Ideological austerity: London fire service cuts vs huge bonuses at publicly owned banks

On Thursday the 8th of January hardened London firefighters wept as their fire stations were shut down. Ten stations were closed down simultaneously in a desperate Tory attempt to save £45 million.

To put this figure of £45 million into better perspective it is useful to look at the bonuses that were paid out at the taxpayer backed banks RBS and Lloyds.

Despite making a £570 million pound loss, Lloyds - which is 43% owned by the taxpayer - handed out £365 million in bonuses for the 2012-13 economic period.

RBS fared even worse, losing £5.2 billion (making total losses of £34 billion since the 2008 bailouts), but they handed out £607 million in bonuses to their staff. RBS is 82% owned by the taxpayer.

An apologist for the Tory cuts might try to deflect from the issue by asking what these extravagant bonus handouts at loss-making banks have to do with the government. There are two main things:

1. The government is the largest shareholder in both of these organisations, meaning that they have the power to curtail the bonus culture within the boardrooms of these institutions, should they want to.*
2. George Osborne is currently wasting taxpayers' money appealing against an EU ruling designed to curtail outlandish bonuses in the European banking sector. He was the only one of the 27 EU finance ministers that voted against the plan to cap bankers bonuses at 100% of their salary (or 200% in exceptional circumstances). Now he's using our money to vexatiously appeal the ruling on behalf of his friends in the City of London.

Another useful comparison can be made with the vast sums that the Tory government gifted to the private sector when they decided to deliberately undervalue Royal Mail in order to sell it off on the cheap. The most conservative estimates put the losses to the taxpayer at over £1 billion, and if the estimated value provided by JP Morgan is to be believed, the losses are more like £6 billion.

If we accept the £6 billion figure from JP Morgan as a reasonable estimate, that amount would have been plenty enough to cover the £22.5 million projected annual running costs of the ten closed fire stations for 266 years!

 It is also worth noting that when the Tories invoke the spectre of an annual £22.5 million running cost as justification for closure, they are being disingenuous. Much of that money flows straight back into the economy (through payroll taxes, supply and service contracts, firemen spending their wages ...) plus there are other economic benefits too (the amount of money saved on repairs by minimising fire damage to commercial and residential properties, lower insurance costs ...). It is entirely possible that some of these stations actually provide a positive overall returns, all things considered, and shutting them down is an example of an ideologically driven false economy.

While we can't be exactly sure how much value would have been returned into the economy by these fire stations, we can be absolutely sure of is that the Tory government and their economics wonks at the Office for Budget Responsibility Recklessness have a track record of catastrophically underestimating the returns on investment on countless other services that have been cut as part of George Osborne's ideological austerity experiment.

    
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*They quite obviously don't want to curtail the bonus culture in the City of London, in fact they are legally challenging new EU rules designed to clamp down on the problem - see point 2.

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Michael Gove's ideological vandalism of the education system

In January 2014 I felt compelled to write an article criticising Michael Gove's confirmation bias riddled historical revisionism, after he made a number of absurd claims about an unpatriotic left-wing conspiracy - spearheaded by the sitcom Blackadder Goes Forth - to denigrate Britain's role in the First World War.
      

Well over 22,000 people shared this picture on Facebook

It was so obvious that Gove was talking absolute rubbish that well over 22,000 people shared my Baldrick meme on Facebook, and as a result it was seen in the Facebook news feeds of over 1.25 million people, making it one of my most successful political memes ever.

Gove's revisionist wittering was certainly one of the most talked about subjects in the first weeks of January 2014, and as good as it is to have widespread recognition that the Secretary of State for Education is an idiot with a warped political agenda, I believe there is a much more important issue that needs addressing, and that is his policy of privatising the English education system into the hands of unaccountable private sector pseudo-charities.

As is the way with many of the most egregious Tory privatisation scams, the roots can be traced back to the preceding New Labour administration. New Labour stated the policy of bringing in unaccountable private sector interests to run publicly funded schools, and by the time they left office in 2010 there were 203 privately operated academy schools, being paid for at the public expense.

When the Tories came to power, they immediately introduced new regulations to speed up the school privatisation process and by December 2013 there were 3,522 open Academies (including over half of all secondary schools in England).

PRIVATISATION
  
One of the conditions set upon publicly owned schools that become academies is that in most cases all of the school property deeds must be signed over, for free, to the unaccountable pseudo-charities that take control of them.

In many cases ownership of the publicly funded property (land, buildings & equipment) is entirely transferred to the private sector pseudo-charity, with the public getting absolutely nothing in return. In other cases the property is given away on 125 year leases for peppercorn rent (which is as good as a permanent transfer of ownership as far as anyone alive today is concerned).

It is difficult to put the scale of this school giveaway bonanza into financial terms because (as far as I know) nobody has attempted to monitor the value of everything that has been simply given away, or rented out at ultra-cheap below market rates. If we make a very conservative assumption that the average value of land, buildings and equipment per school is something like £5 million, and multiply this figure by the 3,000 odd schools that have been simply given away for free (or rented out for 125 years at way below the market rate), we get a ballpark figure of £15 billion.

To put this into perspective, the criminal undervaluation of the Royal Mail before privatisation led to a £1 billion windfall for the private sector at the expense of the UK public. Gove's school giveaway is at least ten times as bad, even using extremely conservative estimates.

After the publicly owned property is given away for free, the public still continues to pump money into the schools as subsidies for the private sector pseudo-charities, a familiar model of private sector parasitism upon the state. Just like the "business" models corporate outsourcing leeches like Serco, Atos, G4S, Capita, Seetec, Avanta, A4E etc, these educational pseudo-charities are entirely dependent upon the state for their income.

PROFITS

The Tories are ever so keen to maintain the fiction that these pseudo-charities make no profits on their taxpayer funded subsidies, but closer inspection of the way these Academy Chains operate reveals that there is an awful lot of profit to be made out taxpayer funded education subsidies. The profits just don't appear on the balance sheet, or as shareholder dividends, as they would in the corporate world.

I'll outline four methods that academy pseudo-charities have been using to extract cash from the public pocket (Topslicing, Leeching, Expenses and Transfer Pricing).

Topslicing

One of the most blatant ways of using an educational pseudo-charity to spin a personal profit is "topslicing". Several of the largest academy chains pay out enormous profits disguised as executive salaries.

Here is an article in The Yorkshire Post detailing how academy chains have robbed the region's schools to the tune of £9 million in order to pay dozens of "administrative staff" eye-watering six figure salaries.

Here is another article (in the Guardian) detailing some of the ludicrous salaries paid out to directors at a number of other academies such as E-Act, The Harris Federation, United Learning Trust and Ark Academies.

The evidence on "topslicing" is absolutely clear: Academy bosses are paying themselves and their mates ludicrous salaries for carrying out the kinds of administrative work that local authorities used to manage on significantly lower salaries. These people are paying themselves far more than the teachers that actually do the work, in fact many of them are paying themselves significantly more than the Prime Minister, just to administer a few schools.

Here are some numbers:

For the 2013-14 academic year the absolute maximum salary for the head teacher of a very large school (outside of London) was £106,148 per year, and the absolute maximum for the head teacher of a large inner London school was £113,303 per year [source]. The salary of the Prime Minister was £142,000 per year.

The head of The Harris Federation (Dan Moynihan) received £317,999 plus pension contributions in 2010-11, and five other members of staff there were paid more than the Prime Minister during the same period. 

The head of E-ACT (Bruce Liddington) received a salary of £280,816 in 2012, plus £18,303 in pension contributions and a further £16,707 in "expenses". E-ACT paid six figure salaries to a further fifteen insiders too.

Academies Enterprise Trust shelled out a top salary of almost a quarter of a million pounds, whilst paying six figure salaries to a further 19 individuals.

In 2010-11 the Richard Rose Trust, which operated just two schools in Cumbria, lavished a salary of between £200,000 - £209,000 on one of their staff and another two-school group Basildon Academies handed over £220,000 - £230,000 to one of their directors.

Outwood Grange Academies Trust lavished a £182,094 salary on their director Michael Wilkins.

School Partnership Trust Academies paid their director (Paul Edwards) between £160,000 - £165,000.

It is absolutely clear that these salaries are excessive, and it is also clear that they are rocketing at way above the rate of inflation too. Against a backdrop of harsh below inflation pay increases for pubic sector workers (the teachers who actually do the work) these pseudo-charity directors are awarding themselves huge inflation busting pay hikes year after year.

According to a Department of Education spokesperson "everyone in receipt of public money has to think very carefully about the right rate of pay for staff". In other words, there are absolutely no controls on how much public cash is being poured into the troughs of privatised education for the academy executive pigs to gorge themselves upon. They are just politely urged by the DoE not to behave excessively, a request they can (and do) ignore, completely without censure.

REMEMBER - ALL OF THESE SALARIES ARE BEING PAID OUT OF THE PUBLIC POCKET AT A TIME OF "AUSTERITY".

Leeching

Compared to using inflated salaries in order to pay huge "insider dividends" to executives so that they can get around the no shareholders in a charity conundrum, leeching is a much more basic and familiar method of money extraction.

Essentially it is the age old scam of making yourself (and your associates) the supplier and the buyer in a transaction involving somebody else's money.

This is not a new problem in the education system. You'd have to be some delusionally optimistic socialist to believe that all Local Authorities (the guys that used to run our schools before Gove's mass privatisation) were so well administered that nobody was making themselves a fortune by awarding contracts to their own companies, or the companies of their mates. However the problem is getting a lot worse now, and some of the academy chains are being absolutely brazen about it too.

The most high profile example is Acadamies Enterprise Trust (the one paying six figure salaries to twenty of their staff - see above) which has been procuring "services" from their own directors and trustees to the tune of half a million pounds, none of the contracts agreed under competitive tender.

AET secretary Ian Comfort bagged £232,960 on top of his salary, and other no-bid contracts were handed out to several other AET insiders too. £171,944 has been paid out to Foster Project and Leadership Development, which belongs to AET trustee Ian Forster. Large sums have also been paid out to other trustees and executives at the pseudo-charity, including Frank Butler Human Resources and Steve Leverett.

Lets get this straight: If you did this with someone else's money in a corporation, your bosses would have you behind bars in a shot (unless of course you were doing it under their explicit orders); if you did this in local government, local investigative journalists (assuming there are any decent ones in your area) would drag you through the coals on it and possibly even get you locked up for it; but because these are pseudo-charities, it seems they can get away with it with complete impunity.

It is not as if AET is a rotten apple at the bottom of the barrel either. They are the single largest taxpayer funded academy group in the UK! 
 
REMEMBER - IT IS TAXPAYERS' MONEY THEY'RE SIPHONING OFF INTO THEIR OWN COMPANIES AND PERSONAL BANK ACCOUNTS, WHILST THE REST OF US ENDURE "AUSTERITY".
  

Expenses

Another large pseudo-charitable academy chain that has been caught out awarding large untendered contracts to insiders is E-Act which has been handed ownership of 35 taxpayer built schools, and all of the taxpayer funded subsidies that come with them. They have also been criticised for their "extravagant expenses claims, first-class rail travel and "a culture of prestige venues" for meetings".

Expenses are a classic method for extracting personal wealth from public enterprises. I won't go into it in detail because I'm assuming that we are all familiar with the kind of brazen expenses scamming of Westminster politicians, and their absolute refusal to stop despite the glare of press coverage that has continued ever since the expenses scandal broke in 2009.

It is safe to say that there are an awful lot well-to-do academy trustees and executives all over England claiming every penny they can get away with in expenses, eating fine food in expensive restaurants, meeting in exclusive conference centres, staying in luxury hotels for pseudo-charitable junkets and traveling in luxury vehicles or in first class, wherever they go.

REMEMBER - ALL OF THESE EXPENSES ARE PAID OUT OF PUBLIC MONEY THAT SHOULD BE DESTINED FOR THE EDUCATION OF OUR CHILDREN.

Transfer Pricing

One last profit extraction mechanism I'm going to look at is Transfer Pricing, which is a term that should be familiar to anyone that knows a bit about tax-dodging*.

Transfer Pricing is an accountancy trick which allows institutions to extract profit in a particular geographic location. It is usually used by corporations in order to make it appear that company profits were made in tax haven economies, when the massive bulk of their business was actually conducted elsewhere.

To give a fictional example: Slock Coffee Shops do the majority of their European business in the UK but they import all of their coffee beans via a subsidiary in Switzerland. The beans are then sold to Slock Coffee outlets in the UK at well above the market rate, which is excused with the narrative that Slock Coffee beans are in some way unique, hence the higher price. This technique allows Slock coffee to extract their profits in low-tax Switzerland, (despite having virtually no coffee shops there) and to pay virtually nothing in UK tax (despite the vast majority of their European trade being done there).

This transfer pricing trick has been used by foreign companies in order to extract profits from the Torified education system too.

One example is the Aurora Academies Trust which runs four primary schools in Sussex which demands that all of their schools must use the Paragon Curriculum, meaning that they pay a £100 per student per year premium to the American company that owns the patent on the curriculum; Mosaica Education Inc. These fees add up to £100,000 per year.

It will come as absolutely no surprise to learn that Aurora Academies Trust is owned and operated by a UK subsidiary of Mosaica Education Inc.
What is the rationale for British schools full of British children paying over the odds for an American curriculum, other than to spin a profit for the US corporation that owns the academy group?

It might be understandable if the US education system was a world leader, but it is absolutely not. The US is plummeting down the league table of academic standards even more rapidly than the UK.

Perhaps it would make sense if these schools were paying over the odds for curricula from highly successful education systems like Finland, the Netherlands, Japan or South Korea, but paying over the odds for a curriculum from a nation with a failing (and massively price-inflated) education system is frankly ludicrous.

The Paragon Curriculum is clearly designed for American, not British kids and even then it has been heavily criticised by US teaching unions and several of the schools that have used their services, only to find that the curriculum was not aligned to state standards, meaning that kids were failing their exams in alarming numbers. If this US company can't even properly tailor their curriculum to the educational standards of Louisiana, it is extremely difficult to imagine how their curriculum would be appropriate for British kids.
 
REMEMBER - ALL OF THIS CASH BEING SIPHONED OFF BY AN AMERICAN CORPORATION IS PAID FOR BY BRITISH TAXPAYERS.
  
POLITICS

One of the most shocking things about the school privatisation agenda is the number of Tory party insiders who have benefited from this scheme to give away our schools to unaccountable private sector interests. Another shocking aspect is the way that Britain's archaic and undemocratic honours system is being used to reward the profiteers that run these pseudo-charitable academy chains.

Probably the most high profile Tory insider to profit from the Tory school privatisation agenda is "Lord" Philip Harris, an unelected Tory member of the House of Lords who is most famous for being the boss of Carpetright. His Harris Federation group now controls over a dozen schools in London (all of which have had their name changed to "Harris ..."). The ownership of several of these schools was forcibly converted to "Lord Carpetright's" academy chain against the wishes of the staff, the children and local residents.

Philip Harris has donated nearly half a million pounds to the Tory party in recent years.

Another high profile beneficiary of the Tory school privatisation agenda is the hedge fund manager and massive donor to the Tory party "Lord" Stanley Fink, who is the chairman of ARK academies, a group which now controls 18 taxpayer funded schools.

Stanley Fink has donated over $2.6 million to the Tory party.

"Lord" John Nash is yet another Tory party donor that is deeply involved in the school privatisation agenda. He has established an academy chain called Future Academies which controls four schools in London. Future Academies hit the headlines in 2013 after it was revealed that they had appointed a 27 year old with absolutely no teaching experience as the head teacher of one of their schools.

In January 2013 Nash was parachuted into the anti-democratic House of Lords by David Cameron in order that he could become Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Schools. The conflicts of interest in having a guy that operates four privatised but taxpayer funded schools working as a schools minister with responsibility for privately operated taxpayer funded schools is incredibly obvious. Another obviously worrying aspect is the fact that a staunch supporter of, and generous financial donor to the Tory party is now responsible for overseeing the national curriculum that is taught to our kids.

John Nash and his wife have donated nearly £300,000 to the Tory party.

Another Tory cashing in on Michael Gove's school privatisation bonanza is the former treasurer of the Tory party Alan Lewis. He is the "patron" of the Kings Science Academy in Bradford and also the owner of the land on which the school is built, meaning that £12 million in public funds look set to flow into his bank account over the coming years. In early 2014 it was revealed that the head of Kings Science Academy has been arrested over allegations of fraud.

Alan Lewis has donated at least £374,000 to the Tory party.

David Cameron has used the archaic and undemocratic honours system to reward several academy bosses -  the ones that are "topslicing" education funds in order to pay themselves and their mates six figure salaries. Here are a few examples:

Dan Moynihan - the guy that bags over £317,000 a year for chairing Lord Carpetright's chain of Harris Academies - was handed a knighthood by David Cameron in 2012.

Robin Bosher - the head of primary education at Harris Academies - also bagged a knighthood from David Cameron in 2012.

Michael Wilkins - the guy that takes over £180,000 as director of Outwood Grange Academies Trust - was handed a knighthood by David Cameron in 2014.

CONCLUSION

Michael Gove and the Tory party have been waging ideological war on the education system and the mainstream corporate media are pretty much letting them get away with it.

• They have given away countless £billions worth taxpayer funded infrastructure, for free, to unaccountable private sector interests, including to a number of major Tory party donors.
• The virtually unregulated shambles they have introduced has created countless opportunities for the unscrupulous to pillage taxpayer funds that are supposed to be used to educate our children.
• They have allowed academy bosses to "topslice" extraordinary salaries and inflation busting pay rises for themselves at a time when teachers (the people that actually do the work) are having their wages repressed with below inflation pay rises.
• They have allowed schools to set up extremely dodgy financial arrangements, where the directors and trustees divert taxpayers' cash into their own businesses and personal accounts via no-bid "service" contracts.
• They have allowed foreign corporations to establish academy chains in order to extract vast sums out of the education system (and out of the country) by charging for the use of their curricula.
• They have used the UK's archaic and undemocratic honours system to lavish Lordships and Knighthoods upon the people who are milking the privatised education system for everything they can get out of it.

If the Labour party had any backbone at all they would be promising to put an end to this shambles by forcing academies to hand back the property deeds to schools that were built at the taxpayer's expense, and by imposing regulations on their wages and business practices. But instead all we get is silence.

 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.

More articles from
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 

              
Michael Gove's Great War revisionism
               
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What is ... Confirmation Bias?
            
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The Tory "War on Justice"

                         
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What is ... a Justification Narrative?

            

Note: This article was amended in April 2015 to give a little more detail on the way that school properties have been simply given away, or leased out at below the market rate on 125 year contracts.

Michael Gove's Great War Revisionism

In January 2014 the Tory education secretary Michael Gove penned a ludicrous article in the Daily Mail invoking the spectres of left-wing academics and BBC bias in order to argue that the First World War was not "a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite".

Other sites (such as Vox Political and The Huffington Post) have already covered this story quite comprehensively so I'll try to avoid reiterating too much of what has already been said. I'll go through some of Gove's absurd ramblings and highlight some of the many things that he's got wrong.

"The conflict has, for many, been seen through the fictional prism of dramas such as Oh! What a Lovely War, The Monocled Mutineer and Blackadder, as a misbegotten shambles – a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite. Even to this day there are Left-wing academics all too happy to feed those myths."

The conflict has also been seen through the great volume of testimonies from people who served during the Great War, from the works of great war poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon to the first hand testimonies collected by the Imperial War Museum and collated in books like Forgotten Voices of the Great War, The Soldier's War and Britain's Last Tommies (all of which I thoroughly recommend as infinitely more enlightening than Gove's partisan wittering on the subject). Many of these first hand testimonies are pervaded by a sense of horror at the tactical blunderings of the generals that resulted in the mass slaughter of millions of men. Gove is desperate to discount the first hand testimonies of those who were actually there in order to present his favoured interpretation; that the war was noble and necessary, that generals like Douglas "butcher" Haig did a good job under difficult circumstances and that the battle of the Somme wasn't a tragic and futile waste of life.

Despite his efforts to resuscitate the reputation of Field Marshall Douglas Haig, some of us are aware that Douglas Haig once said the "the machine gun is a much overrated weapon". On the first day of the battle of the Somme 60,000 British troops were killed or injured, the great majority of them by machine gun fire.

Gove's protestations that the tactics of the Great War didn't amount to "a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite" is easy to understand, given that the administration of the Coalition government in which he serves can easily be seen as  "a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite".

As for his drivel about "left-wing academics", perhaps he is unaware that the historian who did the most to spread the "lions led by donkeys" narrative was  Alan Clark in his 1961 book "The Donkeys". Clark went on to become a minister in Margaret Thatcher's government, hardly a "left-wing academic" by any stretch of the imagination. Not only is Gove expressing an ignorant and politically partisan myth (that the left are inherently unpatriotic) he's also displaying grotesque ignorance of his own political party.

Gove singled out a couple of specific academics to berate as "lefties" and dismissed their work as "undergraduate level cynicism", then he went on to namecheck a few other academics who have presented arguments that he prefers describing their work as "superb" and "skillful".

After about as crude a display of historical partisanship as it is possible to make, Gove had the gall to write that "there is, of course, no unchallenged consensus. That is why it matters that we encourage an open debate on the war and its significance".

Deriding one side of the debate as lefties and myth spreaders whilst heaping superlatives on the other side of the debate doesn't really seem to be the tactic of someone who is committed to an "open debate", it's more the tactic of a man who is stuck in a narrow minded world of confirmation bias, where the work of any historian that confirms his views is "excellent" and "superb" and any historian that presents a view he disagrees with is an enemy to be derided and belittled.

One of the most appalling things about Gove's article is his revisionist determination to speak on behalf of the men who fought and died during the Great War. It's no coincidence that he waited until the last survivors of the conflict had died before deciding to speak on their behalf and say that "those who fought were not dupes but conscious believers in king and country, committed to defending the western liberal order" and that the Great War was "seen by participants as a noble cause".

Not only does he utterly neglect the written and spoken testimonies of hundreds of Great War survivors that contradict his view that they were all willing and patriotic participants, the bit about "defending the western liberal order" is just laughable in light of the fact that the majority of the British public (including all women) were barred from voting, Britain controlled a very illiberal colonialist empire and one of Britain's main allies in the war was Tsarist Russia.

Probably the most absurd section of Gove's driveling revisionism is this:

"The ruthless social Darwinism of the German elites, the pitiless approach they took to occupation, their aggressively expansionist war aims and their scorn for the international order all made resistance more than justified."

This section creates the distinct impression that Gove has confused the Great War with the Second World War. There is no doubt that these criticisms would apply to Nazi Germany, but they hardly apply to the Deutsches Reich.

The criticism that Germany scorned "the international order" is particularly weak, given that the international order of the day was that the countries with the most military power (Britain and France) could invade and occupy whichever territories they liked (France and the UK had carved up around half of the globe between them). "The international order" criticism also fails because anyone who understands the origins of the Great War should know that the conflict came about because of the treaties and alliances between the great European powers which created the two rival power blocks (the Triple Entente & the Triple Alliance). In reality Germany's involvement in the Great War came about because of "the international order" not because of their scorn for it.It is truly egregious for a member of the most social Darwinist government the United Kingdom has suffered since universal suffrage to use "social Darwinism" as a criticism. Michael Gove and his colleagues have worked tirelessly to ensure that "the lower orders" suffer austerity, whilst lavishing corporations and the wealthy minority with tax cuts and subsidies. Perhaps the most glaring example of Tory social Darwinism is their determination to continue the Atos administered WCA regime for the disabled, despite two court judgements that it discriminates against the mentally ill.
 
One of the most grotesque elements of Gove's historical revisionism is his determination to use the Great War to insult and belittle "the left". The shadow education minister Tristram Hunt (a man who actually has some relevant qualifications to work as an education minister) pointed out that "appeals by trade union leaders to oppose German aggression, particularly against Belgium, led more than 250,000 of their members to enlist by Christmas 1914, with 25% of miners volunteering before conscription". In his desperation to use the Great War to launch an utterly feeble attack on the left, Gove has clearly denigrated the contribution of countless thousands of left-wing people who fought and died in the conflict.

Michael Gove has shown himself to be a rambling revisionist, hell bent on deriding anyone who disagrees with his idealised version of the Great War as spreaders of leftist myths. So in conclusion I'll provide a few testimonies from people who were actually there and leave you to decide whether they are guilty spreading leftist "myths" about the Great War as Michael Gove would have you believe.

"The politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder." - Harry Patch

"War's stupid. Nobody wins. You might as well talk first; you have to talk last anyway." - Henry Allingham 

"I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed." Siegfried Sassoon

"War is hell, and those who institute it are criminals" Siegfried Sassoon


"I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust." Siegfried Sassoon
 
"They are not often aggressive or offensively military. This is the dismal part of it: that these men, almost the best value in the ordinary upper class that we have, should allow themselves to suppose that all this is somehow necessary and inevitable; that they should give so much labour and time to the killing of others, though to the plain appeals of poverty and inefficiency in government, as well national as international, they are so absolutely heedless. How is it that as much blood and money cannot be poured out when it is a question of saving and helping mankind rather than of slaying them?" Arthur Greame West
 
"Patriotism, in the trenches, was too remote a sentiment, and at once rejected as fit only for civilians, or prisoners. A new arrival who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out." Robert Graves

"Opposite our trenches a German salient protruded, and the brigadier wanted to 'bite it off' in proof of the division's offensive spirit. Trench soldiers could never understand the Staff's desire to bite off an enemy salient. It was hardly desirable to be fired at from both flanks; if the Germans had got caught in a salient, our obvious duty was to keep them there as long as they could be persuaded to stay. We concluded that a passion for straight lines, for which headquarters were well known, had dictated this plan, which had no strategic or tactical excuse."
Robert Graves

"It doesn't matter what's the cause,
What wrong they say we're righting,
A curse for treaties, bonds and laws,
When we're to do the fighting!"
Robert Graves

"I never joined the army for patriotic reasons" Isaac Rosenberg


"How many have gone? How many more to go? The Admiralty is fast asleep and lethargy & inertia are the order of the day. However everybody seems delighted - so there is nothing to be said. No plans, no enterprise, no struggle to aid the general cause. Just sit still on the spacious throne and snooze." Winston Churchill (future Tory Prime Minister) 

"If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori." Wilfred Owen

 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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Why Ed Miliband needs to stop being so feeble

Ed Miliband is a weak leader. I don't think there would even be many die-hard Labour supporters to contest this assertion. Even though he is a weak leader, one thing stands in his favour. The leaders of the other two Westminster establishment parties are also incredibly weak. 

Nick Clegg completely destroyed any credibility he had when he abandoned virtually all of the Liberal Democrats stated pre-election principles in return for a few ministerial cars and salaries as part of the most zealously right-wing UK government since universal suffrage.

David Cameron is by far the weakest (and most dishonest) Prime Minister this country has suffered in decades, just at a time when we most needed a strong man of courage and integrity. Not only is he the first Prime Minister to have lost a war vote in Parliament since 1782, most of his policy making is unmistakably driven by fear of losing more votes to UKIP. Thus ever more immigrant bashing rhetoric from the Tories, taken to such an extreme that the UKIP leader Nigel Farage even popped up to criticise the Tory "Go Home" vans sent out to troll ethnically diverse areas as "nasty" and "un-British".


One of the most glaring indicators of Ed Miliband's weak leadership was the debacle over Iain Duncan Smith's retroactive "get out of jail free" card in 2013.

Having had his "workfare" mandatory unpaid labour schemes for the unemployed declared unintelligible, undemocratic and unlawful by the courts, the Tory Work and Pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith hastily cobbled together a piece of retroactive legislation to render the rules intelligible - had they been written that way at the time - in order to undermine the court judgement against him.

Astonishingly the Labour leadership decided to allow Iain Duncan Smith to rush his retroactive "I'm above the law" legislation through parliament in a single day as emergency legislation and whipped their MPs into abstaining on the vote (a list of the 50 or so honourable Labour MPs that defied the party leadership to vote against this appalling piece of legislation can be seen here).

Had Labour opposed this abject nonsense every step of the way, they would have given themselves ample opportunity to repeatedly expose Iain Duncan Smith as the callous and incompetent intellectual lightweight that he is. The reason for allowing him to get away with it is almost unfathomable. It seems that the (now-departed) Shadow Work and Pensions Minister Liam Byrne was a big fan of Iain Duncan Smith's workfare schemes, and advised Miliband to support Iain Duncan Smith's desperate efforts to undermine the court judgement against him, so that the policy of exploiting the unemployed as a source of free labour could be salvaged and kept as a Labour policy. Instead of telling Byrne that he was out of his mind and sacking him on the spot, Ed Miliband willingly instructed his Labour MPs to hand Iain Duncan Smith his "get out of jail free card".

Instead of using the court judgement against Workfare to his political advantage, Ed Miliband gave Iain Duncan Smith free rein to undermine the legal system with retroactive legislation because Labour essentially agreed with the Tory policy of exploiting the unemployed as a source of unpaid labour. Looking at many of Labour's other policies, they are pretty much the same as the Tories. 

• The Tories offer us "Austerity to infinity", Labour offer us "austerity-lite".
• The Tories oppose Scottish independence, Labour oppose Scottish independence.
• The Tories privatised the Royal Mail, but Labour had tried hard to do it before them.
• The Tories carved up the NHS for privatisation, but the Labour health minister Alan Milburn (who now works in the private health sector) kicked that door open for them.
• The Tories have given away over half of the secondary schools in England, for free, to unaccountable private sector interests (including several Tory and Lib Dem donors) but Labour started that process too.
• The Tories have used "extremely inefficient" PFI economic alchemy schemes to hide the true scale of their borrowing, but Labour did exactly the same throughout their 13 years in power.
• The Tories use the corporate outsourcing parasite Atos to administer the discriminatory WCA regime, but Labour gave them their first welfare contracts.
• The Tories are pumping billions into botched welfare reforms like Universal Credit, but Labour won't criticise them because they agree with it.
• The Tories have booted reform of the financial sector into the long grass, yet the Labour leadership have barely voiced a whisper of complaint.

The reason that the Labour party are basically no different from the Tory party (other than a few bits of pseudo-socialist window dressing) is that the party has been usurped by adherents of the once extreme-right, but now mainstream economic ideology of neoliberalism. The Labour leadership is dominated by people that buy into the right-wing pseudo-economic fallacies that underpin the neoliberal ideology.

The narrative in the mainstream corporate media is that labour needed to move to the right because there is no longer any appetite for left wing politics in the UK. That's their explanation of why whichever of the three establishment parties the public vote for, we get an orthodox neoliberal government that occupies the right-wing authoritarian quadrant of the political compass.

The problem with this common interpretation is that there is demonstrably a huge appetite for left-wing ideas amongst the UK public. 84% of people think the NHS should be run as a public service, 68% of people would like to see the energy companies renationalised, 67% of people believe the Royal Mail shouldn't have been sold off and 66% of people want the railways renationalised too.

These results show that the majority of the British public are not just a little bit left-wing, they embrace the socialist principle of state administration of vital infrastructure and services.

When the YouGov results are broken down by party affiliation the results are even more compelling. 79% of people that identify as Labour supporters say that the railways should be renationalised and 82% of them say that the energy companies should be renationalised too.

Given that 82% of Labour party followers support full renationalisation of the energy market, and that 68% of the public in general do too, one might think that energy market renationalisation might make a popular policy for the Labour party manifesto. However what Ed Miliband has offered instead is the continuation of the private ownership of our energy infrastructure, just with a 20 month cap on energy prices. This energy price freeze policy is marginally better than what the Tories are offering (taxpayer subsidised profiteering from the energy companies) but it isn't socialism, and it isn't what people want from the Labour party.

If Ed Miliband announced that Labour was going to renationalise the railways and the utilities companies, and unpick the Tory/Lib Dem NHS privatisation by stealth reforms*, the public would approve but the right-wing corporate press would obviously go into outright attack mode. Remember how the Daily Mail launched a disgusting smear campaign against Ed Miliband's deceased father after Ed announced his energy price freeze policy, well imagine how they would react if he announced a properly socialist plan to renationalise the energy market.

It is clear that Ed Miliband and the Labour party are running scared of the right-wing press, hence their refusal to commit to any socialist policies. They should understand that there is nothing they can do about the right-wing press, if they develop party policy to appease the the tax-dodging owners of the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph or the foreign owner of the Sun and Times, then they might lessen the vitriol of the partisan political attacks against them in these papers, but they will never win them over to supporting a Labour party headed by Ed Miliband, no matter how brazenly the prostitute themselves. They should perhaps work on the principle that if the tax-dodgers that own the Daily Mail and the Telegraph are directing their employees to scream blue murder about Labour policies, then perhaps they the Labour party is headed in the right direction.

The Labour leadership are also clearly frightened of the neoliberal EU competition rules, which are often cited as the reason for particular privatisations (such as the NHS and the Royal Mail), however it is absolutely clear that France ignores these rules - The French state owns 85% of the energy company EdF, they operate their own rail network (SNCF), their postal service (La Poste) and also retain large stakes in various other companies such as the vehicle manufacturer Renault and the telecoms giant Orange.

An even better policy for Labour than doing as the French do and ignoring inconvenient EU competition rules, would be to openly defy the EU and demand that the rules are changed, thus creating the populist impression that Labour are prepared to stand up and fight against the imposition of EU rules that go against British economic interests and the will of the British people.

Returning to the poll results - it is quite clear that by refusing to talk about renationalisation, the Labour party are leaving the door open to UKIP. The reults show that even a majority of people that identify as Tory supporters would like to see the railways and energy companies nationalised, however UKIP are very close to Labour, with 73% of UKIP supporters favouring rail renationalisation to Labour's 79% and 78% of UKIP supporters favouring energy market renationalisation to Labour's 82%.

If Labour remain ideologically wedded to the bankrupt ideology of "free market" neoliberal pseudo-economics, they'll actually leave the door open to UKIP to steal countless votes from disillusioned Labour supporters with pledges to defy the EU and renationalise the rail network and/or the utilities companies.

If Miliband wants to win the next election, a populist policy of renationalisation backed up with strong statements that he will not be intimidated by the (tax-dodging) right-wing press barons, nor the EU competition rules (that other EU member states seem happy to ignore completely). The problem is that he is probably too weak a leader to attempt any such thing, and will instead listen to the orthodox neoliberals like Ed Balls, Chuka Umunna and Liam Byrne that have infested the party, and refuse to offer Labour supporters (nor the general public) what they actually want.

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* These reforms compel NHS service commissioners to accept the lowest bid for contracts regardless of factors like standards of care, patient safety or continuity of service.

Note - all polling statistics in this article come from this report by YouGov

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