How David Mitchell and Richard Dawkins are wrong about the EU referendum

On Sunday 29th of March 2016 the Guardian published an article by the actor/commedian David Mitchell entitled "The EU referendum should be a matter for parliament" in which he argued that it was wrong for David Cameron to offer a referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union as a Tory manifesto pledge. In the article Mitchell quoted the evolutionary biologist/relentless self-publicist Richard Dawkins view that it is an "outrage" that the public have been given a vote on whether we remain in the EU or not, and that the whole decision should be "a matter for parliament".

In this article I'm going to explain why I think Mitchell and Dawkins are dangerously wrong to claim that such important decisions should be left to our superior lords and masters in parliament to decide on because the general public are too ignorant to decide for themselves.

Cameron's gamble

Before I get to explaining how utterly wrong-headed the Mitchell/Dawkins "leave it to our lords and masters" view is, first I'm going to point out where David Mitchell was right. Mitchell described Cameron's offer of a referendum on the EU as a "hugely selfish and irresponsible act" driven mainly by the decades old Tory rift between the pro- and anti-EU factions and Cameron's terror of losing Tory votes to UKIP.

It's absolutely clear that Cameron's offer of an EU referendum was firstly a sop to the large number of mainly extreme-right Tory MPs who detest the EU and secondly as a ploy to derail the UKIP surge in Tory constituencies.

The decision to offer a referendum on the EU was based entirely on Cameron's own self-interest. In the year before the 2015 General Election UKIP trounced the Tories (and everyone else) in the low-turnout EU elections and two Tory MPs conducted high profile defections to UKIP. Cameron knew that if he didn't do something to draw the UKIP thorn then the Tory prospects of winning the 2015 General Election were very grim indeed.

In the short-term Cameron's EU gamble was a success. The Tories gained a majority at the 2015 General Election, in which the extreme-right Thatcher-worshipping Ukippers ended up taking more votes off Labour than they did from their Tory ideological blood brothers.

In fact it was such a successful gamble that we ended up with the remarkable, if not completely unprecedented situation where the UKIP leader Nigel Farage ended up publicly appealing for UKIP supporters to vote for the Tory party instead of his own party's candidates!

The problem of course is that in the longer-term the dice has to be rolled, and it's on a knife edge whether the UK will end up remaining in the EU or engaging in a chaotic Brexit led by a bunch of right-wing fanatics who haven't offered anything even remotely resembling a coherent plan for what a post-Brexit UK would look like.

If the public vote to remain in the UK then Cameron's selfish gamble will have been a success, however if they vote for Brexit then the short-term gains will be massively outweighed by the cost. Cameron's position as Prime Minister would be completely untenable and anyone who imagines that there wouldn't be severe chaos as a result of the utter lack of a coherent economic plan from the Brexiters must be utterly delusional.

Where Mitchell and Dawkins are wrong

Both Mitchell and Dawkins argue that referenda on lesser issues (such as fox hunting) would be fine, but that membership of the EU is far too important to be left to ordinary plebs to decide.

There is no arguing that huge numbers of people are woefully under-informed about the arguments for and against membership of the EU (due in a large part to the spectacular levels of bias in the UK mainstream media), however what makes the Mitchell/Dawkins stance so desperately patronising is the idea that our lords and masters in the Westminster political establishment know any better.

Parliament isn't full of experts

The idea that parliament is full of experts who are better qualified to make important decisions than the plebs is completely wrong-headed.

First of all it doesn't take any kind of special economic expertise to get elected to Westminster. Everyone knows that if you stick a red rosette on a pig it would get elected in some areas, and that a dog turd with a blue rosette would win an equally impressive landslide in certain Tory heartlands. You only have to listen to intellectually stunted individuals like Nick Gibb (Tory) or Naz Shah (Labour) to realise that under our deeply unrepresentative electoral system it's entirely possible for people who can barely string a sentence together to get into parliament.

Further proof that MPs are hardly an economically enlightened elite can be seen in the results of a Positive Money survey of MPs that found that only one in ten MP understood that the vast majority of the money supply is created out of nothing by private banks when they make loans, while more than seven out of ten of them actually believed in the ridiculously naive economic fairy story that all new money is created by the Bank of England on behalf of the government.

If the overwhelming majority of these people don't even understand the absolute economic basics like where money comes from, how on earth are they any more qualified than the man on the street to make decisions with important economic ramifications?

Electoral fraud

There has been a mainstream media blackout on the story that over two dozen Tory MPs stand accused of conning their way into parliament at the 2015 General Election by misdeclaring their electoral expenses. The allegations are extremely serious and multiple local police forces are investigating individual cases while there have been numerous calls for a Metropolitan Police investigation into whether Tory party HQ were guilty of orchestrating the fraud on a party-wide basis.

If more than two dozen Members of Parliament are indeed guilty of cheating their way into Westminster, what on earth would give them the right to decide whether the UK remains in the EU or not on our behalf?

Say what you like about the ordinary British citizen, much of it is likely to be unflattering, but nobody can accuse them of cheating their way into position to make such an important decision about the future of the UK.

Bowing and scraping

A notoriously liberal TV celebrity and a "ivory towers" professor lecturing the public that they are too stupid and ill-informed to make important decisions for themselves really does not reflect well on the Bremain camp at all. In fact it's a dangerous stance because, like it or not, the decision to have a referendum has already been made. This means that any effort by Bremainers like Mitchell to tell the public that they're too stupid to decide things for themselves, and that it's best left to the Wesminster establish to decide our fate, is likely just to just drive more people into the Brexit camp.

The funny thing about a lot of British people is that they absolutely love to bow and scrape before their lords and masters. Just look at the pathetic fawning over the royal family, listen to the absolute drivelling dirge that passes for the national anthem, or consider the fact somehow we ended up re-electing the most dangerously fanatical, out-of-touch and incompetent bunch of over-promoted elitists in living memory as our government. However the British really don't like to be told that they must bow and scrape before their betters, especially by a liberal TV celebrity and an "ivory tower" dwelling academic. There's a prevailing attitude that "we'll bow and scrape to our lords and masters because we want to, not because we're told to".

Conclusion

David Mitchell was absolutely right to point out that Cameron's offer of an EU referendum was an incredibly reckless gamble based purely on Tory self-interest, however he's wrong to claim that such important decisions should be left to the Westminster establishment.

He's wrong because the Westminster establishment are just as deeply misinformed about fundamentally important economic issues as the man on the street (if not more so because they live in an insulated bubble of wealth, power, privilege and influence).

He's wrong because a significant number of MPs stand accused of defrauding their way into parliament, meaning that if the decision was left to them, some of them could end up casting deciding votes on such an important decision despite having unlawfully cheated their way into that position in the first place.

He's wrong to complain about it now because the decision to have a referendum has already been made, meaning that liberal Bremainers lecturing ordinary people that they're too stupid to be allowed to vote is more than likely to drive an awful lot of them towards the Brexit camp, because at least the Brexit camp only assume that the general public are an ignorant bunch of halfwits, rather than stating it at them explicitly.

The Mitchell/Dawkins stance is wrong not because the public aren't under-informed, they generally are are because of the bias of the mainstream media, the fundamental lack of political and economic education in the comprehensive school system and the ridiculously short notice at which the EU referendum campaign was announced. It is still wrong though because it assumes that the people in parliament are any better at making such important decisions that the ordinary person on the street, abd because whining about it after the decision has already been made is a waste of time. Instead of spending hours writing that article, perhaps Mitchell could have invested the time in researching the facts of the EU debate for himself?

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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What is ... the Pay as You Feel principle?

The Pay As You Feel principle (also known as Pay What You Want and Pay What You Like) is a heterodox pricing strategy that puts the customer at complete discretion over the price they are willing to pay for goods or services.

The most commonly used names for this pricing strategy are completely self-explanatory because the idea that the the customer is at complete freedom to determine the price for themselves is actually quite a simple one.

Even though the idea itself is simple enough, there are quite a lot of interesting economic factors to consider when it comes to breaking the orthodox mindset that things have a set price and replacing it with a pricing system that allows the price to exist as a free choice between £0 and any value the customer chooses.

Examples

I'm going to begin by briefly detailing a few examples of enterprises that are funded on the Pay As You Feel principle.

Radiohead

One of the most famous examples of a Pay as You Feel pricing strategy was the release of the 7th album by the UK band Radiohead called "In Rainbows". The album was made available for download for whatever the fans wanted to pay for it. Although the majority of people who downloaded the album did it for free, it was reported that the digital revenues from this single album were worth more than the digital sales of all of their six previous albums combined.

The Real Junk Food Project

The Real Junk Food Project is a café in my old stomping ground of Armley in Leeds that uses discarded (but still perfectly edible) food from supermarkets and chain restaurants to provide meals on the Pay as You Feel principle. To date they have saved over ten tons of perfectly good food from going into landfill and inspired several other similar projects all over the UK. One thing that should really appeal to economists is the guy who came up with the concept of this West Yorkshire pay as you feel café was called Adam Smith!

Humble Bundle

Humble Bundle is a series of bundled digital creations that have been released on the Pay as You Fell principle since 2010 (here is a list of Humble Bundle packages). The average price paid per Humble Bundle has varied between just over $14 and just under $4. The fact that Humble Bundle has survived on this business model for over four years in the highly competitive markets of computer games, ebooks, audiobooks, videos and music is enough to show that Pay as You Feel is a viable potential business strategy.
        
Wikipedia

Although Wikipedia don't self-describe as a Pay as You Feel operation, it is quite clear that this is an accurate way of describing their fundraising operation because they rely on donations from users and refuse to allow adverts on their pages. The fact that Wikipedia is the seventh most visited website in the world, yet they only have 217 paid staff is an amazing tribute to the power of the collaborative community that built it, maintains it, and improves it; and to the the voluntary donation system that funds it.

Another Angry Voice (this website)

The only sources of income for this page are small donations from people who appreciate my work enough to make a donation, or set up a small monthly subscription (even though they are perfectly free have access to all of my online work without having to pay for it).
   

Advantages

Conducting business on the Pay as You Feel principle has distinct advantages for both buyers and sellers.

When the buyer is free to choose their own price, they are highly likely to pick a price they consider to be fair, because few customers are going to voluntarily select a price that lies outside their "spectrum of acceptability". This means that (as long as the product isn't shoddy) it's incredibly unlikely that the customer will end up feeling like they've been "ripped off" and suffering buyer's remorse.

This ability for the buyer to choose the price that they find most acceptable is a profoundly important factor because it's capable of providing the best possible sense of satisfaction to the customer, and I'm pretty sure that any marketing wonk will tell you that there is no batter advert for a product than a very satisfied customer.

Another of the main advantages for the seller is that they do not end up excluding customers by setting an arbitrary price for their product/service that is too high (some customers can't afford it) or too low (some customers may imagine it to be "trashy" or low quality if it is priced too low).

Yet another advantage to the seller is that by giving away their product for free they are still increasing exposure to their product, and increasing their potential future market in the process. If a writer ends up giving away ten thousand copies of their book for free, then if it is a good book, that's 10,000 people who might consider returning for another book in the future (potential future paying customers), and 10,000 people who may have gone around telling their friends and family how good the book is (free advertising).

Disadvantages

The existence of freeloaders is the most obvious disadvantage to the Pay as You Feel principle. If the buyer offers to give away their product for free to those who cannot afford it, there will always be people who will take the product for free, despite being more than affluent enough to be able to pay for it.

Even though the system is open to abuse by selfish people, my personal view is that I'd rather have ten of these selfish people freeloading, as long as one person who genuinely can't afford to pay isn't priced out of the market as would be the case had I chosen to use an orthodox arbitrary pricing system.

Another potential disadvantage with Pay as You Feel is that some people are deterred from buying at all because they "feel bad" if they imagine that they are paying less than an appropriate price, so they may not buy the product at all rather than risk feeling bad that they've somehow "cheated" by paying less than a fair amount.

A further potential disadvantage with the Pay as You Feel principle is that it is likely to be a sub-optimal pricing strategy if it is used in isolation. If the seller prefers to focus on their short-term profitability (rather than adopting some longer-term objective such as ensuring that the maximum number of people get exposure to your product) then it's probable that allowing numerous customers to take their product for free would not not be the optimal cashmaking strategy.

There are several ways of optimising Pay as You Feel so that the problems outlined above are minimised as much as possible, some of which I'll detail in the next section.
           

Optimising Pay as You Feel

Rewards

One of the simplest and most effective ways of optimising Pay as You Feel is to offer rewards to those who actually pay. To give an example, if you're marketing a music album, you could provide a bonus track (or three) on downloads that have actually been paid for, while the people who download the album for free just get a download of the standard version.

Recommended prices

Recommended prices are a good way of minimising the effect of the potential "feel bad" effect that deters some potential customers because they're afraid of feeling guilty about having paid the wrong price (detailed above). If the customer is given a clear indication of what is considered a fair price, then they can ensure that their payment falls within their personal "spectrum of acceptability" in relation to the numbers that have been suggested by the seller. 

Examples of two possible "recommended price" strategies are shown in the illustration.

Beat the average

One of the most efficient ways of maintaining a reasonably high level of payments is to offer a reward to those who beat the average price. If people can see that the average price paid by those who actually pay for the product is say £4.82, then they are likely to pay £5.00 and claim their reward. There is one potential drawback with this strategy, which is that potential customers who might be inclined to pay a lower price (say £1.50) but are unwilling to pay almost £5.00, might elect to not pay anything, or even not bother carrying out the transaction at all, on the basis that they'd be getting an inferior product (the product without the reward) if they paid less than the strike price.

Reputation

A Pay as Your Feel restaurant is a good example to illustrate how reputation can be a strong incentive for people to actually make a Pay as You Feel payment, rather than just freeload. If a person who is clearly homeless or destitute goes in and has a meal for free, nobody is going to begrudge them it, because they can't afford to pay. However if a clearly well-to-do couple come in and try to leave without paying anything for their meal, the staff are going to judge them for it, and they'd have to be pretty shameless people to be able to walk out of the place without feeling pretty conflicted about whether the sheer embarrassment of being such a "scrounger" was really worth the few quid they saved by not paying.

Online reputation is an increasingly important thing, so it is easy to see how online reputation could be used as an incentive for people to actually pay for their products in Pay as You Feel transactions. One potential strategy is the awarding of reputation points to those who choose to actually pay for Pay as You Feel products, then allowing those reputation points to be aggregated into the various online reputation management platforms of the kind that already exist.

Charity

Another strategy that can be used in order to encourage customers to pay a higher amount is to make it clear that a certain percentage of the payment will be given to charity, or that if a certain payment threshold is reached, a charitable donation will be made. The fact that customers pay substantially more when they know a charitable donation will be made has been proven in research. The research showed that the increase in price paid was significantly higher than the sums given to charity, meaning that this strategy is beneficial to the seller, and to the charitable causes alike.

Choice

Another way in which customers can be encouraged to pay a higher price under Pay as You Feel pricing systems is if they are given some choice over how the money is spent.

An example might be that the customer is free to choose how their money is spent once the price paid meets a certain minimum threshold. Hence a self-employed writer/journalist might allow their customers to choose into which spending category any amount over the strike price is allocated to, for example:

If you donate more than £5.00, you can choose how you think that extra money should be spent:

• A donation towards my admin and travel costs

• A donation towards my research materials

• A donation towards my next book

• A donation towards my new documentary

• A donation towards my new website

If the customer is given choices like these, the transaction begins to feel more like an investment than a simple purchase at a set price. Not only does the customer get the satisfaction that part of their money is being "spent wisely", but they are also that bit more likely to remain a customer because they feel like they've actually made an investment in one of the seller's forthcoming projects, rather than having just participated in a one off set price transaction with the seller.
                    

Economic Considerations

If Pay as You Feel become a more popular pricing strategy, then there are many economic considerations. These include considerations of how such shifts in pricing strategies might interact with existing economic systems and ideas, and how Pay as You Feel could be used in conjunction with other novel economic concepts.

I am aware that this article is already quite long (even by my own standards) so I'll just briefly outline a few of these considerations.

Pay as You Feel and rational self interest

The fact that the Pay as You Feel principle actually even works is yet another glaring example to add to the ever growing mountain of evidence that many of the the fundamental concepts that underpin orthodox free-market ideology are hopelessly unrealistic. If the neoclassical economic models are correct, and all humans are rational agents committed only to the serving of their own economic self-interest, then a funding model which relies on people paying money for what they could have for free, simply couldn't work.

In order for Pay as You Feel projects to make money, a certain percentage of society must be ascribing a higher value to non-financial considerations such as fairness, social responsibility, generosity or charity, than to the pursuit of their own rational economic self-interest. If this were not the case then all customers would surely just choose to pay nothing and keep all of the money for themselves.

The fact that Pay as You Feel projects succeed shows that any economic system that defines human beings as perfectly rational economic agents must be fundamentally incapable of accurately describing reality. 

Every single time a person decides to pay for something that they could have had for free, it's a poke in the eye for people who believe in the right-wing economic orthodoxy.
              
Pay as You Feel and socialism

The Pay as You Feel principle is clearly compatible with the socialist dictum "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs", but it puts the determination of how much is to be given in the hands of the individual, rather than having it dictated by the seller, or by the state.

In my view Pay as You Feel is entirely compatible with libertarian and anarchist versions of socialism where as much economic freedom as possible is devolved to the people, but it's fundamentally incompatible with old-fashioned "command and control" socialism, where the price of almost everything is dictated by centralised government agencies.

Pay as You Feel and price discovery

Price discovery is the process by which the price of an asset is determined in the marketplace.

The widespread adoption of Pay as You Feel funding models would have significant implications on the way that market prices would be determined. It is obvious that handing all discretion over the sale price to the buyer would have important price discovery implications for the enterprises that choose to adopt these strategies, but they would also have implications for other players in their marketplace too. If suddenly one seller begins offering their product on the Pay as You Feel principle, other agents may have to seriously consider adjusting their own pricing strategies in order to remain competitive.

Pay as You Feel and reputation

As I mentioned in the section on Pay as You Feel optimisation strategies, there is a great deal of potential overlap between Pay as You Feel and digital reputation strategies. As the availability of information storage continues growing exponentially, the capacity for tracking, managing and even financialising our digital reputation is going to increase. 

Money has always served as a store of reputation (the "wealth and status" aspect), so it makes a great deal of sense that this new found capacity for digitally quantifying reputation will likely be developed and financialised. If "being seen to pay a fair price for things" becomes an important part of one's digital reputation, then people's transactions with Pay as You Feel sellers could potentially assume critical importance.

Pay as You Feel and copyright law             
           
If Pay as You Feel pricing strategies became more common in the digital downloads marketplace then the digital copyright theft industry would be severely undermined because the customer incentive to source copyrighted material from "pirates" would be almost eliminated. Why would anyone bother going to a bootleg operation for a copy when they could just obtain the item from the originator for free, or for whatever minimal price they deem most acceptable?

It doesn't matter at all whether you see online piracy as acceptable or not - it's a fact that websites like the Pirate Bay are currently seen by their users as fighting against the profiteering ways of the music, television and film industries.

Under Pay as You Feel the boot would clearly be on the other foot, with the legitimate seller cast as the freedom fighter giving his stuff away for free to those who can't afford it, and the "pirates" cast as the villain taking people's work for free and profiting from it (via ad revenue on their websites, selling it at a mark-up price, plagiarism or whatever). It wouldn't be long before the myth of the digital "pirate" as the information freedom fighter would be rendered obsolete by the fact that taking stuff that someone else has given away for free and then using it to make money for yourself is nothing more than parasitical profiteering.

As a customer it would take a severely tortured moral justification to explain why you went to an online bootlegger to get a copy of the film/book/animation/music, when you could have got it direct from the original source, either for free, or for whatever price you consider fairest. 
In my view it should be socially frowned upon to make a business model on giving away other people's free content (but not prohibited because policing the market place in free goods would blatantly a wasteful economic sinkhole of time and resources). However the act of actually charging people for access to other people's Pay as You Feel creative content should clearly be considered a crime because it represents a theft against the buyer. It's obviously fraudulent behaviour to charge someone a set fee for the content they could have had for free from the original source. 

Pay as You Feel and gifting economics

I'm particularly interested in gift economics, with which the Pay as You Feel Principle is very clearly compatible. If we think of Pay as You Feel transactions as being a gift to the buyer from the seller, and the Pay as You Feel payment as a reciprocal gift to the seller from the buyer, it is easy to see how the syntax of gift economics can be used to explain such transactions.

Thus transactions become "gifts" and payments become "reciprocal gifts", which builds a bond of recipricosity between the market participants, who no longer have to be considered "buyer and seller", but rather "giver and receiver".

When the giver is prepared to give their property away for free as a gift, then copyright law needs serve a much simpler function; that of enforcing the inalienable ownership of the giver - that any receiver can then give the product away for free again, but the originator retains the exclusive and inalienable right to sell at a price.
 
Gift economics is a fascinating subject, and I encourage you to do some more reading on it if ideas like the monetisation of society and the financialisation of class hierarchies make you feel sick, because gift economics provides an insight into how pre-monetary economic systems may have functioned, and how post-monetary or supra-monetary systems might be established.

Conclusion

After consideration, it seems that the best way to conclude this rather long article is to provide a brief personal explanation of why I decided to embrace the Pay as You Feel principle, rather than taking the much simpler (and likely much more profitable) orthodox approach of blathering my website in adverts and hosting a load of paid "click bait" articles at the bottom of each post.

The first reason is that I see Pay as You Feel as a test of my own faith in humanity. Do I believe strongly enough that there are enough fair-minded people out there to make enough small micro-donations between them to meet my costs of producing this blog, and my very modest costs of living? Choosing Pay as You Feel is a demonstration that I do.

The second reason is that I see Pay as You Feel as a test of my own ability as a writer. Am I capable of producing writing of sufficient quality that people consider what I'm doing good enough to be worth voluntarily supporting with their own hard-earned cash? Choosing Pay as You Feel is a demonstration that I do.

The third reason I've chosen to embrace Pay as You Feel is that I really want to see it succeed as a concept, because every single Pay as You feel transaction is a condemnation of the right-wing orthodoxy that tells us that humans are nothing more than self-serving units in the economy, and that every product in the economy has a fixed arbitrary price at any moment in time. 
          
Anyone who rejects the idea that the produce of their labour has a fixed price (as Pay as You Feel givers clearly do) is blatantly an economic rebel. By setting the price at 0-n (anywhere between free and whatever you want to pay for it) instead of picking an arbitrary fixed price for it, the seller is rejecting pretty much the entire orthodox economic framework. And by handing complete discretion to the receiver, the giver in the Pay as You Feel transaction is providing the receiver with the power to prove to themselves that they are behaving as unselfish agents in the economy too, meaning that their economic behaviour cannot be constrained by orthodox economic theories that cast them only as ruthlessly self-interested individuals.

So to summarise, I've chosen to live by the Pay as You Feel principle out of a curious blend of faith, self-belief and rebelliousness.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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12 things you should know about that piteous open letter to Russell Brand

Have you seen the open letter from Jo (the disgruntled financial sector worker) to Russell Brand that has been described as "hilarious" and "scathing" by the mainstream press? I have, and I have a few points to make about it. 

TL;DR

The letter was far too long - and that's some criticism coming from me, given the length of most of my articles, including this one. I console myself with the fact that when I write my long articles I like to employ internal structure (such as subject headings) in order to break it down a bit into coherent and accessible pieces, rather than just jumbling together a long rambling diatribe.

The only reason that I bothered reading Jo's seemingly endless whining until the end was that after only the first dozen or so paragraphs I knew damn well that there would be plenty of ammunition for one of my "12 things ..." articles, otherwise I would almost certainly have dismissed it as TL;DR (too long; didn't read).

Hilarious? Piteous more like it?

The letter wasn't "hilarious" as claimed by the mainstream press, it wasn't even funny. If endless callbacks to Jo caring more about his cold lunch than society was meant to be a joke, it simply wasn't funny, and it remained unfunny despite the constant repetition.

I found Jo's letter about as hilarious as I found Russell Brand was when he and Jonathan Ross and made those abusive phone calls to an old man who used to be famous. Like 2008 vintage Brand, Jo's letter was was annoyingly self-centred and desperately unfunny.

How backwards can you get things?

In my view Jo got it completely the wrong way around when he said "much as I disagree with most of your politics, I've always rather liked you".

I used to find Russell's narcissism and puerile sense of humour really annoying. It's only since he started to grow up and engage with the political world that I've actually begun to warm to him.

It's incredible that someone could think that Russell Brand was better when he was an unfunny egotistical bully, and has begun resenting him since he started developing a bit of a social conscience.

Perhaps it's a reflection on how established the right-wing greed-is-a-virtue mentality has become that Jo actually liked Brand when he was an unfunny and egocentric money-grabber, but now that he's decided to listen to his social conscience and stand up for people who need a bit of help (like the Focus E15 mums), Jo reacts with fury.

Where does debt actually come from Jo?

The letter defended bankers' bonuses and complained about the concept of "debt" as a problem. It's almost as if our poor, hungry financial sector worker doesn't even understand that the reason that there is so much debt in our economy is that the private banks invent 97% of the currency that we use out of nothing, then rent out these debt backed wealth tokens as interest bearing loans. Hence all the debt - because if nearly all of the money in the economy is invented out of nothing by the banks and rented out to us, then destroyed by the same banks when it is repaid, where exactly does all of the money to pay the interest come from?

The institutions Jo works for and defends (despite claiming not to be a spokesman for them) are to blame for the fact that there is so much debt in the system, yet he's using "debt" as a stick to beat Brand with!

It's no wonder the banks collapsed if financial sector workers aren't even aware that the institutions that they work for are responsible for the ever increasing indebtedness of our economy.

At the person criticisms

Jo's letter is absolutely riddled with at the person criticisms (often refered to in latin as "Ad Hominem" attacks). Repeatedly slamming Brand for the fact that he is a millionaire is an extraordinary stance for someone who is so desperate to defend bankers' bonuses.

That Jo repeatedly resorts to personal attacks rather than developing coherent critiques of Brand's politics suggests that Jo doesn't care about actually winning the argument, he just wants to smear his opponent as much as possible, content in the assumption that most people don't have the critical thinking skills to differentiate between a blunderbuss barrage of personal attacks and a well structured counter-argument.

Rabid capitalists?

  
"You know what would have happened if a rabid capitalist had just turned up unannounced?"

Accusing Russell of being "rabid" by implication is a clear example of an ad hominem attack, but Jo's thought experiment is clearly a load of rubbish too. Lets say a Private Equity Fund billionaire who has made his fortune buying out and asset stripping countless viable businesses and outsourcing all of the jobs to China (someone I'd classify as a rabid capitalist) turns up unannounced in order to invest a few hundred million of his ill-gotten gains in RBS. Do you think he'd be turned away and physically forced out of the door by security for not having an appointment? If somehow he was, do you think the poor sod who decided to set security on such a wealthy potential investor would remain in his job for long?

Alternatively we could imagine our Private Equity Fund billionaire kicking up a stink in the lobby in front of a load of TV cameras, but it would be up to Jo to explain why such a ridiculously implausible thing might happen.

The issue clearly isn't that Brand had no appointment as Jo tries to pretend, it's that he was kicking up a fuss.

The "good deal for the taxpayer" argument!

Jo's letter makes the absurd argument that the RBS bailout was a good deal for the taxpayer. Since RBS was bailed out to the tune of £46 billion, the losses at the bank have reached, erm ... £46 billion.

It's almost as if all that public cash was poured into a black hole of debt never to be recovered. As all of this cash has been squandered RBS has continued handing out hundreds of millions per year in bonuses, because it apparently takes high calibre, hard-working people to squander £46 billion in free money from the taxpayer.

Jo spends most of his letter whining piteously, which is annoying but not necessarily dishonest, but this "good deal for the taxpayer" bit is either a display of being stunningly misinformed about the financial sector he works in, or it is derived from downright dishonesty.

Selectiveness

Defending bankers' bonuses at bailed out banks could be considered a brave stance considering the understandable amount of public anger, but cast alongside Jo's pitiful refusal to address stuff like the Libor and Forex rigging frauds and the PPI insurance fraud ("I do not speak for RBS, so cannot say anything about the recent FX trading scandal or PPI or any of that shit"), it's clearly spectacularly cowardly and self-interested stuff.

If he's going to use the "I cannot say anything" excuse in regards to several multi-billion pound frauds, it's bizarrely hypocritical to extensively defend other aspects of RBS business practices.

Jailing corrupt bankers makes more sense than just confiscating their bonuses

Claiming that bankers' not getting paid their bonuses for having committed crimes is sufficient punishment an absurd argument. It's like saying that muggers and armed robbers should be allowed to get off with their crimes, as long as they just pay back the money they stole. There should be an awful lot of bankers in jail in the UK and US after the global financial sector insolvency crisis, money laundering for Mexican drugs cartels, Libor, Forex and PPI, but the only big one who got locked up was Bernie Madoff, and we all know why ... he stole from the rich.

Tax-dodging

Jo makes a number of claims about the way the Mayfair film production company has benefited from tax-loopholes in order to raise funding for films with which Russell Brand is associated. There may be some legitimacy in these claims, but they're a bit bloody rich coming from someone who so desperately defends RBS, which is a company that has been caught instructing businesses not to pay their tax and avoided £500 million in tax, even after they were bailed out by the taxpayer.

"Return of the Fucking Jedi"
   
This is one of the most bizarre arguments I've ever seen: "Return Of The Jedi has never, on paper, made a profit. Return Of The fucking Jedi, Russell. As an actor, and even more so as the producer of a (officially) loss-making film, you've taken part in that, you've benefited from it.". The thing that makes this ridiculous argument so especially weak is that we all know that Jo would undoubtedly defend himself if we were to use the same ludicrous debating tactic with claims that HSBC (a bank he doesn't work for) made money from laundering money for Mexican drugs cartels and terrorist organisations, but because Jo is part of the financial sector, he's benefited from it, and that Jo must be a Mexican drug lord and Islamist terrorist by default.

Personal space

Of all of the issues in Jo's seemingly endless diatribe, the claim that Russell Brand aggressively invaded his personal body space seems to me to be by far the most serious.

Apparently this is the film footage of the incident. From what I can see Russell does get a bit close to the guy, but the fact that Russell smiles broadly at several points and the way that he touches him on the arm with his right hand imply an overly-friendly demeanor, not the spectacularly aggressive confrontation described in Jo's letter.

As someone who has suffered social anxiety and personal body space issues, I can see how it is potentially possible to misread situations as a lot more aggressive or critical than they actually are, but Jo's claim that Russell's nose was "two inches" from his face is clearly an under-estimate, the descriptions of the situation as "pretty fucking aggressive" and "an aggressive invasion of personal space" are clearly exaggerations, and the comparison to "primates squaring off for a fight" outright hyperbole.

Conclusion

The only reason that this ridiculous letter got all over the press at all is that Russell Brand is "clickbait". The newspapers know that by publishing this ridiculous letter they'll get a load of clicks on their websites, and a boost in their online advertising revenues.

Admittedly the reason I've published this riposte to the letter is that Russell Brand is "clickbait", however at least I can console myself with the facts that:

A. Unlike the mainstream press I've been honest enough to admit that I've used "clickbait" in order to get people to read this article.

B. I won't be making any revenue from ad clicks because I don't put any ads on my website. The only way this article could make any money whatever for me is if people have seen it as worthwhile enough to make a small donation after reading it (the "pay as you feel" principle).

C. Using "clickbait" probably isn't so bad if the readers are drawn into reading an article that is ostensibly about Russell Brand, but actually contains a lot of information on important issues such as financial sector corruption, debt backed fiat money creation and the spectacular failure of the RBS bailout, whilst also exposing some appalling debating tactics for the reader to try to avoid in future.

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How the Green party is miles ahead of the game on monetary policy

For several years the group Positive Money has been running a public education drive to explain the way that money is created out of nothing by private banks, and then rented out to the public in interest bearing loans and mortgages, and why this kind of rentier system leads inevitably to irresolvable debt crises and vast speculative bubbles (here's a short video).

At first the establishment treated Positive Money dismissively, as if they were some kind of dangerous tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy peddlers, and tried to talk around the truth by harping on about things like capital requirements.

The Green party recognised the truth in what Positive Money have been highlighting, and in September 2013 they passed a motion to reform the monetary system by taking the power to create money away from the private banks and placing it in public hands.

This landmark motion didn't attract much attention at the time, this is hardly surprising since the mainstream economic press were hardly likely to pay much attention to what the Green party were up to. They should have been much more concerned with the fact that the Reinhart-Rogoff paper they had all lauded as concrete evidence that austerity was necessary was based on a hopelessly botched Excel spreadsheet that any proper science would have picked up in the process of peer review, and by the admission by the IMF that fiscal multipliers (government returns on investment) have been much, much higher since the global financial sector insolvency crisis (between 90p and £1.70 return per pound of investment, rather than the 50p return that austerity fetishists like George Osborne had assumed in their wildly over-optimistic economic projections).

Of the very little coverage about the Green party motion to reform the monetary system, the tone was negative. I actually agree with some of the criticism, because in my view their proposed solution isn't ideal, however to have recognised the problem and proposed a solution is far better than the political establishment (the Lib-Lab-Cons), which has carried on without any recognition of this glaring flaw in the way in which 97% of the money in the economy is created.

For the next six months Positive Money kept up their campaign to spread public awareness of the way money is created out of nothing by private banks and rented out to the public via interest bearing loans and mortgages, the political establishment continued to ignore the issue, and everyone pretty much forgot about the Greens.

Everything changed in March 2014 when the Bank of England released a document entitled Money Creation in the Modern Economy which admitted that "Whenever a bank makes a loan, it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the borrower’s bank account, thereby creating new money" and goes on to explain that banks actually loan out money whether or not they have enough in deposits in their reserves and then borrow the shortfall from the central bank to top up their reserves; thus showing that the Bank of England has accepted that Positive Money were absolutely right. This is probably the closest thing to a revolutionary paper released by the Bank of England in living memory, and has brought the subject of monetary policy to the fore.

This admission from the Bank of England shows that the Green party were well ahead of the game when they voted to reform monetary policy six months beforehand, and that the four other parties are way behind the game, with their heads stuck firmly in the outdated neoliberal textbooks that created the financial sector insolvency crisis in the first place.

That none of the other four parties have shown any interest in reforming the way money is created, in order to prevent the inflation of more speculative property bubbles (like the London bubble) is an illustration that they don't have any solutions. This is because they don't actually seem capable of recognising what the problem actually is, let alone offering anything resembling a solution.

The fact that the Labour party and the Liberal Democrats are offering no new solutions on monetary policy is bad enough (UKIP have been far too busy with their immigration fearmongering campaigns to look at the problem either) but the behaviour of George Osborne and the Tories has been frankly ludicrous. Not only is Osborne incapable of seeing the problem, he's busy pumping taxpayers' cash into the housing market (via Help to Buy and other such schemes) in order to further inflate the speculative property bubble caused by excessive and uncontrolled private sector money creation.

I don't think the Green party have got it exactly right on monetary policy, but they're way ahead of the Lib-Dems, Labour and UKIP by virtue of having actually recognised the problem, and they're double the distance ahead of George Osborne and the Tories because the Tories have actually introduced a load of policies which exacerbate the problem by using taxpayers' cash to pump up the market with false credit. This creation of false credit is their cack-handed solution to help people that have been priced out of the market due to the speculative bubble that has been fuelled by private sector money creation. Not only have they failed to see the root cause of the problem, but the solution they've devised simply makes the mess even worse.

To put this situation into a nice simple narrative, the Green party started running the race over six months ago (their running style isn't perfect, but they're moving along quite nicely and will hopefully really hit their stride soon), Labour and the Liberal Democrats are milling around at the start line unaware that the race has actually started, UKIP are off in the crowd somewhere hunting out immigrants, Muslims and homosexuals to intimidate, and George Osborne, like the clueless towel-folder that he is, has set off running in completely the wrong direction, going backwards around the track.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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