Is there any proposition vile or ludicrous enough that the Tory mental gymnasts won't defend it?

Let's not pretend there's not a common human tendency to resort to absurd post hoc justifications for outrageous behaviour when it's our own, or perpetrated by those we support.

This tendency exists, and anyone who has ever even attempted to develop a rational worldview must have confronted their own tendencies to perform this kind of mental gymnastics routine.

Post hoc mental contortionism to defend the indefensible has been a feature of discourse for as long as any of us can remember, but in recent months there's been a constant stream of Tories willing to take the most absurd and demeaning positions to defend the outrageous behaviour of their political tribe.

There's never been a government full of people willing to absolutely demean themselves by defending the utterly indefensible.

The most obvious and glaring example that springs immediately to mind is the absurd story that Dominic Cummings engaged in a lockdown-defying 30 miles each way to the historic beauty spot of Barnard Castle in order to test his eyesight.

The idea that you'd conduct an eyesight test by packing your family into a car and driving them around the country is as absurd as the concept that undertaking such a reckless public-endangering test was an excuse to defy lockdown measures.

But a whole stream of Tories were herded onto social media to announce how convincing they'd found Cummings' explanation, and that it was 'time to move on'.

But the biggest absurdity of all came when Tory government minister Michael Gove told a right-wing radio interviewer that he too had conducted this kind of radically dangerous driving-eyesight test, which they both had a jolly good laugh about because deceiving the public with absolute bullshit is clearly some kind of lovely in joke for ex private school Tories to chuckle over.

On the subject of Michael Gove, he was at the centre of another one of these frenzies of Tory mental gymnastics when his wife posted a picture of his bookshelf, which proudly displayed the work of the Holocaust-denier David Irving, and the outrageous bible of racist pseudo-science, The Bell Curve.

It's not hard to imagine the absolute cacophony of outrage from the Tories had a figure from the left, like Jeremy Corbyn for example, been found with the work of racists and Holocaust-deniers on his bookshelf.

Yet the Tory reaction to Gove's bookshelf was to snap into ultra-defensive mode, and suddenly begin portraying Holocaust-denial as 'required reading actually' and even deriding critics of Holocaust-denial as Nazis!

Another Tory figure to have provoked numerous impromptu displays of Tory mental contortionism over the last few months is their beloved cult leader Boris Johnson.

When he skipped five consecutive COBRA meetings in the crucial early stages of the pandemic, the Tory mental contortionism circus pretended that it was supposedly perfectly normal (no Prime Minister in history before Johnson has skipped five COBRA meeting in a row during a national emergency), and that he was actually in the right to focus on other issues, despite skipping one of them to lark about with a Chinese dragon!

When Johnson publicly bragged about defying social distancing rules (and basic self-preservation) by shaking hands with coronavirus patients, and then presented "take it on the chin" as the preferable option to "draconian measures" like ... erm ... actually attempting to contain the virus, the Tories put on their cognitive clown outfits again and utterly demeaned themselves by jumping through all manner of hoops to defend the ridiculous behaviour and reckless rhetoric of their cult leader.

Then there was the absolutely ludicrous Tory decision to completely sideline the government's own scientific advisers in order to replace the clear and concise slogan "Stay At Home", with a sequence of nonsense verbiage like "Stay Alert By Washing Your Hands!".

Suddenly Tories were flocking onto social media to pretend that this absolute gibberish was perfectly clear and intelligible, despite the fact that if you'd said "Stay Alert By Washing Your Hands!" to anyone pre-2020, they'd have assumed you were having a stroke and called you an ambulance.

And now we've got the absolutely repulsive spectacle of Tories tying themselves in knots to actually defend monuments to slave traders.

When the people of Bristol took matters into their own hands, after six interminable years of political incompetence, to remove the statue of Britain's most notorious slave-trader Edward Colston, the Tories complained bitterly about the lawlessness and the vandalism.

But then when Tower Hamlets Council removed the statue of slave-trader Robert Milligan, in a completely calm, lawful, and safe manner, the Tories erupted in paroxysms of outrage again.

It turns out that the lawlessness and vandalism objection they started with was just a cover for their real objection, which is apparently that they just like statues of racists, because they get some kind of perverse dopamine kick out of the fact that other people find the memorialisation of Tory slave traders and Tory fascist sympathisers abhorrent and disturbing.

But they'll just keep on inventing one post hoc justification after another to defend what can essentially be boiled down to statue trolling.

The latest post hoc excuse is that they're simply defending history, but where on earth were they when their own party was using austerity extremism as an excuse to shut down 800 libraries, annihilate funding for museums, and trash public investment in history departments and history education at every level of the education system?

They clearly don't really give a damn about the nation's history, or they'd have raised concerns over the last decade of Tory historical vandalism, it's just the latest contortion required of them by the leaders of the CCHQ freakshow circus.

In a matter of months the Tories have proven themselves willing to excuse all kinds of nonsense and depravity, from pretending that driving a vehicle on public roads with failing eyesight constitutes reasonable behaviour, to vehemently defending Holocaust-denial as if it constitutes required reading. And from laughing off the actual Prime Minister mocking his own government's social distancing measures, to publicly eulogising slave-traders!

As a nation we've lumbered ourselves with the most inept and cultish government in British history, with piss-witted simpletons in almost every single crucial position, and no matter how badly they keep on screwing up, we're stuck with them for another four years thanks to their 80 seat majority.

There's very little we could do to rid ourselves of them, and the increasingly bizarre and contorted displays of mental gymnastics they're willing to perform to defend the outrageous words and actions of their own cult illustrates the fact that it simply doesn't matter how bad things get, they'll just spout total gibberish, and continue to get away with it.

They know the gibberish they're spouting is absolute bollocks. We know it's absolute bollocks. And worst of all they know that we know it's absolute bollocks.

But they also know there's basically nothing we can do about it, so they're actually getting a perverse kick out of doing stuff like defending the indefensible, excusing Holocaust-denial, and eulogising slave-traders, because they believe that a nation that elected an incompetent, bone idle bigot like Boris Johnson as their leader will never hold them to account for any of it.

Hopefully the British public with eventually grow tired of this lamentable Tory freakshow of mental contortionism, and get rid of them.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. My online work will always remain free to access, but you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing, if you feel like it.

OR

Priti Patel doesn't even know how the law works!

It's widely accepted that Priti Patel is one of the least intelligent members of the least talented government this country has ever suffered, but once again she's made an absolute fool of herself.

You'll probably already be familiar with some of her other blunders, like claiming that applying the death penalty to innocent people would serve as a deterrent, getting caught working as an agent for another state embedded within the UK government, and being unable to read a six digit number off a piece of paper.

Her error this time is particularly sinister and disturbing because it highlights the fact that she has absolutely no understanding of the fundamental basics of how the criminal justice system functions in a liberal democracy.

Patel's latest blunder came about when she put political pressure on the Chief Constable of Avon and Somerset police to ensure criminal prosecution of the activists who took down the statue of Tory slave-trader Edward Colston over the weekend.

This is simply not how the law works, and this kind of political interference represents a dangerous step towards police state authoritarianism.

The way it's supposed to work is that the police conduct an investigation, and then pass their evidence to the Crown Prosecution Service.

The CPS then make a decision whether to bring the case to trial, based on considerations such as the likelihood of conviction, and whether a trial would actually be in the public interest.

The legitimate role of the government, and specifically the Home Secretary, is to propose new laws, and alterations of existing laws, which are obviously subject to parliamentary approval before they can be enacted.

A legitimate position for the Home Secretary to take would be to argue that the current laws prohibiting vandalism of public monuments are not strong enough, and to propose new legislation.

It's completely illegitimate for the Home Secretary to put pressure on the police or the CPS in order to demand prosecutions, because then any case that is brought, can obviously be perceived as politically motivated.

And once we slip into the territory of politically motivated prosecutions, we end up with political prisoners, meaning we're living in a police state.

Patel is obviously far to dim to understand any of this, but ever since the Stalinist Cummings Purge of  the 21 liberal-capitalist Tory MPs in September 2019, the Tory party is even more bereft of talent than it was before.

I'm obviously no huge fanboy for purged Tories like David Gauke, Ken Clarke, Rory Stewart, Justine Greening, Dominic Grieve, Philip Hammond ... but at least these individuals would have been somewhat more likely to actually understand a little bit about the history and structure of the legal system, and the critical importance of avoiding political interference in the application of justice.

The fact of the matter is that if the protesters who organised the statue removal are found, and prosecuted, they can easily demonstrate that the prosecution was politically motivated, thanks to Patel, and then portray themselves as political prisoners if they're convicted.

I'd actually expect black civil rights campaigners to be queuing up to face such a ludicrous prosecution, because the prospect of being jailed for opposing slavery, in a politically partisan trial, would obviously create a powerful martyrdom narrative and turn their predicament into an instant cause célèbre.

Furthermore, conviction at the behest of a right-wing government would make a powerful demonstration of the systemic racism that the Black Lives Matter protesters were protesting against in the first place!

So whichever way you look at it, Patel has screwed up.

If you're you're even remotely liberal, you'll be opposed to politically motivated prosecutions as a matter of principle.

And if you're of the authoritarian persuasion, and want to see the statue-removers punished, then Patel's politicisation of the process has made the prospect of a reasonable conviction all the more difficult than it already was!

As ludicrous as this situation is, it's also deeply concerning, because once again we're an absolute laughing stock of a country, with a profoundly unintelligent and disturbingly authoritarian Home Secretary who demonstrably doesn't give the slightest damn about how the law is supposed to work in liberal democracies.

Any reasonable person, of any political persuasion (other than rabid right-wing authoritarianism) must be left wondering how on earth we've sunk so low.


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OR

This Tory statue outrage is the latest manifestation of their 'property above people' ideology

On Sunday June 7th 2020 anti-racism protesters tore down the Edward Colston statue in Bristol and threw it into Bristol Harbour. Many would argue that this represented a fitting end for a statue of a slave trader whose ships threw 19,000 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean.

The outraged Tory reaction to the removal of this slave trader statue is an absolutely telling demonstration of their militant ‘property above people’ ideology.

In the midst of a huge global uprising against racism, you might have thought that the Tories would have tried to keep a low profile, given their very recent history of implementing unlawful systematically racist policies, and the racist words and actions of their leader. But no, they couldn’t help themselves.

The unlawfully racist Tory Hostile Environment resulted in the systematic persecution of black British citizens. They were denied housing, employment, social security, banking services, and even life saving medical treatment. Scores were even deported, with several actually dying in exile overseas.

But Tory MPs have more tears for the fallen statue of a historical slave trader than for the thousands of real life victims of their own Windrush scandal!

We all know the Tories love a statue of a racist, because in the middle of the 2019 General Election campaign Boris Johnson and a load of other senior Tories flocked to Plymouth to pay homage to a statue of the notorious antisemite and anti-black racist Nancy Astor.

Not only was Astor a vile fascist sympathiser and antisemite who described Adolf Hitler as a welcome solution to the “world problem of Jews”, she also told a room full of African Americans that they should be “grateful for slavery”!

It’s absolutely beyond question that Tories see more value in statues of racists, than in the actual lives of the people who have suffered at the hands of slave traders, fascists, antisemites, and their own racist policies of systematic anti-black discrimination.

The rhetoric they’ve used to defend their beloved slave-trader statue gives a horrifying insight into the Tory mindset.

Their primary tactic has been to adopt the ludicrous pretence that removing monuments and statues to discredited figures and ideologies equates to erasure of history, which is a ludicrously weak argument.

Did these Tories cry bitter tears of frustration about the erasure of history when monuments to Lenin were torn down in post-Soviet Russia? Of course they didn’t.

Did they howl with outrage when the statue of Saddam Hussain was torn down in Baghdad, and the symbols of Ba’athism were destroyed across Iraq? Of course they didn’t.

Did they vehemently object the erasure of history when statues and monuments to Jimmy Savile were removed after his depraved crimes came to light? Of course they didn’t.

Would they argue that it was wrong to remove all the Swastikas and monuments to Hitler after the defeat of Nazi Germany? Because any kind of consistent application of their erasure of history principle suggests they believe Germany should still be covered in the iconography of Nazi Germany, and Russia should still be covered in the symbolism of the Soviet Union.

Then there’s the nonsensical demand that people should have just waited for politicians to sort it out, rather than taking matters into their own hands.

The problem of course is that the people of Bristol left it in the hands of the politicians to sort out, and instead of taking the required action of calmly taking the statue down, moving it somewhere appropriate (like a slavery museum) and then replacing it with a monument to the victims of the transatlantic slave trade, they spent literally years debating the precise wording of a plaque to be attached to the plinth!

And the local council allowed the slavery apologists at the Society of Merchant Venturers more say on the wording of the plaque than black civil rights activists in the city, or even the mayor!

No wonder people got sick of the political game-playing and eventually took matters into their own hands.

Another problem with the Tory erasure of history attack line is the fact that in one single day the removal of the statue did more to raise public awareness about Britain’s participation in the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade than leaving the statue in place for another century would have done (ridiculous plaque or not).

As David Olusoga pointed out, the removal of the statue wasn’t erasure of history, it was actually a defining moment of history.

And if the Tories really gave a damn about the erasure of history where were their torrents of outrage when the Windrush boarding cards were destroyed by the Home Office, or when the national records were vandalised to erase Britain’s colonial crimes?

The Tory objections to the destruction of actual historical records were non-existent of course, because they don’t mind history being erased if erasing it suits their purposes, and because their erasure of history argument is obviously just disingenuous nonsense to obscure the actual reason they’re enraged by the removal of a slave trader statue.

Perhaps the most despicable Tory argument of all is the way they invoked the Holocaust Museum at Auschwitz as if it constitutes some kind of direct comparison.

’If the Auschwitz concentration camp wasn’t demolished, how dare you pull down our slave trader statue?’

The answer of course is that Auschwitz was preserved as a memorial museum about the Holocaust, while the Edward Colston statue was erected as a memorial to a slave trader.

You’d have to be disgustingly ignorant, or wilfully obtuse to treat them as identical cases.

But what’s even more sickening than this grotesquely misleading comparison in itself, is the way that Tories will dredge up the suffering of one people, in order to whitewash the suffering of another.

Let’s remind Jewish people of the horrors of the Holocaust in our hastily constructed, and searingly incoherent justification of a modern day monument to a slave trader!

The Tory reaction to the removal of this slave trader statue has been divisive, deluded, depraved, and above all disingenuous.

It’s divisive because demanding that memorials to slave-traders should be left standing is an insult to all right-minded people who object to the Tory ‘property above people’ mentality, it’s a spit in the eye for black Brits, and it's especially insulting to the African American and Caribbean descendants of the victims of the transatlantic slave trade.

It's deluded because leaving it to the politicians resulted in endless naval gazing over the precise wording of a stupid little plaque, rather than the required action of just calmly taking it down and replacing it with a memorial to the victims of slavery.

It’s depraved because the logical conclusion of their erasure of history argument would mean leaving Swastikas over Germany, the Saddam Hussain statue in Baghdad, and all the Jimmy Savile statues and monuments that used to be dotted around Leeds.

And above all it’s disingenuous because whatever rhetoric they're spouting to oppose the removal of this statue, the real reason they're so furious is that slave-trader Colston was a Tory MP, and they see the removal of this monument to one of their beloved Tory brethren as an attack on Toryism.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Please consider helping me keep writing by making a donation, or setting up a small subscription. Don't worry if you can't afford to, or don't want to. Access to my online work will always remain free.

OR

Is this the shittest defence of workfare ever?

Back in 2012 when the Tory DWP boss Iain Duncan Smith was battling against the Court of Appeals decision to declare his "Workfare" forced labour schemes unlawful, he launched an astonishingly pitiful defence of his unlawful "Workfare" scams (you can see a video and my critique of it here). I never though I'd see a more useless display of poorly considered rubbish, but someone recently left an attempted defence of "Workfare" forced labour schemes on my Another Angry Voice Facebook page that even manages to beat Iain Duncan Smith's bizarre ranting for sheer wrongness.

I know it's hardly worth my time to critique a ridiculous comment on my Facebook page, but it is often illustrative to demostrate just how wrong it is possible to be (plus I actually enjoy tearing hopeless arguments to pieces, so this article should be a doddle to write).

I'm going to quote the whole comment and then go through it piece by piece showing how mind-bogglingly wrong it is.

"Workfare is obviously not slavery, as no force is being applied to join them. Anyone is free to leave at any time. Hence the scheme is liberal, ie it makes for a free and so more just society in this regard (which is why the left hates it so much). It beggars belief that anyone could claim that working for one's wage is slavery - and then in the same breath say they want to enslave other people, by living off the taxes that other people pay."

So here's my point by point demolition:

"Workfare is obviously not slavery ..." - WRONG - Firstly I didn't actually claim "Workfare was slavery", so your opening salvo is a straw-man argument. Secondly, whether Workfare is slavery or not depends on your definition of the word "slavery". If we define slavery as "forced unpaid labour" then Workfare seems to fit the definition quite neatly. I've often advised people to avoid using workfare/slavery comparisons because it can be perceived as hyperbolic language by the pro-workfare people we're trying to dissuade from supporting it, but to claim that it's "obviously not slavery" is just misleading. We'll come back to inappropriate slavery comparisons later ...

"...as no force is being applied to join them" - WRONG - It is well documented that harsh benefits sanctions are used to force people into joining workfare schemes. In fact, the court case Iain Duncan Smith lost was all about whether his workfare punishment regime was lawful or not (it turned out that it wasn't).

"Anyone is free to leave at any time" - WRONG - If people leave their "workfare placements" at any time, they are invariably punished with the absolute destitution caused by benefits sanctions. This fear of absolute destitution leaves workfare victims in the appalling situation where they have to simply put up with it if they are being bullied or abused by the bosses, or by other paid staff who resent people on unpaid workfare placements because they represent a very clear and obvious threat to the continuation of their paid employment.

"Hence the scheme is liberal" - WRONG - What the hell kind of defintion of "liberal" are you using in order to make it compatible with the state forcing people to work for no wages and with no labour rights, under the threat of absolute destitution?

"it makes for a free and so more just society in this regard" - WRONG - A free and just society where the state can bypass minimum wage legislation and force the citizen to work for no wages in jobs that they can't leave without suffering absolute destitution? What the hell kind of definitions of "free" and "just" are you using here? 

"which is why the left hates it so much" - WRONG - this isn't even a left-right issue, it's a libertarian-authoritarian issue. Stalin (left-wing) used forced labour schemes, as did Hitler (right-wing). The distinction here is whether we believe that the state has the right to extract the labour of the individual for no compensation and distribute it to favoured clients (an authoritarian stance) or whether the labour of the individual actually belongs to the individual (a libertarian stance). 

"It beggars belief that anyone could claim that working for one's wage is slavery" - WRONG - workfare isn't working for a wage, it's working for subsistence level social security payouts that have been paid for through National Insurance contributions. If the state makes the individual work in order to "earn" their social security payments, then what the individual has paid in National Insurance contributions has essentially been stolen from them by the state hasn't it? If you're fine with the government stealing from the public, you're the one who is beggaring belief, not me.

"and then in the same breath say they want to enslave other people by living off the taxes that other people pay" -WRONG - As already mentioned, unemployment benefits are paid in the form of National Insurance scheme payouts. They are not paid directly by other people, they are the payout from a collective insurance fund. If you don't understand how our social security system even works it's no surprise that you're the kind of half-wit who thinks that paying National Insurance contributions is comparable to slavery. This mind numbingly stupid "tax =  slavery" stance betrays the utter stupidity of your position. First you argue that the state taking the entirety of an individual's labour value and distributing it for free to favoured corporate clients (like Warburg Pincus, the US based conglomerate that owns Poundland) is "obviously not slavery", but then you whinge that the state taking a small percentage of the individual's labour value as a contribution towards a national insurance fund designed to protect against disability, unemployment and old age is "slavery"!

All in all this attempted defence of workfare is one of the most pitiful displays of utter wrongness I've ever witnessed!

 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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Iain Duncan Smith: Slavery and Narcissism

Iain Duncan Smith has once again demonstrated how out of touch with reality he is. In an absurdly self-congratulatory speech he compared his "welfare reforms" (which are hopelessly inefficient, economically illiterate, dishonest, unlawful, discriminatory, fraud riddled, punitive, target driven, wasteful, incompetently administered and compassionless) with the abolitionist movement of the 19th Century!

Given that one of Iain Duncan Smith's favourite welfare policies involves compelling tens of thousands of people (under threat of absolute destitution) to rescind their labour rights and work for free for his corporate mates, it is perhaps possible to believe that Iain Duncan Smith is simply engaging in a spot of "trolling". However, in my view he isn't comparing himself to great abolitionists like William Wilberforce and Anthony Ashley-Cooper as some kind of sneering juvenile wind-up, he is clearly delusional enough to actually believe the appalling nonsense that he spouts.

I don't normally go in for psychological analysis, but Iain Duncan Smith makes an absolutely fascinating case because he is such an unbelievable narcissist. In Iain Duncan Smith's worldview, he is some kind of infallible superhero and anyone who dares point out his appalling mistakes (which are far too innumerable to count) is to be instantly dismissed as "the enemy".

 After Iain Duncan Smith's "Workfare" mandatory unpaid labour schemes were declared unlawful by the courts (due to the unintelligibility of the rules) , IDS repeatedly lied about what the court judgement actually said, then stuck two fingers up at the justice system by pushing a truly outrageous piece of retroactive legislation through parliament so that his "Workfare" rules would have been intelligible had they been written that way in the past!

After the courts twice declared that Iain Duncan Smith's Atos administered WCA regime for the disabled is inherently discriminatory, he simply ignored the rulings and continued as if the UK judicial system is some kind of minor irrelevance.

After he was rebuked by the UK Statistics Authority for his egregious misuse of statistics he claimed that he was entitled to blatantly misuse statistics to justify his actions as long as he believes that he is right!

After the Trussell Trust food bank group provided evidence that the exponential rise in food bank dependency is linked to Iain Duncan Smith's welfare reforms he launched into a spectacular tirade which clearly illustrated his desire to have them silenced via the "Protection of Corporate Lobbying and Silencing of Legitimate Political Debate" Bill that the Tories are pushing through parliament despite massive public opposition.

It is absolutely clear that Iain Duncan Smith suffers from a psychotic level of narcissism. It doesn't matter how many catastrophic mistakes he makes, and it doesn't matter how much evidence is provided that he is wrong, his mind is filled with very little other than an overpowering sense of self-regard.

What is much less clear is the reason that the rest of the coalition government allow him to get away with one spectacular blunder after another. Unlike masters of deceit like Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, the man clearly lacks the charisma to convince others of his own brilliance. So how does he get away with it?

There seem to be two different motivations. His Tory colleagues (the ones that unceremoniously removed him as leader of the Tory party in 2003 after it became absolutely clear how much of an incompetent charisma vacuum he was) hate the welfare state with a passion, so it makes some kind of perverted sense for them to put an incompetent moral and intellectual pygmy in charge of it, in order to inflict as much damage as possible.

The unyielding support for Iain Duncan Smith that has been provided by the Liberal Democrat members of the coalition is harder to fathom. There is absolutely no long-term political benefit to be derived from their undying support for Iain Duncan Smith (despite his regular displays of incompetence, malice, hubris, cognitive illiteracy etc). The only conclusion seems to be that they are prepared to actively support Iain Duncan Smith's reign of terror over the most vulnerable people in society because they believe it is a price worth paying for a few six figure ministerial salaries and the short lived sense of self-importance that comes with being part of the government.

In conclusion, the most offensive thing about Iain Duncan Smith's narcissistic and self-aggrandising comparison with the famous slavery abolitionists of the 19th Century is not the fact that he is responsible for herding hundreds of thousands of people onto mandatory unpaid labour schemes: It is the fact that the rest of the government don't just let him get away with being the dangerously psychotic narcissist that he so clearly is, they back him to the hilt and willfully allow him to continue his delusional reign of terror.

 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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The Workfare slavery debate.

A lot has been written about the Tory obsession with making the unemployed "work for their benefits" under Workfare schemes. There are many valid criticisms of Workfare, here are 10 of the best.

• Many of these workfare placements described by the Tories as "valuable work-experience" involve nothing more than months of menial tasks like shelf stacking and floor sweeping with no real training at all.
• Many unemployed people have been forced to give up education, training or skilled work in the voluntary sector in order to stack shelves at places like Poundland on Workfare schemes.
• Future employers are hardly going to be more impressed by a period of mandatory unpaid menial labour at Poundland or Argos than by the use of initiative to undertake training or find skilled work in the voluntary sector.
• Early evidence shows that very few workfare trainees get taken on full time at the end of their mandatory period of unpaid work, often to be replaced by another mandatory Workfare placement.
• The provision of an unlimited supply of workfare labourers actually gives companies the incentive to sack their paid low-skilled employees, thus exacerbating the unemployment situation.
• The main beneficiaries of these workfare schemes are certainly not the unemployed, they are the corporations provided with free rightless labour at the taxpayers' expense.
• The other main beneficiaries are corporations like A4E, G4S, Serco and Atos who have landed lucrative government contracts to administer these schemes. Some of whom have engaged in fraud in order to soak up even more taxpayers' cash.
• Apprenticeships are already a proven system for providing "work experience", the £millions that have been poured into parasitic companies like A4E to administer workfare schemes would surely have been better spent funding apprenticeships with small and medium enterprises, with a view to providing long-term employment opportunities for skillful and dedicated youngsters.
• If the work is worth doing, then surely it is worth paying someone to do it.
• Mandatory unpaid labour schemes like Workfare can be seen as a deliberate attempt to undermine employment law and the minimum wage. Hardly surprising given the Tory contempt for the value of labour.

The problem is that many of these criticisms are completely overshadowed by allegations that Workfare is a form of slavery. The main problem with the allegation that Workfare is a form of slavery is that it gives Workfare apologists a point of attack. They can take the upper hand in the debate by feigning moral outrage that such "work for your benefits" schemes are nowhere near as harsh as the traditional forms of slavery; American cotton plantations, Japanese prisoner of war camps, Soviet Gulags or modern day sex-workers trafficked into Britain from Eastern Europe.

My position is that it is fair to compare Workfare schemes with slavery, after all "mandatory, unpaid labour" would seem to be a fitting description for both mandatory Workfare schemes and of the previous examples that are unquestionably considered to be slavery. The difference of course is in severity, Workfare victims are not treated as the legal property of the slave owners, as in the US cotton plantations. They are not provided starvation rations, viciously beaten and eventually worked to death as in the Soviet Gulags and Japanese prisoner of war camps and they are not held captive like modern day slaves working in the UK sex trade.

If we use sexual assault as an analogy, there are many grades of sexual assault, from drunkenly groping a co-worker at the office Christmas party to appalling sexual abuse inflicted upon very young children in the production of child-pornography films. The argument that Workfare is not a form of slavery because it demeans the victims of "real slavery" is akin to the argument that getting groped by your boss shouldn't be referred to as sexual assault because it demeans the victims of "real sexual assault".

Obviously the argument that getting groped by your boss is not sexual assault because it isn't severe enough is absurd and wrong. I've been drunk many hundreds of times and have always kept my hands to myself so other people, especially people with big responsibilities should be able to control themselves too. The argument that unwanted sexual contact is not sexual assault because it wasn't as severe as others have suffered is unsustainable, therefore the argument that mandatory unpaid labour is not a form of slavery because it isn't as severe as others have suffered is also invalid.

My view is that describing mandatory Workfare placements as slavery is not wrong, since mandatory unpaid labour would seem to be an almost perfect description of slavery. However it is an unhelpful tactic because it gives Workfare apologists the opportunity to create an argument based on the appeal to emotion strategy, which is a very persuasive argument to people that are not versed in analytical thought.

The typical workfare apologist has to resort to appeal to emotion tactics because when it comes to evidence and socio-economic arguments, they don't have a leg to stand on. Take Tory Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith who stated that "those who oppose this process are opposed to hard work". This is a clear example of the appeal to emotion strategy. He disparages opponents to his schemes as lazy, workshy parasites, rather than people with legitimate concerns about the state forcing people to work for free, with no labour rights in order to boost corporate profits.

Giving Workfare fans the opportunity to raise a strong appeal to emotion argument by invoking comparisons to slavery allows them to completely sidestep more rigorous criticisms (as listed above) and put up a smokescreen of moral outrage.

My advice to those that wish to voice their opposition to Tory mandatory unpaid labour schemes is to avoid comparisons to slavery and to stick to facts and analysis. This way the Workfare apologist is left with fewer options; they can try to counter the facts and analysis (extremely difficult given the growing weight of evidence), they can simply remain silent or they can try to raise their own independent appeal to emotion by castigating "the unemployed" as feckless workshy scroungers. If they resort to name calling and generalisations about the unemployed out them as unthinking reactionaries using using obvious appeal to emotion tactics and counter their ignorant assertions with facts.

A famous quote says "Do not argue with idiots, they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience" however if you feel as strongly as I do that these Workfare schemes are a combination of blatant attacks on labour rights and taxpayer funded corporate handouts, then it is important that our voices are heard and that the argument is won. Therefore we need to avoid getting bogged down in emotional arguments and attempts to define "slavery" and stay focused on the facts and rigorous analysis.

More articles from
ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE

The Tory contempt for ordinary working people
               

The Beecroft Report; nothing more than a corporate wishlist
                         

A letter to fans of Workfare
                         
Gaming the Work Programme 
                          

Austerity and the Double-Dip

 

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Richard Dawkins and the slave trade

Prologue: Mentioning Dawkins on the internet is a surefire way of provoking internet traffic and below the line comments. If anyone does care to comment on this piece, please take care to look up the definition of Ignosticism before you accuse me of taking sides on the "God debate". I have even provided a link to the definition, so there is no excuse.

Richard Dawkins, descended from slave owners.

In February 2012 the Daily Telegraph printed an article pointing out that Richard Dawkins, the icon (some would even say the godhead) of the modern atheist movement is descended from a family of slave owners and inherited some of their wealth.

Given the predominance of the slave trade throughout the early British empire and the sheer number of 18th Century ancestors each and every person might have, it is unsurprising that one of Britains leading celebrities has such shady ancestry. The probability is that most of us have few rogue ancestors from 7 generations ago (slave traders, pirates, smugglers, spies, unscrupulous capitalist factory owners, genocidal maniacs, child employers, press gangers.....). The fact that Dawkins has retained the family name of his disreputable ancestor is pure chance, a 64-1 shot (if Dawkins own figures are to be trusted). This inherited name coincidence probably made the "story" much easier to find.

That the Torygraph chose Dawkins as a target is no surprise at all, the man is literally adored by the readers of their historical broadsheet rival The Guardian. Check out the abysmal standard of the below the lines comments on any CiF article about Dawkins, Atheism, Religion or (most annoyingly) pure factual science articles. The Dawkins inspired "atheist ranters" come out in force on Guardian pages. They hate organised religion with a zeal, they deride the faithful as mentally retarded, they gibber on about spaghetti mosters and sky pixies as if such talk actually added anything meaningful to the debate, they debase Dawkins own arguments through grotesque simplifications and they adore the man almost reverentially. It is easy to picture these sycophantic drones smugly typing their intolerant bile, glowing with inner pride at their own rebelious contrariness. I'm faily sure that there is no group on Earth that Telegraph hacks would enjoy pissing off as much.

I'm about as left-wing as Englishmen are made, so it pains me to share the glee of the hacks at one of Britain's foremost Tory neoliberal mouthpieces, yet the accusation "you may have inherited a slave supporting gene" is actually very funny when it's aimed at an eminent evolutionary biologist. 

To me, the fact that Dawkins ancestors profited from slavery is neither here nor there and has little bearing on Dawkins as a person. Had he been ignorant of the facts about his ancestors (as many people are) he could hardly be held liable and even though he did know that the weatlh of his forefathers was amassed through the disgusting exploitation of other human beings, and that his forefathers voted against the abolition of slavery in Parliament to protect their own financial interests, he can hardly be blamed for not publicising these facts. I mean would you tell all your friends, acquaintances and potentially millions of other people about it if you knew that some of your ancestors were utterly evil bastards and you had inherited a share of their wealth?

I'm fascinated by history and genetics, my own forefathers range from an eminent biologist who was more familiar with Kew Gardens than Professor Dawkins ever will be, to seafarers who involved themselves in the smuggling trade. I'm actually rather proud of both branches of my family, they made their contributions to history and the case that I should be held liable for the unpaid import taxes of my distant seafaring ancestors would be as unlikely as an award for my inherited genetic contribution to the biological sciences.

During my time in Argentina I met many people who's families had been part of the military junta and others who's distant forefathers participated in the "conquest of the desert" genocide aginst the native American tribes. It was impossible to blame these people for the crimes of their predecessors, yet to see people proudly displaying portraits of their genocidal great-grandfathers was still quite shocking. I also know British people who were born into wealth and privilidge thanks to their forefathers grotesque exploitation of hundreds of men women and children in unimaginably horrific factories during the industrial revolution. Are they to be blamed for the inhumane ethics of early industrialised capitalism? Holding Dawkins liable for the crimes of his forefathers is akin to blaming German toddlers for the fact that their great-grandfather may have earned his salary as a concentration camp guard during the Nazi occupation of Europe.

The thing that really does bother me about Dawkins' response to the article is the way he casually dismisses the value of his families 400 acre estate (allegedly built with slave money) as "peanuts". He certainly seems to have lost his grip on reality since he started raking in the cash as one of the world's leading celebrity god-killers if the value of his family's profitable rural estate  is "peanuts" in comparison to his income as an icon of the anti-god brigade. To many of his countrymen, atheist or not, ownership of a "small working farm" would be a financially impossible aspiration, not snackfood.

If the property now has such limited intrinsic value to the man as to be compared to common legumes, perhaps his family could dispose of the assets and donate the proceeds to an anti-slavery charity, after all, the estimated global slave population today far exceeds the size of the slavery industry that his forefathers built their wealth and privilidge upon.

Epilogue: As I mentioned in the prologue, I am an ignostic. This means that I view the "does God exist debate" as essentially meaningless (and utterly tiresome when debated by people without the slightest regard for the basics in analytic thinking or ethics). Without a concise definition of what the word "God" means, the debate is futile. To a fervant atheist the question is as meaningless as "does a thing that doesn't exist, exist?" To the faithful adherents of religious dogma it is also a meaningless question, they have no choice but to believe in their specific definition. My justification for assuming the ignostic position is that if "God" is defined as infinite and all powerful, then by definition God is utterly unknowable to the finite mind. Therefore any definition from a finite human perspective must consequetially be flawed, meaning discussion of the subject is rendered meaningless.

See also

Dawkin's ranters please shut up