If anyone is behaving like a "petulant child" it's Chuka Umunna.

The Labour Party business secretary Chuka Umunna has waded into the party leadership debate with some incredibly ill-considered and divisive comments that can only possibly be seen as damaging to the Labour Party.

His comments in a Newsnight interview with  Allegra Stratton included accusations that the Labour Party are "behaving like a petulant child who has been told you can't have all the sweeties in the sweetie shop" and "screaming at the electorate". He also launched a bizarre attack on the most left-wing of the leadership candidates Jeremy Corbyn, saying that his political views are "not a politics that can win" and hurling a totally unsubstantiated assertion that Corbyn supports increasing benefits to people who refuse to work.

The lack of self-awareness here is astounding. Umunna launches a scathing attack against elements of his own party for supposedly telling the electorate what they should think, but then in the very same tirade he blatantly presupposes what he thinks the electorate want when he says that Corbyn's politics simply can't win.

From what I've heard from Corbyn is that he believes Labour got it all wrong under Miliband (thanks to the woeful guidance of right-wingers like Ed Balls, Liam Byrne and Chuka Umunna himself), and that what he wants to do now is to offer the public is an actual coherent alternative to the Tory ideological austerity agenda that has already done such catastrophic social and economic damage to the UK.

For Umunna to claim that the public definitely don't want that, and would prefer the kind of Murdoch approved Blairite Red-Toryism he envisages for the party, is to show precisely the contempt for the electorate that he accuses Jeremy Corbyn of.

It hardly looks like a coincidence that a self-serving career politician like Chuka Umunna would make the presupposition that what the electorate want is precisely what would be best for his own political career. I mean if Corbyn wins the Labour leadership election it would have meant en end to Umunna's time near the top of the party hierarchy because Corbyn would have very little need of careerist red-Tories like him, but now that Umunna has launched such a divisive attack on his potential future leader, his political career will be all but over if Corbyn wins. In fact I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Umunna cross the benches to join the Tory Party if Corbyn wins, or to quit politics altogether to work for one of the big businesses he's spent the last few years sucking up to.

To launch such a blistering attack on an increasingly popular potential future leader of the his own party looks like a pretty foolhardy move, but what must be more alarming to Labour Party supporters is the intense disloyalty he has shown to a significant number of Labour Party colleagues and supporters who support, or at least have sympathy for, what Jeremy Corbyn has actually been saying (rather than the unsubstantiated drivel that Umunna just made up to attack him with). Surely Umunna's ire would have been better aimed away from his own party rather than within it?

One of the most absurd assertions Umunna made during his attack on Jeremy Corbyn was that "ultimately we betray our people if we don't get elected", which is very easy indeed to counter with "ultimately we betray our people if we get elected by adopting the very same politics as the party that ours traditionally exists to oppose".

It's precisely this "no principle is important enough to stick to if it means pissing off Rupert Murdoch" attitude that has made the Labour Party such an unappealing and rudderless organisation that they couldn't even prevent an incredibly unpopular Tory Party from taking a parliamentary majority. The Labour Party needs to find some actual principles and stick to them, rather than relying on focus groups and think tanks to come up with Tory-lite policies that they think will play well in the pages of the right-wing press.

I'm not a member of the Labour Party, but if I was I'd be furious. First of all that Umunna's ill-considered tirade can only be seen as damaging and divisive, but more importantly that such a vacuous, imprudent, unprincipled waste of space of a career politician has risen so high within the party to begin with. It takes quite a breathtaking lack of self-awareness for Umunna to realise that it's the rise of hopelessly inadequate politicians like him that has made Labour so much more unelectable, not the fact that there are still a few people left in the party who stand for traditional Labour values like championing social justice, combating poverty and investing in good public services and infrastructure.

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

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The delusion that the modern economy is a capitalist one

I'd like to begin this article with a quote from the legendary economist John Maynard Keynes about the role of speculation in the economy:

"Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done." The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936

It is only necessary to have the slightest familiarity with the current state of the global economy in order to understand that these days, real enterprise has been totally subsumed under a massive tide of reckless speculation. 

In order to illustrate this point I'll provide a few facts in bullet points:

• It's very difficult to accurately assess the size of the global derivatives market because the gambling that goes on there is almost completely unregulated. Estimates range between $710 trillion and $1.2 quadrillion. To put these figures into perspective, the GDP of the entire world in 2014 was $77.3 trillion, which is only slightly over ten percent of the lower estimate of the size of the global derivatives casino.

• The global financial sector insolvency crisis of 2007-08 was caused when banks and financial institutions all over the world realised that they had been gambling on highly complex sub-prime junk investments, that were packaged up and sold as AAA grade investments even though the people who designed them referred to them as "dog", "shit bag" and "shit breather" and then used Credit Default Swaps to bet against the very same products they were selling to their own clients.

• The scale of the pre-crisis gambling was so bad that it took the biggest state sector interventions in history from the UK and US governments to save the financial sector from the bankruptcies they so richly deserved (funny how the free market anti-state intervention dogma goes completely out of the window when it's reckless bankers instead of factory workers in need of help isn't it?).

• These days the vast majority of financial trading isn't even done by human beings any more. It's done by complex computer algorithms that can conduct vast numbers of trades in tiny fractions of a second (High Frequency Trading). Many people still seem to imagine the stock markets like they were in the 1980s with a load of sweaty and aggressive traders shouting buy and sell orders. Those days are well and truly gone. Nowadays the majority of financial trades are nothing more than extremely rapid computerised gambling.

• Not only is speculation completely rampant in the modern economy, the entire system is skewed heavily in the favour of speculators. Just think about the fact that UK interest rates have been held at an all-time record low of 0.5% since March 2009. How many recklessly over-leveraged financial institutions and buy-to-let speculators would have gone under if interest rates had been anything like normal for the last six years? How much has this unprecedented period of all-time record low interest rates cost savers, pension funds, insurance funds and workers?

• The private banks now create 97% of all money out of nothing at the moment they make the loan (you knew that right?). Of all of this electronic bank created money, only 8% gets loaned to businesses outside of the financial sector. The vast majority of the money created by the financial sector gets pumped into financial speculation (32%) and house price speculation (31%).  If we understand capitalism as capitalists using the means of production to create output and profits, then it's clear that the vast majority of the economic activity in the modern economy actually has nothing to do with capitalism. We're living in a post-capitalist speculation frenzy.

It seems that John Maynard Keynes fears about the capitalist economy turning into a dangerous whirlpool of speculation have come true. As usual Max Keiser has a compelling way of describing the situation:

"The means of production, which used to mean building factories and hiring labour, something that Marx talked about in his work, is no longer valid to describe the global economy. The means of production are now algorithmic trading."

Anyone who thinks that the modern economy is a capitalist one is simply betraying the fact that they either have a faulty understanding of the modern economy, or that they're unfamiliar with the actual definition of capitalism (perhaps using the word as a loose synonym for distinct concepts like "business" or "trade").

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

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The Tory "economic recovery" mantra
                         
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Greece as Sisyphus?

I don't often do reaction pieces to other people's articles, but I believe that this article about Greece from the Guardian's Larry Elliot is quite well written, but raises some important issues too.

I'll begin with a quote from the article:

"Greece is like Sisyphus, the king of Corinth who according to legend angered the gods and was condemned to push an enormous rock to the top of a hill. When Sisyphus neared the summit, the boulder would slip from his grasp and tumble back down to the bottom of the slope, forcing him to start again. 

Alexis Tsipras, too, has angered the gods, in this case the European commission, the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and most of the 18 other countries that are members of the single currency. His punishment for his five-month show of defiance will be to have Greece’s boulder replaced by an even bigger one."

Whether you like Larry Elliot's political analyses or not (I don't particularly) this is undeniably a good piece of political writing. It creates a strong narrative that illustrates a highly complex situation in an easily graspable manner. It skilfully explains the magnitude of Greece's debt burden and the sheer impossibility of paying it off.

Where Larry Elliot goes wrong is the way in which he then goes on to paint the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras as "foolhardy" for having dared to stand up to the impossible power of the ECB, IMF and European Commission troika, only to later admit defeat and cave in to their terms. Elliot goes as far as accusing him of "hoisting the white flag over the Parthenon" deriding him as "a much-diminished figure as a result of the events of the last two weeks" and claiming that he ought to "pay a heavy political price" for it.

The first thing that makes this portrayal of events look so ridiculous is the fact (pointed out by someone in the below the line comments) that just ten days previously the very same Larry Elliot was lauding Alexis Tsipras as a hero who was outwitting and outmaneuvering the troika. Here's a direct quote.

"What Tsipras has done is seize the initiative, something he has proved adept at doing in the five months since he won the Greek general election in January. He has run rings round the troika and continues to do so." [source]

The fact that Larry Elliot has described Tsipras in terms of being a bravely defiant hero one week, and then a hopelessly defeated charlatan the next shows us that he is far more adept at constructing appealing little stories than he is at actually describing the events in a detailed and non-contradictory manner.

The second thing that weakens this portrayal of events is the simplicity of it. Elliot cannot help himself from fitting such a complex situation into a simple story of victory and defeat. The highly emotive imagery of the white flag being raised conjures a scene of total and catastrophic defeat, when in reality Tsipras remains the Prime Minister of Greece. What is more is that he has done something no Greek government has done before him. He has aligned himself with his people. When previous government acted as collaborators with the Troika against their own people, Tsipras has found unity with them. He didn't want to accept the impossibly harsh and ideologically driven terms of the next bailout package, and after the referendum it is proven that the overwhelming majority of Greeks agree with him. Thus it is abundantly clear to the Greek people that even though Tsipras is powerless to stop them from continuing their ideologically driven vandalism of their countries economy, Tsipras is on his people's side, not on the side of the Troika.

Tsipras and the Greek people are absolutely right to oppose the economic sanctions that are being imposed upon them by their creditors. Not only is ideological austerity a quack medicine that makes the symptoms of the economic disease worse, not better, the terms of the deal contradict what is what I consider to be one of the fundamental laws of economics: A debt that cannot be repaid, will not be repaid, which brings us back to the comparison with Sisyphus, which is a good piece of political storytelling.

As I said before, I don't fully dislike Larry Elliot's analysis, it's reasonably informative and well written, it's just that it commits the error of oversimplification in order to mould complex events into an easily intelligible narrative. This kind of narrative oversimplification of politics is rife in mainstream media coverage, and once aware of it the reader should always be on their guard to recognise it for what it is: A very convincing method of coercing people into believing simple stories about complicated political and economic events, because more complex and accurate analyses might raise awkward questions.

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

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12 writers who influenced my writing

This is by no means intended as an exhaustive list of all of the writers who have inspired me and influenced my writing style over the years. I'm sure that after I hit publish I’ll think of other writers who were just as worthy of inclusion as some of those who made it to the forefront of my mind as I was compiling it. 

The list is presented in more-or-less chronological order of when I came across their writing in life, and provides a short explanation of who they are and why I consider their writing so inspirational.

Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl is most famous for his children’s literature, but he also wrote adult fiction too, which is certainly worth checking out. Some people tend to scoff at children’s literature, but I don’t. It takes a special kind of writing voice to engage and inspire children. With his wonderful appreciation of the utter silliness that children adore, Roald Dahl was responsible for completely revolutionising children’s literature, making it as engaging for adults as it is for children. In my view any parent of young children who hasn't read at least a few Roald Dahl books aloud to their kids needs a bloody good talking to.

Spike Milligan

Like Roald Dahl, Spike Milligan was a veteran who witnessed the horrors of the Second World War. I first came across his work as a child (the ning nang nong, Milliganimals and loads of other silly stuff) but it was only when I re-engaged with his work as an adolescent that I came to appreciate the staggering genius of his work. His war diaries are juxtapose the sublime with the ridiculous and the horrific with the breathtakingly beautiful, but it’s in his poetry that I found the most inspiration. Spike suffered terribly with his mental health, and it was his poetry about depression, love and loss that reached out into the mind of the depressed and socially anxious teenager I was and told me that it doesn't matter how bad things get in life, you can still write something utterly amazing about it.

Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke was a remarkable man. He did pioneering work on the development of the radar technology that helped the UK survive the Battle of Britain, he is credited with inventing the concept of the geostationary telecommunications satellite and he was also a noteworthy underwater explorer who discovered the remains of the Koneswaram temple in eastern Sri Lanka. In later life he became one of the greatest science fiction writers of his generation with his brand of hard sci-fi, that eschewed fantasy and scientific inaccuracy for the creation of potential future realities. His science fiction work was a kind of novelisation of popular science and futurology. His book 2001 resulted in one of the greatest science fiction films of all time; Stanley Kubrick’s "2001: A Space Odyssey", a film adaptation that severely tests the common assertion that film adaptations are never as good as the book.

Douglas Adams

If you haven’t read "The Hitch Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy", why not? Surely you've been told many times how good it is. In the view of an unapologetic nerd like me, Douglas Adams is the most hilarious writer I've ever encountered. The humour in his science fiction writing contrasts with the seriousness of hard sci-fi writers like Arthur C. Clarke, but he was no less educational and informative for it, dealing with issues like quantum indeterminacy, improbability, computing, artificial intelligence and countless others through the prism of humour. If, for whatever reason, you consider yourself the kind of person who doesn't like sci-fi, I thoroughly recommend his two hilarious novels about Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. Perhaps the most valuable lesson I learned from Douglas Adams’ work is that it is possible to be incredibly funny and informative at the same time.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn wrote compellingly about his experiences of the brutal excesses of the Soviet Union. He spent a decade in various soviet forced labour camps and political exile for the “crime” of writing a letter to his friend criticising Stalin’s conduct of the Second World War. His experiences during these years formed the basis of most of his great works. “The Gulag Archipelago” was one of the most compelling books I read as a teenager, but the much shorter book “One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich” is his most accessible masterpiece. As the title suggests, it chronicles the events of a single day in the life of the protagonist. What makes it such a remarkable work is the way that it builds a picture of the whole world of the Soviet labour camps by chronicling the activities of a single prisoner in a single day.

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley was born into an establishment family, and perhaps that’s how he gained such a remarkable understanding of the way the establishment powers use propaganda and distraction to maintain their grip on power. He is most famous for his science fiction novel “Brave New World”, but his non-fiction work “Brave New World Revisited” is equally worth a read. George Orwell was another writer who strongly influenced my writing, but as the years progress I’m ever more convinced that we’re moving toward Huxley’s dystopian vision of the future rather than Orwell’s. In 1984 Orwell imagined an all-powerful state that controlled the population through brute force, while Huxley imagined a state that kept people servile by bombarding them with propaganda and distraction. Both Huxley and Orwell taught me that it is possible to conduct insightful and engaging political analysis through the medium of fiction.

Hunter S. Thompson

It is impossible to understate the influence that Hunter S. Thompson’s writing has had on me. He invented the genre of Gonzo journalism, and when he was at his productive peak he was capable of producing unsurpassable analysis of politics and American culture through the prism of his own lived experience. His most famous work was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the film adaptation of which was directed by the legendary Monty Python turned film director Terry Gilliam, but his some of his other work was equally influential. Hells Angels, The Rum Diaries and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail are all exceptional works. I’ve written quite a lot in the gonzo style, the vast majority of it as yet unpublished, and I fully intend to write some more and publish it at some point.

Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell is perhaps my favourite philosopher. Many of the things he wrote in the early to mid 20th Century stand truer today than when he actually wrote them. It really doesn’t matter whether you consider yourself a left-wing person or not, reading some Bertrand Russell and thinking about it will make you more intelligent. If you want to read some, a good place to start might be his essays on Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism entitled “ProposedRoads to Freedom” from 1918.

Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein has written three phenomenal books. “No Logo” is a brilliant critique of consumerist culture. “The Shock Doctrine” exposes the crackpot right-wing economic agenda that was forged in the furnaces of brutal South American dictatorships, and has gradually become the economic orthodoxy of our age. Her most recent book is “This Changes Everything” which deals with the devastating environmental impact of modern capitalism. One of the big influences Naomi Klein had on me as a writer was the way she is so meticulous in backing up her assertions with facts and references.

I think it’s definitely worth noting that Naomi Klein is the only female writer in my list and considering the reasons why. Part of the reason is selection bias. There are just more male writers in my favoured genres of science fiction, politics and economics, but this imbalance is gradually changing and improving as the years progress. Another reason is that most of my favourite writers come from the mid-20th Century period, where there were so many more barriers to female success in place, meaning fewer women could break through and establish themselves as influential writers. I wish there were more women on my list, and hope that should I compile a similar list in the future (perhaps of influential 21st Century writers) that it contains more female voices.

Noam Chomsky

The world is so complex these days that it’s rare indeed for anyone to be able to claim to be a world leading authority figure in two distinct fields. Noam Chomsky undeniably is. Not only is he a world renowned linguist (perhaps his most famous contribution is his grammatically correct but completely nonsensical phrase “colourless green ideas sleep furiously”) he’s also one of the great political thinkers of our age. If you haven’t read any Chomsky you really should. If you lean to the left, then you’ll find his writing compelling, and if you lean to the right you should get a teriffic mental workout from trying to find fault in his analyses.

Ha-Joon Chang

In my view Ha-Joon Chang is one of the greatest economics writers of our age. He has found a manner of explaining seemingly complex economic ideas in everyday language, so that ordinary people can engage with what is often perceived to be an elitist and inaccessible subject. I was already writing about economics in everyday language when I came across Ha Joon Chang’s book “23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism” and I read it with amazement as I realised that there was somebody else out there doing what I was trying to do, and doing such a fantastically good job of it. If you want to know more about the subject of economics, but find it intimidating, then I absolutely recommend that you read some Ha-Joon Chang.

Steve Keen

Steve Keen is an Australian economist who was one of the tiny minority who managed to accurately predict the 2007-08 global financial sector insolvency crisis. I’m not saying he was unique in saying that there was a bust coming, even I was saying that and back then I knew a tiny fraction of what I do know about economics. What made Steve Keen different is that he explained how the crash would come about, and he put his head above the parapet and said so. At the time Keen was lambasted as a fearmongerer for having dared to stand up and criticise the orthodox economic system, but the global financial sector meltdown proved him right. If you manage to read some Ha-Joon Chang and take something from it, the next step could be to move on to Steve Keen’s “Debunking Economics”, which although much harder work, is crammed full of critiques of the right-wing crony capitalist neoclassical orthodoxy that caused the global financial sector meltdown, and has somehow built itself such a powerful position that it seems almost impervious to criticism and immune from reform.

Endnote

If you are an aspiring writer, I imagine that it would be a useful exercise for you to compile a similar list of writers who have influenced you, and analyse what it is about their writing that made it so engaging.

I think the factor that makes these writers stand out from the hundreds of others I've read is more than the fact that they wrote about subjects I found engaging, it's that they found a voice. A style of writing that was uniquely theirs.

If you think that I’ve missed off any terribly important writers please feel free to add your own suggestions and descriptions in the comments section.

 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 writing isn't as easy as it may seem

The other week I was having a conversation with someone who scoffed at me and derided my assertion that being a writer isn't as easy as it might seem. I wasn't saying that I dislike what I do, just that it's sometimes very difficult to be a writer.

That writing is a difficult and often unrewarding occupation isn't just an idle opinion. There's plenty of evidence to show that it's a job that simply doesn't pay the bills. According to research by the Authors Licencing and Collecting Survey, the median income for all writers is just £4,000 per year, and the average for professional writers has fallen to less than £12,000. This means than these days only a tiny select band of writers are making enough from their trade to cover their costs of living. 

Several years ago I started writing as Another Angry Voice as a hobby, never imagining that it would ever become popular enough for me to earn an income from it. It's only in recent months that I've decided to throw myself into it on a full-time basis and hope that I can gradually raise enough small donations to cover my modest costs of living. Despite the fact that I'm not yet meeting my costs of living through my writing, I'm doing a bit better than a huge number of people who have similarly dedicated themselves to their writing, so that's something to be very grateful for.

One of the things that has made it even more difficult for me is that I'm absolutely determined to do it on the Pay as You Feel principle instead of blathering my blog in Google Ads and sponsored clickbait links. Given the traffic that my page attracts now I have no doubt that I could make more than enough to get by through revenue from adverts and sponsored clickbait, but as an advocate of heterodox economics I'd be a total hypocrite to do it that way. If even advocates of heterodox economics like me end up reliant upon orthodox ways of raising revenue, then what hope is there that things could ever be different?

One of the other things that makes my writing so difficult is that I have chosen to write about often appalling subjects like politics and economics, meaning that I'm more often than not writing about my dissatisfaction with the way things are.

As much as people who only know me through my political writing may think of me as a permanently disgruntled person, I'm not. I have a great appreciation for the finer things in life to rival my passions for freedom and social justice. Just today I walked through a field of buttercups and clover with my two kids and put up an enormous cloud of butterflies, the like of which I've never seen before. Sometimes I want to write about things like that rather than important issues like corruption, injustice and extremism, but then I understand that people follow my work for my political analysis, not for a load of flowery prose about how beautiful my bit of the world sometimes is, despite the fact that it's ruled over by a pack of malicious, incompetent and over-privileged Tory politicians and the ruthless profiteering corporations that they serve.

Sometimes, when I'm in the groove, the words flow out of me so effortlessly that it is an absolute joy to write about politics and economics. However I often find myself battling to construct every single sentence, and resenting the hopelessly biased political coverage and mind-numbingly dry economic texts I have to wade through in order to back up my assertions with facts and evidence. Sometimes I'd rather be reading something beautifully written and inspirational, or perhaps trying my hand at literature or poetry.

I really don't intend this to be understood as a whinge. It really isn't. I know I have a brilliant job, and I get an immense amount of satisfaction from a well constructed article or a widely shared infographic. I get the most satisfaction of all when people write me messages explaining how my writing has actually changed their lives. What better reward could I ask for than the knowledge that there are people out there who I've never met who want to thank me for informing and inspiring them?

It's just that having a great job is absolutely not the same thing as having an easy job.

 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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