchester United striker Marcus Rashford, who has spearheaded the campaign for the extension of free schools meals during holidays, to visit a school in the Nottinghamshire district to discuss “why FSM is not the right approach”.

But Clare Harding, headteacher at Asquith Primary School in Mansfield, pointed out that it was “ironic” that the MP had not shown up to a meeting with pupils from the school in Westminster in March, when her school was presented with a Kellogg’s award for its funded breakfast club.

While she agreed that a “long-term solution” needed to be found to address the root cases of poverty, she said “that won’t help the children who need feeding now”. She added: “I have had children steal food out of lunchboxes because they are hungry.”

During the national lockdown, the school ran a food bank for up to 25 families a week, and Harding said that this school year it had bought more school uniforms for deprived children than in previous years while the numbers of children receiving free school meals was rising.

Amanda Fisher, 50, who helps to run School’s Out for Summer Mansfield, which works with schools in the area to provide food vouchers to families with donations from the public, said demand there had doubled in the past four months.

The community organisation was providing for 200 children who had been flagged by their school for extra support in July, but the number has risen to 400. “Over Christmas we could be looking at 600-plus,” Fisher said.

She said delays to universal credit claims, job losses and zero-hours contracts were fuelling the demand.

“We’ve worked so hard as a group to not make these people feel ashamed that they have to come to us,” she said. “But [Bradley] has basically said these families that have got children on free school meals are not worthy.”

Fisher, who has been on benefits and has claimed free school meals for her own children in the past, said that when she first saw her MP’s Twitter tirade she had thought it was spam.

“I just cannot believe the actual mindset of this chap. He’s almost demonising children because of the circumstances that they might be in,” she said. “I’m absolutely appalled that he is my MP. He’s not a Mansfield lad, so that says it all.

“He’s been quite well-off through his childhood. He can’t even begin to imagine what these families are going through, I can, because I’ve been there.”

Among the schools the organisation is working with is St Edmund’s C of E primary school in Mansfield Woodhouse. The school also clashed with Bradley on Friday.

In a Facebook post, the school stated that his comments amounted to a “stigmatisation of working-class families” and that staff “know the truth about families who qualify for free school meals and it is nothing like what he suggests”.

In a response from his personal Facebook account, Bradley asked the school to “remove” the “partisan nonsense”, arguing that his comments had been taken out of context.

A spectacle of the arrogant defending the ignorant ensued . . . 

Attempts to defend the Mansfield MP Ben Bradley by his parliamentary colleague Mark Jenkinson suffered a similar backlash, after fanning the flames with his provocative assertion that in his constituency "food parcels are sold or traded for drugs" and accusing people of attempting to "score political points". The Tories are no match for the footballer Marcus Rashford with "own goals" like this. But self inflicted political penalties continued, with Philip Davies, Conservative MP for Shipley, telling a teenage constituent: "I appreciate that virtue signalling is in vogue, but I am afraid I take the rather old fashioned view that parents should be responsible for feeding their children rather than the state." A nasty side of the Conservative party was further exposed when Selaine Saxby, Conservative MP for North Devon used a post in a North Devon News Facebook group to say: "I am delighted local businesses have bounced back so much after lockdown they are able to give away food for free, and very much hope they will not be seeking any further government support." Really? How small and nasty can you get, wonders Re:LODE Radio? Her comments triggered calls for an apology and her resignation. Saxby subsequently issued a statement saying that she regretted any offence she had caused. 

The backlash following these crass, ignorant and insensitive comments by these Tory politicians was, predictably, extremely fierce. In contrast to these arrogant, thoughtless, ignorant and insensitive pronouncements, on the Saturday night of the 24th October Marcus Rashford tweeted: "A number of MP's and their families have received unacceptable abuse over the last couple of days. Believe me, as a Premier League player, I know all too well what that feels like, and it's unnecessary. We are all bigger than that?" Calling for "collaboration" and "togetherness", he added: 

"Disappointment is a natural reaction, but we must rise above it." 

The following day the Sunday Observer opined in its Observer editorial that:

It is indicative of this government’s attitude to poverty that even the education secretary and the children’s minister approve of sending them into further hardship

It speaks volumes of the government that it has taken a 22-year-old footballer to step into the vacuum to provide moral and compassionate leadership during a pandemic. Perhaps Boris Johnson thought that giving Marcus Rashford an MBE for his campaign for holiday food vouchers for poor children would muffle his voice. But Rashford has continued to speak truth to power in a way that puts the government to shame. Johnson last week instructed Conservative MPs to vote against a motion to uphold Rashford’s continued calls to extend holiday food vouchers for poor children. Just one Conservative minister, Caroline Ansell, thought this was a resigning matter. The rest of the sorry pack, including education secretary, Gavin Williamson and children’s minister, Vicky Ford, dutifully trooped through the lobby.

That vote to deny children who get free meals during the school term food vouchers in the school holidays was bad enough. Even worse are the arguments MPs wheeled out to justify their decision. Brendan Clarke-Smith said giving food to hungry children was akin to “nationalising children”. Ben Bradley implied these vouchers were spent in crack dens and brothels over the summer. Mark Jenkinson argued that food parcels were being traded for drugs in his constituency. (Neither offered a shred of evidence for these ridiculous suppositions.) Selaine Saxby hoped those businesses in her constituency stepping in to provide free meals would not be seeking further government support. Philip Davies lambasted a 16-year-old constituent who wrote to him about the issue for being “intolerant”.

Senior ministers know better than to openly voice these sentiments. But these views are far from fringe: they offer an ugly glimpse into a persistent strand of Tory thinking about poverty. Too many who have lived privileged lives on the Conservative benches believe their successes are down purely to their hard work, not the advantages that were handed to them on a silver platter. The corollary of this fantastical belief is that people who live in poverty, who cannot get a job that pays enough to support their family, are somehow morally deficient.

This is nonsensical dogma. Poverty is less the product of individual life choices but overwhelmingly the inevitable result of the deficient economic and social orders that shape all of our lives. It is generated by low pay, unemployment and poor mental health. Minimum-wage jobs do not pay enough for parents to provide for their children without state support; little wonder that seven in 10 children in poverty come from working families. Just as bad is the poverty that sets in when large numbers of jobs vanish from an area and a lack of support to retrain consigns many to the scrapheap, making it hard for their children and grandchildren to escape the shackles of multigenerational joblessness.

But it does not suit small-state Conservatives to acknowledge this. Even as they stigmatise people for relying on state handouts, they refuse to ensure cleaners and carers are paid enough to support their families. The Conservative MP Kit Malthouse justified voting against last week’s motion because a better way to help children in poverty was to “pump money into the welfare system”. We wholly agree, but this was an odd sentiment from someone whose party has spent the last decade eroding tax credits and benefits – many families lost the equivalent of thousands of pounds of support a year – in a way that has contributed to rising levels of child poverty. Conservative chancellors may have told us it was a necessary economy, but the tax cuts they handed more affluent families and businesses that cost billions of pounds a year suggested otherwise. If unemployment soars, as expected, in the coming months, things will get worse. The £20 a week boost to universal credit is set to be rescinded next April, dropping unemployment benefits to their lowest real-term levels since the 1990s.

Meanwhile, the government has failed to mitigate the educational and mental health impacts of the pandemic on children. And, rather than address the root causes of the under-attainment of poor children at school over the last decade, Conservative ministers have flirted with the notion that it is somehow the widespread teaching of critical race theory in schools that is disadvantaging white, working-class children. Alongside asylum seekers and the legal profession, children now appear to be fair game in the culture-war politics of Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings: whether it is to take potshots at those campaigning against structural racism or to make Victorian-era aspersions about the feckless poor.

They have made a massive misjudgment. The dogwhistle politics of Vote Leave cannot carry the country through a pandemic and the overwhelming response to Rashford’s call – the hard-pressed businesses, councils and individuals who have come forward to reduce the number of children going hungry – shows they have misjudged a nation. It is a heartwarming antidote to the callousness of ministers.

But what do we teach our offspring when, though we can afford to, we choose not to ensure that all children have somewhere safe and warm to live, that they don’t go to bed hungry, that they have a pair of shoes without holes? We teach them that to be poor is to be shameful, that there is nothing wrong with a world where despite working all the hours under the sun you will never escape the fear and anxiety of what would happen if your fridge breaks or your landlord serves notice. We teach them that what should be theirs by right is theirs only through charity and benevolence.

Victorian-era values need sweeping away! They are unaffordable! 

But "even Victorians felt sympathy for hungry children" says Angelique Richardson. And she asks:

Why doesn't this government?

Angelique Richardson, professor of English at Exeter University, writes this opinion piece for the Guardian (Tue 27 Oct 2020) setting out how novelists from Gaskell to Hardy helped change thinking about childhood poverty. She says: 

It’s time some MPs took a lesson from them.  

Hunger courses through Mary Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel documenting what would become known as the hungry 40s. Like Dickens with Oliver Twist, 10 years earlier, she sought to move the heart of middle England. Hunger could no longer be accepted as natural or inevitable.

In Gaskell’s novel, “hunger-stamped” men from Nottingham, Sheffield, Glasgow, Manchester and other industrial cities implore parliament in vain to act on the “unparalleled destitution of the manufacturing districts”. John Barton, a chartist and trade unionist who is one of the delegates, knows hunger. As a young child, he and his mother (who dies “from absolute want of the necessaries of life”) had hidden their hunger so his younger siblings could eat. His “little son, the apple of his eye” dies of starvation.

Ben Bradley, MP for Mansfield, self-describes on his Twitter profile as “the first blue brick in the red wall”. He has been embroiled in a storm for tweeting that in one school in his constituency in which “75% of kids have a social worker” one “lives in a crack den, another in a brothel”. The school, he notes, is “at the centre of the area’s crime”, a rhetorical move that is an affront to Marcus Rashford’s plea that we “stop stigmatising, judging and pointing fingers”. “These are the kids that most need our help, extending FSM doesn’t reach these kids,” Bradley concludes, by way of explaining why he was one of 321 Conservative MPs to vote against feeding the nation’s poorest children.

Epitomising the government’s laissez-faire approach, Tory MP Brendan Clarke-Smith, who has denied a need for foodbanks, told the Commons: “We need to get back to the idea of taking responsibility.” Where is the awareness of the relation between poverty and economic conditions that parliament’s website on Poor Law reform claims has been in evidence since the 1880s?

Bradley’s remarks don’t really add up. If an individual or community needs more intense support, as he suggests, it is unclear why their children shouldn’t receive food during school holidays. But there is also a harsh logic to his comments that is to be found across this government. Bradley’s controversial beliefs were last in public view when a 2012 blogpost surfaced in which he recommended state-subsidised vasectomies for unemployed people (for which he has since apologised).

Bradley was blogging in support of capping child benefit at two children, leaving any younger siblings to go hungry. This passed into law in 2017. His views show continuity both with the Malthusianism that underpins eugenics – the notion, since discredited, that there wouldn’t be enough food to go around because of the speed of expansion of the human population – and a moralism that stretches back beyond Thomas Malthus himself. Both are key to understanding the current political situation, and the vote against free school meals.

In A Dissertation on the Poor Laws (1786), medical doctor Joseph Townsend declared that hunger taught “decency and civility, obedience and subjection, to the most brutish, the most obstinate, and the most perverse”. Malthus assimilated this idea into a racialised language in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798): “The savage would slumber for ever under his tree, unless he were roused from his torpor by the cravings of hunger.” For Malthus, the Elizabethan parish poor laws, which provided outdoor relief, threatened the independence of the English poor, and the dependent labourer was “an enemy to all his fellow-labourers”. Here was the division on which capitalism depended. Poverty was also essential for the functioning of the English middle class; the same sense of fear and disgrace would regulate the sexual behaviour of women.

In 1800, the Tory prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, withdrew a bill that would have supplemented the wages of agricultural workers, based on family size and the price of bread. Radical William Cobbett declared in an open letter to Malthus in 1819 that the “laws of nature” he talked of having “doomed the labourer and his family to starve” were in fact “sitting at Westminster”. The 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act was ultimately the work of entrenched landed interests, pushed through by Tory commissioners. Cobbett pointed out in the Commons that Malthus had said to the poor “at nature’s board there is no seat for you”. But the bill passed into law, routinely referred to in the Times as the Starvation Act.

Charles Darwin urged in the Descent of Man against the intentional neglect of the vulnerable, which he saw would lead to the loss of “the noblest part of our nature”. He called his readers back to the golden rule, “‘As ye would that men should do to you, do ye to them likewise;’ and this lies at the foundation of morality.”

At the century’s end, Thomas Hardy denounced eugenic and Malthusian rhetoric, most dramatically in Jude the Obscure, through the deaths of the three children, “done because we are too menny”. As a young boy, Jude apprehends that the world is less one of scarcity than of the mismanagement of resources. Employed as a scarecrow but united by “a magical thread of fellow-feeling” to the birds he is paid to scare, he tells them: “You shall have some dinner you shall! There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford to let you have some.”

It was Victorian writers and radicals who drew the public’s hearts and minds to the hunger that comes from misgovernment. 

In the last week, more than 200 children’s authors and more than 2,000 paediatricians have signed open letters in support of a campaign led by a Black British footballer and humanitarian who went hungry as a child. 

Local businesses and councils (mainly Labour) are doing all they can. Even hyper-capitalist McDonald’s is chipping in. What we need next is a responsible government.

Today, Marcus Rashford's petition to end child food poverty had been signed by over one million people. 

Sally Weale and Patrick Butler report for the Guardian (Wed 28 Oct 2020):

Marcus Rashford’s petition to end child food poverty has topped a million signatures as thousands of cafes, restaurants and local businesses stepped in to support struggling families without access to free school meals over the half-term holiday.

It is one of only five parliamentary petitions to attract a million signatures, and the first since the last general election, galvanised by the 22-year-old Manchester United footballer’s campaigning skills and deft use of social media to gather support.

Hundreds of thousands of people signed up in protest after MPs last week voted down a Labour motion to extend free school meals until Easter 2021 in order to stop children going hungry.

Labour has since piled on the pressure, calling for transparency over the chancellor’s role, amid reports of a row between the Treasury and the Department for Education. “It’s unbelievable that this government would refuse to provide food to the country’s poorest children at the height of the pandemic”, said the shadow chancellor, Anneliese Dodds.

“And now ministers are engaged in a desperate blame game rather than admitting they got this wrong and putting it right.”

The chancellor’s spending review has been set for 25 November and Downing Street said Rishi Sunak could announce extra support to feed families through the school holidays, though many in government remain opposed to food vouchers.

Rashford’s petition calls on the government to expand access to free school meals, provide meals and activities during holidays to prevent hunger and expand the healthy start scheme to provide more support to young mothers on benefits.

As the million milestone passed, the Manchester United and England striker used his Twitter account to highlight the efforts of great-great-grandmother Flo Osborne, 89, who has baked hundreds of pies to feed hungry children over half-term.

More than 2,000 cafes, restaurants and other businesses in England have so far joined Rashford’s call to support struggling families during half term, according to All Of Us Together, a team of tech and campaign volunteers who have set up an interactive map to register participating organisations.

Alison Killing, from the All Of Us Together team, said they were asking participating businesses to report back on how many meals they give out during the week to build up a map of demand and help local councils support families.

“We want to make sure we capture the places offering help, and make sure that the families who are struggling see where they can get help locally – sharing the map in your local facebook groups and in your communities will go a long way to making that happen.”

Human kindness is overflowing . . . 

The title of this post quotes a line from the lyric of I Think It's Going to Rain Today, written by singer, songwriter, and composer of film scores, Randy Newman. Newman told Rolling Stone magazine that he wrote the song around 1963 or 1964. He went on to say that the "music is emotional – even beautiful – and the lyrics are not." This is a song for dark times, and the lyric is performed by Randy Newman in a way that gently allows the lyric to carry a level of irony that colours the phrase "human kindness is overflowing". This post takes on this potential double meaning of the phrase, firstly, that when things are bad, human kindness is supplanted by those "frozen smiles that chase love away". But, secondly, in that very same void, we often see that human kindness is, indeed, overflowing.

Randy Newman is recorded performing the song in this video montage of two concerts, including his induction into the 2013 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and as performed in concert at the BBC in 1971. It is a song for all seasons, appropriate to many times of challenge and difficulty.  

Human kindness is overflowing . . . 

. . . and I think it's going to rain today

Broken windows and empty hallways, A pale dead moon in a sky streaked with grey. Human kindness is overflowing, And I think it's going to rain today.

Scarecrows dressed in the latest styles, With frozen smiles to chase love away. Human kindness is overflowing, And I think it's going to rain today.

Lonely, lonely. Tin can at my feet, think I'll kick it down the street. That's the way to treat a friend.

Bright before me the signs implore me: Help the needy and show them the way. Human kindness is overflowing, And I think it's going to rain today.

Child poverty in India and the United Kingdom

This story, published in today's Guardian print edition, Wednesday 28 October 2020, and tucked away on page 15 in the National News section, offers a twist on the pattern of exchanges along the LODE Zone Line, between Britain, the old colonial power, and a modern India.

Robert Booth Social affairs correspondent for the Guardian reports (Tue 27 Oct 2020): 

A charity that feeds millions of poor children in India has joined the drive to end holiday hunger in England and distributed its first meals from a new kitchen in Watford.

Hot vegetarian dishes cooked for less than £2 each using a model developed to feed the hungry in cities such as Mumbai and Ahmedabad were dispatched to a school in north London on Tuesday amid growing pressure on the government to reverse its decision not to fund free school meals this half-term.

Trays of hot cauliflower cheese and mixed vegetable pasta cooked by chefs working for the Akshaya Patra charity, which produces 1.8m meals for schools daily in India, were collected by Kate Bass, the headteacher of Mora primary school in Cricklewood, from a purpose-built kitchen designed to cook 9,000 meals a day.

“Desperate measures for desperate times,” she said as she loaded her car boot with cartons of food. “Even families that were managing before aren’t managing now.”

The charity is planning to set up similar kitchens in Leicester and east London and expects to keep delivering free meals to schools in the Christmas holidays.

“It might seem strange to some that this model is imported from India,” said Bhawani Singh Shekhawat, the chief executive of Akshaya Patra. “But we are bringing a tested model from a country that has dealt with this problem with speed and at scale.”

The charity also aims to sell meals to schools for less than £2 a portion – with half paid by the state and half by its donors.

Recipients at Mora primary included Atika El Mir, a mother of two, who said money was tight because her husband has had less work because of Covid. “Everything is hard times now,” she said. “This is a good idea. It is so kind.”

“It’s difficult to feed the kids at the moment,” added Dennis Perez, a design technician picking up the hot food on a scooter with his three young children. “I work full-time, but after rent and bills … The council can’t give me anything because I work more than 16 hours. That’s why I grabbed this opportunity.”

Campaigners said the expansion of an operation developed to end child food poverty in India in the UK was a sign of how serious the problem had become.

“One can scarcely believe the new methods communities are having to deploy to protect children from hunger and this is another example,” said Andrew Forsey, the national director of Feeding Britain, which is lobbying the government for a permanent increase in universal credit payments and to establish universal holiday activities and a food programme.

Lyla Rees, an eight-year-old pupil, came to the handout with her mother, a school governor. “I wouldn’t want my friends to go hungry over half-term,” she said.

The Akshaya Patra kitchen uses steam cookery to keep levels of fat low. The project’s backers have watched with concern at the contents of some of the lunches being put together by volunteers this week, featuring crisps and sugary drinks.

“It solves the hunger problem, but not the nutritional problem,” said Shekhawat. “It creates problems like juvenile diabetes and coronaries.”

Sonal Sachdev Patel, the chief executive of the GMSP Foundation, the donor which funded the £500,000 kitchen, said: “The way this country has responded is utterly amazing, but [many small operations] isn’t the solution.

“Hunger in the UK has been a problem for much longer than this. The solution is to bring in the technology and innovation that India is already using. They have a nutrition problem, we have a nutrition problem, but they are doing this already.”

The world's biggest kitchen . . .

Along the LODE Zone Line in Puri, India, where one of the cargoes was made for the LODE project in 1992, the largest kitchen in the world can be found in the Shree Jagannath Temple. With 250 ovens, 150 cooks and more than 100 dishes a time, the Jagannath temple in Puri has the world’s largest kitchen that can feed more than one lakh people at a time. One lakh (a unit in the Indian numbering system) is equal to 100,000.

The temple earns more than 10 lakh rupees everyday from the Maha-Prasad made in the kitchen.

"It is said to be the biggest kitchen in the world and it is believed that Lord Vishnu takes his food here,” says chief administrator of the temple, Suresh Mahapatra.

In keeping with this demand, nearly 250 households in the nearby Kumharpada village are engaged in making the earthen utensils used here. The kitchen needs more than 10,000 of them everyday.

"This is what we have been doing from our fore fathers. Although we do not earn much from this we feel proud that our labour has been rendered to the service of the Lord,” says a devotee, Gopinath Patihari.

The temple has still not found any place in record books for the simple reason that they do not want anyone to enter into the kitchen for record sake and break the sanctity of the place, according to the temple administration.

However, the Jagannath temple is clearly one of the largest temples in the world.

Q. Where can you see three deities processor three so-called Juggernauts and the largest kitchen in the world?

A. The Shree Jagannath Temple in Puri!

The techniques of the Temple kitchen provide a practical model for the feeding of tens of thousands of people every day.

Q. Why does the UK need charities to feed hungry children?

The Feeding Britain charity on its page:

What We Do

has a list of numbered points under the heading: We make change at three levels, and No 3  says:

3. Gaining systemic change

We know that however hard local projects work to support people in crisis, many of the root causes of hunger need to be addressed through national policy reform and legislation. We take the lessons and evidence from our regional partners about what is causing hunger in their communities, and use this knowledge to seek systemic changes that will alleviate, and ultimately eliminate, hunger from our country. We work closely with a cross-party group of MPs and Peers, as well as ministers and officials, to make sure decision makers are aware of the real situation for people at risk of hunger today, and what can be done to bolster their incomes and living standards.  

This would imply that the answer to the question immediately above is that there are systemic causes of poverty and hunger in the UK!

The system that must not be named?  

Global capitalism?

Q. Why does India need charities to feed hungry children?

A. Neoliberalism? 

The God My Silent Partner GMSP Foundation has a section on Our Approach where there is an articulation of a:

Theory of Change 

GMSP sets out the Theory of Change thus: 

AIM

To fundamentally improve the rights and lives of vulnerable communities 

WHAT DO WE BELIEVE?

• All human beings should be treated equally 
• Individuals have the right to choose their own path 
• Collaboration: we can’t solve problems on our own 
• We have a responsibility to support humankind 
• Respecting one another is a key element of creating a peaceful world
• Grassroots organisations are drivers of change 

HOW CAN WE ACHIEVE THIS?

• Promoting rights-based education 
• Advancing economic participation and agency 
• Enhancing rights and access to justice 
• Improving health

WHAT DO WE KNOW?

• Women and girls transform communities 
• Boys are part of the solution 
• Ending violence requires a holistic approach 
• Investing in strong NGO leaders creates change 
• Women’s economic empowerment is critical to a woman’s value ​​
• Grassroots organisations embedded in their communities can create effective solutions

WHAT WE'RE DOING

• We support innovative solutions driven by communities themselves 
• We invest with money, time, skills, networks 
• We invest in strong leaders who listen to their communities and have a track record of success 

WHAT HAS CHANGED AS A RESULT OF OUR ACTIVITIES?

• Increased income, agency and access to finance 
• Reduction in prevalence of gender-based violence 
• Perception change

This quote by Arundhati Roy is to be found on the GMSP homepage and is a powerfully affirmative message in dark and difficult times.

For the LODE project, naming "Capitalism" and "Neoliberalism began on 26 February 1992 in Puri, India, home of the world's largest kitchen, with the purchase of THE TIMES OF INDIA newspaper. 

Twenty five years later, for the Re:LODE Cargo of Questions, an article quoted in the LODE Leaflet from 1992 was republished on the Puri Information Wrap. It represents a significant moment in the capitalist free market neoliberal globalisation process. It is well worth quoting here, and is further contextualised by an article published twenty years later to illustrate the impact of global capitalism in the twenty-first century:

As we dwell on contemporary changes in the generation of wealth and its distribution, a number of distinctive feature of our times immediately spring to view. At the outset, it is clear that socialist polities everywhere have undergone a traumatic experience, comparable to what capitalist polities experienced in the 1930's. Next, it is equally clear that the indifference of radical thinkers to liberal values and institutions has played an important role in weakening the political structure of socialist societies in the very recent past. Last, but not least, the current trauma of the socialist world calls for a fundamental rethinking of socialist theory and practice if the enduring concerns of socialism are to remain on the agenda. It would be monumental folly to imagine that the trauma of world socialism has no special meaning for an India engaged in a serious examination of the principles and practice which shape its political economy. But if we are to avoid a panic reaction, it is necessary to do three things. First, to locate the principles that have guided our economy since the 1950's. Secondly, to take stock of our successes and failure of our great experiment in social transformation and economic growth. And lastly, instead of blindly accepting economic prescriptions flowing out of international financial agencies, we should work out a strategy of economic management which rests upon the specificity of our social condition. 

The social experimentation that was initiated in India in the 1950's rested precisely upon such an exercise. It was clear to all concerned that the mechanism of the market had led humanity to the Great Depression of the 1930's, not to mention the frightfulness of fascism. Indeed even a cursory look at our economy and society makes it obvious that the manner in which the "market" is currently held out as a panacea is a matter of deep concern. To start with, the market is not uniformly successful even if in an advanced capitalist world. If we turn to developing countries, the situation is much more alarming.

Most developing countries have discovered that blind recourse to marketisation, while it may benefit some, leads a society as a whole to disaster. The few successful Third World countries - characterised by their modest size, and also the absence of a vast agricultural hinterland - have to be examined with reference to the "special" relations which the advanced capitalist world sought to establish with them, not necessarily for economic reasons. Moreover the state was anything but "neutral" in such polities.

It has been pointed out that there exists considerable confusion among economists between the notion of the market, on the one hand, and the climate of "competitiveness" on the other. The market is often a monster, promoting inequitable growth and distribution and generating class warfare in societies. The ethos of competitiveness pertains to an altogether different world; to efficiency; to innovative technology; and to the crucial concept of sustainable growth. Moreover, unlike the market, competitiveness does not necessarily conjure into existence vulgar consumerism which corrodes the integrity of individuals at the same time as it undermines the moral voice of the community. For all these reasons, we need to examine closely the political economy of liberalisation, if we are to negotiate our way into the next century as a humane, productive and equitable society.

THE TIMES OF INDIA 26 February 1992 

This article was juxtaposed in the Puri Information Wrap article Twenty years later! The dirty picture of neoliberalism: India’s New Economic Policy, a critique of 2012 by Raju J. Das in the Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal.

The full text of Raju J. Das theses can be found on this Re:LODE Cargo of Questions page, as well as the LINKS site. 

Raju J. Das introduces this critique of India's New Economic Policy highlighting the matter and question of CLASS. He writes:

The Bollywood movie The Dirty Picture (apparently) runs on three things:

entertainment . . .

. . . entertainment and entertainment.

The dirty picture of neoliberalism runs on three things, as well: 

class, class, and class.

Indeed, neoliberalism must be seen as the restoration and reinforcement of class power (Harvey 2005), class power of large owners of business over the working masses.

This article makes a series of observations on the multiple aspects of neoliberalism in India as a class project. What is problematic about the “New Economic Policy” (NEP) is not this or that aspect of it (e.g. the idea that it causes an increase in the number of people below the official poverty line). The whole policy is the problem. So it requires a dialectical totalising critique, one that places its limited benefits in relation to its enormous costs, seen from multiple vantage points.

India’s NEP is more than a governmental policy. It is a program of the bourgeoisie tourt court, with devastating impacts on the toiling masses. Neoliberalism in rural areas – agrarian neoliberalism -- is particularly ruthless in its impacts. Neoliberalism is also a spatial project: it is implemented through transformation of space relations, and it produces enormous spatial unevenness. Neoliberalism in India, like in the periphery as such, is also a part of the imperialist project, implemented via burgeoning “new compradore” elements both in the business world and outside. Given the adverse impacts of neoliberalism, it has resulted in massive resistance from below which has been countered by the state via a combination of palliatives and repression. Interestingly, in spite of some opposition it has offered, the left has been, overall, a conduit through which NEP has been delivered. Neoliberalism has, however, opened up interesting possibilities by renewing the classical political questions: national-democratic question and the agrarian question as well the question of socialism itself. What follows is presented in the form of a few theses.

Re:LODE Radio chooses to select some excerpts from these theses to in some way answer the question as to why India needs charities to feed the hungry. Raju J. Das' first "thesis" is headed by the question:

What is NEP and what it is not?

The NEP is not merely economic. This is because it must ensure political and ideological conditions for capital accumulation. The political refers to state repression and judicial coercion (including suppressing democratic rights, discussed later). The ideological refers to the promotion of market fetishism in all spheres of everyday life, including in our consciousness. Associated with market fetishism is the idea of getting rich quickly by any means and of the market as the dominant method of helping the poor (hence the popularity of such things as self-help groups and microcredit in the development discourse).

The second of these theses is quoted here in full, and is headed:

Winners and losers

The NEP has led to a small minority of winners and a very large majority of losers. Not only in terms of its underlying driving forces, but also in terms of necessary consequences, the NEP is a class project in that it produces an enormous amount of class inequality. The NEP has vastly benefited the capitalist class, including its financial elements, producing close to 70 dollar billionaires in the country. It has placed a colossal amount of wealth in the hands of a few, the wealth produced by the sweat of the propertyless masses. A part of this wealth has been hidden away in overseas banks and another part is publicly displayed via pretentious lifestyles.[iv] The NEP has certainly brought some foreign technology and cheaper intermediate goods in some cases. It has also benefitted some educated people – including tech-coolies -- employed in IT and related industries, providing cheap labour to global capitalism. The economic success of this stratum is mobilised as an ideological prop for the NEP. A wide variety of consumer items is now available for those with money (approximately 200 million in the country of 1200 million).

On the other hand, the NEP has heaped unspeakable miseries on the bottom 800-1000 million), the proletarians and semi-proletarians and vast numbers of small-scale business/landowners. It has produced a massive amount of economic inequality, insecurity, unemployment and under-employment, casualisation, informalisation, heightened level of labour exploitation and lax or non-implementation of protective factory acts. It has produced what Utsa Patnaik calls “a republic of hunger” and what Jean Dreze calls “a nutritional emergency”. It has produced a graveyard of people who are committing suicide because they cannot pay their bills, and this is happening not just in villages but also in erstwhile booming cities such as Tirupur.

In poor countries such as India, a specific form of neoliberalism is agrarian neoliberalism. Agrarian neoliberalism represents an internally contradictory logic: enhancing the value of rural areas as an arena for big business activities; and reducing state investment in rural areas, whether for promoting rural economic development or social welfare. Rural areas have become an arena of capitalist accumulation in newer ways: buying peasants’ land at dirt cheap prices; contract farming; cultivation of capital-intensive high-value farm products such as flowers and shrimps in a country where millions even do not have access to rice or wheat or a glass of safe water to drink; agribusiness sale of seeds, etc. to peasants; and patenting of indigenous knowledge of peasants. In terms of the state neglect of rural areas, rural development expenditure as a percentage of the net national product has been decreasing.[v] Government subsidies for fertilisers, electricity and other farm inputs and investment in irrigation have been slashed. Access to cheap loans to farmers has been limited. Price support to farmers has been reduced, and the Public Distribution System has been drastically curtailed.

Peasants are losing land to capitalist industrialisation and land speculation. Land ceiling laws are reversed because these are considered to be constraints on capital flows into farming. Peasants are being forced to leave their land because farming is not viable: costs of cultivation are going up due to shrinking government support. Highly indebted, many are driven to distress sales of their products. They are also affected by the import of subsidised foreign farm goods.

As Professor Utsa Patnaik (2007) has admirably documented, food production and availability per capita is decreasing, in part because land is converted to non-food crops both by big companies and smaller owners attracted by the prospect of making a little cash. This is a grave danger to food security. Also, in the areas where high-value farm products are produced (shrimps; flowers), an intense exploitation of labour and land happens in order to make the sector competitive in the global market. Declining investment in rural infrastructure (especially flood and irrigation control) is increasing vulnerability to drought and floods. Agrarian distress is creating a huge reserve army of labour, a part of which is forced to migrate to cities, putting pressure on wages that are already very low. This, along with shrinking government support for workers, allows capital to raise the level of exploitation. That NEP has produced increasing numbers of wealthy people on the one hand and thousands of millions of people whose basic need for food remain unsatisfied singularly speaks to neoliberalism as a class project.

On its own terms, NEP is not a big success either. It has unleashed some entrepreneurial energy. Yet, India still accounts for only 2 per cent of the global economy and less than 1 per cent of world trade. Even in the IT sector, India remains a relatively minor player dependent on the technology and markets of the West. There is little sign that in key sectors the average level of labour productivity has improved relative to that in richer countries. India remains a cheap labour platform of global capitalism.

This excerpt is taken from the thesis headed:

NEP as a spatial project

What is called infrastructure is big business indeed. The production of space has an ideological moment to it as well. By constantly asserting that the country needs a large amount of money for its infrastructure, the state justifies measures to court private capital through various cash and kind incentives and for justifying cuts in welfare expenditure.

The NEP has also resulted in an enormous amount of unevenness between regions, because neoliberal investment, whose main motive is profit making, tends to be geographically concentrated, although the patterns of unevenness are not written in stone. Just because investment happens in a few places or states, producing impressive glass buildings, gorgeous shopping malls and islands of “hi-tech” firms, this does not mean that all the places in the country can experience this: the process in which some places in the country become developed includes most other places not developing. Neoliberalism is a process of production of spatial inequalities (and spatial displacements). A most important form of this unevenness is between rural and urban areas; urban areas grow 500% times faster than rural areas. Agriculture has more or less stagnated as public expenditure has dwindled and public resources are diverted from it to infrastructure projects in the interests of big business. The geographical face of the country outside the cities and their closely connected hinterlands is dismal; this is not to deny enormous unevenness between the richer areas inside cities (e.g. gated communities) and slums. [vii]

The patterns of uneven development have interesting political dynamics, between cities and between states. With pro-business reforms, regional elites have some more power vis a vis the central government, and these regionally based elites compete with each other for external loans and domestic as well as foreign capital. Some states (and some cities) get more investment than others, thus creating a new layer of uneven economic development. When all places are equally neoliberal in courting capital, small differences in policy or other factors necessary for profitmaking become metamorphosed into large differences.

The following thesis is quoted in full and is headed:

NEP and imperialism

The NEP  is a part of the imperialist project. India’s NEP is a part of global neoliberalism, whose history is connected to working-class struggle in the West and anti-colonial struggles in the periphery. More specifically, capitalism, under the rule of financial capital, has been seeking to withdraw, since the 1970s, many of the concessions (e.g. welfare benefits) it had conceded to the working class in the advanced countries (Harvey, 2005). And global big business is no more willing to concede some autonomy to peripheral states and the national bourgeoisie of poor countries that it had tolerated in the aftermath of anti-colonial struggles. Natural resources, markets, space (including spaces to dump waste) and labouring bodies of poorer countries cannot be entirely left in the hands of the national bourgeoisie to exploit. International capital must have free access to these. The NEP, the medium of and outcome of global neoliberalism, playing itself out in India establishes direct exploitative connections between the bourgeoisie (including financial segments of it) of rich countries and India’s poor masses to a degree that did not exist earlier. An important aspect of neoliberalism is “the new determination to drain the resources of the periphery toward the center” (Dumenil and Levy, 2005: 10) via the activities of international financial capital and other segments of the international big business.

Such transfer of resources occurs via exploitation of workers and peasants of India by imperialist capital, a process that the NEP furthers. This imperialist exploitation is abetted by the imperialist countries and India’s pliant-compradore state, which is epitomised in sultans of reforms such as Dr Manmohan Singh.[viii] It is also interesting that some of the Indian states are run under budgetary guidelines formulated by the US “knowledge” firm McKinsey, the IMF and the World Bank and DFID, etc. and comprador intellectuals and advisors bought off by these institutions. In many ways, neoliberalism – privatisation, cuts in government spending, etc-- was imposed by international institutions under the name of conditionalities for loans and which have directly affected the masses. It is also interesting that exactly the same sort of measures have been undertaken in imperialist countries themselves in the interests of their top “1%”, which have impacted their own “99%”. Neoliberalism – the onslaught of capital on the toiling masses – is the thread that links the toiling masses of the world, although these masses in the poorer countries are affected a lot more than in richer countries. 

The text of the thesis is quoted in full and is headed:

NEP and class struggle

The NEP has been an arena of, and an object of, class struggle. This class struggle has been from above and from below. Given the devastating impacts of the NEP it is not surprising that there has been massive resistance against it. Millions of people have gone on strike multiple times since the 1990s. Some of the resistance has been against the venal, atrociously corrupt way in which the partnership between capital and the state has undemocratically milked public resources. Much of the resistance has been directly against privatisation, liberalisation, globalisation and reduction in state support for the poor and farmers.

Because of the struggle from below, real and potential, the state has slightly slowed the pace of “reforms” (especially, labour laws etc.), and this is so especially when a given reform will adversely affect weaker members of the bourgeoisie which cannot compete in the global market. The state has also tried to provide some palliatives as a part of the neoliberal policy to ensure that reforms are not politically derailed by the social unrest. In terms of actual support for the poor, this is too little relative to the amount of damage caused by neoliberalism (note that both the necessity for palliatives and the limits to these palliatives are caused by neoliberalism). The dominant neoliberal view is one of market idolatry: the poor should be sacrificed at the altar of the god of the market, the god of reforms, the god of growth, which has more power than the millions of gods in our holy land, and this god will benefit the poor (aam admi) in the long run. In the short run, while the poor are prostrating before the market god, they get bruised laying on the hard surface, so they need some form of band-aid. The so-called employment guarantee scheme, like the farmer loan waiver, is one such thing. Finance Minister Chidambaram, like many others (Khatkhate 2006; Bhagwati 2001), think that “growth is the best antidote to poverty”. So, “what is needed is not less, but more reforms”, says our finance minister (quoted in the Hindu, November 8, 2006). 

The bourgeoisie needs “growth” (meaning a massive increase of money in its hands in the shortest possible time). The political parties and the neoliberal state, at the central and provincial levels, will deliver this. This is the limit to how much and in what way the workers and peasants can benefit from the palliatives. The idea that there is such a thing as neoliberalism with a human face means that neoliberalism itself is inhumane.

And where numbing of consciousness through official and academic market-oriented propaganda, including by finance ministers and other spokespersons of capital, fails, where intoxication of the masses by the fetishism of seasonal festivals called elections eases (note that the majority of the masses think that reforms are pro-rich) and where official bribing in the form of limited welfare is ineffective, and where therefore the masses do rise in revolt, the state has been using repression launching class struggle from above to clear the barriers to the twin methods of accumulation: accumulation by dispossession and accumulation by exploitation (Das 2012). Dispossession of tribal peoples and years of tribal poverty exacerbated by neoliberalism have led to Maoist resistance in several hundred districts. The Maoist threat is elevated to the biggest threat to the nation and then is conveniently used as an excuse to suppress any legitimate democratically organised protest against neoliberalism. Interestingly, the politics of the fight against Maoism, which is not necessarily against capitalist accumulation as such (more below on this), is being used to remove all barriers to precisely that, i.e. capitalist accumulation.

The capitalist class has also directly engaged in struggle from above by undermining the power of workers striking against capital. Capital has done this by hiring goons to hurt striking workers, resorting to the bribing of union leaders and locking employees out. In many recent years, person days lost to lockouts are five times the number lost due to strikes. The courts also have ruled against the democratic right to strike.

Raju J. Das is critical, as in this excerpt, of the left in parliamentary politics in the thesis headed:

NEP and the left

It is undeniably true that left parties have put pressure on governments to implement certain pro-poor measures (e.g. public works) and to slow the pace of certain neoliberal measures. But overall, the left forces (unless otherwise noted, by “left”, I am henceforward referring to the parliamentary left as represented by the Communist Party of India (CPI) and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI-M) have virtually converted themselves into a conduit for the implementation of the NEP through ideological and political-administrative means.

Raju J. Das concludes his article under the heading:

Concluding comments: New Economic Policy and old social problems

Neoliberalism is about changing the balance of class power in favour of the capitalist class. This is true in rich countries. This is no less true in poor countries such as India. India’s NEP is a policy on behalf of capital, and it is therefore a policy of capital, tourt court, mediated and implemented by the state at central and provincial scales.

A dialectical view of the NEP points to the weight of its contradictions. More specifically, the NEP has brought to the fore the revolutionary-political questions anew. Consider the national question. The national question is no longer about fighting formal colonialism. It is rather about fighting new imperialism, practiced dominantly through economic mechanisms. It is the imperialism of the IMF, World Bank, multinational corporations and international “aid” agencies. This is an imperialism that is justified and sold to Indians through the discourse of development and progress. It is also sold via chauvinistic ideas about India’s “superpower status”, which is but as a regional subordinate helper of the supreme guardian of global capitalism (the United States), which, as Wood says (2003: 133), guards the subordinate guardians (subordinate states such as India) of the capitalist imperatives in different parts of the world. That a prime minister, left to choose between holding on to his top job of public service to a nation and sealing a strategic partnership with the USA, would choose the latter says a lot about the imperialist character of the “neoliberality” – the neoliberal mentality – of current state managers. The post-colonial neoliberal state itself has become a mechanism of new imperialism.

Consider the democratic question. There has been massive resistance to the NEP, as mentioned earlier, to which the state is responding in a most undemocratic manner. It is also promoting venal capitalism; massive corruption in the public offices has been endemic since the 1990s. By making all political parties/groups equal as far as their adherence to neoliberalism is concerned, the NEP has also created a situation where casteism and religious fundamentalism are made use of to divide the poor electorate and to garner votes, creating conditions for the perpetuation of undemocratic relations based on religious and caste identity.[xi] The NEP is creating new aspects of the agrarian question as well, the question of peasants’ property and their miseries caused by agribusiness. So the democratic question – including democratic governance, equal rights of citizens irrespective of caste or religious background, agrarian question -- becomes important in new ways in neoliberal times.

And the national question and the democratic question – i.e. new imperialist subordination, the state and society becoming more undemocratic, peasants losing land -- are rooted in the fact that the NEP is basically a capitalist project. The NEP represents capitalism in its most naked and ruthless form. This is where the dirty picture of the NEP is coming from. The dirty picture of neoliberalism, once again, runs on three things: 

class, class, and class.

If the above assessment is broadly correct, it indicates a very different sort of solution to the national and democratic questions as well as specific problems such as mass impoverishment the NEP is creating than what the current left is offering. The intellectual and political fight against the NEP cannot be about merely changing the dirty clothes of the state (meaning changing its policy and making it regulate affairs of capitalism more as during olden times). It cannot be about interrupting, deconstructing and destabilising things and narratives about the NEP or wider society a bit here and a bit there, although that is certainly necessary. The idea that there is such a thing as neoliberalism with a human face is basically based on the lie that basic interests of capital are fundamentally compatible with the basic interests of toiling masses of the country in a sustainable, contradiction-free manner.

Control of society’s resources by big business, unregulated growth, exploitation of labour, income inequality and ecological devastation cannot belong to the same set in which socially coordinated wealth creation, equality, solidarity, popular democracy and satisfaction of needs belong. Therefore, the intellectual and political project must have a larger goal of theoretically and practically transcending the conditions which produce the dirty picture of neoliberalism itself.

Raju J. Das is associate professor at the departments of geography and development studies, York University, Toronto, Canada. Das is on the editorial board of Science & Society and the editorial advisory board of Dialectical Anthropology.

References cited

Banerjee-Guha, S. 2009. “Neoliberalising the ‘Urban’: New Geographies of power and injustice in Indian cities”, Economic and Political Weekly, XLIV: 22.

Banerjee, S. 2008. “A Political Cul-de-sac: CPI(M)’s Tragic Denouement”, Economic and Political Weekly, October 18.

Bardhan, P. 2005. “Nature of Opposition to Economic Reforms in India”, Economic and Political Weekly, November 26, 2005.

Bhagwati, J. 2001. “Growth, poverty and reforms”, Economic and Political Weekly, March.

Datt, G. and Ravallion, M. 2010. “Shining for the poor too”, Economic and Political Weekly, XLV: 7.

Das, R. 2007. “Looking, but Not Seeing: State and/as Class in Rural India”, Journal of Peasant Studies, 34: 3-4.

Das, R. 2012. “Reconceptualizing Capitalism: Forms of Subsumption of Labor, Class Struggle, and Uneven Development”, Review of Radical Political Economics (forthcoming).

Dumenil, G. and Levy, D. 2005. ‘The Neoliberal (Counter-) Revolution’, in A. Saad-Filho and D. Johnston, eds. Neoliberalism: a critical reader, Pluto press, London.

Harvey, D. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, New York.

Khatkhate, D. 2006. ‘Indian Economic Reform A Philosopher’s Stone’, Economic and Political Weekly, June 3.

Kumar, A. 2008. “Dissonance between economic reforms and democracy’, Economic and Political Weekly, January 5.

Marx, K. 1977. Capital volume 1, Vintage, New York.

Patnaik, P. 2010. “A left approach to development’, Economic and Political Weekly, XLV: 30.

Patnaik, U. 2007. The republic of hunger, Three Essays Collective, Gurgaon.

Wood, E. 2003. The empire of capital, Leftword, Delhi.

Notes

[i] This does not mean that the way in which capitalists’ interests are reflected in the NEP can be entirely reduced to capital’s interests. When these interests are mediated by the state, autonomy of the state (including electoral compulsion in India) must be borne in mind.

[ii] See the early work of Bardhan (Political economy of development) as well as Bardhan (2005). While I agree that state resources have been used to benefit the proprietary classes, I do not endorse his analytical-Marxist sympathies for the market economy (nor his viewing of state actors as a class) (see Das, 2007).

[iii] Interestingly, the obsession with growth is such that a party can engage in sectarian violence, of religious, etc. type (e.g. the BJP in Gujurat) but can be still more or less “condoned” if it promotes economic growth through pro-business policies. Neoliberalism and communalism are not unrelated.

[iv] “The State under neoliberalism … actively promotes an increase in the share of surplus value in the hands of domestic and foreign corporates …” (Patnaik, 2010).

[v] It has dropped from 2.85%  in 1993-94 to 1.9% in 2000-2001 (Patnaik, 2007: 155).

[vi] The class bias in the space transformation – road building – can be seen by the fact that while millions of rupees are spent on high-speed roads, etc., 63% of villages with a population 1000 or less are not even connected by a road. Obviously, people in these villages do not have enough market power.

[vii] The cities have experienced neoliberalisation in specific ways. “The consequences [of neoliberalisation for cities] can be seen in the increasing focus on hyper forms and mega construction activities, increased speculation and expanded investment in land and real estate …, service sector, signature projects, mega cultural events and a reduced focus on the employment generating production process, affordable housing, and collective sharing of urban space and resources” (Banerjee-Guha, 2009: 105).

[viii] In fact, the state apparatus is increasingly occupied by pro-market ideologues and neoliberal technocrats and indeed by businesspeople themselves. This signifies the neoliberalisation and technocratisation of the state apparatus.

[ix] This left – like much of the academic left -- is informed by the spirit of civil society activism and micro-political resistance. The spectre of "post-isms" (e.g. post-Marxism) haunts this left; the spectre of proletarian socialism does not.

[x] Sumanta Banerjee writes: “It was under … [Jyoti Basu’s] leadership that the West Bengal Left Front government opened up the state’s economy to private investors from outside, and the long-awaited Haldia petrochemical complex was brought to fruition as a public private sector joint venture... Following this, in 1994 the CPI (M)-led Left Front government … adopted a new industrial policy which offered concessions to the magnates of the private sector and multinationals to set up industries in the state. …[in the process of pursuing neoliberal policies], the party ended up by robbing Peter to pay Paul – grabbing agricultural land (without paying adequate compensation to the farmers) and subsidising the investor industrialists by huge tax relief and other concessions that eat into the state exchequer”(p. 12-13).

[xi] Of course, why the masses fall for these lies – that caste and religious identities are crucial determinants of their economic miseries—is an interesting question (see Kumar 2008 for a good discussion on this).

"Neoliberalism is about changing the balance of class power in favour of the capitalist class. This is true in rich countries. This is no less true in poor countries such as India." 

Amartya Sen, Harvard professor and Nobel-prize winning economist, gave a speech earlier this month upon winning the 2020 Peace prize of the German Book Trade, at the Frankfurt Book Fair. An edited extract of the speech was published in the Guardian Journal pages in the print edition on Tuesday 27 October 2020.

In the Re:LODE Cargo of Questions Information Wrap for the Gwalior LODE cargo, Amartya Sen is referenced in the article:

Two Indias - social justice versus the pathology of ideological marketization

An accompanying article in the same Re:LODE Cargo of Questions Information Wrap looked at:

Continuing poverty in a rich country?

The headline for Amartya Sen's Opinion piece/speech in the print version of the Guardian on Tuesday 27 October 2020 ran:

India once stood for liberty. Now despotism has taken over

Nothing is as important, the philosopher Immanuel Kant claimed, as the “freedom to make public use of one’s reason on all matters”. Unfortunately, as Kant also noted, the opportunity to argue is often restrained by society – sometimes very severely. A disturbing fact about the world today is that authoritarian tendencies have been strikingly on the increase in many countries – in Asia, in Europe, in Latin America, in Africa and within the United States of America. I fear I have to include my own country, India, in that unfortunate basket.

After India secured independence from British colonial rule, it had for many decades a fine history of being a secular democracy with much personal liberty. People showed their commitment to freedom and their determination to remove authoritarian governance through decisive public action, for example in the general elections in 1977, in which the despotic regulations – dressed as “the emergency” – were firmly rejected by the people. The government obeyed promptly.

However, in recent years the priority of freedom seems to have lost some of its lustre for many people, and the current government gives striking evidence of the inclination to promote a different kind of society. There have also been strong attempts to stifle anti-government protests, which, strangely enough, have often been described by the government as “sedition”, providing grounds for arrest and for locking up opposition leaders. Aside from the despotic tendencies implicit in this approach, there is also a profound confusion of thought here, since a disagreement with the government need not be a rebellion to overthrow the state, or to subvert the nation (on which the diagnosis of “sedition” must depend).

When I was in school in British-ruled colonial India, many of my relations, who were nonviolently agitating for India’s independence (inspired by Mahatma Gandhi and other champions of freedom), were in British Indian jails under what was described as “preventive detention”, allegedly to stop them from doing anything violent. After India’s independence, preventive detention as a form of incarceration was halted; but then it was reintroduced, initially by the Congress government, in a relatively mild form. That was bad enough, but under the Hindutva-oriented BJP government now in office, preventive detention has acquired a hugely bigger role, allowing easy arrests and imprisonment of opposition politicians without trial.

Indeed, from last year, under the provision of a freshly devised Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), the state can unilaterally declare someone to be a terrorist, which allows them to arrest this alleged terrorist and place them in incarceration without trial. A number of human rights activists have been designated as terrorists and are in jail already under this arrangement.

When someone is described as being “anti-national”, this can be seen as a big philosophical denunciation anywhere in the world, but in today’s India it may mean nothing more than the person has made some critical remarks about the government in office. The confusion between “anti-government” and “anti-national” is typical of autocratic governance. The courts have sometimes been able to stop such abusive practices, but given the slow movement of the Indian courts, and the differences of opinion within India’s large supreme court, this has not always been an effective remedy. One of the most prominent defenders of human rights in the world, Amnesty International, has been forced to leave India as a result of governmental intervention.

The pursuit of authoritarianism in general is sometimes combined with the persecution of a particular section of the nation – often linked, in India, with caste or religion. The low-caste former “untouchables”, now called Dalits, continue to get the benefits of affirmative action (in terms of employment and education) that were introduced at the time of India’s independence, but they are often very harshly treated. Cases of rape and murder of Dalits by upper-caste men, which have become shockingly common events, are frequently ignored or covered up by the government, unless pressed otherwise by public protests.

The Indian authorities have been particularly severe on the rights of Muslims, even to the extent of restricting some of their citizenship rights. Despite centuries of peaceful co-existence between Hindus and Muslims, there have been striking attempts in recent years by politically extremist Hindu organisations to treat indigenous Muslims somewhat like foreigners and to accuse them of doing harm to the nation. This has been fed by cultivating disaffection and inter-religious animosity through the rapidly increased power of extremist Hindu politics. The fact that the celebrated poet Rabindranath Tagore had a Hindu background was not contradicted by his self-description in Oxford (when giving the Hibbert lectures) that he came from the confluence of three cultural streams, combining Hinduism and Islam, in addition to western influence.

Indian culture is a joint product of people of different religious faiths, and this can be seen in different fields – from music and literature to painting and architecture. Even the very first translation and propagation of Hindu philosophical texts – the Upanishads – for use outside India was done on the active initiative of a Mughal prince, Dara Shikoh, the eldest son of Mumtaz (in whose memory Dara’s father, Emperor Shah Jahan, built the Taj Mahal). Led by the government’s current ideological priorities, many school textbooks in India are being rewritten now to present a thoroughly revisionist history, reducing – or ignoring altogether – the contributions of Muslim people.

Despite the government’s power, armed with the UAPA, to call anyone a terrorist, those accused are typically committed to nonviolent protests in the way that Gandhi had advocated. This applies particularly to newly emerging secular resistance in India, led by student leaders. For instance, Umar Khalid, a Muslim scholar from Jawaharlal Nehru University who has been arrested and imprisoned as an alleged “terrorist” through the use of the UAPA, has eloquently expressed this secular movement’s commitment to peaceful protest: “If they beat us with lathis [sticks], we will hold aloft the Tricolour [the Indian national flag]. If they fire bullets, then we will hold the constitution and raise our hands.”

While the growth of authoritarianism in India demands determined resistance, the world is also facing a pandemic of autocracy at this time, which makes the Indian lapses look less abnormal than they in fact are. The justification for imposing tyranny varies from country to country, such as reducing drug trafficking in the case of the Philippines, curtailing the flow of immigrants in Hungary, suppressing gay lifestyles in Poland, and using the military to control allegedly corrupt behaviour in Brazil. The world needs as many different ways of defending freedom as there are attacks upon it.

Dr Martin Luther King Jr noted in a letter written in 1963 from Birmingham jail: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” He also insisted that all resistance has to be nonviolent. So do the young student leaders of today’s India. If there is a commonality in the distinct manifestations of autocracy, there is also a shared reasoning in the resistance.

Durga Puja

The Trends Desk of the Indian Express ran this story October 25 2020 including the image above:

'Coronasuras' to migrant crisis, the most unique idols this Durga puja

Hannah Ellis-Petersen South Asia correspondent for the Guardian reports (Thu 22 Oct 2020) on the creative response to the Covid-19 pandemic and its social impact by artists involved in the Durga Puja festival. She writes: 

Every autumn the streets of Kolkata come alive with the sounds of Durga Puja. The Hindu festival, which celebrates the triumph of good over evil, is marked in West Bengal and neighbouring states as a time for dancing, drumming, eating and worship

Yet the festival’s most defining feature is the pandal – towering displays of religious sculptures depicting the story of Durga Puja: the moment that the Hindu goddess Durga triumphed over the demon Mahishasura.

Pandals are known for their creativity, and this year, as the festival began on Thursday under the restrictions of Covid-19, it was no different. But now, in several pandals, instead of the usual sculptures of the Mahishasura demon, a new malevolent being has been put in its place: the coronavirus demon, better known as the Coronasura.

The Coronasura has taken several shapes. In some pandals, the head has been made to look like a Sars-CoV-2 particle, with its head covered in long trumpet-like fronds. Others have simply made the demon green, as if he is an embodiment of the virus.

Babu Pal, the secretary of the artisans association of Kumartuli, the street in Kolkata where most Durga Puja icons are made, spoke of the inspiration behind the Coronasura they had made for a customer.

“Corona is the demon that everybody recognises, it is the demon that everybody is fighting, and we are all looking for the strength to defeat it,” said Pal of the sculpture. “Also we had no Covid cases in our artisans area, and we wanted to make this icon to thank the goddess for protecting us from the demon of corona here.”

The humanitarian impact of the coronavirus pandemic also inspired the artist Rintu Das to create a very different pandal for the Barisha Club Durga Puja committee in Kolkata this year. Rather than depicting a goddess, Das portrayed Durga as a migrant woman making the treacherous and exhausting walk along India’s roads with her children.

It is based on the experiences of tens of millions of India’s migrant workers who, when the country went into lockdown with just four hours notice, found themselves stuck hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of miles from home. With no work and no transport available, most began walking home in what became the greatest exodus of people across India since partition. Almost 1,000 migrant workers are known to have died on their journey.

“I would turn on the TV and I would see all the images of migrant women walking hundreds of miles along the sides of the roads, often carrying their children, with just a handful of rice to eat and feet that were raw and bloody. Women, mothers, daughters, who looked so desperate as they walked,” said Das.

“That’s when the idea came to me to make a Durga Puja idol which showed the goddess as these migrant women. These women who are in pain and suffering but also full of strength and determination and power, who should be respected and worshipped; women who have God within them.”

In an acknowledgment of the demon of hunger faced by migrants and so many other people in West Bengal during lockdown, the towering 14ft sculpture has been surrounded by 30,000 rice sacks, lit up with bulbs and hung up around the pandal.

“I pray that my Durga gives a new life to everyone who encounters it, that she takes away pain from everyone who is suffering right now,” said Das.

The pandemic has altered this year’s Durga Puja beyond recognition. West Bengal, a state still battling rising cases of coronavirus, introduced a series of strict measures to prevent millions coming out into the streets and causing a feared surge in cases, which now total more than 7 million in India. The 4,000-plus pandals across the state, the biggest and most popular of which usually draw in millions of visitors, have been banned from allowing anyone but organisers and performers to enter. Barricades have been erected around these usually buzzing places of worship.

It has been particularly tough for the traditional artisans who earn a living by making the icons for Durga Puja out of clay and fibreglass. Usually they receive orders and begin creating the sculptures five months before the festival, but this year they had less than two months. Even then, orders only trickled in.

Prasant Pal, 47, an artisan in Kolkata’s Kumartuli street who has been working for more than 25 years, said last year he had received orders for more than 50 icons: this year it was just 15 small ones, and his income had fallen from 3m rupees (£31,000) to 70,000 rupees (£725).

“Artisans have suffered a lot because of this pandemic,” he said sadly. “Most of the artisans left Kolkata and were scared to come back because of Covid. But we had to persuade them, because if they don’t work they will die of hunger.”

Even though visitors are not allowed into the pandals, the Durga Puja committees of West Bengal have found other ways to ensure they can be enjoyed. Many, like the Nutan Sangha Durga Puja committee in a neighbourhood of Kolkata, have gone digital. Abhishek Bhattacharya, a committee member, described how they were offering “an augmented 360-degree video tour of our pandal so people can be in their homes but still virtually walk through and enjoy seeing the idols as if they were really there”.

People can also use YouTube or Facebook to watch a live feed of the pandal, which this year is on the theme of introspection, and there will also be video broadcasts of dancing and celebrations “so we can still reach out to the crowds wherever they are”.

The committee for one of Kolkata’s most popular pandals, the Santosh Mitra Square Durga Puja, have also, reluctantly, gone digital. Sajay Ghosh, who sits on the committee, spoke nostalgically of previous years when 10,000 people an hour would visit their grand pandal, which would take months to create.

“People can view our pandal virtually online, but in our hearts we know it is not the same,” said Ghosh. “We all want to feel the warmth of the festival, and we are all feeling so sad at the situation this year, I can not even express it.”

Artisan Kush Bera, along with his two children, pays tribute to the police and health workers in the coronavirus pandemic.

Using a language usually associated with warfare, The Indian Express covers a version of the Goddess Durga slaying 'Coronasura' while paying tribute to health workers and the police, cast in the role of "frontline warriors".

In a bid to highlight the brave struggles of COVID-19 frontline warriors, a popular Durga Puja pandal in Kolkata has replaced the traditional idol of Mahishasura with that of ‘Coronasura’. The Youth Association of Mohammad Ali Park — for its 52nd Durga Puja celebrations — has used idols of police and doctors in masks, so as to make an important statement of staying safe in the pandemic.

Speaking with indianexpress.com, Ashok Ojha of Md Ali Park Durga Puja, said: “By replacing asura’s idol with that of a ‘corona demon’, we pray that the Goddess slays the virus, in the way that she slayed Mahishasura. So, it is not Mahishasura but Coronasura this year. Our purpose is to make people aware of the importance of wearing masks and maintaining social distancing norms.”

Re:LODE Radio notes that many Indian citizens have recently suffered extreme brutality from the police, especially the Dalit communities and Muslims. It is also the case that many of India's poor, in becoming victims of the coronavirus have been turned away from healthcare facilities, and have struggled and failed to pay for their medical treatment.

The New York Times covered the issue of police brutality in India in a story by Jeffrey Gettleman and Sameer Yasir, published on August 20 2020, headlined: 

Hundreds of Police Killings in India, but No Mass Protests

A subheading runs: Despite evidence of widespread police brutality, no significant grass-roots movement has arisen. For many Indians, day-to-day crime is the more pressing issue.

NEW DELHI — A father and son were hauled into a small police station in the southern Indian town of Sathankulam in June after arguing with police officers. When friends and family members went to the station, they heard screams emanating from inside, growing louder as night fell.

The next afternoon, the two men, Ponraj Jeyaraj, 58, and Beniks Jeyaraj, 31, stumbled outside surrounded by officers, blood dripping down the backs of their legs. They had clearly been tortured in police custody, family members and lawyers in the town said.

“Please, find a way to get us bail,” Ponraj Jeyaraj begged his sister, Jaya Joseph, as he was taken to a hospital, she recalled. She said her brother’s last words to her were: “We will not survive another day.”

Father and son died hours apart, from severe internal injuries, a few days later. Police officials in charge of the station declined to comment, saying the case was now under federal investigation.

A crowd gathered in June around the coffins of Ponraj Jeyaraj and Beniks Jeyaraj in Sathankulam.

The ordeal for Ponraj Jeyaraj and his son began on the evening of June 18. They argued with police officers who were going around the market in Sathankulam, scolding a number of shopkeepers for violating coronavirus rules — including the Jeyarajes, who had kept their shop open 10 minutes past the required closing time. A few days earlier, family members said, the same officers had tried to pressure Beniks Jeyaraj into giving them a free phone from his shop, and when he refused, they left in a huff.

On June 19, around 7 p.m., four police officers from the Sathankulam station arrested the father and drove him away in a van. When his son rushed to the police station, he was detained as well.

Several witnesses, including a lawyer, Raja Ram; one of the Jeyarajes’ neighbors, Dev Singh Raja; and a rights activist, Yusuf, who like many Indians uses only one name, said that when the men were brought to a hospital for a medical exam the next day, they were limping in blood-spattered pants, leaving a trail of thick, dark blood. Ponraj Jeyaraj asked for a lungi, a type of sarong. His son, too, changed into fresh clothes.

Paramedics watched in shock, Mr. Ram said, as the Jeyarajes’ new clothes reddened with blood within minutes. The father and son were then driven to the house of a magistrate, who saw them from a distance and gave the police permission to send them to jail.

On June 22, they were moved to a hospital after complaining of chest pains. Ponraj Jeyaraj was the first to die, late that night. Hours later, his son died.

After shopkeepers called for a strike to protest the deaths, the Central Bureau of Investigation, a federal agency, stepped in. Ten police officers have been arrested and put in jail, but a magistrate told prosecutors that none of the officers were cooperating and that they had tried to destroy evidence.

These days, the Jeyaraj family spends much of its time meeting with investigators and trying to obtain the autopsy report, a process that is likely to take months.

“Getting justice in cases like these is a long struggle,” said Vinod Kumar, a son-in-law of Ponraj Jeyaraj. “Especially when you know the protector has turned into a murderer.”

A priest, seated in a chair, consoled relatives of Ponraj Jeyaraj and his son, Beniks Jeyaraj, in Sathankulam, India, in June. Both men died after being taken into police custody; family members say they were tortured.

According to a lengthy report by the National Campaign Against Torture, an Indian rights group based in New Delhi, the capital, at least 1,731 people were killed in custody last year. The majority of the victims, the report said, were the usual victims of abuse: Muslims and lower-caste Hindus.

Watching the people get lairy / It's not very pretty I tell thee / Walking through town is quite scary / It's not very sensible either / A friend of a friend he got beaten / He looked the wrong way at a policeman  

Would never of happened to Smeaton /An old leodensian

I predict a riot

Human kindness is overflowing . . .

The culture and behaviour of police forces across the world often reflects the normative culture and implicit policy of the powers that be. Randy Newman's song I think it's going to rain today was covered by the reggae and pop band UB40. and released in June 1980. Forming the band in December 1978, this group of friends, sharing musical ambitions, and who knew each other across Birmingham, England, chose the name "UB40" in reference to being jobless and "on the dole". The form issued to people claiming unemployment benefits from the UK government's Department of Employment at the time, stood for Unemployment Benefit, Form 40.

This montage includes the UB40's "pop promo video" of their cover of Randy Newman's song, along with news footage of the 1985 Handsworth riots, exposing the vast gulf and void of understanding between the local community and a UK government hell bent on restructuring the economy in the interests of speculative capital.

. . . human kindness is overflowing?

Handsworth had been the scene of a less serious riot four years earlier, when a wave of rioting hit over 30 other British towns and cities during the spring and summer of 1981. Three days of rioting had taken place in the Handsworth area of Birmingham, England in July 1981. The major outbreak of violence took place on the night of Friday 10/11 July, with smaller disturbances on the following two nights.

The riots were characterised by the Scarman report into the 1981 riots in England as "copycat riots" – taking place after the Brixton riots in London, and around the same time as the Toxteth riots in Liverpool and the Moss Side riots in Manchester – though some have argued that this is an oversimplification. 

The immediate flashpoint was an attack on a locally well-known Police Superintendent who was trying to calm rumours of an impending march by the right-wing National Front. The following disturbances resulted in 121 arrests and 40 injuries to police officers, alongside widespread damage to property.

The second Handsworth riots took place in the Handsworth district of Birmingham, West Midlands, from 9 to 11 September 1985. The riots were reportedly sparked by the arrest of a man near the Acapulco Cafe, Lozells and a police raid on the Villa Cross public house in the same area. Hundreds of people attacked police and property, looting and smashing, even setting off fire bombs.

Racial tension and friction between the police and the local ethnic minority communities was seen as a major factor in the riots. Handsworth had been predominantly populated by the black and Asian communities for around 30 years by 1985. Handsworth also had one of the highest unemployment rates in Birmingham. 

During the last couple of weeks Liverpool has seen the tier 3 restrictions on the economic life of the city, along with deep fears concerning the economic future, rekindle worries that things may return to the situation in 1980's, when unemployment and industrial collapse under the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, led to social unrest and the Toxteth riots of 1981. 

In the wake of the destruction of social fabric along with the urban fabric, the government minister Michael Heseltine instigated urban renewal schemes, including the Liverpool Garden Festival, and a regeneration of the Royal Albert Dock that included the Maritime Museum, Tate Liverpool, and Hartley Quay, the location of the first LODE performance with The Yellow House unloading the LODE cargo 12 September 1992. 

The early years of the Thatcher government following the election of her government in 1979, saw a shift in conservative politics to a radical and ideologically driven free market neoliberal agenda. This agenda stands to this day, an elaborate theoretical construct designed to distract everyone from the matter in hand. 

"Business as usual" - to be conducted without restraint, and at all costs!

Distracted from distraction by distraction, business would be conducted as usual. Meanwhile unemployment raged, wages were driven to the bottom, manufacturing industry was increasingly replaced by capitalism's mesmerising sequence of speculative bubbles and the invention of unregulated of financial products. Social unrest and institutional racism in the policing of society, was predictably followed by riots in the streets.

We needed jobs . . .

. . . they gave us flowers

In 2011 cabinet papers released by the National Archives under the 30-year rule reveal that minister in Margaret Thatcher's government warned her NOT to spend money on Liverpool, a city with communities experiencing high levels of deprivation.

Liverpool, where rioting in 1981 prompted ministers to consider . . .

. . . a 'managed decline' during which residents would be encouraged to move elsewhere

Alan Travis home affairs editor for the Guardian reported (Fri 30 Dec 2011) under the headline and subheading: 

Thatcher government toyed with evacuating Liverpool after 1981 riots

National Archives files reveal ministerial warning to PM not to spend money on deprived city, saying decline was largely self-inflicted

Alan Travis reports on the revelations that include damning evidence of a racist policing culture in the UK that accepted its role as suppressing legitimate social and political unrest: 

Margaret Thatcher's closest ministers came close to writing off Liverpool in the aftermath of the 1981 inner-city riots and even raised the prospect of its partial evacuation, according to secret cabinet papers released on Friday.

They told her that the "unpalatable truth" was that they could not halt Merseyside's decline and her chancellor, Sir Geoffrey Howe, warned her not to waste money trying to "pump water uphill" and telling her the city was "much the hardest nut to crack".

The cabinet papers released by the National Archives under the 30-year rule reveal Thatcher's closest advisers told her that the "concentration of hopelessness" on Merseyside was very largely self-inflicted with its record of industrial strife.

The files show that when Michael Heseltine pressed the case to save Britain's inner cities with his cabinet paper, It Took a Riot, they ensured his demand for £100m a year of new money for two years for Liverpool alone was met with a paltry offer of £15m, with the condition that "no publicity should be given to this figure".

Although they never articulated the case publicly at the time, those telling Thatcher that there was little point in spending money on Liverpool also included the industry secretary, Sir Keith Joseph, and her Downing Street advisers, Sir John Hoskyns and Sir Robin Ibbs.

In a confidential note in the immediate aftermath of the Toxteth riots, Howe said that Heseltine's plans for a "massive injection of additional public spending" to stabilise the inner cities had to be rejected: "Isn't this pumping water uphill? Should we go rather for 'managed decline'? This is not a term for use, even privately. It is much too negative, when it must imply a sustained effort to absorb Liverpool manpower elsewhere – for example in nearby towns of which some are developing quite promisingly."

Howe told Thatcher that Heseltine's plan for a cabinet minister for every deprived region should be restricted to a one-year lone experiment in Merseyside after arguing that if there was any extra money he would rather spend it on the more promising West Midlands. He decried Heseltine's role as "minister for Merseyside" as an attempt by the latter to create a "godfather role" for himself.

The cabinet papers also disclose that the cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, personally warned Thatcher that Heseltine, despite his undoubted "zest and panache'', was not the man to save Britain's inner cities arguing he was "distrusted and disliked in the local authority world". Armstrong suggested Jim Prior or Lord Soames would do a better job.

In his paper, Heseltine concentrated on the "devastating impact" of 30%-50% unemployment in some inner-city areas and described the outcome of postwar policy towards Merseyside as a "tactical retreat, a combination of economic erosion and encouraged evacuation".

Thatcher went to Liverpool and told community leaders she had come to listen. Her memoirs show that she did indeed listen to the views of some young people in the town hall but was so appalled by their bitter hostility to the police that she quickly starting begging them not to riot again.

They had complained that the cause of the riot lay in the police tactics of the Merseyside chief constable, Kenneth Oxford: "He believed in slapping people down and keeping them down," says the official record of the meeting. "The police had attacked the very community leaders who had tried to bring the riot to an end. They said the Liverpool police regarded anyone who was black as a criminal and acted accordingly."

When Thatcher complained to the archbishop of Liverpool, Derek Worlock, immediately afterwards about their "hatred of the police" he told her there was "a silent colour bar" operating in the city, saying there were only eight non-white police officers and neither councillors nor shop assistants from ethnic minorities.

But Thatcher said she was not concerned "about the colour of people's skins" and condemned the rioters as criminals. It was left to the Scarman inquiry to tackle the police racism that lay behind the complaints. The official papers confirm that the main response to the 1981 riots was to give forces better equipment and more powerful weapons.

The cabinet papers also show that a panicky Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir David McNee, told the prime minister at the height of the Brixton riots in July that he was unable to guarantee the security of the royal wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer, which was due to take place the following month without the introduction of a modern-day riot act. He raised the stakes by telling her that he had already raised it with the Queen.

McNee presented Thatcher with a list of equipment he needed including riot shields, water cannon, rubber bullets and armoured vehicles – preferably painted blue rather than kept army grey, CS gas and even a "heli-telly" – an early mobile surveillance helicopter – during a midnight visit to Scotland Yard.

He said he was especially concerned about the arrangements for the planned royal wedding fireworks in Hyde Park which foreign dignitories would watch from a stand without any cover.

The government responded by immediately providing 1,500 Nato riot helmets from army stocks, asked the army to provide more baton rounds and six water cannon to the police and opened three army camps to be used as prison overflows.

A water cannon demonstration was also laid on but the use of troops was ruled out. "If necessary the police should be properly equipped and even armed, before such a step was taken," said the Downing Street note of a conversation between the home secretary, Willie Whitelaw, and Thatcher on 11 July when riots erupted in Moss Side, Manchester.

The minister finessed the demands for a new riot act but conceded that the police should be given the discretion to use rubber bullets and baton rounds for the first time in mainland Britain. In typical Whitelaw fashion he only made this concession after the chief constables had privately assured him that they would not use them.

The 1981 riots were Britain's worst urban riots of the 20th century, running from April to July and involving violent confrontations between mainly young black people and police in Liverpool, Manchester and parts of London including Brixton and Southall. More than 800 police were injured and more than 3,000 people arrested.

The disturbances came as Thatcher's early monetarist economic experiment plunged unemployment towards 3 million and her well-documented reaction to the first televised pictures of rioting and looting in Toxteth – "Oh, those poor shopkeepers" – illustrated the limited law and order nature of her response.

While she stood firm against Heseltine's attempt to create a traditional Tory drive to save Britain's inner cities, Whitelaw set about re-equipping the police with more modern helmets, shields and batons that would prove as important as building up coal stocks in Thatcher's showdown with the miners in 1984.

The scandal of Orgreave

David Conn looks back to the so-called Battle of Orgreave in The long read for the Guardian (Thu 18 May 2017), and highlighting the fact that as home secretary, Theresa May championed inquiries into past police abuses such as those committed at Hillsborough by South Yorkshire police. But she has refused calls to investigate the roots of that disaster – the violence of that same force against striking miners five years earlier.

On the release of government documents in 2014 Channel 4 News ran a story: Maggie and the miners - were the army at the ready? on 3 Jan 2014 with a report by Paul Mason. Government papers released under the thirty-year rule reveal that Margaret Thatcher followed the  miners trike with a forensic oversight bordering on obsession- and the military could have also intervened. Channel 4 News revisited the: Battle of Orgreave: South Yorkshire Police tactics linked to Hillsborough 5 May 2016, with a report by Alex Thomson, as the interim chief constable of South Yorkshire Police - the force which came in for severe criticism at the Hillsborough inquests in 2016 - said that he would welcome an independent assessment of what happened at Orgreave. This montage of the news reports includes one of the organisers involved in the '84 strike saying:

They were much better organised than we were . . . Don't trust em is the truth . . .  

Don't trust anything that they say!

The Thatcher government was blindly unconcerned about communities experiencing extreme deprivation. Anyone fighting for the human rights of employees against the behaviour of capitalist interests, became "the enemy within". 

Unfortunately not much has changed in the Conservative party over the years, it remains the case, and along with support from neoliberal thinktanks, well funded by rightwing American billionaires, the ideological spin and disinformation machine, makes matters much worse today. Boris Johnson has "got form" on this, with numerous occasions when he has gone out of his way to casually express the deep rooted prejudice of his class.

Johnson apologises . . .

Richard DeDomenici - A Boris performance in Liverpool

On the 21st of October 2004, the day after then shadow arts minister Boris’ stage managed visit to Liverpool to apologise for accusing the city of wallowing in disproportionate grief over the murder of Iraq hostage Kenneth Bigley, I dressed up as Johnson and wandered the city saying sorry to all those Liverpudlians that didn’t get to meet him in person.

The month after this performance Boris was sacked. 

But he would return. 

NB. The man in the railway station told me that “if it wasn’t for that policeman over there, I’d kick your fucking teeth down your throat.” The funny thing is, he didn’t even know who Boris Johnson was, and in retrospect I probably shouldn’t have explained it to him. 

A Bluecoat Commission by Richard DeDomenici 

This withdrawal and apology by Johnson of his assertion that Liverpudlians were wallowing in their "victim status" was in 2004. However, when Johnson was called out by Liverpool MP Maria Eagle in the House of Commons on 25 July 2019 for editing and publishing the hugely offensive article in The Spectator in 2004,  the Prime Minister Boris Johnson directly refused to apologise for the slurs made against Liverpool and those affected by the Hillsborough disaster in the magazine he edited.

According to Liam Thorp of the Liverpool Echo (25 July 2020): 

Boris Johnson brazenly refuses to apologise for Liverpool and Hillsborough slurs 

The infamous piece - written by Simon Heffer - but edited and approved by Mr Johnson, smeared Liverpool and its people following the brutal beheading of Scouse engineer Ken Bigley in Iraq.

Talking about the attitudes of Liverpudlians, the article added: “The extreme reaction to Mr Bigley's murder is fed by the fact that he was a Liverpudlian. Liverpool is a handsome city with a tribal sense of community. A combination of economic misfortune — its docks were, fundamentally, on the wrong side of England when Britain entered what is now the European Union — and an excessive predilection for welfarism have created a peculiar, and deeply unattractive, psyche among many Liverpudlians.They see themselves whenever possible as victims, and resent their victim status; yet at the same time they wallow in it.”

Blame games 

At the beginning of last week Boris Johnson was blaming the Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham for not agreeing to accept an unacceptable financial support package for those severely affected by the economic impact of the restrictions involved in the tier 3 imposition. However, as London and areas of the south-east of England were moved into tier 2 restrictions, new financial support packages from the Chancellor, amounting to figures far in excess of the contentious bargaining gap of £5 million for Greater Manchester, were suddenly made possible. John Crace, the politics sketch writer for the Guardian, captures the quality of absurdity, disarray and "too little and too late" in this now all too familiar scenario.

Too little, too late! 

John Crace writes (Thu 22 Oct 2020): 

The government moves in mysterious ways. Only on Tuesday, it had been unable to find an extra £5m to secure a deal with Andy Burnham and other local leaders to take Greater Manchester into tier 3. And on Wednesday there had been no money available for the poorest children, who will tiresomely insist on still wanting to be fed when not in school, to get free meals during the holidays up until next Easter. But on Thursday the Magic Money Tree was dripping with cash.

Rishi Sunak has only been chancellor for about eight months, but I’ve already lost count of how many budgets he’s delivered since March. We must be into double figures by now. His winter economy plan that was announced at the tail end of last month hasn’t even survived till the end of autumn – and is now on to its third iteration.

Some may see this as a weakness in strategic planning. A failure to predict what was only too obvious to most of the rest of the country. But Sunak prefers to give his policies a more positive spin. He likes to see himself as the Man in the Know; someone who can react to fast-changing events at speed. After all, who could possibly have guessed that the UK – along with the rest of Europe – was heading for a second wave of coronavirus? Other than the government scientists who had been saying just that for months.

So Sunak was back in the Commons to deliver yet another round of financial help for businesses affected by Covid-19. The costings could wait for another day, as Sunak prefers not to let the details of how he will eventually pay for things – austerity or higher taxes – take the gloss off his moment in the limelight. First was a bailout for all businesses affected by being in tier 2. This was backdated to August just to prove that he wasn’t just bothered about London and the West Midlands, but really, really cared about the north-west too. If he’d announced all this just a week ago, he could have saved the government a world of pain.

Then there was going to be more help for businesses who would now only have to pay 5% of the wages of employees who only worked one day per week. This wouldn’t make the worker any better off and more likely to be able to pay the bills, but it would at least make it more likely they still had a job. Which was something. And finally the government was going to double the support for the self-employed from 20% to 40%, so they would also go broke a little less quickly.

The shadow chancellor, Anneliese Dodds, wasn’t quite as enthusiastic about the new proposals as Sunak seemed to expect. She called them “too little, too late” and observed that the best part of a million jobs had already been lost as a result of the government not having acted sooner. Nor did she wholly buy the idea that the measures weren’t being driven by London and the West Midlands and that the north-west had been tacked on as an expedient afterthought.

What was required, she concluded, wasn’t the whole country gradually edging its way into tier 3: it was a “circuit breaker” to halt the rise in infections. Though this did rather presume that the government could introduce an effective test-and-trace system. Even as she spoke, the latest statistics were published showing performance going from bad to worse.

But Rishi wasn’t here to listen to any of the naysayers. He is a man with the effortless self-belief and thin-skinned vanity of a multimillionaire who is never likely to experience financial hardship and just wanted to lap up the plaudits of the crowd. He got unexpectedly tetchy when accused of going for a cheap photo opportunity in Wagamama – Sunak doesn’t do anything on the cheap – and instead chose to wallow in the love of his own benches. This was his day. His moment in the sun and nobody was going to spoil it. At times like this, he gives the impression he believes his brand is bigger than that of his own party.

The fawning proved far too much for Boris Johnson, who had appeared for the opening half-hour, and he sloped off just as Andrew Mitchell was declaring his undying love for the chancellor. There’s only space for one narcissist in the room when Boris is around. So just as well the prime minister had gone awol, otherwise he would have had to listen to Tory Matt Vickers describe Rishi as “the man, the myth, the legend”. Sunak could only nod in agreement.

What no one mentioned of course, was that we had been here countless times before. Each of Sunak’s previous recent budget statements, which had proved to be hopelessly inadequate, had been received with nothing but adulation. But that was then and this is now. The past wasn’t just a foreign country it was a nonexistent country. And when, in a month or so’s time, Sunak came to the Commons to announce yet more measures, they too would be greeted with the excitement and shock of the new.

The battle of the egos was resumed later in the afternoon when Johnson and Sunak combined to give a joint Downing Street press conference. And though neither had anything new to say, it was Sunak who was the clear winner on points. Boris merely repeated his shtick of mumbling incoherently while casually mixing in the odd lie about anything that caught his fancy – he looks increasingly fed up with the job and only capable of dealing with a reality that he would like to exist – while Rishi sounded totally confident and at ease. Even when he is having to explain why his previous measures have been inadequate, he manages to maintain the pretence that his mistakes were deliberate.

Still, Sunak shouldn’t get too relaxed about being top dog. Because the person showing most sincerity was Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser and the third person in the room. And though he was doing his best to be optimistic, he didn’t have much cheer on offer. The test-and trace system was still a mess and that was really the only way out of the current situation. We were stuck with the virus, and we were stuck with a government committed to a tiering system from which no region was likely to escape downwards anytime soon. It was going to be a long winter.

The Express and Star 

In the West Midlands, the tone of the Express & Star, a regional evening newspaper in Britain, is worth registering, referencing, as it does, the economic catastrophe experienced in the region during the 1980's. Founded in 1889, the newspaper is based in Wolverhampton, England, and covers the West Midlands county and Staffordshire. The Express & Star is one of the few independent newspapers still operating in the UK, having been under the continuous ownership of the Graham family almost since its inception. At the weekend (25 Oct 2020) the paper carried this report in the Business section. 

Shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds questioned whether the wage support scheme will fail to incentivise employers to keep people on. 

Chancellor Rishi Sunak has been warned his latest emergency package will not be enough to prevent the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs from sectors hardest hit by coronavirus.

Conservative peer Lord Wolfson, the chief executive of Next, said roles will be shed from the retail industry as consumers make a permanent shift to shopping online.

And shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds warned unemployment was heading towards “1980s levels” despite Mr Sunak’s wage subsidy package, as official figures showed borrowing continued to soar and new local lockdowns were announced.

Steve Barclay, who is Mr Sunak’s deputy as chief secretary to the Treasury, defended the measures as being targeted to roles that remain “viable” but warned “we cannot save every job”.

Sectors hardest hit by the restrictions in place to slow Covid-19’s spread continued to raise warnings despite the Chancellor’s Job Support Scheme to help pay wages for employees able to work at least a third of their hours.

Lord Wolfson told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the seemingly permanent shift to online shopping means that a lot of “unviable” jobs are in retail.

Asked if a lot of those roles are in retail, he replied: “I think that is right. I wouldn’t want to underestimate the difficulty that is going to cause a lot of people who work in retail.

“I think it’s going to be very uncomfortable for a lot of people. We will inevitably, and have already, reduced the number of people working in our shops and I’d expect that to continue over the coming five or six years as the demand for retail goes down.”

The British Retail Consortium warned an estimated 130,000 retail jobs had been lost since January, a number they fear could nearly double by the end of the year “despite recent interventions by the Chancellor”.

The influential Resolution Foundation think tank warned the “winter economic package” would not stave off a spike in unemployment.

Chief executive Torsten Bell said Mr Sunak was right to announce fresh support but added that “design flaws mean that the new Job Support Scheme will not live up to its promise to significantly reduce the rise in unemployment”.

Unedifying battles . . . 

As Warrington became one of the latest areas in the north of England to move to tier 3, the highest level of coronavirus restrictions, negotiations for other areas, including Nottingham, appeared stalled before the wekend. Meanwhile, Josh Halliday North of England correspondent for the Guardian, reports (Fri 23 Oct 2020). a little ways out his usual patch, on the intervention of the Conservative Mayor of the West Midlands:

Street urges clarity

Josh Halliday reports: 

Andy Street, the Conservative mayor of the West Midlands, has urged the government to approach lockdown talks “straightforwardly” and to end “unedifying” public battles with regional leaders.

Following a week of fury from leaders across the north of England, Street said conducting public rows with mayors such as Greater Manchester’s Andy Burnham would not give “anyone any confidence or certainty” ahead of a winter of social curbs.

The former John Lewis boss said ministers should be clearer about the formula used to allocate funding to each region entering tier 3, the strictest level of coronavirus restrictions, and ensure that talks with local politicians were held swiftly and in private.

“I don’t want a protracted negotiation,” he told the Guardian. “If we were at level three, the very simple point is you must have a very serious health crisis on your hands, so you must be decisive over this. If there is a set formula from the government, in fact, it’s not a negotiation. Can we please be told that straightforwardly? Then we can, in a sense, respond to that.”

Street’s intervention follows a bruising week for the government in which its approach to implementing Boris Johnson’s lockdown policy has been condemned as a “deliberate act of levelling down”, “tawdry” and a “divide and conquer” strategy.

With Nottingham set to head into England’s strictest lockdown measures imminently, meaning the closure of “wet-led pubs” and other venues, and other regions close behind, scrutiny has turned to the formula used by ministers to decide the level of funding given to each area.

Robert Jenrick, the communities secretary, said this week that local authorities would be offered a standard financial package based on £8 a head for test and trace and an additional £20 a head for business support.

But local leaders have criticised this calculation as too simplistic as it fails to take into account factors such as business density, deprivation, proportion of hospitality jobs, and whether the area has already been in a long-term lockdown. There is also little clarity about what the business support fund can be used for, with council leaders saying there had been little guidance from government.

Street, arguably the most powerful Conservative outside Westminster, said he would expect the West Midlands, if it was to enter tier 3, to get a similar government offer as Greater Manchester – £82m in total – given that they both had 2.8 million residents. He refused to say whether he would accept it.

“What I would want to do with other local leaders is be really clear in advance of getting to that point what our position would be,” he said. “Because we do not want a protracted negotiation, particularly in the public domain, because that doesn’t give citizens, businesses, anybody, any confidence or certainty.”

He added: “I would like to have [the offer] well in advance of anything to happen. I would like it to be confidential. The whole thing played out in the public domain is unedifying. And I would like it to be a genuine exploring of what the specific issues are in each region built on top of a national situation.”

Street welcomed Rishi Sunak’s overhaul of the job support scheme, praising the government’s “decisive response” to his own lobbying for more support for businesses in tier 2 areas. He wrote to the chancellor 10 days ago to warn of an “avoidable domino effect” of business closures and job losses unless there was swift action, later saying the government had “completely missed” the impact on these businesses.

World beating?

Jonathan Powell takes a view on the way Boris Johnson conducts negotiations. Jonathan Powell, the first Downing Street Chief of Staff, under British  Tony Blair from 1997 to 2007, and the only senior adviser to last the whole period of Blair's leadership, was also the chief British negotiator on Northern Ireland, so he is someone who knows about difficult negotiations.

Jonathan Powell contributed this Opinion piece for the Observer (Sun 25 Oct 2020) under headline and subheading: 

Like Pyrrhus, Johnson loves to lay claim to victories, all of which are at our expense

His tactic of repeatedly walking away from negotiations is wearing very thin with voters

As a classicist, Boris Johnson will be all too aware of the fate of Pyrrhus of Epirus in the third century BC. He enjoyed a series of victories against the Romans but at such a cost of casualties on his own side that he lost the war, supposedly saying after battle: “One more such victory and Pyrrhus is undone.”

This makes it all the more surprising that Johnson appears to be following Pyrrhus down the same track in his approach to negotiations, seeking victories at any cost. And that cost is going to fall on us as a nation, particularly as we enter the endgame of negotiations on an EU free trade agreement.

No 10 – presumably Dominic Cummings – briefed the Spectator last week on its approach to negotiations, claiming modestly that its aim in every case is to increase tension because “it stays calm while others panic”, allowing it to get its way. Those at No 10 clearly think they are very clever but what they don’t seem to grasp is that the result of this strategy is that their success in these battles has been purely Pyrrhic.

In October 2019, following lots of tough talk, Johnson provoked a crisis by declaring the Brexit negotiations over. He returned to the table shortly afterwards, however, desperate to conclude an agreement before an election and capitulated to the EU’s demands on the Irish border, which he had repeatedly rejected. He declared the outcome a great success at the time, a result of the robust stance he had adopted. Now he is trying to reopen the agreement because he and his allies say they have discovered it is a threat to the very existence of the United Kingdom. The vaunted victory turned out to be a failure.

This spring, Johnson refused to fire Cummings despite his clear breach of the government’s own lockdown rules. He did so, No 10 claimed, because he refused to give the press a scalp. He was victorious and Cummings is still in place. But the cost of the victory was horrendous for the government. The public had rallied to Johnson in the face of the coronavirus threat, but his defence of Cummings led to a precipitous collapse in support, which has turned out to be lasting. The notorious eye test trip to Barnard Castle is likely to be one of the main things anyone remembers about this government.

Last week, No 10 embarked on a negotiation with Andy Burnham over financial support for Greater Manchester in the face of new Covid restrictions. Again it provoked a crisis by walking away from the table over the relatively trivial amount of £5m. Johnson claimed victory by imposing restrictions without the agreement of local authority leaders. Again, it was a Pyrrhic victory because the chancellor ended up giving Manchester even more than the £65m they were asking for. In the process, Johnson turned Burnham into the “king of the north” with a good shot at becoming next leader of the Labour party and holed the Conservative northern strategy below the water line.

Most importantly, No 10 is trying the same gambit again in the current negotiations with the EU on a new free trade agreement and it is likely to end equally badly. Those at No 10 have deliberately provoked a crisis with the EU by passing a bill that contradicts the Brexit agreement, in the process endangering the Good Friday agreement and Britain’s reputation for respecting international law, and then walked away from the table. Now they have walked back in, without the EU making any substantive concessions, in a desperate effort to conclude an agreement. There is no sign of the EU negotiators panicking but rather calmly proceeding on the path they had already set out on. All the ludicrous tough guy posturing is designed to do is to allow Johnson to claim after the event that the EU surrendered in the face of his patriotic stance, just like last time.

But the consequence will be yet another Pyrrhic victory. Successful negotiations are based on building trust. A piece of paper is only worth something if both sides can be trusted to implement their undertakings. By breaching that trust with their juvenile antics, Cummings and Johnson have increased the risk of Britain being plunged into an even deeper economic crisis by convincing our European partners that they cannot sign an agreement with a government that deliberately fails to implement an agreement it signed just a year ago.

Even if the EU does in the end decide to conclude an agreement, it will be a very anaemic one, as close to a no-deal as an agreement can be, and almost certainly requiring a further transitional period beyond the end of the year to avoid chaos in Kent, although no doubt the transition will be called something else. The costs for the country of this unattractive combination of arrogance and incompetence in the approach to negotiations will far outweigh any short-term political benefits for Johnson from his music hall posturing.

In the end, Pyrrhus, for all his victories, was never able to hold territory or build an empire. Far from becoming a new Alexander, as he had hoped, he died a failure. The same will be true of Johnson if he enjoys any more victories like these. 

Brexit ideologues at the centre making a grab for power . . . 

. . . and taking powers away from the existing national, regional and  local democratic structures, is being increasingly exposed during this pandemic crisis. 

I'M TAKING BACK CONTROL! 

Steve Bell on Boris Johnson taking direct control of pandemic response – cartoon in the Guardian (Wed 3 Jun 2020).

The brexiteer's rhetorical slogan "take back control" has curious  and contradictory resonances, that in the UK hark back to: 

How Europe became the Tories’ eternal battleground 

This article in the Observer (Sun 9 Dec 2018) by a leading historian, Nicholas Crowson, addresses the question: 

How did a fringe obsession become the dominant Conservative vision - and risk tearing the party apart? 

Nicholas Crowson, in charting the long rise of Tory Euroscepticism, his article comes to the period in the early 1990's and the Maastricht Treaty. This was precisely when the LODE project was originally conceptualised, and many of the LODE zones Questions as posed in the 1992 LODE-zone Europe were shaped by the complex notion of "subsidiarity". that was foregrounded in the Maastricht Treaty negotiating process.

Nicholas Crowson writes of this period in his article: 

Thatcher was in fact agnostic about Europe during much of her leadership, but she recognised it was a tool for domestic statecraft. A chance to pitch “them” against “us”, as she battled for European budgetary rebates, using this to deflect from her own unpopularity, and from recession and unemployment at home. Later, with the negotiations for a Single European Act, she saw her chance to finally impose a British economic, or “Thatcherism in Europe”, vision.

Jacques Delors, the then European Commission president, scuppered these plans. Only belatedly did Thatcher realise that the SEA could accelerate closer integration. This provoked her 1988 Bruges speech, and Euroscepticism became mainstream. The Thatcherite monetary alliance had fractured – with former allies, such as Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson, becoming enemies for arguing that further integration (short of federalism) was necessary to protect neoliberal values.

In Thatcher’s wake emerged Major, who appeared more emollient, wishing Britain to be at the heart of Europe. At Maastricht in December 1991, he pushed for EU enlargement, favoured “subsidiarity” (with decisions taken where possible at the national level) and secured opt-outs from the single currency and the Social Chapter.

Predictions that the treaty ratification process would fall to a newly elected Labour administration were wrong, as Major won in 1992 though Europe played no real part in that election. Still, the majority of Conservative election candidates had endorsed the treaty, and senior figures were confident that the argument, while not extinct, had died down.

The honeymoon was shortlived. Although Labour’s leadership was in turmoil, the Danish and French “No” referendums threw the process into chaos. Written-off by commentators, and a Eurosceptic press, Major’s government saw through the ratification process. Despite Eurosceptic rebellions spilling into legislative matters beyond Europe, such as Post Office privatisation and coal mine closures, he served a full term.

However, the emergence of explicitly anti-European parties (Referendum party and Ukip) meant that the Tories kept a watchful eye for signs of a Eurosceptic electoral take-off. The answer of William Hague, leader between 1997 and 2001, was to embrace Eurosepticism and to allow his party a 1998 vote on whether to accept the single currency: 84% said no.

Subsidiarity?

During the lead up to the signing of the Maastricht Treaty there was some discussion in political circles about "subsidiarity", but it was not really a concept that was generally understood in the UK, except as an aspect of these deliberations. 

Subsidiarity is best understood as a principle of social organization that holds that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate, or local level,  that is consistent with the effective resolution of these issues. It is a concept that is essentially practical, and enables policy to be socially and politically adapted, as well as being embedded more closely with localities and communities. The needs and wishes of the community shape policy, unencumbered by the centres of power. As a spatial concept "subsidiarity" relates to centres and margins, seen as products of various histories. The social and political realities and needs in the "margins", or "peripheries", where centralised power is often felt to be in conflict with immediate needs and realities, requires the exercise of local powers. 

Subsidiarity as a concept or principle has a history that goes back to the complex territorial power networks of a post Reformation European political landscape. The concept originates in the writings of Calvinist law-philosopher Johannes Althaus who used the word "subsidia" in 1603 in his "Politica Methodice Digesta, Atque Exemplis Sacris et Profanis Illustrata".  The ideas developed in this text relate to the early development of federalism in the 16th and 17th centuries and the practical value of subsidiarity as a social and political principle.

Emden in 1575 

Perhaps these ideas may have been practically shaped by where he found himself in the early 17th century, for in 1603, he was elected to be a municipal trustee of the city of Emden, in East Frisia, and along the LODE Zone Line in northern Germany, and where he ultimately made his fame. He became a city Syndic in 1604, which placed him at the helm of Emden's governance until his death. 

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Emden in East Frisia (now Germany) was at the crossroads of political and religious activity in the region. A prosperous seaport situated between the Netherlands and the Holy Roman Empire, with convenient maritime access to England, Emden was a prominent city in the politics and policy of all three nations, and was thus able to retain a significant amount of political freedom. It was located within the overlapping territories of the Catholic Habsburg emperor and a Lutheran provincial lord, but its population was mainly Calvinist, and the city had a strong Calvinist spirit. Emden also played host to two Protestant synods, first in 1571 and again in 1610, and was widely regarded as the "Geneva of the North" or the "alma mater" of the Dutch Reformed Church. These attributes made the city the ideal place for Althusius to propose his particular brand of political philosophy; Emden's theological and political prominence coupled with its yen for religious and civic independence made the Althusian political theory both topical and popular. 

After his death, Althusius remained a controversial thinker. His Politica was attacked by Henning Arnisaeus and Hugo Grotius during the seventeenth century for its defence of local autonomies against the rise of territorial absolutism and proponents of the modern unitary nation state.

Althusius saw confederations as feasible and successful cooperative constitutional orders. In his view, a confederation could be built on successive levels of political community where each community pursues common interests. A village was a union of families, a town was a union of guilds, a province was a union of towns, a state was a union of provinces, and an empire was a union of states. 

Given that Althusius was a noted Calvinist, it is intriguing that his concept of subsidiarity was taken up and later used in 1891 by the Roman Catholic Church for its social teaching. The material conditions of modernity, including both capitalism as the dominant economic system, and its potential adversary socialism, presented a significant challenge to the Roman Catholic Church in its attempts to forge a social teaching relevant to dealing with the actual conditions of everyday life.

The Rerum novarum, with the direct translation of the Latin meaning "of revolutionary change", or Rights and Duties of Capital and Labour, is an encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII on 15 May 1891, and considered a foundational text of modern Catholic social teaching.

An encyclical was an open letter, passed to all Catholic patriarchs, primates, archbishops and bishops, and this Rerum novarum addressed the condition of the working classes.

It discussed the relationships and mutual duties between labour and capital, as well as government and its citizens. Of primary concern was the need for some amelioration of "the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class." It supported the rights of labour to form unions, rejected socialism and unrestricted capitalism, while affirming the right to private property. 

Essentially conservative, particularly in its respect for the liberal sacred cow, private property, regardless of the probable scales of inequality, nevertheless this document held that;  

"wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner. If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice." 

Re:LODE Radio reflects on the present situation in the UK during the pandemic crisis, where government financial support for working families, currently 80% of income up to a maximum of £2,500, and then planned to run at a reduced 60% of wages. But many families and individuals have not been included in this furlough scheme and so rely on the inadequate and discredited benefits system that is called Universal Credit but often leads to universal debt.

The UK party of government regards this level of support as generous. Reality suggests that 60% of 100% normally earned income, and a 100% that often barely supports the costs of living, ends up being more like a debt and poverty trap. This is a widespread occurrence across the globe. 

Recently, local leaders across the north of England have made the case for protecting lives, livelihoods and jobs with a more realistic scheme. It is only because the kindness of people is overflowing that society is not irreparably broken. Food banks, schools and charities have held back some of the consequences that flow from the stark inequalities that are being revealed across the United Kingdom.

Human kindness is overflowing . . .

. . . and I think it's going to rain today

Cover of Randy Newman's I think it's going to rain today by Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr.

Back to the Vatican and an encyclical issued by Pope Pius XI on 15 May 1931, 40 years after Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum novarum, further developing Catholic social teaching. 

Unlike Leo XIII, who addressed the condition of workers, Pius XI discusses the ethical implications of the social and economic order. He describes the major dangers for human freedom and dignity arising from unrestrained capitalism, socialism, and totalitarian communism. He also calls for the reconstruction of the social order based on the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity.

The encyclical was called Quadragesimo anno, Latin for "In the 40th Year", to place this extension to the Catholic Church's views on its social teaching in a direct relationship to the Rerum novarum issued 40 years before. 

The Wikipedia article on subsidiarity and Catholicism notes that:

As with many social encyclicals in the modern period, this one occurs in the historical context of the intensifying struggle between communist and capitalist ideologies, exactly forty years – hence the title – after the Vatican's first public stance on the issue in Rerum novarum. Promulgated in 1931, Quadragesimo anno is a response to German National Socialism and Soviet communism, on the one hand, and to Western European and American capitalist individualism on the other. It broke the surface of Catholic social teaching in this context, and it is helpful to keep this in mind. 

The fundamental principle of subsidiarity is stated thus in the Quadragesimo anno:

It is a fundamental principle of social philosophy, fixed and unchangeable, that one should not withdraw from individuals and commit to the community what they can accomplish by their own enterprise and industry. (Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo anno, 79)

The principle of subsidiarity has had a significant influence on the developing political philosophy of European political movements and the formation of Christian Democratic political parties. The Wikipedia article on subsidiarity and Catholicism notes:

As Christian Democratic political parties were formed, they adopted the Catholic social teaching of subsidiarity, as well as the neo-Calvinist theological teaching of sphere sovereignty, with both Protestants and Roman Catholics agreeing "that the principles of sphere sovereignty and subsidiarity boiled down to the same thing."

The Church's belief in subsidiarity is found in the programmes of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, where grassroots community organizing projects are supported to promote economic justice and end the cycle of poverty. These projects directly involve the people they serve in their leadership and decision-making.

The Wikipedia article on subsidiarity notes: 

Subsidiarity is perhaps presently best known as a general principle of European Union law. According to this principle, the Union may only act to make laws collectively where independent action of individual countries is insufficient without equal action by other members.

Subsidiarity was established in EU law by the Treaty of Maastricht, which was signed on 7 February 1992 and entered into force on 1 November 1993. The present formulation is contained in Article 5(3) of the Treaty on European Union (consolidated version following the Treaty of Lisbon, which entered into force on 1 December 2009):

Under the principle of subsidiarity, in areas which do not fall within its exclusive competence, the Union shall act only if and in so far as the objectives of the proposed action cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States, either at central level or at regional and local level, but can rather, by reason of the scale or effects of the proposed action, be better achieved at Union level.

The national parliaments of EU member states have an "early warning mechanism" whereby if one third raise an objection – a "yellow card" – on the basis that the principle of subsidiarity has been violated, then the proposal must be reviewed. If a majority do so – an "orange card" – then the Council or Parliament can vote it down immediately. 

Taking back control?

The Brexiteer mantra of taking back control in exiting the European Union has led to a situation where sovereignty in the United Kingdom has returned to the default setting of centralisation of power, and there are no yellow or orange cards. Not only is there an increased centralisation of power there is a lack of accountability, as the blue brick Conservative MP's in the so-called Red Wall are discovering. 

Helen Pidd, North of England editor for the Guardian reported on a joint letter from a group of Tory MP's in northern England expressing fears that the Conservative election pledge to 'level up' is being abandoned (Mon 26 Oct 2020).

Over 50 Tory Mp's in northern England press PM for roadmap out of lockdown

It's not about levelling up it's about business as usual with a centralised UK executive power in Westminster. The spectacle before us in this pandemic is a government increasing the profitable outsourcing of state, devolved powers and local authority functions to private interests intimately connected to Conservative interests and individuals. NHS test and trace is a prime example, among many others. 

George Monbiot, writing an Opinion piece for the Guardian today (Wed 28 Oct 2020) exposes how a vital public service is being bungled by private contractors under the headline:

How teenagers ended up operating crucial parts of England’s test and trace system 

This is the devolving of political power, social policy and function to unaccountable capitalist interests that have no allegiance to either "the nation" or "the people".

Subsidiarity, anarchism and bioregionalism? 

There is a reference in the Wikipedia article on Subsidiarity to a way of looking at the grass roots and ethical approach of Catholic social teaching as a form of anarchism. Philip Berryman's book from 1989, Our Unfinished Business - The U.S. Catholic Bishops' Letters on Peace and the Economy, is the reference cited in the article. He writes:

Is not the "principle of subsidiarity" somewhat anarchist? It is perhaps not accidental that E. F. Schumacher was Catholic, as is Ivan Illich. There is a clear strain of anarchism in the Catholic Worker movement, as well as in many peace activists (for example, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, and Elizabeth McAlister).

Ivan Illich died in 2002. He continues this thought and makes a connection to what was in the late 1980's a recent anarchism inspired movement - bioregionalism. He writes:

The root idea of this movement is that we humans do in fact live in discernible regions, each with its own characteristics. We should live in harmony within these regions rather than to do violence to them and to the earth. For example bioregionalists believe we should consume locally produced food rather than trucking it across the continent or flying it or shipping it from another hemisphere. Human ingenuity should be turned to developing available resources to the utmost while remaining in harmony with the local ecology.  

NO! WE DON'T NEED TO KEEP ON TRUCKIN'! 

Robert Crumb's visual riff on the lyrics of the Blind Boy Fuller song "Truckin' My Blues Away", consists of an assortment of men, drawn in Crumb's distinctive style, strutting confidently across various landscapes. The strip's drawings became iconic images of optimism during the hippie era.

Crumb was offered $100,000 by Toyota to reproduce the image for a Keep On Truckin' advertising campaign, but turned it down.

Robert Crumb says in The R. Crumb Handbook by Robert Crumb and Peter Poplaski.

I became acutely self-conscious about what I was doing. Was I now a "spokesman" for the hippies or what? I had no idea how to handle my new position in society! . . . Take Keep on Truckin... for example. Keep on Truckin'... is the curse of my life. This stupid little cartoon caught on hugely. There was a D.J. on the radio in the seventies who would yell out every ten minutes: "And don't forget to KEEP ON TR-R-RUCKIN'!" Boy, was that obnoxious! Big feet equals collective optimism. You're a walkin' boy! You're movin' on down the line! It's proletarian. It's populist. I was thrown off track! I didn't want to turn into a greeting card artist for the counter-culture! I didn't want to do 'shtick'—the thing Lenny Bruce warned against. That's when I started to let out all of my perverse sex fantasies. It was the only way out of being "America's Best Loved Hippy Cartoonist."

Q. Boris the dodger or Boris the menace? 

A. Both, deservedly! 

The political class in the United Kingdom overseeing a surreptitious "coup d'état", are cast as comic characters from the Beano in Martin Rowson's cartoon on ministers selling Brexit from 2018.

It's only going to get worse for the blue bricks in the red wall, and even worse still for their constituents when it comes to the predicted impact of Brexit on the UK economy.

Lisa O'Carroll, Brexit correspondent for the Guardian, reported just over a week ago on a possible Brexit job shock for factory workers in the red wall constituencies (Wed 21 Oct 2020). She writes under the headline and subheading: 

Red wall areas facing Brexit job shock even under a deal – report

Voters who switched to Tories could easily swing back if factory jobs go, says report

Lisa O'Carroll writes: 

The “red wall” voters who helped deliver Boris Johnson’s election victory will be disproportionately affected by Brexit even in the event of a deal being agreed, storing up trouble for the prime minister in 2024, according to a report.

With the new wave of Tory MPs in former Labour strongholds forced to choose between supporting Johnson over his handling of coronavirus lockdowns in the north and answering to their constituents facing job losses, the report forecasts more trouble after Brexit.

It classes 35 of the constituencies as “vulnerable” to a Brexit job shock because they rely so heavily on manufacturing.

As the gains made by the Conservative party in 2019 were so slender, they could easily be reversed by job losses or the uncertainty to livelihoods caused by Brexit, says the Manufacturing in the Marginals report, compiled by a former Foreign Office official and high commissioner.

Lexington Communications report

In a fresh look at the consequences of Brexit, Paul McGrade weighed up the number of votes that delivered the Tories’ majority against manufacturing jobs, constituency by constituency. In some constituencies the capacity for Brexit shock is greater because so many key jobs are concentrated in one sector.

For example, in Bury North, where the Tories took the seat from Labour by 105 votes, there are 4,500 people in manufacturing jobs, with many in the chemical industry, a sector recently identified as at risk from Brexit.

The chemicals company BASF, which has six sites in the UK, has said Brexit will add a £1bn of costs to its business, even if there is a deal, potentially threatening the future of some of its operations and those in supply chains that use their chemicals in paint, coatings and agriculture.

This is because it faces £50,000-£60,000 in additional costs to go through a new compliance process for each of its 1,300 unique chemicals, because the UK is coming out of the EU’s Reach regulation system.

“Given how exposed the chemical industry is to trade disruption with the EU, owing to its heavily regulated nature, this underlines how economic harm to manufacturing could do significant electoral damage in these Tory-held marginals,” says the report. “In Bury, where the Conservatives won two seats on very slim majorities, and in neighbouring Heywood and Middleton, the scale of employment in the chemical industry is very high, amounting to 4,495 jobs.”

The challenges flow from Britain’s departure from the single market and the customs union and will be faced irrespective of a deal being struck.

“The risks from no deal are well known. But our report, for the first time, maps where manufacturing jobs are at risk in every constituency in Britain, deal or no deal. In much of the blue/red wall, the number of jobs potentially at risk far outweighs the current political majorities, which shows the scale of the post-Brexit challenge for the Conservatives and for Labour if they want to hold or win those seats at the next election,” said McGrade, who is Brexit counsel at Lexington Communications.

If the ratio of factory jobs to Tory majority votes can be said to be roughly 40:1 in Bury North using this “risk” calculation, the next most vulnerable seat for the Conservatives is High Peak in Derbyshire.

Home to thermoplastics manufacturers, chemical suppliers and metal castings companies, it has more than 6,000 manufacturing jobs, compared with the Tory majority of 590 votes – a 10:1 ratio.

Also vulnerable to a Brexit manufacturing decline are Bolton North East and Blyth Valley, where the number of factory jobs is nine times greater than the Tory margin of victory.

Other areas deemed at risk include the West Midlands, which has 30,000 jobs in the motor industry across five constituencies. Solihull, home to Jaguar Land Rover, will be particularly vulnerable, says the report.

“In a lot of these constituencies, these are the best jobs around and are highly skilled,” said McGrade.

The east has a huge reliance on the pharmaceutical industry, bringing the number of jobs in manufacturing up to 242,000 across five constituencies including Cambridge and Welwyn Hatfield.

The report says it recognises that manufacturing is not some sort of “political kryptonite” for the Conservatives, but adds: “The fact that these votes were won, in the words of the prime minister, on the strength of ‘borrowed votes’, means they are vulnerable to switching next time.”

Taking back control? 

This introductory article by Joe Humphreys and his interview with the philosopher Michele Nicoletti was published in the Irish Times (Tue 19 Mar 2020) under the headline and subheading: 

‘Take back control’: why the Brexit slogan resonates across Europe

Unthinkable: People want ‘sovereignty’ over their lives, says philosopher Michele Nicoletti

An irony of the Brexit debacle is that it has taken the focus off major flaws in the European project. A referendum stemming from some quite justified criticism of the European Union has blinded us to the fact that Europe is in a mess.

Several countries, including our own, have highly unstable governments patched together from competing factions. Public debate is coarse and polarising. The result?

“Representative democracies are showing an increasing weakness and lack of efficacy in governing the great contemporary challenges, such as climate change, migrations or the protection of social rights,” says Michele Nicoletti.

Professor of political philosophy at University of Trento, in Italy, and a former chairman of a major European human rights watchdog, Nicoletti is in Dublin next week diagnosing Europe’s maladies for a public lecture at the Royal Irish Academy.

He emphasises the need to look beyond the troubles of any one country, and to acknowledge the fear, intolerance and “mistrust in the ruling classes” which has swept across Europe. “We cannot remain indifferent to these fears and we must ensure that our institutions – at local, national and international level – can regain the ability to address these fears head on, to listen to them and provide comfort, to instil courage and hope.”

Part of that process is for governments to try to understand why so many people feel dispossessed or victimised; why the slogan “take back control” resonates so widely. Nicoletti believes it starts with the human wish for “self-belonging” – a desire to have both one’s dignity respected and one’s uniqueness recognised.

While this “principle of self-belonging” sounds very theoretical, it “has to be translated into concrete legal and social protections for the human being,” says Nicoletti, this week’s Unthinkable guest. This includes strengthening instruments for the protection of individuals, and combating “the invasion of the private sphere by criminals and speculators”.

The interview 

Can you explain the principle of ‘self-belonging’, and why it’s important.

“People live today in a situation of great disquiet towards the future and in a state of fear. I define this fear as the fear of being dispossessed of oneself. Many people are afraid that their government has escaped from their hands and ended up who knows where – in the hands of international finance or technocrats or uncontrolled migration dynamics.

“I interpret ‘sovereignism’ also as a reaction to this fear: as a desire to be ‘sovereign’ over our own life, to decide on our own destiny. If this is true, fear can be answered in two ways: either by seeking protection from those who are strong or by trying to find resources in ourselves, in order to face the current challenges.

“Those who think to save themselves by being protected from others end up increasing their dependence and the sense of dispossession. Instead, we must go the opposite route, the way of empowerment of individuals and communities. The principle of self-belonging goes in this direction. It affirms that every human being belongs to herself and is not a ‘thing’ in the hands of others or a ‘fragment’ of a whole.

How do national and international institutions currently fail to recognise the ‘self’?

“Recognising the difference of each individual and community ‘self’ and paying equal respect to them is tiring and expensive.

“It is easier to govern slaves than free subjects. We know this from the ancient Greeks. Yet the true political government is the government over equal and free beings. The rest is a paternalistic or despotic government.

“Europe has been the place of invention of this form of government of free and equal beings. Now the challenge is to realise this form of government at the European level, renouncing every technocratic government that flattens the differences.”

Is it important for politicians to always keep their promises? One of the difficulties for the British government is that the electorate has voted for something which most political leaders believe will do the country harm.

“In a democratic regime, it is essential for politicians to respect the will of the people. But the people need to have clear and real alternatives... Today, after many months, British citizens do not know yet what they have opted for. This is totally irresponsible behaviour on the part of the rulers.

“At this point, it would be good to clarify what is the actual alternative to Brexit and to call citizens back to choose between two clear and real alternatives. This would not be a U-turn on policy. On the contrary, [it would be] the only way to respect citizens’ will and to take it seriously.”

A number of political philosophers, including Onora O’Neill, have voiced concern about an over-emphasis on rights today at the expense of duties. What duties do citizens have locally, nationally and internationally?

“We owe to Simone Weil in her wonderful book L’enracinement the idea that ‘The notion of obligations comes before that of rights… A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds’. Declaring that every human being has the right to food without having fixed a corresponding duty to ‘feed the hungry’ is an empty enunciation.

“Without a minimum of solidarity the human species is unable to survive. We are the mammals that have the longest gestation period and dependence on other human beings to be fed. So the duty of caring for others is written in our DNA.

“On the social and political level we find the same centrality of the duties of solidarity towards the other members of our own community, be it the local community, the national state, Europe or the society of mankind. This is why citizens have always had not only rights but also duties: to contribute to the common defence of life and protection of the vulnerable people, to use their own talents and pay taxes, to respect common rules and to change them democratically when they are wrong.”

Other thinkers, such as Zaki Laïdi and Yuval Noah Harari, have traced the current political malaise to a loss of meaning within western countries. Is there a political vision for Europe which can give people a sense of collective purpose?

“There is no doubt that in contemporary societies there is often a loss of meaning. But I have doubts that this loss is mainly due to politics. It is not the aim of politics to give sense to life. Love, religions, the arts and other more important things can play this role.

“But politics – and only politics – can achieve a peaceful and just order in which it is easier for people to rediscover the meaning of their lives.

“This would seem to me a great task for politics and also a good reason for commitment. The political vision of Europe that can still mobilise the energies has always been the same since the birth of European civilisation and it derives from its humanistic traditions: building a city at the service of the human person, her freedom and her search for beauty.

“Humanising politics is the European mission. And this can be done only if the dignity of every human being is respected, if power and technology serve the human person, if the critical rationality is preserved.”

‘The notion of obligations comes before that of rights… A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds’. Declaring that every human being has the right to food without having fixed a corresponding duty to ‘feed the hungry’ is an empty enunciation.

When it comes to duties and responsibilities in a world dominated by the power held by those that serve capitalist interests . . . 

. . . it all boils down to money. 

Money, you've got lots of friends

They're crowding around your door

But when you're gone and spending ends

They don't come no more

So says one of the verses in "God Bless the Child", a song written by Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog Jr. in 1939. It was first recorded on May 9, 1941 and released by the Okeh Records in 1942.

In her autobiography Lady Sings the Blues Holiday says that an argument with her mother over money led to the song. She says that during the argument her mother said "God bless the child that's got his own." The anger over the incident led her to use that line as the starting point for a song, which she worked out in conjunction with Herzog.

In his 1990 book Jazz Singing, Will Friedwald describes the song as "sacred and profane," as it references the Bible while indicating that religion seems to have no effect in making people treat each other better. 

The first lines of Billie Holiday's song run: 

Them that's got shall get . . .

. . . them that's not shall lose 

This UK government and this UK political party has shown itself resistant to one of the most basic social duties and responsibilities; the abolition of food poverty and homeless destitution. 

Martin Rowson: a gruelling ordeal

A government of greed and incompetence? 

An absence of empathy? 

A lack of social conscience? 

The pursuit of short term returns . . . 

This does not bode well when considering the immediate climate crisis. While people are hungry then it's not much use to them worrying about global heating, carbon emissions, methane emissions, deforestation, melting ice and biodiversity catastrophes.

Speaking of which . . .

Jonathan Watts, Global environment editor for the Guardian reports on scientists' alarm at the record delay in the freezing of Arctic sea ice. 

Jonathan Watts reports under the subheading: 

Delayed freeze in Laptev Sea could have knock-on effects across polar region, scientists say 

Jonathan Watts writes:

For the first time since records began, the main nursery of Arctic sea ice in Siberia has yet to start freezing in late October.

The delayed annual freeze in the Laptev Sea has been caused by freakishly protracted warmth in northern Russia and the intrusion of Atlantic waters, say climate scientists who warn of possible knock-on effects across the polar region.

Ocean temperatures in the area recently climbed to more than 5C above average, following a record breaking heatwave and the unusually early decline of last winter’s sea ice.

The trapped heat takes a long time to dissipate into the atmosphere, even at this time of the year when the sun creeps above the horizon for little more than an hour or two each day.

Graphs of sea-ice extent in the Laptev Sea, which usually show a healthy seasonal pulse, appear to have flat-lined. As a result, there is a record amount of open sea in the Arctic.

“The lack of freeze-up so far this fall is unprecedented in the Siberian Arctic region,” said Zachary Labe, a postdoctoral researcher at Colorado State University. He says this is in line with the expected impact of human-driven climate change.

“2020 is another year that is consistent with a rapidly changing Arctic. Without a systematic reduction in greenhouse gases, the likelihood of our first ‘ice-free’ summer will continue to increase by the mid-21st century,” he wrote in an email to the Guardian.

This year’s Siberian heatwave was made at least 600 times more likely by industrial and agricultural emissions, according to an earlier study.

The warmer air temperature is not the only factor slowing the formation of ice. Climate change is also pushing more balmy Atlantic currents into the Arctic and breaking up the usual stratification between warm deep waters and the cool surface. This also makes it difficult for ice to form.

“This continues a streak of very low extents. The last 14 years, 2007 to 2020, are the lowest 14 years in the satellite record starting in 1979,” said Walt Meier, senior research scientist at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center. He said much of the old ice in the Arctic is now disappearing, leaving thinner seasonal ice. Overall the average thickness is half what it was in the 1980s.

The downward trend is likely to continue until the Arctic has its first ice-free summer, said Meier. The data and models suggest this will occur between 2030 and 2050. “It’s a matter of when, not if,” he added.

Scientists are concerned the delayed freeze could amplify feedbacks that accelerate the decline of the sea ice. It is already well known that a smaller area of ice means less of a white area to reflect the sun’s heat back into space. But this is not the only reason the Arctic is warming more than twice as fast as the global average.

The Laptev Sea is known as the birthplace of ice, which forms along the coast there in early winter, then drifts westward carrying nutrients across the Arctic, before breaking up in the spring in the Fram Strait between Greenland and Svalbard. If ice forms late in the Laptev, it will be thinner and thus more likely to melt before it reaches the Fram Strait. This could mean fewer nutrients for Arctic plankton, which will then have a reduced capacity to draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

More open sea also means more turbulence in the upper layer of the Arctic ocean, which draws up more warm water from the depths.

Dr Stefan Hendricks, a sea ice physics specialist at the Alfred Wegener Institute, said the sea ice trends are grim but not surprising. 

“It is more frustrating than shocking. This has been forecast for a long time, but there has been little substantial response by decision-makers.”

. . . and furthermore! 

Jonathan Watts, Global environment editor for the Guardian, reported yesterday (Tue 27 Oct 2020) on new evidence that frozen methane deposits in the Arctic Ocean are beginning to be released as a result of global heating.

Arctic methane deposits 'starting to release', scientists say

Scientists say they have found evidence that frozen methane deposits in the Arctic Ocean have started to be released over a large area of the continental slope off the East Siberian coast, the Guardian can reveal.

High levels of the potent greenhouse gas have been detected down to a depth of 350 metres in the Laptev Sea near Russia, prompting concern among researchers that the discovery could have “serious climate consequences”.

The slope sediments in the Arctic contain a huge quantity of frozen methane and other gases – known as hydrates. Methane has a warming effect 80 times stronger than carbon dioxide over 20 years. The United States Geological Survey has previously listed Arctic hydrate destabilisation as one of four most serious scenarios for abrupt climate change.

The international team onboard the Russian research ship R/V Akademik Keldysh said most of the bubbles were currently dissolving in the water but methane levels at the surface were four to eight times what would normally be expected and this was venting into the atmosphere.

“At this moment, there is unlikely to be any major impact on global warming, but the point is that this process has now been triggered. This East Siberian slope methane hydrate system has been perturbed and the process will be ongoing,” said the Swedish scientist Örjan Gustafsson, of Stockholm University, in a satellite call from the vessel.

The scientists – who are part of a multi-year International Shelf Study Expedition – stressed their findings were preliminary. The scale of methane releases will not be confirmed until they return, analyse the data and have their studies published in a peer-reviewed journal.

But the discovery of potentially destabilised slope frozen methane raises concerns about the potential impact on the speed of global heating.

The Arctic is considered ground zero in the debate about the vulnerability of frozen methane deposits – which have been called the “sleeping giants of the carbon cycle” - in the ocean, and if releases were to exceed a tipping point it could increase the speed of global heating.

With the Arctic temperature now rising more than twice as fast as the global average, the question of when – or even whether – they will be released into the atmosphere has been a matter of considerable uncertainty in climate computer models.

The 60-member team on the Akademik Keldysh believe they are the first to observationally confirm the methane release is already under way across a wide area of the slope about 600km offshore.

At six monitoring points over a slope area 150km in length and 10km wide, they saw clouds of bubbles released from sediment.

At one location on the Laptev Sea slope at a depth of about 300 metres they found methane concentrations of up to 1,600 nanomoles per litre, which is 400 times higher than would be expected if the sea and the atmosphere were in equilibrium.

Igor Semiletov, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who is the chief scientist onboard, said the discharges were “significantly larger” than anything found before. “The discovery of actively releasing shelf slope hydrates is very important and unknown until now,” he said. “This is a new page. Potentially they can have serious climate consequences, but we need more study before we can confirm that.”

The most likely cause of the instability is an intrusion of warm Atlantic currents into the east Arctic. This “Atlantification” is driven by human-induced climate disruption.

The latest discovery potentially marks the third source of methane emissions from the region. Semiletov, who has been studying this area for two decades, has previously reported the gas is being released from the shelf of the Arctic – the biggest of any sea.

For the second year in a row, his team have found crater-like pockmarks in the shallower parts of the Laptev Sea and East Siberian Sea that are discharging bubble jets of methane, which is reaching the sea surface at levels tens to hundreds of times higher than normal. This is similar to the craters and sinkholes reported from inland Siberian tundra earlier this autumn.

Temperatures in Siberia were 5C higher than average from January to June this year, an anomaly that was made at least 600 times more likely by human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide and methane. Last winter’s sea ice melted unusually early. This winter’s freeze has yet to begin, already a later start than at any time on record.