Poverty in 21st Century Britain - A Tory comedy

On the 18th of December 2013 the Tory party showed their true colours in a debate on food poverty.

The Tory bench chatted noisily and giggled their way through the entire debate, for which they were reprimanded by the deputy speaker on several occasions. Had they been listening to the introductory speech by the Labour shadow DEFRA minister Maria Eagle instead of chattering away noisily they would have heard the following:

• The number of people visiting foodbanks has risen from 40,000 to 500,000 since the Tories came to power in 2010.
• 19% of food bank referrals have been as a result of the Government’s changes to welfare payments and more than a third are caused by delays in payments to people who are legitimately entitled and nearly a fifth of people referred to food banks actually have jobs.
• An official report on the growth in food banks was completed in June 2013 but the government is still refusing to make it public six months later.
• Since 2010 the UK has suffered the longest period of falling real wage values since records began. The Tory policy of wage repression has resulted in wages rising by less than the rate of inflation for 41 out of the last 42 months.
• The cost of staple foods (fruit, vegetables, meat, bread & cereals) have risen way above the rate of inflation and poor families are spending significantly more of their limited incomes on food.
• The costs of energy and water are rising way above the rate of inflation whilst the profits of the privatised energy and water companies are soaring.
• The cost of nursery places is rising five times faster than pay, there are 35,000 fewer child care places and 576 fewer Sure Start centres.

The minister responsible for welfare Iain Duncan Smith decided not to even bother with the debate, he stuck around for a while to have a good laugh before sneaking out early (perhaps to change his trousers after pissing himself laughing at all the rib ticking tales of poverty and suffering?). The person the Tories put forward instead was the appalling Esther McVey. Her response to this barrage of facts and evidence was to launch yet another feeble and downright dishonest "blame Labour" narrative - here's her risible riposte.

"I welcome this debate to answer honestly the points made in the motion and to clarify all this, but to be honest, a far more realistic debate would have been brought by Government Members and the people of the United Kingdom on how Labour derailed the UK, destroyed its finances"

The first and most obvious point to make is that McVey cites her own honesty twice in a single sentence. The people most likely to talk up their own honesty like this are those that are about to say something dishonest, and McVey did precisely that with the outright lie that the UK had the largest structural deficit in the developed world under Labour. 

In monetary terms the 4.8% of GDP budget deficit run by the USA in 2009 was many times the size of the UK deficit by virtue of the fact that the US economy is many times larger than the UK economy. The statement remains untrue if we consider the data in percentage terms too because in 2009 Greece had a structural deficit almost double the size of the UK (9.8% of GDP). Even if we allow the artificial exclusion of Greece as a developed country, the narrative that the UK finances were in a significantly worse state than other developed nations in 2009-10 is blown out of the water by the spectacular implosion of the Irish economy, which led to an incredible budget deficit of 30.6% GDP in 2011 (which puts the 5.5% of GDP deficit that McVey was blatantly fearmongering about into perspective). Perhaps the fact that Japan had a debt to GDP ratio of 174% in 2010 when the national debt under Labour was 44% of GDP might also put McVey's desperate debt fearmongering into perspective.

It is absolutely clear that the real cause of the global financial sector crisis was the reckless risk taking of financial sector institutions such as Lehman Brothers, AIG, RBS, Northern Rock, Bradford and Bingley etc, not solely the maladministration of the Labour government in the UK. Labour can be apportioned some of the blame for their light touch regulation of the City of London and their refusal to deflate the UK property bubble, however at the time the Tories were squealing for even more financial sector deregulation which would undoubtedly have made the financial sector crisis even worse. George Osborne's refusal to re-regulate the City of London and the existence of his barmy multi-billion Help to Buy (Help the Banks) property price inflation subsidies suggest that the Tories haven't even got the most rudimentary understanding of what actually caused the financial crisis.

McVey continued with her strategy of citing her own honesty (she did this four times) as a pathetic attempt to disguise the lies that she was telling. Here's another corking lie:
 
"We are paying back all the debt that we saw under Labour"

The truth is that the Tories have borrowed more in three years that Labour borrowed in their 13 years in office. Since 2010 the UK national debt has risen from 44% of GDP to 76% of GDP. Only a Tory could claim that borrowing an extra £400 billion in just three years represents a "paying back" of debt.

All of this dishonest economic bluster hid the fact that McVey had very little to say about any of the actual points raised by Maria Eagle other than a ludicrous claim that the rise in food bank dependency is a good thing because "“It is positive that people are reaching out to support other people". In fact her refusal to actually engage with the evidence revealed that she saw the debate on food poverty as nothing more than an excuse to suck up to the Tory party leadership by trotting out the same old propaganda narratives the Tories have been leaning on to disguise their own criminal mismanagement of the economy for the last three years.

What is even more sickening that McVey's desperate and feeble efforts to blame Labour for a cost of living crisis that has spiraled out of control since 2010 were the howls of laughter from the government benches at the plight of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the UK. The Labour MP for Copeland Jamie Reed summed up this sickening Tory gloating by saying "I regret to say that the laughter from some of those on the Government Benches during this debate says more than words ever could".
 
After making her appalling speech McVey didn't even bother to listen to the rest of the debate. The Labour MP for Manchester, Gorton Gerald Kaufman said "It is disgraceful that the junior Minister, having made one of the nastiest Front-Bench speeches I have heard in my 43 years in this House, has now sloped off and not bothered to listen to the views of the House".

In the end the motion to make combating food poverty a government priority was defeated by the Tories and their Lib Dem sidekicks. Amongst the votes to defeat the motion were those of Iain Duncan Smith and Esther McVey, both of whom ignored the actual debate and then wandered back into the chamber to vote down the motion they couldn't even be bothered to debate. I believe that it is about time that new rules are established that any MP that has not witnessed at least 80% of the parliamentary debate is excluded from voting on the issue. If they can't even be bothered to listen to the debate, they should lose their right to vote on it.
      

 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for  Another Angry Voice  is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

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Nick Clegg's confused and downright dishonest rhetoric on EU migration

Here's a quote for anyone that is still labouring under the delusion that Nick Clegg isn't a Tory in all but tie colour:

"With my enthusiastic support in this coalition government, we are instituting new restrictions on the ability of people who come from other EU countries to access benefits on the first day they arrive, no questions asked."

There is absolutely no evidence that this happens. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that it doesn't. You only need the faintest understanding of how the benefits system actually works to know that it is literally impossible to access benefits without answering an awful lots of questions. So to imply that it is possible for anyone at all to claim benefits without answering any questions is an outright lie. A lie clearly designed to stir up anger against immigrants.

One of the main elements of this "no benefits for immigrants" policy that Nick Clegg "enthusiastically supports" is a plan to ban immigrants from claiming working tax credits for five years. This is quite clearly discriminatory stuff, given that the existence of working tax credits are an open admission that the poverty wages paid in the UK simply aren't enough to sustain working people and their families. Why should a hypothetical hardworking Belgian that has lived, worked and paid tax in the UK for four straight years be made to live on a poverty income, way below the tax credit subsidised incomes of people that happened to have been born in the UK?

One obvious repercussion were such a vindictive and openly discriminatory strategy to be implemented would be a tit-for-tat reaction from other EU states to ensure that UK citizens are denied the benefits they are entitled to whilst living abroad, putting them at a severe economic disadvantage against the locals and against migrants from other EU states.

The criticism here isn't so much that Clegg agrees with the Tory plans to economically discriminate against migrants from within the EU, it's the fact that he's trying to have it both ways. He's trying to dress himself up as a supporter of the EU, whilst simultaneously supporting a policy which undermines one of the core principles of the EU; that all EU citizens are to be treated equally by their host country (a Belgian living in the UK is entitled to what a Brit is entitled to; a Brit living in Belgium is entitled to what a Belgian is entitled to).

The whole idea of Freedom of Movement legislation is that all EU workers should be considered as equals. This Clegg endorsed plan to financially discriminate against immigrants goes against the whole spirit of the deal. If Clegg believes that migrants from within the EU should be economically discriminated against, then he should openly oppose EU Freedom of Movement legislation, rather than clouding his support for economic discrimination against immigrants behind a veneer of pro-EU rhetoric.

Were Clegg in opposition, we know that he would be attacking this kind of policy as the vindictive nonsense that it quite clearly is, and criticising the outright lies that underpin it. Which leaves us with the questions of why he is so vocal in his support for it now, and why he is so willing to peddle the complete lie that EU migrants are entitled to UK benefits without answering any questions at all.

It is absolutely clear that this policy has nothing to do with managing the immigration system, and everything to do with the Tories creating the impression that they are doing something about immigration in order to ward off the threat of UKIP. It is obvious how a vindictive policy built upon lies about immigrants and the benefits system might be of benefit to the Tories, however it is quite impossible to see how such a strategy could be of any electoral benefit to Nick Clegg.

One of the most absurd things about the above quoted statement from Nick Clegg is that it was preceded by criticism of the leaked Tory agenda to restrict migration within the EU by setting an arbitrary immigration cap as "undeliverable". But how is it possible to consider a policy aimed at restricting a phenomena that clearly doesn't exist as in any way "deliverable"? If the number of immigrants accessing benefits without answering any questions remains zero, that wouldn't be a measure of success, in fact it would be an indicator of an enormous waste of parliamentary time legislating to prevent a problem that only exists in the (tiny) minds of anti-immigration little Englanders (and Nick Clegg).

Aside from the observations that the policy Nick Clegg claims to "enthusiastically support" is designed to prevent a stated problem that doesn't even exist, and there is absolutely no way a man that claims to be a pro-EU liberal should be arguing in favour of open economic discrimination against EU citizens that have every legal right to come and work in the UK, there's also the fact that his statement relies on the absurd implication that immigrants are coming here to sponge off our generous benefits system. The actual evidence paints a different picture. The vast majority of EU migrants come to the UK to work (immigrants are a net benefit to the UK and they are significantly less likely to claim benefits than British born people) and our benefits system is anything but generous in relation to the enormous cost of living in the UK. Given the extortionate rents we pay for our tiny houses, our skyrocketing utilities bills, our high fuel prices and our rip-off over-crowded public transport systems - anyone coming to the UK solely in order to claim benefits must either be totally mad, or so lacking in cultural awareness that they haven't realised that the Daily Mail is more of a fascist hate comic than a newspaper, and ended up believing some misleading propaganda about how the UK welfare system is so incredibly generous and so easy to access.

Lastly, considering how Nick Clegg has so rapidly backtracked on things he has enthusiastically supported in the recent past (tuition fees, House of Lords reform, proportional representation, secret courts ...) one has to wonder how long his "enthusiastic support" will last for this insane policy of open economic discrimination against EU workers, whilst claiming to support the EU.

 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for  Another Angry Voice  is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

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Reflections on the Left Unity Founding Conference

The name "Left Unity" has now been formally adopted

On the 30th of November 2013 I attended the Left Unity Founding Conference as a press observer. 

I traveled to London with reasonably low expectations because I didn't want to allow myself to get carried away and then find myself overly disappointed if things didn't turn out as I would have liked, and also because I felt that I would achieve a more balanced report if I attempted to cover it from the perspective of an impartial observer, rather than that of a strong supporter. Unfortunately, what I witnessed at the Conference failed to meet my own lowered expectations.

This is going to be a critical analysis, which will doubtlessly upset a number of Left Unity supporters, however in my defence I contest that I will report a number of positive aspects too. I believe that there is a huge demand for a new party of the left and it is my impression that the vast majority at the conference were decent socially concerned people that want to see Great Britain changed not for their own personal gain, but because of their desire to see a better, fairer and more just society. However being well meaning isn't good enough on its own - a number of issues raised at the Conference need to be addressed, and I believe that the most important role in friendship is recognising when it is necessary to offer some honest criticism when we believe that mistakes are being made.

Party Name

I'll start with something positive: The party name was decided as "Left Unity" which is a much better name than the alternatives "Democratic Voice" and "Left Party". The last thing they needed to do was to engage in a giant rebranding exercise, especially to adopt a name that is pretty much devoid of meaning. The positive thing about the decision to include the word "unity" in the name is that it puts a lot of pressure onto the party to actually strive to unite the left, rather than simply turning themselves into just another virtually irrelevant leftist faction. Whether they can actually live up to their newly formalised name is something we'll have to wait to find out.

Aims vs Constitution

In my view the most important thing for a new party of the left should be the development of a short and simple expression of their aims - so that people know what the party stands for and against. There were two problems at the Left Unity Conference. Firstly that the majority of the proposed "platforms" were far from short, simple or accessible; and secondly that the Conference voted to support an amendment that the surviving platforms would not be accepted as the official aims of the party anyway.

After a three minute statement from each platform and a ludicrously short 20 minute general debate, most of the platforms were explicitly rejected by the Conference. This left two sets of aims standing, the Left Party Platform and the Hackney/THLU statement. In my view both are problematic, but the Hackney Statement is clearly more accessible to people that broadly define themselves as left-wing than the LPP which is full of the kind of left-wing language that may appeal strongly to the activist left, but will doubtlessly turn off swathes of the broad left that Left Unity must engage if they are to have any chance of realising their ambition of making themselves a popular party of the left, rather than just another insignificant leftist faction.

The two surviving statements can be seen here. In my view the second is vastly superior to the first, which starts out with an extremely off-putting screed of political labels. It is important to note that neither of these statements are binding, and there seems to be no barrier to the development and presentation of other alternative statements of aims for the party to consider at the next conference.

After the aims were dropped, Conference moved on to the constitution of the party, which was eventually passed despite its many obvious flaws. It seemed that it was passed more on the principle that to vote against it would mean that the Founding Left Unity conference had hardly achieved anything, rather than because it is a great constitution that deserves support.

The fact that the party now has a constitution but no aims leaves them in the ludicrous position that they have built themselves a political power structure without presenting anything resembling a guiding statement of their political aims. Given their lack of formal objectives, Left Unity can hardly style themselves as an alternative to the three orthodox neoliberal Westminster establishment parties - which are nothing but hollowed out political power structures with no guiding principles other than political expediency. In my view it was a big mistake for Left Unity to prioritise the codification of their political power structure above the development of a carefully defined party philosophy.

It is a very negative sign that Left Unity has codified a complex political power structure before actually spelling out what it is that they want to achieve, however there is a positive side. Neither of the remaining statements of aims are the kind of stuff that are going to inspire the broad left to join the party in droves, but as far as I can tell there is no barrier at all to the presentation of a new set of aims at future conferences. Two particular amendments to the constitution are important here. The first was that future changes to the constitution (such as the addition of the explicit aims of the party) would need a simple majority, rather than 75% support; and the second is that individuals would be allowed to initiate motions at Conference, rather than motions needing a large group of support before being heard.

I believe the next Left Unity National Conference must work to formally adopt a concise and accessible statement of aims as a matter of priority.

Unrealistic timetabling

In my view it was never remotely possible to achieve everything on the Conference agenda within the allocated time. In fact, a single day is probably not sufficient to give fair hearing and considered debate to either the formalisation of the party aims or to the ratification of the party constitution, let alone attempting to do both. The result was a chaotic scramble of amendments and votes, without time for the contemplation and debate that are absolutely necessary in order to make good decisions.

One particularly problematic aspect was the extremely confusing way in which debates over countless amendments on various different pages were clumped together, and then voted on in batches, which left many people totally befuddled about what was actually being voted upon. Had Conference adopted a simpler strategy of debating one amendment at a time and then voting on it, and stripped away all of the confusion over what was being voted on and the endless repetition of page numbers, then there would have been a bit more time for actual debate.

Deciding things democratically is absolutely the right approach, however if it is done in such a rushed and haphazard way that there isn't time for proper debate, and a significant proportion of people are not even clear on the subject of the vote, let alone the implications, it becomes uninformed democracy - which is bad.

I think it is very important that Left Unity learn their lesson here and set more realistic timetables for future events.

Positive Discrimination

By far the most disappointing part of the conference for me was the debate over whether to include a statement of positive discrimination towards women (but not for ethnic minorities, the disabled, LGBT minorities, class minorities, minority theological stances or any other scapegoated minority group) in the Left Unity constitution.

I'm going to write an article about positive discrimination, so I'll keep my objection here as brief as I can: I object to positive discrimination because I believe that people should be judged on the content of their character rather than on the shape of their sex organs, (or what they chose to do with them for that matter).

The positive discrimination policy that was brought to debate by two proposed amendments was the statement that "As part of our overall commitment to gender equality, at least 50% of those elected to regional or national party bodies should be women".

One amendment aimed to scrap the statement entirely (democracy), the was to introduce a degree of flexibility by stipulating a minimum of 40% representation for either gender ("positive discrimination lite").

The problem with the contentious statement is that it implies that if 60% of people elected to a particular body within the party happen to be men, the party will intervene against the democratic consensus because as part of their commitment to gender equality they will explicitly discriminate against "surplus men" - However if 60% of people elected are women, the party won't intervene to impose an artificial gender balance.

To paraphrase -
If you don't agree with arbitrary and anti-democratic
gender balancing, you're a fascist and you ignore rape!
[standing ovation from audience]

People were selected from the floor to argue for or against on a discriminatory basis, (favouring women, ethnic minorities and the disabled*) but when most of the speakers made strong arguments against positive discrimination, the decision was made to artificially "balance" the debate by hand picking people to argue in favour of positive discrimination. This decision to appeal for more speakers resulted in one of the most offensive political speeches I've ever heard in my life. A speech in which anyone that disagreed with discrimination against men was derided as "no different from the Tories" and "far-right", baselessly accused of "ignoring rape" and explicitly accused of thought-crime: "how dare you think ...".

The fact that such a speech was made wasn't the really terrible thing - after all, people are entitled to express their views (even if they are nothing more than offensive "if you don't agree with me you're a fascist" based nonsense). The awful thing was that this empty and offensive rhetoric received the loudest cheers of the day (significantly louder than the applause for the opening speech from Ken Loach) and both of the amendments to chuck out the statement that implied explicit discrimination against men were both heavily defeated.

The fact that such an appalling barrage of emotive and offensive rhetoric won the ovation of the day was utterly disheartening, but it did illustrate a point I've tried to explain in my writing many times - the emotive argument often trumps appeals to logic, evidence and reason.

The right-wing neoliberal orthodoxy has been winning the [mis]information war because it is far better at creating emotive narratives (an immigrant has stolen your job, a scrounger is living off your taxes ...) than the left is. The fact that a large room full of left-wing people ignored the reasoned, evidence based appeals against positive discrimination and then whooped and cheered their approval of offensive and fact averse rhetoric in favour of it, shows that the left are just as susceptible to confirmation bias and the empty emotive argument as the ordinary Daily Mail reader.

The really silly thing about the decision to keep such a divisive, one eyed and ludicrously contradictory statement in the Left Unity constitution is that elsewhere in the constitution it is contradicted by point 14) f. which states that the 50% gender balance is all important and sets out a policy whereby if men are over-represented, the democratic process will be subverted to install a woman, but equally if women are over-represented, the democratic process will be subverted to replace them with a man.

In my view this kind of anti-democratic tampering is political cyanide. If the party feels strongly about gender equality, they should work hard to support candidates that explicitly support gender equality, no matter what the shape of their sex organs. To judge a candidate solely on the shape of their sex organs is inherently sexist, and to dismiss a popular and democratically elected candidate in order to replace them with a less popular or less talented candidate simply because their sex organs are the wrong shape is the kind of ludicrous nonsense that drives fair minded people away from the left in droves.

Children's membership

The original draft of the constitution would have allowed very young teenagers to become full members of the party, but setting the age limit for membership at 13 wasn't good enough for many people at the Conference. Despite the fact that the only young person to speak in the very short debate on membership age spoke against allowing the very young to become full members, Conference voted to scrap all age limits on membership.

In my view this was a daft decision but I don't want to dwell on it too much other than to say that if I were an unscrupulous bastard I could now triple my potential voting power by signing up to Left Unity and enrolling my seven year old daughter and my five year old son as full party members and telling them how to vote.

I'm not actually against the idea of a 12 year old of exceptional political awareness for their age being allowed full membership, but to revoke the age limitations entirely is an absurd way of dealing with the issue. Surely a more pragmatic stance would have been to set the age limit somewhere sensible (say 15), but include a clause that younger people can be allowed membership at the discretion of local branches. Thus if the local branch agree that the exceptional 12 year old actually has their own political worldview (rather than just being a cipher for their parent's views), then they could be given full membership.

The Broad Left

One of my big hopes for Left Unity was that they could step away from the traditional closed-shop bickering between socialists and the extreme-left, and actually focus upon the construction of a left-wing party to appeal to the millions of people that have some left-wing principles, but wouldn't necessarily label themselves a socialist or pine for the outright destruction of capitalism. It is absolutely clear that a massive proportion of the population feel this way. A recent Yougov poll found that 87% of the public want the NHS "nationalised and run in the public interest". 68% want to see the energy companies nationalised, 67% the Royal Mail and 66% the rail network.

There is a massive appetite for left-wing ideas, but the very syntax of traditional socialism had been undermined by decades of anti-left propaganda that have warped the meanings of words like "socialism" and "Marxism" to such an extent that their actual meanings have been obfuscated. The left needs to move away from the old language of socialism and reach out to the masses in language that modern generations can engage with.

Another trend that Left-Unity should be well aware of is the move towards casual left-libertarianism amongst younger generations. I consider myself as much a left-libertarian as a socialist, in that I value concepts like justice, privacy and individual liberty just as highly as I value the more socialist ideals of democratic control over vital infrastructure, social welfare and equal access to services.

I didn't see anything at the Left Unity Conference to suggest that they are capable of transcending the old language of socialism in order to engage the broad left, or the heterodox left that they will absolutely need to, if they are going to actually change society rather than exist as just another minor leftist faction.

Conclusions

The reason I have struggled to complete this article (it's taken me nearly two weeks) is that I didn't want to be overly critical, but it has been extremely difficult given that the most ugly part of the whole conference was also by far the most popular with the crowd. Hearing someone accuse me of thought crime and "ignoring rape" for daring to believe that democracy is vastly more important than arbitrary gender balancing exercises, was bad enough - but the fact that this individual received rapturous applause for it seared it into my mind as by far the most memorable moment of the event. It's not that Conference voted in favour of the arbitrary gender balancing that created such a stench, but the fact that the Conference whooped and cheered for a divisive "if you don't agree with me you're a Nazi" style speech from the political playground.

Given that I was made to feel like an outsider and a thought-criminal for daring to believe in natural gender equality rather than some contrived and arbitrary quota system, it is has quite difficult to imagine how I could endorse Left Unity in the future, and made the search for some positive conclusions to draw that much more difficult.

Some of my positive conclusions are that the choice of name was a good one, the decision to allow a simple majority to amend the constitution was excellent and the fact that the party has (by default) another opportunity to have go at clearly defining a set of aims that will actually strike a chord with the public, rather than turning them off with the language of the hard left.

Another conclusion is that the majority of people there clearly meant well, and were motivated by their vision of a better, fairer society, rather than the pure self-interest of the orthodox neoliberal establishment politicians.

After returning from London I went to the Left Unity website to find a copy of the amended and ratified constitution so I could link to it in the article, however, even after nearly two weeks it either hasn't been uploaded, or it has been uploaded is such a way that it is almost impossible to find. What I found instead was an article which described Left Unity as a new party for "Socialists to the left of Labour". In my view, if the party is to have any success it must strive to be more than just an exclusive club for people that identify as "socialists to the left of Labour". They've got to reach out to the broad left, the heterodox left and most importantly of all, the millions of politically disengaged. Without striving to build a broad base of support, Left Unity will ultimately fail to transcend the obscurity of being just another hard-left faction.

I have decided that from now on I won't be specifically endorsing Left Unity, but that I will continue to promote awareness of the party by including them in my list of worthy movements and alternative political parties.I will continue to follow their activities with interest - in the hope that they will move towards a policy of engagement with the broad left rather than shutting themselves off as a small hard-left faction more interested in endlessly debating their differences, rather than leading an effort to unite the left against the radical right-wing economic ideology of neoliberalism that has utterly dominated UK politics since 1979.

 Another Angry Voice is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for Another Angry Voice is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

* How is it even possible to pick people on the basis of being visually disabled without discriminating against those with non-visual disabilities such as mental conditions or painful but not visually apparent symptoms? In order to avoid discriminating in favour of the visually disabled and against the less visually disabled, you'd have to give all disabled people special identifiers so they can be discriminated in favour of. However a special voting card, armband or badge to mark out the disabled is probably skirting a little to close the Star of David armbands of Nazi Germany for most minority groups to be entirely comfortable with.

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The disability witch hunt continues

Back in September I wrote an article examining the case that the Atos administered Work Capacity Assessment is psychological torture for disabled people, especially those suffering mental health conditions.

One of the strongest pieces of supporting evidence was the fact that in May 2013 a panel of judges found that the assessment regime discriminates against people with mental health conditions.

Showing his usual contempt for the justice system the Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith decided to carry on with his discriminatory disability assessment regime regardless, and to waste taxpayers money by submitting a vexatious appeal.

In December 2013 the result of the appeal was announced. The DWP appeal was thrown out and the original findings that the WCA regime discriminates against people with learning difficulties, mental health problems and autism was upheld.

The essence of the case is that the vast majority of disabled people facing the WCA regime are expected to compile the medical evidence to support their case by themselves. It is absolutely clear that many people with severe mental problems are simply incapable of effectively gathering the required medical evidence, or in many cases, even understanding the requirement that they collect medical evidence to prove their condition.

Despite the fact that they have now been found to be discriminating against people with mental health conditions by two different courts, Iain Duncan Smith and the DWP are absolutely determined to carry on with their discriminatory regime. An official DWP spokesperson claimed that the judgement would not trigger a pause in assessments and went on to claim that it will have "no effect on day-to-day business, which continues as usual". In other words, they will continue discriminating against people with mental health conditions regardless of what the courts say.

 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for  Another Angry Voice  is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

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An absurd Tory redefinition of rights

                         
Iain Duncan Smiths retroactive "get out of jail free" card
               
Libeling the evidence: The Iain Duncan Smith fallacy
                
The "War on Justice"

             

The "Protection of Corporate Lobbying and Silencing of Legitimate Political Debate" Bill
            

The "I don't understand you - so you're stupid fallacy

The "I don't understand you - so you must be stupid" fallacy is one of my absolute favourite bits of faulty reasoning. To be perfectly honest it is not technically a right-wing fallacy because it could conceivably be used by very stupid people of any political persuasion - however in my experience, I've only ever seen it used by those poor people suffering under the delusion that their haphazard collection of simplistic right-wing tabloidisms represent some kind of profound understanding of politics and the economy.

The user

The kind of person that uses the "I don't understand you - so you must be stupid" fallacy is the type of person that thinks that just because they are in possession of a collection of simplistic idioms, slogans and assumptions to explain away any given political phenomenon, this makes them an expert authority figure when it comes to political debate.

There are many problems with this mindset, not least the fact that anyone that has ever pursued genuine knowledge is familiar with: the more you learn, the more you realise you don't know. This problem was brilliantly summed up by Bertrand Russell who said "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts."

Fools and fanatics allow themselves to believe that they are experts because they have a collection of very simple answers to support their worldview, whilst thinking people realise that the elevation of particular views to the status of "absolutely beyond doubt" is an impediment to the pursuit of genuine understanding.

A major problem for the tabloid thinker is that many of the idioms, assumptions and slogans they use to create their comfortable illusion of political expertise are mutually contradictory. 

For thinking people, the acceptance of two mutually contradictory views results in irritating bouts of cognitive dissonance until we can resolve the situation by rejecting or redefining one of them. The tabloid thinker is often almost completely immune to cognitive dissonance because they don't have a holistic worldview. 

One minute they can berate the unemployed as "idle scroungers", then the next spout some spurious justification narrative to defend the idle lifestyles of hereditary wealth. They can do this because they are unwilling to consider the idea that it is somewhat contradictory to generalise about the poor and castigate them for being idle, yet defend the rentier class despite the overwhelming evidence that their wealth allows them the freedom to be as idle as they like. 

The tabloid thinker is comfortable holding mutually exclusive explanations because they just don't do "joined up thinking"

Being a pub bore
The first time I remember noting the "I don't understand you - so you must be stupid" fallacy was in a pub a few years ago. Now I admit that I was being a bit of a pub bore by talking about politics (one of the three forbidden pub subjects - politics, business and religion) but in mitigation this was a quite special pub, where the barman would play me at chess for free drinks* and intellectual conversation was not strictly forbidden.

Anyhow - I got talking to a bloke about the unrepresentative nature of politics. The thing I was trying to explain was that the average politician doesn't actually work for us, they work for their donors. The politician knows that they get their parliamentary pay whether they bother to represent their constituents or not - therefore it serves their self-interest to use their political power and their political connections to serve the interests of corporations and the wealthy minority in order to further enrich themselves with kickbacks, rather than devoting their time to serving the interests of their constituents (as they are supposed to). Thus politicians have a strong financial incentive to forget about the best interests of their constituents, and instead serve the interests of corporations and the wealthy in return for political donations, corporate junkets, ludicrously overpaid advisory positions, corporate directorships, speaking fees and countless other forms of kickback.

The guy I was talking to was absolutely insistent that I was wrong. He maintained that we pay their wages so they must work for us. I tried explaining my point in several different ways, using numerous examples, however there was no convincing him. He soon became agitated and angrily declared that he couldn't understand what on earth I was going on about, therefore I must be stupid. Normally I would have argued the point, but the guy was as burly as he was drunk, so I decided to drop the "conversation" and challenge the barman to another game of chess instead.

Arguing with trolls
The encounter in the pub happened a while before I'd established Another Angry Voice, so for quite a while I remembered it as an probably the stupidest bit of "reasoning" I'd ever encountered. However, as the AAV Facebook page began growing in popularity and my exposure to cognitively illiterate right-wing ranters increased exponentially, I began to see ever more pitiful attempts at right-wing "logic" including numerous invocations of the "I don't understand you - so you must be stupid" fallacy.

One particularly impressive example occurred after I rebuked someone for a truly feeble attempt to claim that New Labour was a left-wing project. He said that the privatisation of the HMRC property portfolio into the hands of a company based in Bermuda for the purposes of avoiding tax was a left-wing policy, because it had happened under a Labour government.

My response was to question his assumption that everything that a Labour government does is by definition left-wing, even the extraordinarily right-wing policy of privatising the HMRC property portfolio. I mean what warped definition of "socialism" must an individual be using if it includes privatisation of public property into the hands of tax-dodgers?**

As part of this response I stated that New Labour had abandoned socialism in order to embrace the "right-wing psuedo-economic ideology of neoliberalism". The comeback to this was that it was nothing more than "a load of meaningless buzzwords" and that I was stupid.

The problem of course is that all of those words do have meanings. Even if you don't know the meanings of any particular word, it isn't difficult to go and look it up. Apologies to those that are arleady familiar with all of these words, but I'm going to briefly define each of them to demonstrate that they are not "meaningless buzzwords".

Right-wing : An outlook or specific position that accepts or supports social hierarchy or social inequality as inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable.

Pseudo-economic ideology : The prefix pseudo- is used to mark something as false, fraudulent, or pretending to be something it is not. Thus something that is described as a pseudo-economic ideology is something that purports to be an economic discipline, but is in fact an ideological agenda.

Neoliberalism : A word that is used to describe the economic orthodoxy of the late 20th / early 21st Century, which is built upon a foundation of neoclassical economics and pushes right-wing economic objectives (privatisation, tax cuts for corporations and the super-rich, attacks on labour rights and the right to protest, financial sector deregulations, abandonment of capital controls, centralisation of executive power, abandonment of monetary autonomy ...). Here's my article on the meaning of neoliberalism.

The moral to this story is this: If you don't understand all of the words, the person that uttered them is probably not the stupid one in the conversation.

Tips
I imagine that anyone that has managed to read this far without abandoning the article as "stupid" because it is full of "meaningless buzzwords" such as "cognitive dissonance", "mutually exclusive", "holism" and "neoliberalism" isn't actually in need of any tips for avoiding the "I don't understand you - so you must be stupid" fallacy, but I'll provide some just in case.

If you find yourself reading something that you don't fully understand, there are two possibilities. Either you're not getting it because you're missing some information or vocabulary or it is actually incomprehensible gibberish.
 
It is fairly easy to identify incomprehensible gibberish, because it is usually presented in appalling grammar. However, Noam Chomsky demonstrated that it is possible to construct grammatically correct sentences with no actual meaning. The famous example he provided was "colourless green ideas sleep furiously". It is fairly easy to spot that this kind of construct is meaningless because of the glaring incompatibility of the words ("colourless" and "green" are mutually exclusive, it's not a great strategy to personify abstract concepts and "furiously" is hardly an appropriate adverb to describe sleep).

If the thing you are struggling to understand is written in acceptable grammar and is not filled with glaringly incompatible words, then it is likely that you need to look up some of the constituent words in a dictionary. Looking up the meaning of a new word is hardly an admission of ignorance, given that there are well over a million words in the English language and the test your vocab data suggests that the average native English speaker knows some thing like 20,000 - 35,000 of them (between 2% and 3.5% of the total).

Whatever the case, it is probably better to avoid going around calling people "stupid" whether you understood what they said or not. If you have looked up any unfamiliar words and had a good think about what it means and you still don't understand, the best course of action is probably to ask politely for a rephrased explanation, not to resort to insults.

Conclusion
The "I don't understand you - so you must be stupid" fallacy is one of my absolute favourites for two main reasons. Firstly because it takes such an astonishing lack of self-awareness for the user to conclude that because they can't understand the argument, the utterer of the argument must be the stupid one; and secondly because it is such a remarkably daft stance that it actually quite rare (as compared to other much more common fallacies such as the inefficient state fallacy, the "Hitler was a socialist" fallacy*** or the "Waah you're censoring me" fallacy) so it is quite a privilege if you ever have it wielded at you.

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* Being quite good at chess I became somewhat of a regular there!

** Anyone who is even vaguely politically literate knows that one of the core socialist principles is the commitment to social ownership, which is completely incompatible with selling off public property to a Bermuda based tax-dodging operation.

*** The ludicrous "Hitler was a leftie" fallacy is one of the next articles to write in my political myth busting series.

 Click here to read more articles in the Political Myth Busting series 

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