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Don’t grovel – demand!
“It’s not much to ask in return for a year’s work”, argues Barrie Clement in the current issue of Unite the Union’s magazine, uniteWORKS. What’s this about? It’s the “Living Wage”.
The Living Wage was invented by the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University. The aim, says Clement, was “to provide the minimum pay rate required to provide the essentials of life.” According to Clement that means “enough to cover rent and energy bills and something left over for one cheap holiday in the UK.”
But the last part of that sentence suggests the grovelly position of the union on this question. Apart from eating and paying the bills, all we deserve “in return for a year’s work” is “one cheap holiday in the UK”. Thanks, Barrie.
Of course, everybody understands that the national minimum wage of £6.31 an hour is not a living wage. But neither is Loughborough’s £7.65 (£8.80 in London), although 5 million people across the UK are paid less than that. Yet, in September, Unite argued to the Low Pay Commission that “the statutory minimum should be uprated in line with the Living Wage.” Why did they argue for that? For replacing poverty wages with – er, well – poverty wages?
It looks like they were less robust than even that. According to Clement, Unite urged the Commission “to ‘take the boldest possible step’ towards doing so.” Whatever could that mean? Do it? Do a bit of it? Don’t do it? How hesitant and grovelly can you get?
It’s not clear what General Secretary Len McCluskey thinks. He says, “The legal minimum should be raised to a living wage to end the desperate wage depression inflicted on working people.” Well, a proper living wage would do that – but not Loughborough’s Living Wage.
There are a number of dangers here. Ed Miliband may have the odd nightmare about the first: the Tories could uprate the minimum wage to the Loughborough levels (Boris Johnson supports Loughborough, David Cameron apparently does) and that would leave Labour with no trousers.
The second danger is for the rest of us: McCluskey and Unite clearly want a Labour government. But – in line with previous form – Labour could promise to implement such an uprating and, on winning the 2015 election, break their promise. “It’s unaffordable to make it anything other than voluntary”, they might say, “both for the public and private sectors. The Tories have left such a mess, we didn’t realise.” If that happened the disillusionment of workers with politics would be increased beyond measure, with all the benefits that that might bring to outfits like UKIP, the BNP and the EDL. But even if Labour did raise the minimum rates to Loughborough levels, low-paid workers would still be left without enough to pay for Barrie Clement’s list of food, rent, energy bills and a cheap holiday.
But a better scenario is possible. Clement tells how cleaners in parliament went on strike to obtain the Loughborough Living Wage – and got it. London Underground cleaners did the same. So imagine what other workers might achieve if they strike, not just for Loughborough but for a proper living wage, well into double figures.
Well, Barrie, I don’t think you meant to send us in that direction – but thanks anyway.
A place to build and inhabit
As a relief from the demonising of niqabs and mosques, from the exceptional publicity given to the Al-Madinah school compared with non-Muslim academy schools also in special measures, and from Islamophobia generally, I take you back, gentle reader, to a time when, at least sometimes, multiculturalism was managed better. W. A. Meeks[1] writes of a time and place when a particular minority’s rights within the community were under threat. They protested to the local magistrates and council. The city authorities responded by declaring that the rights of those citizens should be maintained. They had, said the city council, the right to
“‘come together and have a communal life and adjudicate [their affairs and controversies] among themselves, and that a place be given them in which they may gather together with their wives and children and offer their ancestral prayers and sacrifices to God …’ The magistrates are to set aside a place ‘for them to build and inhabit’, and the market officials are to make provision for ‘suitable food’ to be available for [them].”
The time? 49 BC. The place? Sardis, in the Roman province of Asia. The minority? The Jewish community. Meeks continues:
“The subsequent history of the Jews in Sardis was apparently extraordinarily happy. In the second or early third century they were given for their ‘place’ a remodelled basilica, of huge size and elegant decoration, part of the monumental Roman gymnasium complex on the main street of the city, which they kept until the city itself was destroyed, long after the [Roman] empire had become officially Christian.”
Those were the days.
[1] Meeks, W.A. (2003), The First Urban Christians: the Social World of the Apostle Paul, Yale University Press, Yale, pp. 34-35.
Let’s be clear – Tory and Lib Dem MPs have decided terminally ill patients should work or starve
(not satire – it’s ConDemNation today)
Back in 2011, Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs joined together to reject an amendment which would have exempted terminally ill cancer patients from benefit cuts.
They decided that if you are diagnosed with a terminal illness such as cancer – but have been given more than 6 months to live – you will have to work or starve.
Here’s a previous blogpost about that:
The government has finally done something so outrageous even I can’t be bothered to satirise it
This decision by coalition MPs was so outrageous that after intense lobbying, there were some concessions made by the government.
However, in a bizarre piece of upside-down DWP logic, it now seems that if you have less than 6 months to live – you will be refused benefits.
This is from the Chester and Ellesmere Port Foodbank blog:
Jenny
View original post 342 more words
Henry V, Williams and Iraq
Well, when you feel a theme coming on …
Henry V, eh? Well, I’ve sometimes thought (not recently) that if someone had sent Tony Blair the following bit from Henry V the whole Iraq fiasco could have been avoided. In this scene Bates and Williams are debating in the trenches (well, you know) with the king (they don’t know it’s him) the merits or otherwise of the war. Henry describes his cause as “just and his quarrel honourable”:
“Williams: That’s more than we know.
Bates: Ay, or more than we should seek after. For we know enough if we know we are the king’s subjects. If his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us.
Williams: But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads chopped off in a battle shall join together at the latter day, and cry all, ‘We died at such a place’ – some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle, for how can they charitably dispose of anything, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it …”
So do I think that if someone had quoted Williams to Blair (“the king who led them to it”) he would have listened? No, I don’t. But I still wish someone had done it.
Sycophancy is not new
The words quoted below are from Shakespeare’s Henry V. It simply struck me that their equivalent can be heard on a regular basis in today’s House of Commons, as lowly backbench MPs intent on promotion suck up to the prime minister in the hope of being given their just reward. The two sycophants are the Earl of Cambridge and Sir Thomas Grey, and they are talking to Henry:
“Cambridge: Never was monarch better feared and loved
Than is your majesty. There’s not, I think, a subject
That sits in heart-grief and uneasiness
Under the sweet shade of your government.
“Grey: True. Those that were your father’s enemies
Have steeped their galls in honey, and do serve you
With hearts create of duty and of zeal.”
Unlike today’s politicians, Henry didn’t swallow this sickening stuff. He already knew the two were traitors. After spelling that out for 3 pages he told them at the end of the audience:
“Get ye therefore hence,
Poor miserable wretches, to your death;
The taste whereof, God of his mercy give
You patience to endure, and true repentance
Of all your dear offences. – Bear them hence.”
“Bear them hence.” Wouldn’t we just love to hear someone speak those words (who could do it?) to today’s entire tribe of politicians, sycophants and hangers-on. Not to their deaths, of course – perish the thought. But hence. Far, far hence.
Race, the police and two stories of Paris
Gary Younge has given a brilliant interview about the story of the Roma girl in Greece, and the girl in Ireland whose parents were wrongly suspected of not being her parents: http://rabble.ie/2013/10/23/roma-racism-and-tabloid-policing-interview-with-gary-younge/y
Reading it has reminded me of something about Gary Younge, and it’s a lesson in how very protected white people are, and therefore how ignorant.
Younge lived in Paris in 1990, and he writes about it in his book Who Are We? He at first had difficulty finding a flat because he was black. Then someone helped him find a flat-share. But it was in a posh area, near the Panthéon:
“Few black people could afford to live there so whenever I went out I ran the risk of being stopped, searched and rifled for my papers. The assumption was that I was either an illegal immigrant, a thief or a burglar. Almost every day I would suffer this indignity at the hands of the state, and some days more than once.”
One day he was pulled off a métro train at Arts et Métiers station
“and beaten up by several policemen who claimed they were looking for drugs. After that, whenever I saw police, my stomach would tighten and my legs weaken.”
He was in Paris on a student exchange for 6 months in 1990. I was there in 1990 too, and I lived there till 1995. In all that time, nothing like that ever happened to me. How cosseted I was.
I didn’t live near the Panthéon, as it happens. I lived in the 18th arrondissement, near La Porte de Clignancourt. It’s a good mixed area, including white French, Portuguese, Italian, Vietnamese, and a goodly Arab population (most of them originally from Algeria). As a result there were some interesting shops to be found!
Some time in, I think, 1993, a local resident from Ghana was arrested and taken into the local nick and when he came out he was dead from shotgun wounds. He didn’t have a shotgun when he was arrested. Demonstrations after his death continued for a week, heavily controlled by armed police. It was also heavily misreported. One newspaper described how demonstrators had shattered the glass in bus shelters and telephone kiosks. I walked round, but couldn’t find any.
All that was 20 years ago. Aren’t things very different now? Haven’t attitudes changed? We don’t make racist assumptions any more, do we? I’m not so sure. I noticed in recent years that Eurostar travellers wanting to book hotel rooms near the Porte de Clignancourt were actually being warned that some customers had said this area of Montmartre, where I lived unmolested for 5 years, was not safe.
What fantasies haunt the minds of at least some here-today-and-gone-tomorrow Eurostar customers?
Down the privatised drain
An article in the New York Times today (see below) is both funny and informative. It is about government plans to upgrade London’s sewage system, privately of course. There are concerns here about the environment, and about disruption during construction. But much of the discussion is about who is the most appropriate provider, the public or the private sector. The government, of course, says private.
A few points to make: Ann Rosenberg is surely right here when she says:
“The thing that sticks in my throat is that I will be paying for this until I die, and then my children will pay for this tunnel, which none of us will own but which will go into the asset base of Thames Water and its investors.”
And Michael Gerrard at Thames Water revives a hoary old bit of nonsense: “Londoners”, he says testily to objectors, many of whom, like Ann Rosenberg, catch a hint of the profit motive wafting on the breeze, “will have to contribute to their city’s future. If you want London to grow you must invest in the infrastructure.” Sorry, Michael, Londoners would be “contributing to their city’s future” even if your company was bypassed in favour of public investment. Sewage treatment wouldn’t be free. Londoners would contribute as taxpayers.
Of course, Michael Gerrard is not thinking of contributing. He’s thinking of profiting. And we should never forget that if the service is to be provided by the private sector it has to be profitable. So if profit margins aren’t satisfactory, prices will presumably rise (whatever makes me think that?).
But if the company goes bust? Well, the government that let the company loose on our sewage will try to persuade another company to take over the operation (British Gas, for example, or Tescos). If that doesn’t work, it will step in to pick up the pieces, pay for all the costs of failure, and set about providing the service itself from the public purse. All that will cost Londoners a great deal of money. So couldn’t we move straight to public, and cut out the nonsense in between? After all, it’s quite an essential service.
Anyway, here’s the article:
REVISITING UKIP
I’ve had a bit of feedback to my blog on UKIP. So I have revisited the questions I raised, i.e. whether UKIP is a fascist party, and the question of legal status.
It’s often too easy, if we’re lazy, to label the political right as fascist. It was often said that the Thatcher government was fascist but, in one meeting I attended back then, someone rightly pointed out that if that were true we wouldn’t be holding the meeting! So maybe I’ve fallen into the lazy trap. But as I say that, I am still uneasy.
What can’t be denied is that UKIP is a party of the hard right which campaigns not just against the EU but also against LGBT equality, for harsher immigration controls, deeper spending cuts and a quicker break-up of the NHS. In the European Parliament it is in a grouping which includes the far-right, anti-gay United Poland party and the right-wing Northern League of Italy.
The aim of fascism is to smash all working class organisation and ultimately all forms of democracy. Its aim is to use parliamentary democracy in order to destroy it. And fascism means violence, and fascists today encourage and engage in violent street attacks on blacks and Asians (especially Muslims), asylum seekers, LGBT people, trade unionists, the left and so on. This description doesn’t fit UKIP as a party, and its party organisation doesn’t have the disciplined combat form characteristic of fascist parties.
And yet … The history of some of its core members is fascist: HOPE not Hate has highlighted the case of Robert Ray, an Essex councillor, once National Front (NF) organiser for Newham, who canvassed with Nigel Farage during the recent Thurrock council by-election; Nigel Farage himself seems to have such a history, with teachers at his school worried about him being appointed a prefect. One alleged that he was among pupils who marched late at night through a Sussex village shouting Hitler Youth songs.
The words and actions of other prominent UKIP members give rise to similar worries about the core beliefs and attitudes of UKIP. Much of this is documented by HOPE not Hate. Alexandra Phillips, UKIP’s Head of Media, has a particularly bad record when using – well, yes – the media. On Facebook, she frequently mocks the disabled, often referring to herself or others as “spaz” or “spasticated”, both words, says HOPE not Hate, “that have thankfully dropped out of common usage as the majority of British society regard them as offensive.” She also refers to an online friend as an “autistic wanker”. She says she is “hungrier than a Biafran”, a mocking reference to those who starved during the 1960s Nigerian-Biafran war. She said she was “bored of being Anne Frank”, referring to the iconic Dutch victim of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Farage, like Enoch Powell before him, likes to raise impossible spectres so that voters, fearful of the future, will turn to him. Powell’s spectre was of a kind of bloodbath that would take place as a result of immigration: “As I look ahead I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’” Compared to that, Farage’s effort at this year’s conference, like much of what he does, is laughable. And yet it isn’t. For the aim is the same. So he says that from 1 January next year,
nearly 30 million of the good people of Bulgaria and Romania have open access to our country, our welfare system our jobs market. How many will take advantage of that no one knows. The Home Office don’t have any idea at all. The previous estimate was 13,000 in total. Migration Watch thinks 50,000 a year. It could be many times that.
Then he gets to crime, and the threat becomes more sinister, more dangerous:
There is an even darker side to the opening of the door in January. London is already experiencing a Romanian crime wave. There have been an astounding 27,500 arrests in the Metropolitan Police area in the last five years. 92 per cent of ATM crime is committed by Romanians. This gets to the heart of the immigration policy that UKIP wants, we should not welcome foreign criminal gangs and we must deport those who have committed offences.
The statistics here are used in an extremely doubtful way, and HOPE not Hate explains this better than I can – go to the following link and scroll down a bit:
FactCheck: Nigel Farage’s Ukip conference speech
All this is worrying. Of course, some of the scandals associated with UKIP are about the usual jealousies and infighting that go on in any political party. But we should take their racism and xenophobia seriously. When Powell talked of blood, ethnic minorities were attacked and people died. There are similar consequences when Farage does his anti-Romanian rant. HOPE not Hate tells how, in the Eastleigh by-election, the UKIP candidate linked Romanians with “a natural propensity to crime”. Shortly after, two young Romanian workers were attacked in Brighton because their language sounded “East European”. It is partly the rhetoric used, and the images conjured up, by Farage and UKIP as well as the fascists of the BNP and the EDL, that has led to the spate of recent racist attacks on my Afghan-British neighbours as they drive their taxis in the small hours.
And I suppose the question is: Do we want UKIP to get its hands on the levers of power? Because I suspect that, if they do, hostilities will cease between UKIP, the BNP and the EDL. And then we’ll find out whether UKIP is fascist or not.
I think that fascist parties should be banned. And UKIP?
Workers’ rights in Qatar (see previous blog)
Back to Qatar. And football. But not – except in passing – back to workers’ rights. Channel 4 News tonight reported that the 2022 World Cup will go ahead and the place will be Qatar. But there were still concerns.
What were they? Well, the summer heat, really. So could the event be moved to winter? No. To have it at Christmas would clash with the Champions League “at its most lucrative stage”. So that’s Christmas ruled out. So it’s got to be after Christmas, then? No. That would clash with the Winter Olympics or Superbowl – presumably for the same lucrative reasons. Some say that to leave it in the summer period will put the health and safety of players at risk. Others say the newly built eco-friendly stadiums will solve the problems of the desert heat.
So stalemate.
But the last two points (health and safety of players and eco-friendly stadiums) ought to remind us of something else. For while the health and safety of players is important, what about the health and safety of the workers who are building the eco-friendly stadiums and other bits of superstructure at such risk to life and limb (see previous blog)? Unless that issue is addressed, the accidents will continue, the death toll will rise. Qatar 2022’s Hassan al-Thawadi tried to reassure us tonight with talk of “initiatives” by the government and his organisation, but his gabbled and garbled message failed to convince. Meanwhile, FIFA’s Sepp Blatter proclaimed that there were 9 years in which to resolve the issues. He also said that he couldn’t predict the outcome of the arguments about winter, summer, before Christmas, after Christmas, or even, I think, about desert heat, because he was not a prophet. One thing seems likely though: there will be many families in Nepal and India who, after seeing their relatives off to construction jobs in Qatar, will be fearful of predicting whether they will ever return.
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