What is ... performative stupidity?

When Jeremy Corbyn and Labour abstained on the motion to dissolve parliament and hold a general election, Boris Johnson responded by claiming that he can only speculate about the reason.

But in reality he's been told repeatedly that Labour are keen to fight an election, they're just waiting for the legislation to prevent No Deal By Default to be passed into law before they agree to hold a general election.

He knows that they're delaying the election until after they've disarmed the trap that he tried to set them, but he's pretending not to understand for effect.

When Johnson pretends to be incapable of understanding the simple strategy he's had explained to him multiple times already, he's engaging in performative stupidity.

Performative stupidity is an increasingly popular trend in political discourse, and it's utterly infuriating.

Instead of taking the traditional approach of saying something along the lines of "this policy is stupid because [reasons]", it takes the form of "I'm too stupid to understand this policy, so it must be stupid".

Johnson isn't the first to try it by any stretch, in fact until recently performative stupidity has been far more common on the Remain Ultra side of the Brexit divide.

Pretty much everyone had seen some dolt pretending to be too stupid to understand Labour's Brexit position, especially BBC Politics pundits who seem to take some kind of perverse pleasure in pretending to be too stupid to understand, and having it explained to them again, and again, and again. The same pretence of faux stupidity week after week.

The interview goes something like this:

BBC Presenter: But Labour's Brexit policy is sooo confusing, how can anyone possibly understand it?

Labour Spokesperson: It's actually quite simple. We want to stop the Tory No Deal Brexit disaster from wrecking the UK economy. Then we want to seek renegotiation with the EU to develop a means of leaving the EU that doesn't involve devastating the entire UK economy. Then we'll put the renegotiated fail safe deal to a final say referendum with Remain on the ballot.

Presenter: Gosh, that's a lot of mouth words you just used! How is it even possible for ordinary plebs to hold so many different thoughts in their heads at one time? Why can't you just keep it easy to understand by picking one side and telling the other half of the country to piss off?

Spokesperson: That would be the simple thing to do, but it would be the wrong thing to do. Someone needs to try to heal this terrible Brexit divide David Cameron and the Tories created, and it's impossible to do that by completely alienating one side and ignoring their concerns to pander exclusively to the other side.

Presenter: Well now that's even more mouth words isn't it? So now I'm going to pretend to not understand what you're saying some more in the hope that a load of mindless idiots watching this show will imitate my behaviour and go around pretending that they're also too stupid to understand the basic concept of compromise too. Thank you and good night.

This kind of performative stupidity debating tactic is an infuriating debasement of political discourse, because it takes such bad faith to pretend to be incapable of understanding something that's already been explained to you over and again.

Just think about it.

Other bad faith debating tactics like lying, smearing, straw-manning and whataboutery result in the debasement of political discourse because they lower the bar, and pollute the discourse with dishonesty and personal abuse.

Performative stupidity is more insidious because it involves deliberately pretending to be stupid in a pathetic ruse aimed at convincing the gullible that a reasonably simple and oft explained issue is just too complicated for them to even bother to think about.

This kind of tactic doesn't just debase the discourse because it lowers the bar, it's actively intended to make "I'm too stupid to understand this" an acceptable alternative to reason-based critique.

And the more popular performative stupidity tactics become, the more political pressure will be exerted on our political leaders to develop glib, facile, over-simplistic solutions to complex problems, because anything detailed, or nuanced, or strategically sophisticated will be shouted down by the "I'm too stupid to understand this" performative stupidity brigade.

So the next time you see a politician or political commentator claiming to not understand something (that it's their actual bloody job to understand and critique), ask yourself if they've really honestly failed to grasp the idea, or whether they're seeking to actively erode the standard of political debate by just pretending not to understand.

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What is ... "centrism"?

One of the huge mistakes people make with the term "centrism" is imagining that it's actually a moderate central position between capitalism and socialism like the name implies, when it's nothing of the sort.

In reality modern "centrism" is an orthodox neoliberal strategy of shifting ever further rightwards in order to position yourself ever so slightly to the left of whatever ideological insanity the political right are up to.

Historical context

For proof that there's been a decades long rightwards shift of the "centrists" just consider what was the central political ground from the 1940s through to the 1970s.

Conservative governments all through the era ran vital public infrastructure, services, and industries as state enterprises, built and maintained social housing, and regulated the financial sector in order to prevent devastating crises like those of the 1920s and 1930s.

The position of the Tory party in the 1950s and '60s is clearly significantly to the left of the "centrist" Labour government between 1997 and 2010,which introduced privatisation in our schools and hospitals, refused to build more social housing (or even reverse the disastrous Tory policy of selling off social housing without replacing it), and catastrophically deregulated the financial sector to enable the reckless sub-prime gambling that triggered the run on Northern Rock and eventually the 2008 bankers' insolvency crisis ("centrist" Democrats did the same kinds of regulation in the US leading to the same insolvency crisis and bailouts situation over there). 

Anyone back in the '50s or '60s talking about privatising schools, hospitals, the Royal Mail, and even police services would have been considered a raving ideological extremist, but these days it's the political norm, and actual government policy.

And just imagine what would have happened to someone in the '50s or '60s if they'd proposed selling off our entire nuclear industry and letting it fall into the hands of the French government, then bribing the French and Chinese governments with public cash into building our new nuclear plants for us!

They'd have strayed so far from the political centre ground that the vast majority of people would condemn this kind of ideological lunacy as "treason".

But since the advent of the neoliberal era in 1979 this kind of absurd ideological extremist is absolutely commonplace, and the nuclear sell-off and bribery of the French and Chinese has actually happened under Tory rule.

In fact someone like Jeremy Corbyn who proposes a mix between socialist policies and regulated, properly taxed capitalism would obviously have been a political centrist in this pre-neoliberal era, but in modern Britain, as we know, he's routinely portrayed as a terrifying political extremist with radical and unpopular economic policies.

He's portrayed this way by the self-declared "centrists" because he's refused to jump on board the radical hard-right neoliberal bandwagon like they all have.

He's stayed on the traditional centre ground as the "centrists" rapidly steam towards the radical hard-right and yell "extremism" at him out of the window as they fade into the distance!

Modern context

Now think about the political position of the self-declared Labour "centrists".

Remember Labour losing the 2015 general election by pathetically imitating Tory austerity dogma rather than opposing it. That's "centrism".

Remember the Labour right-wingers and mainstream media hacks parroting the ludicrous myth that Labour lost because they were too left-wing under Miliband in order to justify their absurd theory that Labour should imitate Tory economic radicalism even more closely? That's "centrism".

Remember all 3 of the Labour "centrist" candidates cementing Corbyn's win by actually abstaining on the vote on £12 billion worth of Tory social security cuts for the poorest people in society during the Labour leadership election? That's "centrism".

The Labour "centrists" lost the party the 2015 General Election with their policy of pathetically imitating Tory policy, and then their immediate response was to claim that the solution to this self-inflicted defeat was yet another huge rightwards lurch towards the policies of the the most radically right-wing Tory government since universal suffrage!

In the minds of modern self-appointed "centrists" moderation and pragmatism clearly involves continually imitating the Tories, even when they're busy outright defying the public will by privatising schools, hospitals, and police services, trashing the economy with hard-right austerity dogma, destroying local government with unprecedented funding cuts, overseeing the longest period of collapsing wages and living standards in living memory, and using public cash to bribe foreign governments into building national infrastructure for us!

A basic grounding in political reality reveals that modern day "centrists" are not people who actually take a central position between capitalism and socialism, they're right-wing people with an interest in misleading the public into believing that the radical hard-right economic dogma of neoliberalism is somehow a moderate and pragmatic approach that exists in on the political centre ground!

Labels

It should be pretty obvious that "centrism" is a misleading political label that bears absolutely no relation to the hard-right neoliberal policies that modern "centrists" tend to support and imitate.

Another example of this kind of increasingly misleading political label is "Conservatism".

These days there are very few actual (small c) conservatives left in the Conservative Party. There's absolutely nothing "conservative" about the radical hard-right, pro-privatisation, anti-worker, cult of the individual bollocks they've been pushing for the last 4 decades.

And this is before we even bother to mention the Liberal Democrats and their numerous votes in support of grotesquely illiberal Tory party policies between 2010 & 2015 (secret courts, dripa, the gagging law, bedroom tax, sanctions and disability assessment regimes ...)

All three are examples of desperately misleading political labels.

At least Jeremy Corbyn is more or less exactly what he says he is on his label: a democratic socialist.

And at least the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru (Welsh Party), and the Green Party tend to offer more or less what their labels imply too.

But conservatives, "centrists", and liberals have shifted position so dramatically over recent decades that the policies they promote bear almost no resemblance to the political labels they self-apply.

Criticising centrism

One of the most difficult things about criticising the kind of self-appointed "centrists" who push radically right-wing neoliberalism is that an awful lot of people are so politically naive that they take the "centrists" at face value.

Politically naive people think that just because "centrists" self-declare as "centrists" that their political position is actually in the moderate centre, rather than lying ever so slightly to the left of the most radically right-wing Tory government in living memory.

So if you criticise "centrism" this complacent James O'Brien-listening, BBC-watching, Guardian-reading demographic is liable to think that you're only criticising the moderate political centre ground because you've been brainwashed into supporting the radically left-wing "cult of Corbyn"!

What they're completely and utterly unprepared to accept is the idea that hard-right neoliberal dogma is actually the ideological cult which has completely infested the Westminster political establishment and the mainstream media, and that the few who haven't got on board with this hard-right, pro-privatisation, pro-austerity, anti-worker, deregulation frenzy are the last remaining "centrists" from the pre-neoliberal era!

So be careful when you end up criticising "centrism". If your audience doesn't understand that you're criticising neoliberals trying to give themselves a veneer of legitimacy by self-applying the label "centrist" then they're liable to imagine that you're actually attacking the old conception of a "centrism" that offers a compromise between socialism and capitalism.

They're liable to take your criticisms as confirmation of their absurdly warped view that people like you are the radical ideological extremist and continue believing that neoliberal self-labelling "centrists" and Tory ideological extremism represent the moderate centre ground!

  If you found this article interesting or informative,      

  here's another article about the "centrist" delusion that 

  their ideology is flawless and everything bad is always    somebody else's fault.

  

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What is ... Rage Sharing?

It's been known for a long time that headlines are the most important part of a news story.

Even in the time before social media it was obvious that far more people would see the newspaper headlines (on newsagent shelves, or on newspaper reviews on the TV, or on the canteen table, or on the next week's chip wrappers) than would ever actually read the contents of the article.

But since the advent of social media, headlines have become even more important because there are loads of people out there who will share articles without even bothering to read them first (especially via Twitter retweets), and other people who are so fact-averse that they'll form extreme political judgements based on the headline of the article that they've clearly not even bothered to read.

Some of the most mega-viral articles of 2018 have been astoundingly misleading anti-Corbyn headlines that are completely contradicted within the body of the article, but literally tens of thousands of people became so outraged by the deceptive headlines that they shared without even bothering to read the article and check that the headline is justified.

This behaviour is "rage sharing", and mainstream media publications are cashing in on it big time with absolute torrents of shares and clicks (the currency of online journalism).

Apéritif: Aren't biffers gullible?

I'll come to the two desperately misleading anti-Corbyn headlines later, but just to illustrate that rage sharing articles without reading them is not a new phenomenon, just consider the fact that in 2014 the extreme-right hate group Britain First shared a spoof story about the Essex villages of High Easter and Good Easter being forced to change their names by pesky Muslims and lefties.

Hundreds of Biffers rage shared the article and spewed bigoted badly-spelled diatribes in the comments without even bothering to read the article and clocking that it was a ridiculously obvious spoof which included quotes from people like "Dr Touchi" from the prestigious "University of South Thurrock"!

Independent: Corbyn the immigrant-hater

June 2018 saw a truly egregious examples of rage sharing with over 31,000 people sharing a grotesquely misleading headline in the (supposedly left-liberal) Independent that brazenly cherry picked highly selective quotations from a Jeremy Corbyn speech about trade policy to portray him as some kind of bonkers hard-right anti-immigrant Brextremist.

This outrageously deceptive headline struck a chord with the self-declared "centrists" (orthodox neoliberals to give them a more accurate description) and the ever-reactionary #FBPE Twitter echo chamber.

It was absolutely clear that very few of the people rage sharing the article were actually reading it, otherwise they couldn't have failed to spot the brazenly dishonest selective quotation tactics, or the fact that Corbyn's trade policy speech was actually pretty good.

Guardian: Corbyn the militant Brextremist

In December 2018 The Guardian jumped onto the rage share bandwagon with a brazenly deceptive anti-Corbyn headline of their own that was so widely shared by "centrists" and the #FBPE echo chamber it almost broke Twitter with a mind-boggling 88,000+ shares (at the time of writing).

Literally thousands of people reacted in absolute "never voting Labour again" fury to the headline "Corbyn: Brexit would go ahead even if Labour won snap election" without a single one of them picking up on the crucial facts that:

1. The words "Brexit would go ahead" were plucked out of thin air by Guardian hacks and placed next to Corbyn's name in the headline (amazingly he's not actually quoted saying this anywhere in the article).

2. What Corbyn actually said was common sense. If he won a snap election he'd go to the EU and establish basic stuff like whether they'd consider renegotiation, and whether they'd extend the Article 50 deadline. Anyone who thinks that upon becoming Prime Minister he shouldn't attempt to establish the EU's position on the drastically changed political circumstances as a matter of urgency is quite frankly out of their god-damned tree.

3. If you've got the patience to read all the way down to paragraph 18 of the article you even find Corbyn expressing his view that if there's another EU referendum then Labour's policy would be decided democratically by its members (meaning Labour would back Remain whatever Corbyn's personal beliefs!). Surely an article saying "Corbyn keeps second referendum option on the table" would make a less misleading headline than a phrase Corbyn didn't even use designed to make it seem like he's arbitrarily ruling out a second referendum entirely?

Profit and propaganda

It's absolutely clear that the corporate media are learning that there's a significant market in anti-Corbyn rage share articles with headlines that bear little to no relation to what Corbyn actually said.

In fact the liberal mainstream media and the anti-Corbyn mob seem to be developing a kind of symbiosis.

Outlets like the Guardian and the Independent benefit from absolute torrents of shares and clicks when they use deceptive anti-Corbyn headlines, and the #FBPE echo chamber, Labour right-wingers, and other Corbyn detractors get the instantly shareable anti-Corbyn headlines they constantly crave.

Stuck in the middle

The big loser in the scenario (aside from Corbyn and the Labour Party of course) is the standard of political discourse that is now not only polluted by the lying Brextremists and the absurd unicornist fantasies they've fostered amongst their herd of followers, but also by equally extreme people on the Remain side who have no qualms whatever about sharing desperately misleading headlines, or even just outright lying, if they feel that doing so serves their political purposes.

They're either such gullible dupes that they mindlessly rage share articles without even reading them to check that the headline is justifiable, or they know perfectly well that the headline is deceptive but they share it anyway because they consider their political agenda to be far more important than stuff like truth, honesty, and integrity.

Either way their attitudes are just as bad as the Brextremists who got us in this mess in the first place.

How is rage sharing a deceptively titled article without even bothering to read it first any better than believing a lie on the side of a bus? And if they do know that the headline is deceptive but they're sharing it anyway, how is that any better than actually writing a lie on the side of a bus?

Who needs bots?

We're all aware of social media bots by now. Whether it's dodgy Russian bot farms spreading divisive propaganda, pro-Israeli astroturfing operations, or the bot nets that the Brexiteers ran during the 2016 EU referendum.

But who actually needs bots to spread their propaganda when it seems incredibly simple to just trick a vast army of unthinking, uncritical real life human drones into rage sharing your political propaganda for you?

There's a massive propaganda war going on, and the footsoldiers are an enormous army of absolute dupes who are so intellectually lazy they don't even bother to read the articles they share or think about things for themselves.

Rage sharing is here to stay

Had the Guardian chosen a reasonably fair interpretation of Jeremy Corbyn's position as their headline rather than deliberately seeking to portray his stance as negatively as possible (as some kind of rigidly inflexible Brextremist absolutist) they know for a fact they wouldn't have triggered such a tsunami of rage shares.

As far as they're concerned, if blatantly deceptive headlines create enormous torrents of shares and clicks, then sod journalistic standards and sod what remains of the Guardian's dwindling reputation, let's cash in on the rage shares and grab as much advertising cash as possible as the torrent of hits floods in.

If tens of thousands of people are going to send your article mega-viral by rage sharing it simply because the misleading headline confirms their political biases, and nobody is ever going to hold you or them to account for spreading such a vast barrage of deceitful and deceptive propaganda, then why wouldn't other unscrupulous mainstream media hacks make use of exactly the same tactics?

What is ...? is an occasional Another Angry Voice series. See the other articles here.

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What is a Corbyn's hat distraction tactic?

In recent weeks a new kind of propaganda strategy has been deployed in order to muddy the waters and get people quibbling over trivial details to distract attention away from the main issue.

It's a specific kind of distraction tactic based on getting people arguing over the trivial minutiae of a subject rather than the big picture, and I'll explain why I've decided to coin the term "Corbyn's hat" distraction tactic to describe it.

Corbyn's hat

The reason I've decided to call this kind of propaganda ploy a "Corbyn's hat" distraction tactic is that the most glaring example I've ever seen to date involved sidetracking an important debate about broadcaster bias into a heated argument over Jeremy Corbyn's hat.

The bigger issue was that the BBC (which is supposed to be a politically impartial state broadcaster) made the extraordinary decision to mock up a giant poster of a red-tinted Jeremy Corbyn in front of the Kremlin to use for the background of one of their shows in which Corbyn's evidence-seeking stance on the Sailsbury poisoning was ridiculed and no mention of the £800,000+ Theresa May's Tories have taken in donations from Russian oligarchs and Putin cronies.
 

This wasn't the first time the British state broadcaster has used photoshop to attack Jeremy Corbyn, they even photoshopped him with Osama Bin Laden during a debate on terrorism during the 2017 General Election.

This staggeringly biased editorial decision displayed the kind of extreme pro-government anti-opposition bias you'd actually expect to see in Putin's Russia, so it's no surprise that it generated a lot of complaints, but somehow the BBC and their mates in the establishment club managed to focus the debate down onto the trivial issue of whether Jeremy Corbyn's hat had been photoshopped.

The literal big picture (that the supposedly impartial BBC blatantly photoshopped a red-tinted picture of Jeremy Corbyn onto the Kremlin) was lost in a ridiculous quibble over whether the BBC had also altered Jeremy Corbyn's hat to make it look more Russian, with hard-right Tories and so-called 'centrists' alike pouring scorn on the "Corbyn's hat" debate as if that was the core issue, rather than an utterly trivial side issue distraction away from the Putineqsue behaviour of the BBC.

You couldn't really get a clearer example of people quibbling over a trivial issue to distract from the big picture when the big picture was literally a big picture.

Effectiveness

Getting people quibbling over a trivial side issue rather than thinking about the big picture is distinct from other propaganda distraction tactics like "whataboutery" (trying to deflect attention onto a different subject altogether) and the "dead cat" tactic (doing, saying, or revealing something so grotesque that public attention is diverted away from the serious issue at hand) because it doesn't actually change the subject of the debate, it just narrows it down to such an extent that people end up quibbling over one very specific aspect of the subject, rather than viewing the subject in its broader context.

This "Corbyn's hat" type distraction strategy is highly effective because it's not an obvious "look! a squirrel" kind of distraction, it's a distraction that involves directing attention at a trivial aspect of the subject, which means that people could actually conclude that they've debated the subject and come to a conclusion on it, even though they've completely sidetracked away from the main issue.

Clearly a distraction tactic that allows the victim to erroneously believe that they've actually debated and understood the wider subject is a much more effective form of propaganda than a simplistic ploy to switch their attention to another matter altogether.

Windrush landing cards

Theresa May created the Windrush scandal by introducing vile UKIP-pandering anti-migrant legislation in 2014. Legislation that has resulted in British citizens without documentation being denied employment, denied housing, denied social security, denied pensions, and denied NHS care. These dehumanising and discriminatory rules have left thousands living in fear of imprisonment and deportation from their own country.

In a desperate attempt to deflect blame away from herself Theresa May stood at the dispatch box and misled parliament by claiming that the decision to destroy Windrush landing cards was taken by Labour in 2009.

It didn't matter that the Home Office had already admitted that the landing cards were destroyed in October 2010, under Theresa May's watch, her misleading claim was the ideal "Corbyn's hat" distraction for the Tory propaganda machine, and the debate waged for the rest of the day over who destroyed the landing cards.

The fact is that even if Labour had destroyed them, which they didn't, it was only because of Theresa May's vile Faragist anti-immigrant legislation that the Windrush scandal developed.

But by sidetracking the debate onto who destroyed the Windrush landing cards the Tory propaganda machine created the misleading impression that there's some kind of debate over whether Labour or the Tories were to blame, when the indisputable reality is that Theresa May's grotesque UKIP-pandering attack on immigrants is to blame.

Be vigilant

Using a "Corbyn's hat" distraction to deliberately sidetrack the debate into ridiculous quibbling over a minor aspect of the issue is clearly and undeniably an effective propaganda strategy, so be vigilant, and don't be afraid to call out "Corbyn's hat" distraction tactics the next time you see this kind of propaganda in action.

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This article was part of the "What is ... ?" series. To see more articles in the series, click here.

Guaranteed Employment explained

On January 1st 2017 the economist Tony Atkinson died at the age of 72. He was the driving force behind the development of the field of poverty and inequality studies and inspired the work of the hit French economist Thomas Piketty. In his 2015 book "Inequality - What can be done?" Atkinson set out 15 proposals for combating the increasingly urgent problem of widening inequality.

In this article I'm going to look at his third proposal of the 15; that the state should work to reduce unemployment and guarantee work to anyone who seeks it.

Unemployment

As a result of the ideological battles of the 20th Century the economists Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels have acquired terrible reputations, however the fact remains that they developed damning critiques of capitalism that stand as true today as they did when they were first written over 150 years ago.

One of Marx's most telling insights is that capitalists require a standing army of unemployed labour in order to maximise their own profits. The objective of this "Reserve Army of Labour" being to dissuade the rest of the labour force from demanding higher wages or better working conditions out of fear of being sacked and thrust into absolute destitution.

Marx spotted this brutal characteristic of capitalism in the 19th Century and it's still blights the lives of millions to this day. It's undeniable that the UK state actively maintains this pool of unemployed labour to this day. The Westminster government and the Bank of England both embrace this harmful theory that too high a percentage of workers in jobs is a bad thing.

As long as capitalism continues to keep a certain percentage of the workforce in destitution in order to keep the rest in order, then there will always be unemployed people. They obviously can't just "get a job" if the economy is actually being deliberately rigged so that there's always a scarcity of jobs.

Welfare

The idea of running a punitive welfare regime that punishes and harasses the unemployed into finding work is abhorrent when there simply aren't enough paid jobs to go around. Such a draconian system is always likely to end up punishing people who are less capable of jumping through all of the bureaucratic hoops in order to prevent their social security payments from being cut off. People with learning difficulties and mental disabilities end up getting sanctioned into absolute destitution because they can't deal with the stress and bureaucracy, while the tiny minority of hardened benefits freeloaders will simply continue to learn and adapt in order to carry on gaming the system as they always have.

In short we have a welfare system that is so badly designed that it actually punishes the most vulnerable (who are the most likely to end up in the deliberately maintained Reserve Army of Labour) for their inabilities to deal with all of the draconian, dehumanising and often Kafkaesque postcode lottery that is the UK welfare bureaucracy .

Guaranteed Employment

Tony Atkinson's proposal on Guaranted Unemployment is that the state has a duty to provide basic employment to anyone amongst the unemployed who is willing to seek it. Here's exactly how he put it:

"The government should adopt an explicit target for preventing and reducing unemployment and underpin this ambition by offering guaranteed public employment at the minimum wage to those who seek it."

This is dramatically different from current practice because under Iain Duncan Smith's direction the Tories rolled out mass "Workfare" programmes to compel the unemployed into abandoning their labour rights (the right to earn the minimum wage for example) and working for no pay, often at giant highly-profitable multinational corporations (thus replacing jobs that could have been done by paid employees with a never ending supply of free labour from the Tory government).

The current system works by condemning people to absolute destitution if they refuse to comply with these labour extraction schemes on the grounds that they shouldn't have to "earn" their paltry subsistence benefits because they've already paid for them through years of National Insurance contributions.

Instead of using the threat of absolute destitution in order to coerce people into exploitative unpaid labour schemes as it does now, the state should make sure that anyone who wants to work for a fair wage has the opportunity to work for a fair wage.

A system that guarantees a job opportunity to anyone who wants one would massively improve the welfare system by helping people to avoid becoming trapped in it. It would also be beneficial because it would provide the state with a large flexible workforce that could be utilised for the general good of the nation.

The fear

The idea of a societal responsibility to provide paid jobs to anyone who is willing to work would lift a huge burden of stress off the general workforce. If every worker knew that they'd have a guaranteed job to fall back on if times turned bad for them, they'd be liberated from the stress of worrying about the terrible consequences of losing their job.

The problem for die-hard capitalists is that they believe that fear and stress amongst the workforce is good and necessary. They think that in order to maximise their own profits it's vital that the general workforce should be to afraid to push for higher wages or better working conditions for themselves. They refuse to support the concept of "a paid job for anyone who wants to work" because as beneficiaries of the capitalist system, they like it just the way it is.

Productivity

The appalling belief that it's necessary to keep a percentage of the workforce jobless and destitute in order to keep the rest of the workforce in their place is easily countered by the absolute mountain of evidence that happy and unstressed workers are far more productive.

In my view it's no coincidence at all that the UK has one of the most draconian and poorly funded welfare systems in the developed world, and that the UK is suffering an appalling productivity crisis as British workers continue to lag further and further behind workers in rival economies like Germany and France.

Poverty

I've outlined the case for Guaranteed Employment from various perspectives in this article, and also in this previous article from 2013. The last one I'm going to put forward is the reason that informed and motivated Tony Antkinson's career; the alleviation of poverty.

If every worker had a right to a paid job, then rates of poverty would decline dramatically. If every parent had a right to a job, then child poverty rates would be significantly reduced.

When it comes to the concept of Guaranteed Employment we're left with two positions to take. We either accept it as a potential solution to several pressing social and economic issues, or we dismiss it because we believe that in order for capitalism to function it's necessary for people to be afraid of unemployment, and for children to grow up in poverty, so that capitalists can take a bigger slice of the wealth for themselves.

What we can do

• Read Tony Atkinson's book on inequality and/or check out more of his work on his website.

• Learn more about the field of poverty and inequality studies that Tony Atkinson pioneered.

• Learn more about the many other alternative ways of thinking about the economy.

• Learn more about Basic Income, which is another heterodox economic policy aimed at alleviating poverty.

• Write to your MP (or other political representatives) to ask that they consider the concept of Guaranteed Employment and explain whether they would support or oppose a policy of guaranteeing a proper paid job to anyone who is willing to work.

 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 ... Land Value Tax?

The idea of Land Value Tax (LVT) Land Value Taxation is a method of raising public revenue by means of charges on the value of land. LVT is widely regarded as a very efficient form of taxation, not least because it's pretty much impossible to avoid/evade.

Land monopolists
Throughout history one of the most commonly proposed solutions to the problem of land monopolists is forced redistribution, where the land is simply taken by force and redistributed to the community, but LVT advocates take a different approach. They propose that that wealthy landowners who monopolise land shouldn't have their land taken by force, but that they should pay a tax to the community.

LVT would act as an incentive for them to either put the land to productive use in order to cover the cost of the tax, or to transfer ownership of the land to someone else who would put the land to better use.

Advocates

The idea of taxing the value of land has been around for thousands of years. The Apastamba Dharmasutra is one of the oldest Hindu documents in existence and in its section on property and taxes it states that "If any person holding land does not exert himself and hence bears no produce, he shall, if rich, be made to pay what ought to have been produced", which is an expression of the view that tax should be applied to the potential value of the land, not to the actual produce of the land.

The most famous LVT advocate was the 19th Century American economic philosopher Henry George. George was clearly influenced by the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau who decried the inequalities caused by land monopolisation in the 18th Century:

"The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said 'This is mine' and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: 'Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody'."  Rousseau

Other early LVT advocates include the physiocrats (most notably Anne Robert Jacques Turgot and François Quesnay) the British economists Adam Smith (probably the second most egregiously misrepresented economist in history behind Karl Marx) and David Ricardo and the British-born US revolutionary Thomas Paine. 

Modern advocates come from across the political spectrum. The Green Party have been long-term LVT advocates, the Corbyn-McDonnell Labour leadership are much more open to the prospect than any Labour leadership in decades. On the right, the free-market fanatic Milton Friedman advocated LVT saying "There's a sense in which all taxes are antagonistic to free enterprise – and yet we need taxes. ...So the question is, which are the least bad taxes? In my opinion the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land".

Benefits

There are many potential benefits to Land Value Tax. It would discourage rentierism and land speculation, improve land use, raise wages and eliminate the need for taxes on productive activity. One of the biggest benefits of all is that it's a tax that would be almost impossible to avoid/evade because it's simply not possible to move vast tracts of land to tax havens like the British Cayman Islands.

The economist Fred Foldvary states that  LVT encourages landowners to develop vacant/underused land or to sell it, and that it deters speculative land holding, dilapidated inner city areas return to productive use, reducing the pressure to build on undeveloped sites and so reducing urban sprawl.

One of the main benefits of LVT is that it would allow taxes on productive activity to be reduced or abolished. The idea of using a land tax to reduce or eliminate income and consumption taxes would clearly be to the benefit of millions of working people who own little or no land, but the wealthy landowner class obviously wouldn't like the idea at all.LVT is rightly regarded as one of the most efficient taxes imaginable because it doesn't deter productive activities by taxing them and because it would be almost impossible to avoid.

A fairer system

A tax system that targets the asset-rich rather than the hard-working, and that is pretty much impossible to avoid/evade would clearly reduce inequality and improve social mobility. People who work hard would be able to keep more of their income, while those who generate their wealth by idly monopolising land would have to pay tax to the rest of society for the privilege.

The current system of imposing taxes on income and consumption instead of land value clearly benefits those who derive most of their wealth from property and rent, and who have the financial means to pay tax advisers to hide their incomes in tax-havens.

Just look at the way the Grosvenor dynasty managed to avoid paying £3.6 billion in Inheritance Tax through the use of trust funds so that the young Hugh Richard Louis Grosvenor could inherit a £9 billion property empire from his father.

Society is set up in a way in which the poor and ordinary have to pay taxes on their income, and tax on their consumption, and another load of tax if they're lucky enough to inherit some wealth, meanwhile the tiny super-rich minority repeatedly sidestep paying their share of tax.LVT would massively reduce the iniquity of the tax system. If you own land, you pay tax on it. It doesn't matter whether the landowners register themselves as a company in a tax haven or not; it doesn't matter if the land is owned through an elaborate network of off-shore trust funds; if they own land in the UK they need to cough up the tax. If they don't pay the tax, the land can be incrementally taken in lieu of payment and redistributed to people who will bother to pay the tax.

Resistance of the land-rich

Given the incredible power of the inherited wealth aristocracy in the UK, the prospects of a fair land tax system being introduced here look very slim indeed.

The British political class is absolutely riddled with landowning aristocrats, especially the ruling Tory Party and the unelected House of Lords. The prospect of a Tory government introducing LVT is absolutely laughable (Tory MPs have twice wrecked Labour Party efforts to introduce LVT, once in 1931 and again in 1951).

The prospect of getting LVT through the House of Lords is not quite as ludicrously unlikely as the Tories introducing LVT, but Britain's bloated and unelected upper chamber is utterly riddled with wealthy landowners who would obviously be inclined to protect their own self-interest by fighting tooth and nail to scupper any proposed LVT legislation.

There are clearly a great number of unelected Lords who would prefer to see the burden of taxation put onto workers and productive businesses instead of onto their property empires.

The mainstream media is also heavily dominated by billionaire tax-dodgers with vast property portfolios. Any politician proposing LVT would have to expect  a vicious propaganda war to be waged against them by the likes of Jonathan Harmsworth (Daily Mail, Metro), the Barclay Brothers (Telegraph, Spectator) and Richard Desmond (Express, Star).

Landowner subsidies

The introduction of a Land Value Tax would have loads of social and economic benefits, but it has been fiercely resisted by the powerful landowner class because they know that they'd be unable to avoid paying it. In fact the privileged European landowner class have resisted Land Value Tax so successfully that they've actually managed to establish for themselves a system of taxpayer funded Landowner subsidies!

In the past farmers received subsidies for their produce, which is problematic in its own way, but kind of makes sense. Nowadays there is no necessity for them to actually produce anything at all, the EU pays out vast subsidies to landowners simply for owning the land.

The UK electorate has voted to leave the EU, but thanks to the extraordinarily reckless lack of a government contingency plan for Brexit and the interminable foot-dragging over Article 50 we're still in it.

When the Tory government does eventually get around to developing an actual plan of action and then leaving, they've already made it clear that the taxpayer funded handouts to landowners are going to continue if not increase. It would be crazy to expect anything different from a political party that counts inherited wealth aristocrats and farmers as two of its most loyal demographics.

Instead of having a fair tax system based on taxing wealth, we've got a system based on taxing consumption and labour in order to actually hand out subsidies to idle land monopolists!

Henry George's Land Value Tax is a great idea because it taxes the super-rich on wealth that they simply cannot hide, but the European landowner class are so powerful that they've not only successfully resisted Land Value Tax, they've actually had politicians devise a polar opposite system to further entrench their privilege by diverting the money raised from taxes on consumption and labour into lucrative subsidies to be showered on wealthy landowners whether they put their land to productive use or not!

LVT and Basic income

The concepts of Land Value Tax and Basic Income often go together. In 1797 Thomas Paine wrote that every person should be entitled to a basic subsistence income funded by a tax on land "as a compensation in part for the loss of his or her natural inheritance by the introduction of the system of landed property".

The majority of modern-day Basic Income advocates suggest that it should be funded through some form of Land Value tax.

If you want to know more about Basic Income check out the following articles:

• An introduction to Basic Income (simple)

• Basic Income vs the current UK welfare system (a little bit complicated)

• A Basic Income Labour Market analysis (a bit more complicated)

Progressive politics

Any political party with a genuine interest in the development of a fair and efficient tax system should at least consider the benefits of LVT.

The benefits would go much further than just making sure that the wealthiest in society actually pay tax, it would also significantly reduce the problem of land speculators hoarding land and inflating property prices, and it would drive the economy by encouraging people to put land to good use, and by removing taxes on genuinely productive activities.

The first step towards a fairer system is the abolition of the ludicrous system of taxpayer funded subsidies for land monopolists, and the second step it to set about reducing taxes on productive activities and their replacement with LVT.

As far as I'm concerned, any political party that supports landowner subsidies and rules out LVT cannot possibly be considered progressive. If any political organisation insists that it is the responsibility of the landless to subsidise the land monopolists, rather than the responsibility of landowners to compensate society for monopolising the land, there's absolutely no way they can be considered progressive.

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