Right-wing ideologues are weaponising anti-Semitism to silence criticism of capitalism

People who follow Scottish politics may remember John McTernan as the unbelievably inept political strategist who managed to lose 40 of Labour's 41 Scottish seats in Westminster at the 2015 general election.

After masterminding the most catastrophic electoral collapse in British political history one would have thought that McTernan would be treated as the political joke that he is.

However the man with such boundless incompetence that he actually managed to kill the Labour Party in their Scottish heartlands is still routinely given mainstream media platforms and treated as if he's some kind of wise and knowledgeable political oracle, rather than the nonsense-spewing clown-like political figure that he actually is.

For some reason the normally reputable (but always right-leaning) Financial Times has given McTernan a platform to push his cartoonish political nonsense in a column entitled "Labour’s mistake is to believe there are no enemies to the left".

McTernan starts out with a number of obvious lies about Labour anti-Semitism claiming that anti-Semitism in the Labour ranks is "a recent phenomenon", which "coincides with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader".
 

The evidence is absolutely clear that support for anti-Semitic views have fallen dramatically since Jeremy Corbyn became party leader. This is almost certainly due to the massive influx of genuinely left-wing people into the party, many of them from the younger demographics who generally have way more socially liberal and progressive views than the older generations.

And as for the idea that anti-Semitism in Labour is a "recent phenomenon", how is it possible to explain how Labour's chief spin-doctor Alistair Campbell produced vile anti-Semitic attack posters in 2008? How is it possible to explain Campbell telling the journalists who uncovered the scandal to "fuck off and cover something important you twats"? And how is it possible to explain away the fact that the Blairite party leadership decided to take absolutely no action whatever to discipline him for either the anti-Semitic posters, or the abusive and 100% unapologetic reaction to the scandal?

After rambling on pretentiously for paragraph after paragraph McTernan eventually comes out with surely one of the most delusional and self-awareness deficient sentences ever to have featured in the Financial Times.

"Rhetoric about the 1 per cent and economic inequality has the same underlying theme [as anti-Semitic tropes] — a small group of very rich people who cleverly manipulate others to defend their interests. So anti-capitalism masks and normalises anti-Semitism"

This extraordinary effort to conflate legitimate criticisms of issues like capitalism and inequality with anti-Jewish bigotry is extraordinary on so many levels.

According to McTernan's warped worldview anyone who points out that just 8 men own the same wealth as half the world is being anti-Semitic!

Anyone who attempts to critique the excesses of the reckless over-financialised speculation frenzy that late stage capitalism has degenerated into is being anti-Semitic!

Anyone who points out that Tory austerity dogma has resulted in a vast transfer of wealth from the poor and ordinary to the mega-rich elitist class is being anti-Semitic!

Anyone who raises concerns about how mega-rich individuals and corporations routinely buy political influence and use their wealth to cynically manipulate others is being anti-Semitic!

The agenda here is obvious. It's an attempt to defend capitalism from any form of criticism by cynically equating the language of dissent against the hard-right economic status quo with unacceptable racist bigotry.

McTernan is hoping to construct a right-wing mindset where anyone who ever complains about the excesses of capitalism or the problem of rising inequality can be instantly dismissed as a racist bigot so as to permanently evade discussion of any of the actual issues they're trying to raise.

It's an attempt to create a right-wing version of political correctness whereby any attempt to ever question the capitalist system can be instantly shouted down and ignored as if it's nothing more than vile and unacceptable bigotry.

But the grotesque cynicism isn't even the worst thing about it. The worst thing is the vile self-righteousness that manifests as an absolute lack of self-awareness.

Even though he'd already proven himself to be an anti-Semitism denialist by whitewashing Labour's issues before 2015 when Blairites like him were running the show, McTernan imagines himself to be some kind of righteous white knight figure who is right, and just, and proper in his opposition to anti-Semitism. But his attempt to use anti-Semitism as a smokescreen to defend corporations and the mega-rich from any kind of systemic critique relies on an obvious anti-Semitic trope in itself.

In order to define any criticism of the greed, wealth-hoarding, manipulation, corruption, and influence-buying that goes on in late-stage capitalism as anti-Semitism, it's necessary to identify all of these issues as being inherently Jewish traits.

McTernan's line of thinking is that 1. Jews are greedy 2. the political left criticise greed: Therefore the political left are anti-Semites.

McTernan's hopeless effort to conflate criticism of the hard-right economic status quo with anti-Semitism is further demolished if we consider the fact that Jewish intellectuals from across the political spectrum have a long history of critiquing capitalism and inequality. Karl Marx was Jewish. Rosa Luxemburg was Jewish. Helen Suzman was Jewish. Hyman Minsky was Jewish. Robert Skidelsky is Jewish. Noam Chomsky is Jewish.

Are we expected to believe that all of these Jewish activists, academics and intellectuals are raving anti-Semites because they have critiqued capitalism and inequality?

Are we expected to believe that all left-wing Jewish people are 'self-hating Jews' simply because this obnoxious (non-Jewish) failure of a political strategist crudely conflates criticism of capitalism with anti-Semitism?

The problem with vile and conniving opportunists like McTernan is that they've realised accusations of anti-Semitism can be weaponised to discredit and silence their political opponents, but they're so base and crude that they end up actually spreading vile anti-Semitic tropes like 'greedy Jews' and 'self-hating Jews' around in their efforts to weaponise the issue for their own partisan purposes.

Conclusion

Criticism of the problems and excesses of late stage capitalism is not anti-Semitism.

John McTernan is cynically using the anti-Semitism issue to smear anyone who dares question what he considers to be the natural order of things.

However in order to weaponise anti-Semitism in this manner he's produced a vile article that stumbles through anti-Semitism denialism, invocation of the vile anti-Semitic 'greedy Jew' trope, to the implication that Jews who dare to ever critique capitalism or inequality must be 'self -hating Jews' who are engaging in anti-Semitism simply by raising their concerns about the state of the world.

Just like almost everything McTernan says, it's entirely useless in actually understanding the world around us, but it does serve to highlight the grotesque self-awareness deficient worldview that him and people like him occupy.

Is it any wonder Labour annihilated their own political heartlands in Scotland after their party became so dysfunctional that utterly repugnant hard-right ideologues like this ended up running the show?

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OR

Jeremy Corbyn is a social democrat

One of the most commonly occurring strategies in the mainstream media propaganda war against Jeremy Corbyn is the tactic of painting him, his shadow cabinet and the people who support him as a bunch of extreme-left fanatics.

If you want proof that they're not just consider the response of the Labour Shadow Business Secretary Jon Trickett to the BHS corporate pillaging scandal.

"The Prime Minister laments public cynicism about the corporate sector. But for as long as scandals like Sports Direct and BHS continue to occur, the public are justified in their impression that in Tory Britain 2016 there is one rule for the 1% and another rule for the 99%. Only a fundamental overhaul of corporate governance will restore their faith." [source]

Trickett's response clearly isn't a full scale anti-capitalist condemnation, it's a call for better regulation. Far from being a far-left battle cry, it's actually a classic demonstration of social democratic values.

In reality, hard-left people who have anarcho-communist or Marxist tendencies are extremely dismissive of the social democratic idea that the excesses of capitalism can be mitigated through corporate regulation and socialist policies (like operating health services, public transport and energy infrastructure as not-for-profit public services). Very left-wing people are usually very dismissive of social democracy because they see capitalism as essentially unreformable.

The debate between the centre-left social democrats and the diverse bunch of more left-wing political philosophies that for the sake of brevity I'll lump together as "anti-capitalists" is an interesting one. Both sides have good points to make. The social democratic post-war consensus period (1945 - 1979) saw a blend of regulated capitalism and state socialism. This ideological compromise resulted rising prosperity across all sectors of British society, decades of falling national debt and the longest period of economic stability in British history. It may not have been perfect, but it worked incredibly well while it lasted (that's why it's referred to as the "Golden Age of Capitalism").

On the other hand it is undeniable that the social democratic post-war consensus gradually weakened and was eventually torn down and replaced with the hard-right corporatist Thatcherise ideology that has infected the Westminster establishment club from 1979 to the present. The hard-right Thatcherite ideology resulted in the destruction of Britain's heavy industries and the communities they supported, the fire-sale of countless valuable public assets to private profiteers, severe house price inflation, the financial sector meltdown, ideological austerity and the iniquitous mess we have today. It's possible to argue that as long as socialist policy is only used to mitigate the worst effects of capitalism, then the public will eventually get complacent and hard-right corporatists will seize control and undo all of the good work.

It's certainly fair to argue about whether anti-capitalists have a valid point about capitalism being unreformable. What it's completely unfair to argue is that Jeremy Corbyn, his cabinet, and the majority of his supporters fall under the hard-left "anti-capitalist" banner when they're very clearly 21st Century social democrats (Otherwise Corbyn, McDonnell and Trickett would surely be using the appalling BHS and Sports Direct scandals to call for the overthrow of capitalism rather than better regulation to prevent such scandals happening again).

To anyone with the remotest sprinkling of political literacy, comments like the above quote from Jon Trickett are clear demonstrations of Corbyn's actual position on the centre-left. Such comments make an awful lot of sense to people with social democratic principles (the majority of the UK population), but they clearly don't go anywhere near far enough to appeal to the hard-left "anti-capitalists" they stand accused of being by the right-wing mainstream media propaganda machine.

Conclusion

Next time you hear or read someone talking about Corbyn as if he's a dangerous extreme-left anti-capitalist fanatic, you can be sure that they're either a political illiterate, or if they do know that they're deliberately talking crap, they're clearly taking you for one if they expect you to believe such transparent nonsense.

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OR

The Tory contempt for the value of labour

The Tory establishment elite would gleefully abolish the
May Day bank holiday because it was created in
order to coincide with International Workers' Day

The May Day bank holiday which is celebrated in more than 80 countries across the World is a time for people to celebrate the great achievements of international workers movement. It is a day to recognise the sacrifices made by workers of the past in order to fight for the fair wages and decent working conditions we benefit from today.  In 2011 the Tory led coalition government in the UK proposed the outright abolition of the May Day bank holiday in order to replace it with a so called "United Kingdom" bank holiday in October. The idea that a day to celebrate the hard work and sacrifices of ordinary working people should be abolished is a distinctly Tory idea, in that it expresses the absolute contempt the English establishment elite have for the value of labour.

In England the May Day bank holiday is not just a day of celebration for British workers, it is also an opportunity for the English to show off their cultural eccentricities in the form of Morris Dancing, 'obby 'oss parades, maypole dancing and cheese rolling. That the Tory establishment would do away with all of this wonderful and absurd eccentricity in order to attack the workers reminds us just how spiteful their attitude is towards ordinary working people.

The Tory establishment would gleefully do away with all of this
wonderful and absurd eccentricity in order to attack the workers.

The Tory plans to abolish Labour Day are far from the only example of Tory malice towards ordinary working people, throughout the decades the Tory establishment elite have battled against workers rights. The Tories have always hated the trade union movement and instead of adopting a sensible co-operative approach between employers and unions (as can be seen in Germany and across Scandinavia) the Tory establishment elite spent decades trying to cripple the trade unions, a battle they eventually won in the 1980s. In the 1990s they opposed the introduction of a National Minimum Wage and in the 2000s they supported the Labour party in their policy of pouring hundreds of billions of pounds into the debt riddled financial sector, instead of using this vast cash pile to offer direct support to industry, research and development, infrastructure projects, services, education and manufacturing, preferring to see hundreds of billions in taxpayers' cash used to prop up a dysfunctional financial sector than have it used to protect jobs and industry.

When the Tories returned to power at the head of the coalition government in 2010 they set about their usual tactics of attacking the pay and welfare entitlements of ordinary working people whilst simultaneously giving large tax breaks to corporations and the super-rich. Under the guise of "austerity" the Tory led coalition set about the destruction of hundreds of thousands of state sector jobs, attacks on pensions, huge health service and benefits cuts, the deliberate suppression of state sector wages and derisory increases in the National Minimum Wage (especially for young workers). Whilst the majority of ordinary working people have been made to pay for the reckless gambling of the financial sector through prolonged below inflation pay rises, large pension losses and reductions in welfare standards, the Tories have enabled the super-rich economic elite to become richer. In 2011 the bosses of the FTSE 100 group of corporations awarded themselves an eye watering average salary increase of 49%, the richest 1,000 people in the UK increased their combined wealth by 4.7% to £414 billion and in 2012 George Osborne announced an income tax cut for the very highest earners in the UK, meaning that someone with a salary of £5 million would receive a tax cut of over £240,000 whilst someone working 60 hours a week, 52 weeks a year at national minimum wage would have to get by on around 7% of that tax giveaway.

That the Tories have made the majority of ordinary people pay the cost of "austerity" whilst allowing the richest to continue getting richer comes as no surprise at all, given their unofficial party motto of "steal from the poor to give to the rich". What is surprising is their sheer contempt for the value of peoples labour. This utter contempt can be seen in two key policy areas, their plans to introduce "regional pay" in the state sector and their trenchant defence of the Department for Work and Pensions absurdly unfair workfare schemes.

On the face of it the Tory "regional pay" plan to award higher salaries to those working in richer (Tory) areas and lower salaries to those working in poorer (Labour) areas looks like a case of vindictive political tribalism. A policy aimed at ensuring Labour voting areas are punished by incentivising the most talented state sector workers to leave poorer areas to work in richer, Tory voting areas. That the Tory establishment would use the pay of state sector workers as a political tool to punish areas that vote for their political opponents is bad enough, but their support for the DWP's grotesquely unfair (and economically illiterate) mandatory unpaid labour Workfare schemes really shows their contempt for the value of labour.

Tory employment minister Chris Grayling has repeatedly
shown his contempt for the value of labour with his
trenchant defence of mandatory unpaid Workfare schemes.

Much has been written about the unfairness of forcing unemployed people to work 30 hours a week in order to receive their pitifully low unemployment benefits. The idea that anyone should be compelled to work for giant profit making corporations (Tesco, Sainsbury's, TK Maxx, Burger King, Maplin, HMV, Boots, Poundland, BHS) for no pay at all, already demonstrates the Tories absolute contempt for the labour of unemployed people, but a closer examination of the economic implications reveals that it is not just the labour value of the unemployed that they casually dismiss, it is yours too. Nearly all of these mandatory unpaid labour Workfare schemes involve nothing more than several weeks or months of menial tasks like shelf stacking or warehouse work. For every person that is compelled to work unpaid for these corporations, there is another person denied a job, another person claiming benefits, another person not making tax contributions. If the work needs doing, the corporation should pay someone at least the minimum wage to do it. That the Tories have repeatedly and vehemently defended these schemes demonstrates both their economic illiteracy and their absolute contempt for the value of labour.
 
The Tories are the party of the establishment, they have always worked to protect the interests of the rich establishment elite, the landlords and the capitalists, which by definition means working against the interests of the working poor, the tenants and the trade unionists. The Tories have always valued inherited wealth above earned wealth, and valued wealth accumulated through capitalist exploitation above wealth made through hard labour. So as you are enjoying your May Day bank holiday, try to remember that the day is a celebration of the fact that the workers united to demand fair wages, decent working conditions and the occasional bank holiday, and that the Tories consider these great achievements to be defeats for the establishment class and would gleefully abolish May Day out of sheer spite.

The Mensch fallacy

The ideologically driven neoliberal dogma that has been the foundation of Conservative party policy for over three decades is defunct. It was holed beneath the water line when the "evil state sector" stepped in with the biggest state subsidies in human history (bailouts at above 90% of GDP by the government's own estimates and the near complete nationalisation of several debt stricken and insolvent banks) to rescue the financial sector temples of neoliberalism from the consequences of their own reckless gambling. Yet the political and economic establishment continue hawking exactly the same ideologically driven neoliberal clap trap under the new name of "austerity".

The best that (failed) Tories like Louise Mensch can offer in defence of their adherence to defunct ideologically driven pseudo-economic gibberish is to trot out truly pathetic arguments against those who complain about the defunct neoliberal model, excessive corporate greed, financial sector corruption and growing inequality.

The Mensch fallacy relies upon the straw man argument that anyone that opposes neoliberal economics, must be a raving anti-capitalist tree-hugger who opposes all forms of trade. Thus if these protesters have ever bought any commodity under the capitalist system (coffee and tents are her cited examples) they must be complete hypocrites.

Louise Mensch made this utterly lame point during an appearance on the long running BBC topical news comedy panel show Have I Got News For You and was immediately set upon by the other panellists for having made such a stunningly fallacious argument. That she tried to pull off a spectacularly lame right-wing fallacy in such a public setting gives her the unusual distinction of getting the first ever political myth busting fallacy named in her (dis)honour.

The Mensch fallacy is so lame it hardly needs further deconstruction, but I'll go on anyway.

Opposing the excesses of the deregulated financial sector does not equate to hating capitalism and all forms of trade. Living within a particular economic system does not disbar a person from criticising perceived problems with the system. You don't have to want to go back to a stone age barter system economy in order to complain that the FTSE 100 corporate executives awarded themselves a stonking 49% average pay rise in 2011, at a time when the vast majority of ordinary people were being made to suffer wage repression and harsh self-defeating Tory austerity.

Another huge flaw in the Mensch fallacy is that it would work just as well as a criticism of anti-communist protesters, in that they will almost certainly have benefited from provisions of the state at some point (used the state owned public transport system, drunk from the state owned water supply or relied on their state sponsored education for their ability to write their protest banners).

The fact that the Mensch fallacy is equally applicable to anti-communist protesters is particularly ironic as her argument is little more than a stunningly dim-witted extension of the pathetic "If you don't like it here, why don't you just go and live in North Korea" retort. 
              

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More articles from 
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 

Margaret Thatcher's toxic neoliberal legacies
 

The Tory "economic recovery" mantra is a lie

The Tory contempt for ordinary working people

Austerity is a con
 

2011 in UK Plc

Here are a few facts about the performance of the UK economy in 2011.

• In 2011 the executives that run Britain's elite corporations (the FTSE 100) managed to wipe £85 billion off the value of their companies, a loss of 5.5% of market value.
• These executives were not sacked for this dismal performance, they didn't even suffer a commensurate 5.5% cut in salaries. In fact they awarded themselves stonking average salary rises of 49%.
• Meanwhile ordinary working people in the UK received a miserly average salary increase of 1.4% (the fact that the average wage includes the massive rises for the richest 1%,  skews this figure). If we accept the highly conservative official estimates of 5-6% retail price inflation, this means that the average working salary in the UK deflated by over 3%.

Throw in increasing unemployment, skyrocketing utilities and fuel prices, unscrupulous and virtually unregulated landlords, unsustainable house prices, public transport overcrowding and price inflation, the massive scale of UK private personal debt, Osborne's pathetically self-defeating public sector austerity measures and no attempts to rein in the activities of London's parasitic shadow banking sector, the UK economy looks to be in ruinously poor shape.


The naked greed of these corporate executives should be enough to provoke a massive and unstoppable UK wide anti-capitalist movement. However the British general public have now become so docile, apathetic and down right stupid that they would prefer to vote in meaningless Strictly Disabled Celebrity X-Dancing on Ice polls than rise up in protest against a corrupt and impossibly comprimised establishment elite that seem perfectly happy to rake in their huge taxpayer funded salaries and pension contributions, whilst their loyalties are bought by the corporatists with expensive junkets, campaign contributions and the promise of future highly paid executive positions on the side, so that they are incentivised to allow neo-classical capitalism to continue to eat itself from the inside at the expense of everyone in the country but the tiny corporate elite.

Michael Moore on "Occupy Wall Street" & the Troy Davis execution

I'm sure that US activist Michael Moore would be the first to admit that he is a bit of a fat tosser, but as usual he is bang on the money with these critiques of the corporatisation of America and the disgraceful execution of Troy Davis in Georgia.

More video content on Another Angry Voice

Mixed Economy vs Neoliberalism

British economist John Maynard Keynes,highly influential
in the creation of the Post-War consensus mixed economy.

I decided to make this comparison after reading yet another baseless and generalised attack on the concept of socialism, which went along the lines of:

"Government's are not very good at spending money. This is one of the reasons socialism doesn't work".


So how about looking at the track records of state socialism and neoliberalism in the contexts of UK public spending and socioeconomic trends before we start accepting sweeping generalisations like this?

The Post-War Consensus mixed economy (a mix of state socialism and regulated capitalism).

• 1947-1979 (32 years).
• Key influences & personalities: John Maynard Keynes, R. H. Tawney, William Beveridge, Clement Atlee, Nye Bevan, Harold Macmillan.
• Origins: Started in the wake of a massive debt crisis (WWI + inter-war economic chaos + WWII).
• Budgetary responsibility: 28 consecutive years of budget surpluses, only three years of budget deficits.
• Government Debt: Reduced national debt burden from 237% of GDP in 1947 to 43% in 1979.
• Economic stability: Other than the economic turmoil of the mid-late 1970s which was used as excuses to destroy the Post-War Consensus, an era of relative economic stability despite the loss of Empire and the Cold War partition of Europe.
• Poverty: Massive reduction in levels of absolute poverty.
• Consumer spending power: Provided ordinary working people with levels of discretionary income never seen before (or since).
• Employment: Kept unemployment low on a long term basis.
• Housing: Massive reduction in levels of slum housing and gradually improved access to decent housing for hard working people.
• Public Health: Introduction of the National Health Service to provide health care "free at the point of use".
• Overview: Long term economic stability, massive public debt reduction, commonly referred to as "the golden age of capitalism".

The neoliberal experiment (based on the bankrupt ideological dogma of amoral neoliberalism).

• 1979-2011 (32 years)
• Key influences & personalities: Milton Friedman, Frederick Hayek, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Augusto Pinochet, Gordon Brown.
• Origins: Started in the wake of a few relatively* minor crises (1973 oil shock, late 70s industrial unrest) with the lowest levels of government borrowing in over a Century.
• Budgetary responsibility: Only managed to record budget surplus in 17 of 32 years with a best run of 7 consecutive years (1983-1991) which was partially funded by the firesale of heaps of state infrastructure (privatisation).
• Government Debt: Increased levels of national debt from 43% to 164% (including bailouts 91% GDP & PFI scams 15% GDP, which are misleadingly kept off the national debt figures).
• Economic stability: A period of increasingly violent economic instability despite the end of the Cold War partition of Europe, exponential improvements in IT capabilities and the influx of cheap Asian commodities.
• Poverty: Massively widening of the poverty gap and the creation of pockets of absolute poverty in formerly industrialised areas.
• Consumer spending power: Squeezed levels of discretionary income, especially since Osborne's "self defeating austerity" programme and VAT rises kicked in.
• Employment: Kept unemployment high on a long term basis, with several nasty unemployment spikes during recessions caused by the instability of deregulated markets.
• Housing: Increased levels of slum housing (via unregulated something-for-nothing slumloring) and increasing difficulty for working people to find access to decent housing due to unsustainable speculative house price inflation.
• Public Health: Erosion of free public health provision (dentistry & eyecare), and the gradual privatisation of the National Health Service (PFI hospitals, private sector providers, 2011 Health & Social Care Bill).
• Overview: Resulted in the Neoliberal Economic Crash and "the crisis of capitalism".

* = By "relatively" I mean in comparison to the economic consequences of the World Wars or the Neoliberal Economic Crisis.

Conclusion

Despite the demonstrable failures of militant neoliberalism
over the last 32 years, the UK is stuck with a government
that adheres to the defunct economic dogma of Milton Friedman.

Although there were still plenty of political and socioeconomic problems during the Mixed Economy years I'd say that overall this basic comparison makes a pretty convincing case for a return to the mixed economy. However the ruling Tory led coalition are insistent that the bankrupt "greed-is-good" neoliberal show must go on and that ordinary working people are going to have to pay through the nose for the huge economic failures of the establishment's defunct neoliberal dogma via deliberately stagflationary economic policies, while the financial sector elite laugh all the way to the (taxpayer subsidised) bank.

Self defeating austerity

"Self defeating austerity"

A beautiful turn of phrase used to sum up the idiotic neoliberal response to the crisis of neoliberalism in just 3 words used by the Italian economist Riccardo Bellafiori in a Guardian article entitled A Crisis of Capitalism.
 
Their political dogma of more privatisation, more deregulation, more attacks on state productivity and more transference of wealth to the uber-rich, show neoliberal politicians and economists up to be either mad (Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results - Einstein) or evil (damaging the entire "real economy" of the world by engaging in a deliberate war on the wealth and living standards of the majority of ordinary working people in order to sustain the extravogance of the establishment elite).

The successfully tested alternative to this neoliberal madness in 4 words:

"Restore the mixed economy"

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Neo-Victorianism, nostalgia or revisionism

During his McTaggart lecture Google chairman Eric Schmidt joined
the growing number of people who openly romanticise the Victorian Era.

In recent years it has become a regular feature of British life to hear vague Neo-Victorian sentiments from political and economic leaders. Several prominent Conservatives have called for a return to "Victorian values", their nauseating education minister Michael Gove went as far as to claim that "I don't think there has been a better time in our history". During the annual McTaggart lecture in August 2011 the American chairman of Google advised the UK to "look back to glory days of Victorian era" during his devastating critique of contemporary British educational standards.

You would hope that in romanticising the Victorian era these people are not pining for the return of child labour, unregulated, dangerous and polluting industries, low pay, horrible working conditions, a class system built on foundations of economic discrimination, racism, sexism and homophobia. An era of disgusting and poorly sanitised slums for the masses with pockets of staggering wealth for the economic elite with a political system that disenfranchised women and all but a tiny minority of landed gentlemen.

Thanks to numerous television programmes, on the subject many people are
aware of the magnificent engineering achievements of the Victorian era,
including Brunel's magnificent Clifton Suspension Bridge.

I hope what inspires people to idealise Victorian standards and values are the magnificent engineering achievements of the age, the "protestant work ethic" that powered so many world leading industries, the philanthropism of the Victorian super-rich, the pioneering introduction of many fundamental social reforms, the grandiose buildings and the national pride at being empire builders and world leaders in so many fields of human endeavour.

In my opinion this much romanticised "Great British" age stretches far beyond the lengthy reign of Queen Victoria, after all it would be absurd to think that an epoch could begin and end with the rule of one woman. To take a modern example, no matter how much they try to disguise it these days with their talk of the "big society" and "social mobility", Thatcherism is still at the heart of modern Conservative party policy more than two decades after the great witch herself was deposed.

In my opinion the beginning of the most progressive period in British history can be traced back much further than the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1837. There are a number of credible origins for the narrative of this enterprising and pioneering spirit, the elimination of Catholic heterodoxy in the mid sixteenth century is one plausible starting point however I'm going to fast forward to the birth of the industrial revolution and the development of modern capitalism.

Many of the pioneering capitalist enterprises were brought about under states of overt state oppression. Followers of nonconformist religions were tolerated by the Church of England based elite, but they were barred from the establishment, barred from attending university and from working in legal professions, they were barred from sitting as MPs, prevented from trading in Corporation towns and regularly imprisoned for refusing to pay tithes to the establishment church.

Followers of many of these dissident faiths found their access to the traditional sources of wealth blocked by the state, so as persecuted minorities have done throughout the ages, they turned to their resourcefulness and their sense of community to create their own wealth. The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) were amongst these early industrial pioneers, playing important roles in the development and financing of nascent technologies such as the iron casting process and steam powered factories and transportation, technologies that went on to become fundamental components of the industrial revolution.

The Quakers and many of the other non-conformist religions insisted upon conducting their business in an ethically motivated manner, meaning that they became the leading social reformers of the age. Their convictions led them to provide decent housing and less exploitative working conditions for their employees as well as pioneering the provision of workers' welfare such as education, healthcare and pensions for the communities they founded to populate their factories.

It was in the mid 19th Century that the establishment finally began to practice serious religious toleration, the English universities finally began admitting Quakers and John Dalton became the first Quaker MP in 1830. Eventually the huge social benefit of the non-conformist welfare schemes became undeniable to the socio-political elite who gradually began to use the state to provide social welfare instead of leaving it up to the personal disposition of the factory owners. One of the great pioneering social reforms enacted by government was the 1870 Universal Education Act, which came into force against a background of working class enlightenment through the provision of public libraries and countless literary and philosophical societies.

The work of pioneering social reformers like Robert Owen helped
make the Victorian era great, modern day reactionaries tend to consider
the whole topic of strategic social reform with contempt.

Religious conviction was by no means the only inspiration for social reform, the great Robert Owen of the unincorporated town of Manchester honed his egalitarian ideals alongside religious non-conformists such as the great Quaker scientist John Dalton and the Congregationalist minister Joseph Whitworth at the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, he shared egalitarian ideals with the non-conformists and used Quaker businessmen such as William Allen to fund his early business ventures but despite all of this he remained a vocal critic of organised religion until his unexpected conversion to spititualism shortly before his death.

Idealistic factory towns like Robert Owen's New Lanark factory (the site of the first infant school in Britain), the Congregationalist mill at Saltaire, Bradford and the Quaker chocolate village at Bournville, Birmingham became places of pilgrimage for the social reformers and philanthropists of their day. Visitors included royal families, intellectuals, politicians and businessmen from around the globe, who realised the virtues of compassionate capitalism and set about instigating social reform in their own nations.

Many of the hard nosed establishment capitalists utilised the advanced production techniques developed by the non-conformist pioneers to undercut them by retaining traditional disgustingly exploitative working and living conditions and refusing to providing community welfare. However the ethically driven social reformers had clearly demonstrated that grotesque exploitation was not a fundamental part of industrialisation and eventually the benefits of employing a healthy, well educated and extremely loyal workforce became indisputable.

The Victorian enlightenment saw huge rises in living standards and literacy, providing a healthy and educated workforce capable of spreading English industrialism and social reform across the globe, most notably through the construction of railway infrastructure and the establishment of English schools. The pioneering social reforms of the Victorian era were followed by the introduction of the state pension in 1909 and cumulated in the post war consensus and the provision universal healthcare with the creation of the NHS in 1946.

Even though the era was famous for it's ethical social reformers and the mass enlightenment of ordinary people, the Victorian age was tainted by huge social problems and commonplace discrimination. Disgusting levels of urban poverty were as fundamental to the great works of Charles Dickens as they were to George Orwell's 1937 sociological investigations into the terrible poverty of the industrial north during the inter-war years, "Road to Wigan Pier" written 100 years after the coronation of Queen Victoria.

The Victorian era was also tainted by brutality and discrimination, corporal punishment in schools was nearly ubiquitous, for much of Queen Victoria's reign people convicted of minor offences were deported to Australia and sodomy was a capital offence. Even after the sodomy law was repealed in 1866 famous intellectuals such as Oscar Wilde were ruthlessly persecuted for their homosexuality. In the late nineteenth Century the newly founded Metropolitan Police employed agent provocateur's and planted evidence to undermine alternative political ideologies such as socialism and anarchism.

The Victorian democratic system was skewed towards the interests of the establishment elite, with only rich landed gentlemen allowed to vote in elections until the 1867 Reform Act, even then all women and huge numbers of working class men were excluded from political participation and the economic elite were compensated with multiple votes in order to maintain their grip on power and influence.

It is not surprising that people are inclined to romanticise the Victorian era for it's world leading industries and pioneering social reforms, despite the appalling living conditions of the masses. It is important to understand what this nation has lost in order that so many of us reminisce so fondly about an era that was so badly tainted by grinding poverty, illiteracy, low life expectancy and huge economic and political inequality. The British Empire has been replaced by neoconservative interventionism and neoliberal economic control, largely done through undemocratic American based institutions. Britain's Industrial power has been destroyed by elitist contempt for all forms of manual labour and establishment fears of an empowered working class. The social reforms that began in the nineteenth Century and cumulated in the post war consensus have been eroded away by 30 unbroken years of the neoliberal slash the state and privatise everything agenda.

The reactionary neoliberals that seem to make up the bulk of the modern day Conservative party could learn a lot from the Tories of the Victorian age. Instead of opposing much needed electoral reform of an anachronistic voting system for their own political benefit, Victorian Tories brought in the 1867 Reform Act which effectively gave the vote to swathes of the working class for the first time. Instead of allowing a parasitic slumlord rentier class to openly exploit the poor, Victorian Tories introduced powers to compel owners of slum dwelling to sell to local councils. Instead of cutting investment to universities and libraries and erecting more financial barriers to higher education, Victorians gave education to the masses through the Universal Education act. Instead of calling for the deregulation of industries for the benefit of corporate interests, several Victorian Tory governments introduced Factories Acts to limit corporate exploitation of the poor. Instead of commodifying justice in order to dissuade ordinary people from seeking legal redress, Victorian Tories introduced the first legislation to compel employers to compensate employees injured on the job.

Given the glee with which some leading Tories have been using "austerity measures" to undermine and destroy social provisions it is easy to imagine reactionary Tories fantasising about a return to the Dickensian levels of inequality. A time where the rich were only constrained by their own morality and there was no social safety net, meaning the truly desperate had to rely on the charity of faith organisations or the philanthropy of the economic elite in order to avoid ending up in the workhouse. The much hyped "Big Society" seems suspiciously like the Victorian reliance on individual charity and philanthropy instead of state intervention to address poverty, low educational standards and injustice. The Tory attacks on social services, the healthcare system and government funding for charitable projects as well as the defunding of universities, libraries and the arts contrast sharply with the many Victorian Era state interventions to improve the conditions of the poor and to raise educational standards.

Modern day Tory policies of opposing electoral reform, slashing investment in scientific research and education, commodifying justice and the undoing of social reforms in the name of "austerity" seem to be the polar opposite of the progressive social and economic policies that created such vast improvements in the living conditions of the masses. This contrast creates the suspicion that the Tory motivation for their calls for a return to "Victorian values" could actually be based on the desire to see the restoration of Dickensian levels of inequality, the renewal of Britain's discriminatory class hierarchy and it's elitist education system and the reawakening of unrestrained capitalism and all of its horrors.

UK government procurement, a litany of ineptitude

A few selected examples of massive overspends in UK government procurement.  A litany of ineptitude.

Gordon Brown's preference for neo-liberal economic alchemy like PFI
has lumbered the UK with hidden defecit of around £250 billion.

PFI: As Chancellor Gordon Brown favoured public investment through neo-liberal economic alchemy projects called PFI (Private Finance Initiative). Studies have shown that borrowing from the private sector in order to artificially reduce the national defecit has lumbered the UK with around £250 billion of overpriced and inflexible infrastructure debts. Studies have shown that PFI hospitals built for the NHS routinely come in 18-60% over budget, replace existing state facilities with smaller private ones and will eventually cost NHS Trusts multiple times the value of constructing the facilities through government borrowing. After the contracts expire, what was originally state infrastructure is left under the control and ownership of private investors. Brown favoured these scams because it allowed him to hide the infrastructure costs off the government debt calculations. The inflexibility of many PFI contracts and their one side penalty charges force NHS Trusts and local authorities to sacrifice other local services in order to keep up their PFI payments, often on infrastructure that is unfit for purpose.

Metronet: the shareholders pulled out of this PFI consortium to maintain and upgrade the London Underground when they got into financial difficulty, leaving the system in chaos with a legacy of unfit signalling equipment, rolling stock and infrastructure, lumbering the taxpayer with estimated costs of £2 billion.

NHS Connecting for Health: The NHS computer spine was ordered in 2003 and originally expected to cost £2.3 billion over three years, in June 2006 the total cost was estimated by the National Audit Office to be £12.4bn over 10 years, the project is still far from completion and the eventual cost is currently estimated to be over £20 billion. The project itself has been described as offering few clinical benefits and suffering from serious data security issues. The costs of the venture should have been lessened by the contracts signed by the IT providers making them liable for huge sums of money if they withdrew from the project; however, when Accenture withdrew in September 2006, then Director-General for NPfIT, Richard Granger charged them not £1bn, as the contract permitted, but just £63m. Granger's first job was with Andersen Consulting, which later became Accenture.

NOMS: The original projected budget for the Home Office procurement of the National Offender Management System was £99 million. By 2008 the cost of the project had risen to £513 million, meaning that the project will end up more that 400% over budget.

Eurofighter Typhoons: Originally ordered in the mid 1980s the fleet of RAF Eurofigther Typhoons eventually cost more than £20 billion, with each aeroplane costing more than 75% more than predicted. The fighters are still suffering technical difficulties and will not be fully adapted for ground attacks until at least 2018, more than 30 years after they were originally ordered. Tory defence equipment minister Peter Luff had little more to say than "the MOD and Eurofigter had learnt from past problems with the programme", yes, they learnt that they could waste £billions of taxpayer's money without any serious repercussions or criminal charges.

1995 Chinooks: The MOD spent at least £500 million and the best part of a decade on upgrades to 8 Chinook helicopters that were not airworthy, unsafe and unfit for purpose when delivered at a cost of £259 million in 2001. A ten year operational delay, a tripling of costs and the procurement of the most expensive helicopters in history.

Brian MacGregor, Tory Transport minister 1992-1994
drew up the regional monopolies blueprint for the UK rail network
and his influence should be considered the most damaging
since Dr Beeching's "axe" in the 1960s.

The Rail Network: Realising that they were almost certain to lose the 1997 general election the Tories rushed through the privatisation of British Rail, which one of the most botched and inefficient privatisation schemes in history. The system was fractured into many regional monopolies, each monopoly running trains hired from private rolling stock operating companies (ROSCOs) on a privately maintained network. The network operators Railtrack increased profits by reducing safety maintenance on the tracks, eventually (after numerous fatal accidents) Railtrack was replaced with a quasi state controlled organisation called Network Rail which went on to run up an estimated £24 billion debt while the board of directors awarded themselves obscene pay raises and bonuses in a jobs-for-the-boys culture they also spent £millions of public money paying off and gagging whistleblowers and harassment victims. The ROSCOs didn't bother to order any new rolling stock for the 1,064 days after rail privatisation causing the near complete destruction of the one world leading British train industry.

When Labour came to power, they refused to reform the rail franchising system and even handed out longer term contracts to many of the regional monopolies. The worst example was the Network Rail East Coast Mainline franchise which began with annual subsidies for operator National Express but under the terms of the contract the operator would eventually end up paying a £1.4 billion lease for the franchise. As the subsidies were phased out National Express bailed out of the contract lumbering the taxpayer with an estimated £700 million in costs. Despite ditching their responsibilities and shafting the taxpayer National Express were allowed to keep their other rail franchises elsewhere on the network and nothing will prevent them from bidding for future rail contracts.

Under the state run British rail system in 1994 the net subsidy to the rail network was £1.6 billion, eleven years later net subsidies to the privatised rail network had increased to £4.6 billion despite no large scale improvements to the rail infrastructure. Even if the 1994 figure is adjusted by RPI to 2005 terms (£2.2 billion) the annual cost to the taxpayer of running Britain's railways has more than doubled under privatisation while passengers face increasingly overcrowded trains and inflation busting fare rises year after year.

Mapley Steps: Perhaps the most absurd example of witless government procurement is the case of HM Revenue & Customs' £3.3bn contract with a firm called Mapeley, in which the UK tax inspectorate handed over the ownership and management of 591 tax offices to an offshore company based in the Cayman Islands. The cost of  the contract has subsequently risen to an estimated £3.87bn and the department has found that it cannot recover its own VAT on their rent. The National Audit Office criticised the deal stating that "any apparent savings for the department are accompanied by reduced tax revenues." As well as cost overruns and lost tax revenue it also seems that HM Revenue & Customs will be forced to pay compensation to the offshore company as numerous tax offices are closed as part of the Tory austerity measures. To date nobody in government or the civil service has been held accountable for the creation of such a ludicrous contract specifying that the UK tax inspectorate pay billions of pounds in rent into a massive tax avoidance scheme and no moves have been made to force the company to pay UK tax on their profits.

These and many other government outsourcing projects have cost the UK taxpayer tens of billions of pounds. In order to stop the casual waste of taxpayer's money I propose several reforms to UK government procurement, including a ban on contracts with companies that refuse to pay UK tax on their profits, a procurement watchdog and a procurement blacklist for companies that have been found guilty of shafting the taxpayer. I have gone into greater my proposals on my (forthcoming) "Manifesto for the UK economy" article.